Grace Blakeley on Why The Far-Right are Gaining Momentum | Audible Sessions

Grace Blakeley is a British economic and political commentator, as well as a published author, and in her new book Vulture Capitalism she unpicks just what is going wrong with the world and how we got here. She offers some interesting solutions, breaking down how the far right has gained traction worldwide, and looks at how to stop the cycle of individualism that is preventing the UK from thriving.

Listen to Vulture Capitalism on Audible now: https://adbl.co/3VcmLUJ

CHAPTERS:
00:00 – 02:14 The origins of Vulture Capitalism
02:15 – 03:55 The Maxrist perspective of true democracy
03:56 – 06:37 Brexit Referendum and the erosion of democracy
06:38 – 09:16 Where Grace believes the far-right movement stems from
09:17 – 11:59 Experiments in Socialism and a rigged system
12:00 – 13:24 How Margaret Thatcher helped cultivate the mindset shift to individualism
13:25 – 18:13 Keeping optimistic on changing the public’s mindset to collectivism

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– We’re not just struggling because of our own personal failings, we’re struggling because the system is rigged. – So Grace, welcome to Audible. – Thank you for having me. – We’re here to chat about your new book, Vulture Capitalism. So to start with, why did you feel like you needed to write this book? – So the beginnings of the book came during the very earliest stages of the pandemic. We had just come out of this, you know, very bitter election campaign, and I’d been kind of going out to bat for the Labor Party. And I remember going on loads of TV shows and being asked by like prominent mainstream journalists, things like, we’ve got, you know, the government spending loads of money now. This is basically what you wanted. This is socialism, right? You know, because the government has been giving loads of money to big businesses and corporations, and boosting the financial sector, and handing out cash to landlords. And I just thought, wow, people have no idea what socialism is, and relatedly, they don’t have any idea what capitalism is. And that’s what motivated me to write this book because I wanted to kind of take apart this idea that capitalism means free markets and democracy. And what I show in the book is that actually real capitalist systems, the kind of economies in which we live today, markets aren’t very free. Democracy doesn’t work very well. And instead of having this really clear separation between private institutions and the government, you have big corporations and states basically working together to make sure that the people at the top kind of continue to be able to extract wealth from everyone else and kind of, you know, wield political power with very, very little resistance. What you see is this kind of fusion of public and private power in service of just augmenting the wealth and power of those at the top. And it just kind of undermines this idea that capitalism is the same as democracy and free markets, and shows that we live in these deeply hierarchical societies in which, you know, as I said, this kind of fusion of corporate and public power is used to really just make the average person feel disempowered and to prevent us from really being able to control most of the decisions that affect our lives. And that’s why I argued that actually capitalism is kind of incompatible with real freedom. – And what does real freedom look like to you? – True democracy, basically, where we all as individuals have the power to shape what goes on in our lives, but also as collectives, as communities, as workplaces, you know, as citizens we have the power to work together to shape how we’re governed, to basically govern ourselves. And it sounds kind of airy fairy, and like how’s that gonna work in practice? But in the book, I look at all these examples of what’s happened when people have basically come together and said, we’re gonna take charge of this community. We’re gonna take charge of this workplace. I study capitalism from a Marxist perspective, which sounds very scary. It sounds kinda like a bit of a dirty word today. And I argued that the system of production that we have in capitalism where some people own all the stuff, and everyone else has to work, creates a particular type of political system, one based on basically hierarchy and domination, where the average person is basically viewed as unable to make important decisions about their lives in which politicians say, you know, we can’t have real democracy because the masses will just abuse it, where CEOs say workers can’t possibly be given control over production. They have to be managed very carefully by kind of, you know, often by kind of AI and these very centralized processes. And for me, the only way to push back against this kind of power is to demand real democracy, is not just to hope that we can vote for different politicians or have different corporate executives and they’ll somehow start making different decisions. It’s actually to say, for as long as these people are able to monopolize power and wealth in this economy, they will continue to make decisions that benefit them. – Mm, and so how is democratic planning, which is what you’re suggesting there, different from say, the Brexit referendum where anyone, everyone, you know, was able to have their say? – So I think the referendum that we had on leaving the European Union, it’s often used as this example of how democracy doesn’t work. Because basically, you know, the argument is that people are stupid, and they vote against their own interests. I think if you actually look at what happened during the 2016 referendum, it was a rebellion against the absence of democracy. It was people using their vote on this really critical issue to basically say, screw you to a political class that they considered to be completely out of touch. It was really interesting, right, that there was this Michael Gove coming out and saying, "We’re sick of experts." And that being something that was really galvanizing to this base of people that voted to leave the European Union. You would think, what on earth does that have to do with like the vote to leave the European Union? And actually what he was picking up on was this real anger at the sense that decisions that should be being made democratically are increasingly the preserve of technical experts or people within the state or international organizations who aren’t subject to any democratic accountability. Look at Central Banking for examples. There’s even actually a report of a technical official in the Bank of England when deciding about interest rates saying that unemployment in the north is a small price to pay for economic growth in the south and in and around London, right? Those are political decisions that are being made by people who are presenting themselves as technical experts without any democratic accountability. There’s no way for us to, you know, like fight back against that and say, well actually, no, unemployment in the north isn’t a good enough price to pay for economic growth in the south. And whilst people perhaps wouldn’t have been able to kind of articulate that anger about the erosion of democracy in those ways, that is when you speak to them what they feel. It’s what people mean when they say, I go out and vote, and everything just stays the same, or my community’s been ignored, my preferences have been ignored. It is about the absence of democracy and people’s deep anger basically at politicians treating them with contempt. And I think the only response to that is to fully democratize our political system, democratize our economy, and make sure that people not only have power over the choices that they make in their daily lives, but also about the progression of society as a whole. – But if people were so, you know, discontented with the status quo as it was, why did, why was there not a swing to Jeremy Corbyn who was clearly being shown as, whether people liked it or not, something different? Why was there not that swing if it was just a kind of protest vote? – Well, I mean, there was a big swing in 2017. You know, Labor got a massive share of the vote at that point, and that was when, you know, the fight back really began. And, you know, there’s loads of reasons that the Labor Party didn’t win in 2019. Brexit’s obviously one of them. There were problems within, you know, the Labor Party that meant that the whole functioning of the institution wasn’t what people wanted to see. There was obviously like a concerted and very powerful campaign against him from basically, you know, pretty much every section of society. So, you know, it’s not surprising that that didn’t end up manifesting the, it didn’t end up being able to channel the anger that people did ultimately feel. And instead we saw what’s actually happening all over the world, which is that the far right picks up on that anger. And when there isn’t a kind of left alternative, people who are angry at being betrayed by the system go to the other side of the political spectrum and kind of go for like extremist groups that basically just say, burn the whole system down. You’re seeing this in Germany right now, right? Where you have a similar sort of system. It’s two main political parties, both of which basically believed the same thing, permanent austerity, not much investment, you know, barely doing anything about climate breakdown. And a left government was, a center left government was voted in recently and has basically been unable to do much to really shift what’s going on in the economy. And now the extreme far right, AFD, that is fresh out of a scandal in which some of its leaders were accused of meeting with neo-Nazis is now the second largest party in Germany. This is what happens when people become disillusioned, and disenfranchised, and angry at the absence of any representation in democracy. And they don’t have an analysis as to why that’s happening. They just vote for politicians who say, we’re going to just burn down the whole system. We’re gonna give a kicking to the elites that have ignored you for so long. That anger, instead of becoming a constructive force for transformation, becomes a purely destructive force. And that is, I think, the thing that I’m most worried about at the moment as we see politics in this country just descend into the same kind of sterile divide between two political parties who basically just believe the same thing. – So why then, based on all of that, do you believe that if people are given power and not the people who have power at the moment, that they will use it to form socialism, that they’ll cooperate rather than compete? – Well, I think because we’ve got a lot of evidence just from like on the ground experiments that that is what they’ll do. My favorite part of the book is at the end when I look at these just amazing experiments in kind of worker organizing and community wealth building. There’s this small village in North Wales called Blaenau Ffestiniog. It’s one of these classic kind of left behind places that politicians, you know, like to talk about. And the people in this community, a couple of people in particular decided that they were gonna start a community enterprise to kind of create jobs and try and reinvigorate the local area. And as soon as they they did that, everyone else in the community stood up and took notice. They were given a bit of support by the Welsh government, and they started to create all of these community enterprises. They created even their own kind of community energy company that used the hydroelectric power that was available in the area. Instead of having that being extracted and used to enrich a big multinational corporation, they were like, why can’t we have our own energy company that serves the local community and that we run collectively and that kind of works for us? In the 1980s, we had this view that there’s no such thing as society. It was the triumph of competitive individualism. So it’s like if you can’t afford to put food on the table, that’s your own fault. Rewind like 60 years, if you couldn’t put food on the table, you would’ve gone into your workplace, organized with your coworkers and said, we’re gonna go on strike until our boss pays us enough money to be able to feed ourselves. Now it’s like you go out and take out a high interest loan to be able to just put food on the table for your family, or you just blame yourself and you say, I’m a failure because I can’t do the things that I need to survive in this economy. And that is really what is preventing us from being able to reimagine this system and to build something new. It’s the idea that we are all competing against each other. We should all be in it for ourselves. And it’s why I think that these examples of worker organizing and community wealth building are so radical. It’s not because you can transform an entire economy just by, you know, building a couple of community enterprises. That’s part of it. But it is because we cannot begin to imagine the kind of social transformation that we need for as long as we consistently view ourselves as isolated individuals competing against each other. That form of social organizing and change has to come from people realizing that we are in this together, and that to transform our world, we need to work together. We need to look after each other. We need to build movements. We need to fight against the system that is basically rigged against everyone. And that, you know, we’re not just struggling because of our own personal failings. We’re struggling because the system is rigged. – And so that’s more of a kind of mindset and societal shift than it is on the face of it, a economic or political shift. So how do you change mindset? – Well, I think it’s both, right? Because the shift towards this competitive individualism was facilitated by a bunch of economic shifts as well. So, you know, for example, Thatcher broke up the unions, right? Which made it harder for workers to organize. But she also tried to create out of workers these kinds of mini capitalists or like investor entrepreneurs who saw their lives as like a balance of assets and liabilities. And she did that by privatizing the social housing stock, privatizing people’s pensions, deregulating the finance sector so that you would conceive of your own prosperity as tied to what was going on in financial markets, what was going on in the housing market, rather than looking at the wage share of national income or levels of inequality. So that ideological shift has a material underpinning. That’s the way that I analyze and understand capitalism in the book. It’s not just about shifts in the realm of ideas. Actually the way that our society works and the way that this system works can always be traced back to the decisions that are made by our, you know, governing elites, by big businesses about how we produce things and how our economy is organized – And given the people in power hold the power, how do you stay optimistic about really changing things? – My, so one of my favorite democratic socialist politicians is Tony Benn. Some of you might be familiar with Tony Benn. He has this quote, which is, "There’s no final victory just as there’s no final defeat, just the same battle to be fought over and over again." And I think, you know, you can think of that in like broad political terms as like, you know, coming back to the same fight. But I think it also refers to this struggle that takes place within each of us, within our workplaces, within our communities every day, which is a struggle to believe that things could be different. I really, really do think that the biggest thing standing in the way of change is just the fact that most people don’t think that they have any power and don’t think that things could change. If that changed overnight, the whole system would basically lose legitimacy and would kind of crumble, right? Because once people stop believing in the system, the only power that those at the top can wield is just brute force and brute economic force, right? It’s to kind of say put down protests and- – But they do that already, right? – They do. But the fact that, you know, we aren’t pouring out onto the streets, and that that isn’t the form of power that has to be used all the time suggests that there is this underlying legitimacy or that people just simply don’t think that change is possible, right? And that I think is the biggest barrier for economic and political transformation. It’s just people blaming themselves for problems that are actually wider social problems, and people thinking of themselves as just these isolated individuals who could not possibly work alongside others to achieve change. And so in order to kind of push back against that shift, we do also need to move towards a different way of thinking about economics and politics that replaces individualism with collectivism, right? That says, rather than you just being responsible for everything that goes on in your own life, like of course you are responsible for what happens in your own life, but also we as a collective are responsible for the nature of our society, for the outcomes that we see within our politics, for the way that our economy works. And if we begin to come together and really build different models within our communities, it starts to show people that there is an alternative. And that’s really what’s important. It’s so many people know that this system is broken. They know that we are not fighting inequality, we’re not fighting climate breakdown, but it’s so hard to imagine how things could be different when you can only conceive of things from your perspective as this isolated individual. It’s when you start to learn that you can work with other people to change things, that you realize that you actually have power. And that’s kind of why I wrote this book, is to show people that, it’s to show people firstly the lies that we’re fed about the way that this system works, but also, and probably more importantly, to show that there are alternatives. And there are so many alternatives. There’s just like, I think it’s like 11 that I write about in detail in this book, but there’s so many more examples of just ordinary people coming together, resisting. You know, like indigenous communities in the Amazon resisting deforestation, communities coming together in the participatory budgeting movements saying, we’re gonna take control over how our municipality spends its money. Just ordinary examples of like bravery and courage that belie this idea that we are all just these isolated competitive individuals that would like gouge each other’s eyes out for a pay rise, right? We have just as much of a capacity for cooperation as we do for competition. And you know, the step towards building a better society is just everyone actually believing that. It’s always gonna be a massive struggle. You know, it’s, I think often we have this idea, right, that like it’s so obvious that we should be decarbonizing it, so obvious that we need to reduce inequality. If we can just make these arguments and like convince the people at the top that it would be a sensible way to reorganize the economy if we, you know, reduce corporate power, raise taxes on the rich and increase spending on public services, that they would just do it. And actually I think we need to get a bit real about the people who are benefiting from the system being the way it is right now. And that as long as those people who benefit from climate breakdown, inequality, exploitation, as long as they remain in power, we are not going to get good policies. And real democracy is the only solution to that.