• By
• Uncategorized

Neoliberalism often presents itself as a victory for individual autonomy. In an interview, Grace Blakeley explains the hollowness of this claim — and why the Left needs to offer its own, better vision of human freedom.

Despite the many horrors of today’s world, there are still people telling us that capitalism means the “freedom” of the market. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom, Grace Blakeley, journalist and staff writer for Tribune, confronts this neoliberal mythology. She shows how much capitalism owes to planning and state intervention — and combines this with engaging case studies of corporate crimes, imperialist power, and financial bailouts. These are not “excesses” of capitalism, she argues, but its very essence.

In an interview, she spoke to Jacobin’s Helmer Stoel about her new book, her politics, and the challenges for the Left.

Helmer Stoel

What drew you into politics in the first place?

Grace Blakeley

I was raised in a quite political environment. My granddad was a communist and a shop steward in the Transport and General Workers’ Union. He came from a working-class background and educated himself. At age fourteen, he ran away from home, joined the Navy, and read The Communist Manifesto. He and my grandmother had three kids, my mom, Karen, and then Karl and Keir, who were named after Karl Marx and Labour [Party] founder Keir Hardie. My parents were very involved in things like the Nicaragua solidarity campaign in the 1980s. From around age thirteen, I knew I wanted to do politics, but in a less-defined, generally progressive way.

I went to university to study PPE [Philosophy, Politics, and Economics], which probably made me more liberal. But during my African Studies course, I became a bit more radicalized. Studying PPE is like studying global capitalism from the perspective of those at the top, and African Studies is like studying it from the perspective of people at the bottom. After that, I wanted to go work in the United Nations or at an NGO, or do a PhD. But I thought that if I want to fix any of these problems I should start with the City of London, because it’s laundering all the money that’s sucked out of the Global South, much more than is going to these countries in development aid. That was also when Jeremy Corbyn was running for Labour leader.

I came to know about what Jeremy was doing through the work I was doing with the Tax Justice Network, which was combating the facilitation of tax avoidance and evasion by financial institutions located in the City, scarring the Global South. Jeremy talked about international development and the exploitation of poor countries. I thought: this guy seems pretty good, maybe I should start helping him. That drew me into the Labour Party. Like for a lot of friends, this was a decisive moment for me: things might have turned out different if this had not happened.

Helmer Stoel

Your new book addresses a misunderstanding about how contemporary capitalism works: you point to the Cold War legacy of equating capitalism with the free market and socialism with planning. You argue that we need to stop speaking about “free-market capitalism” and acknowledge that it’s a hybrid system that also involves planning.

Grace Blakeley

The neoliberals would accept the idea that they planned for the construction of markets. But they’d also say that what happened within those markets was unplanned. They’d say: they’ve set the rules of the game, now you guys go and play it. But in Vulture Capitalism, I go further to say that actually neoliberalism involves constant, extensive, and pervasive planning once the game has started. It’s basically planning to protect the interests of capital: governments intervening to bail out financial institutions, big corporations, etc., and promulgating legislation that benefits them, corporate welfare, but also — beyond government intervention — corporate planning.

The whole idea of a free market is that no corporate institution should plan because you can only do what the market is telling you to do: you develop a business plan and the market context changes, you have to change your business plan accordingly, so as an individual firm, you have no real power because of all the competitive pressure exerted.

But within a monopolistic market, i.e., where there’s a firm insulated to some degree from competitive pressure, it can plan in a similar way to a government. Just as a government can say: we’re investing in this kind of technology and that determines the future of our society, corporations can say: we’re going to invest all our time and energy in building AI [artificial intelligence]. No one else gets to decide whether that’s a good use of resources. Corporations are so powerful that they’re able to shape the development of human society.

Helmer Stoel

Just to understand its appeal, in ideological terms, neoliberalism was also a story about freedom, and especially about how all planning threatened individual freedom.

Grace Blakeley

In the introduction, I talk about how the neoliberal project was based on what [Friedrich] Hayek called a “double truth.” He basically says that we will need to present these ideas as about a return to free markets: so, it’s about delivering individual freedom. It’s about your freedom of choice as a consumer. It’s about your freedom to basically do whatever you want. But underneath that, there will be this broader and deeper project, which is to some extent really about planning. It’s about how we develop systems that encourage particular types of behavior and prevent others.

In the UK, the idea of the freedom to do whatever you like and become very wealthy was historically associated with the breaking up of the unions, and in place of that kind of collective power you have the sale of social housing, the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and the sale of those assets to individuals.

Alongside a big financial boom, that meant that those assets increased substantially in value, so people feel like they have become wealthier because of their investments as mini-capitalists. That “entrepreneurialism” is the carrot of neoliberalism: the idea that if you compete in the way that we’re telling you, you will become wealthy, you will succeed, and you will have a kind of stable, secure life, etc.

The flip side of that is the actual reason that these changes were implemented. This is what the “double truth” means. The story told to everyone is: we want to create an entrepreneurial society. So, we’re going to let you buy your home, invest in stock markets, etc. But the intention was to break up collective power and encourage people to think of themselves as individuals. This was, again, an intentional form of planning. It was about breaking the collective spirit of the 1960s and ’70s, and replacing it with isolated, atomized individuals who were just competing against one another.

So, you had attacks on the labor movement and the creation of anti-union laws but also this privatization and financialization: giving people their own homes, allowing them to invest in stock markets, piling debt on top of them to purchase all these things. This is a powerful disciplining tool to encourage people to compete with each other and to think of themselves as isolated individuals.

My parents’ generation bought their houses for £30,000 in the 1980s and they’re now worth millions. They make sense of that not in terms of social trends, but by saying, “I’m a really successful entrepreneur. I’m intelligent. I’m good at reading the market.” That really encourages this shift toward individualism. But then those who don’t own assets are disciplined by the fact that their wages are lower, they have no bargaining power, they have a lot of debt. The ideology of competitive individualism encourages you to blame yourself for those things.

Helmer Stoel

You give several case studies, including the Boeing safety scandals. Many of these companies occupy a monopolistic position. Still, they have to compete. How does Boeing compete with Airbus? And why don’t they do this through price-setting?

Grace Blakeley

Rather than competing over price — which both companies realize doesn’t work in the long term — they keep prices stable and coordinate and collude. They compete over cutting costs in the form of wages, for example by gouging suppliers. They use their market power relative to smaller companies to demand concessions. Then there are also forms of political corruption to extract wealth from different parts of the supply chain. Boeing has been embroiled in multiple corruption scandals and has close links with government, as in the deal with Southwest, for example.

Helmer Stoel

The power of asset managers such as BlackRock is also enormous. Already in Stolen you introduce the idea of a people’s asset manager [PAM].

Grace Blakeley

Asset management basically involves investing other people’s money. The big investment banks have asset management arms that invest capital that is theirs to invest. I said that the synergies that arise from this model are quite significant because an investment bank might lend money to a growing start-up, for example, and then its asset management arm might also view this as a really good investment opportunity.

My proposal is that we could set up a national investment fund that would invest in, for example, sustainable technology companies or infrastructure projects — things that we wanted to invest in. Then the people’s asset manager can take an ownership stake in those companies so that any returns that accrue from the bank’s lending come to the ultimate owners, the public.

Basically, it hinges on the distinction between borrowing where you don’t get ownership of the asset, versus investment like buying a stock or a share or taking a position in a company where you do get an ownership stake. If you have that stake, then you have a right to the future returns from that project. So, the argument was that having a national investment bank isn’t enough: you also need an institution that’s capable of taking an ownership stake in those companies.

That could be funded through a citizens’ wealth fund, like Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which has an ownership stake in many sectors across the global economy. The difference, here, would be that a people’s asset manager would have a democratically elected board, representation for the labor movement, and there would be frequent public consultations about what people wanted to see investment in.

Helmer Stoel

You describe how corporate planning influences the daily lives of workers — and have a chapter on Fordism. You describe Jeff Bezos as “the Ford of our age.” Many have argued that we have long since entered post-Fordism. Does something about Fordism still exist in companies such as Amazon?

Grace Blakeley

I don’t think that you can say that Fordism has continued. The model isn’t the same as it was in the 1940s. The argument is, rather, that the kind of society that we get reflects the balance of class power. The reason that Fordism was Fordism is that there was a class of organized workers who were able to demand much more from their bosses within the Ford corporation, which meant that certain demands had to be conceded.

Ford also required a certain macroeconomic context, basically characterized by stability. So, the American state stepped in to create those conditions, muting the ups and downs of the business cycle and stepping in to mediate between bosses and workers when required. So, the whole setup of Fordism, isn’t just a particular regime of accumulation that comes from legislation or institutions as these new Nobel Prize winning economists would talk about. It’s about the balance of class power.

When that balance shifted during the 1970s and ’80s, as a result of various changes related to both the structure of capitalism and to particular decisions made by institutions and individuals, that’s when you see a shift from a Fordist production process to what you could call the Amazon process. In this model, labor has been decisively defeated, so you can hire exploited workers on whatever basis you like, tell them to do whatever you like, treat them like robots and they will struggle to organize.

This model also has more frequent crises. Yet a company like Amazon is so powerful that it doesn’t necessarily require macroeconomic certainty to be able to generate profits. It basically encloses an entire market and is able to generate certainty for that; it doesn’t need the state to intervene to mediate between labor and capital because labor has no power. So, all these changes in the nature of regulation and political economy come back to the balance of class power rather than being a purely intellectual or ideological shift.

Helmer Stoel

The last part of the book discusses successful cases of democratic-socialist planning, such as Salvador Allende’s government in Chile. Proposals for socialist planning often face the same objections: the problem of scale, and price as a coordinating mechanism for the market. A lot of this reverts back to the debates on socialist planning of the 1920s.

Grace Blakeley

I do get frustrated with the academization of some of these debates because you cannot abstract these questions from what is happening in practice. I’m perfectly sympathetic to the people involved in the original socialist calculation debate. This debate was grounded in a particular historical moment and also alongside particular political movements that wanted answers to these questions.

In some cases, these debates around cybernetics were being implemented in the USSR but they were shut down by central planners who didn’t want more self-organizing systems. That was all good stuff, but it was rooted in a particular political moment and movement that had the potential to make these ideas reality. Today, if we are addressing the question of democratic planning by putting a bunch of numbers into a computer model or trying to build a model that will allow us to efficiently allocate resources in a centrally planned society without money, we are not doing our jobs, because that is not the question that we need to be asking.

Right now — and this is why I start with these questions around power and planning — we need to ask how we can give people enough sense of their own power that they start challenging the system. I didn’t come to this issue of planning from an intellectual interest, like whether centralized planning is a more efficient way of allocating society’s resources. I came to it because the economy we have now is based on a pervasive and invisible form of centralized planning that is very difficult to challenge and that rests on an ideology that tells people that you live in a competitive economy and have to compete with people around you. That’s what makes the system work. Even though it’s not true, this is part of the ideology.

It’s that ideology of competitive individualism that stands in the way of any socialist transformation, regardless of how you think it might happen, because people are so convinced that they are on their own. Collectivism is the crucial condition for any socialist movement. In these competitive individualistic societies, there’s an immense amount of organized power at the top but people confront that as an isolated individual, and think, yeah, capitalism is broken. Politicians work with businesses to keep me down, but I’m on my own. There’s nothing I can do about that. That’s the big problem we have.

So, how do we break through that ideology? Well, we have to show that capitalism isn’t actually a free-market competitive system. The people at the top are cooperating with each other all the time, but they convince us that we have to compete and that we have to operate in this free-market system, because that’s the most efficient thing.

Helmer Stoel

You’re quite critical of the state of the Left. You describe cartelization: the process by which social democratic parties become intertwined with state power and the interest of capital. Can we see Blairism as the paradigmatic case?

Grace Blakeley

Yes, the political scientists who developed that idea of cartelization were studying the US Democrats and Labour. They said that the breaking of the link between labor parties and their mass spaces — both with the union movement and with the party membership — has been a decisive step toward the creation of political cartels that don’t need to pay any attention to the interests of members or the people that they’re supposed to represent. Instead, they can develop links with the state and then agreements with other political parties to neatly swap over political power when elections come without ever challenging the fundamental basis of the system.

Helmer Stoel

In the summer, Britain was shocked by far-right anti-immigration riots, starting after the terrible mass stabbing in Southport. Among left-wing commentators, there has been a heated debate on if economic factors are still relevant here, since racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric played such a major role. Do you think there is a link?

Grace Blakeley

There is a link, but it’s mediated by psychological factors. The starting point is people feeling alienated and disempowered. If you feel like you have literally no control over your own life or anything that’s happening around you, 80 percent of people will say I am just going to completely disengage from politics, whereas 20 percent will react with rage. Some will channel it into something productive, some into something reactive. How that rage is channeled will be defined by how people think about themselves and their relationships to other people.

In an individualistic society, there are no mechanisms to channel that rage into something productive. In the past, if it had made you angry, you would do something about this: join a union or a political party, go to a protest. But because today we have this pervasive individualism, you confront that powerlessness on your own. That’s what my next book will be about.

It’s not a purely economic thing: it’s not just that people’s living standards are going down. They feel powerless to change anything and they confront that powerlessness on their own, so that generates a form of individualized rage, which is kind of like Nietzschean revanchism.

You just want to take revenge on the people who are fucking you over, so you elect someone who says that they’re going to do that revenge for you. Or you get out onto the streets and you take that revenge yourself. What are you doing when you are doing that? You are taking back a sense of your own power. How? By wielding that power over people even more powerless than you are. You’re replicating the system within which you exist.

Helmer Stoel

You were also quite critical of Corbyn. Is there any way to revive a meaningful post-Corbyn left in Britain right now?

Grace Blakeley

I was very much part of it. But there are things that I’ve realized since then that matter a lot for the critique of the movement I would now have. In the book, I argue that approaching people with an offer of protection by a capitalist state is very different than approaching them with an offer of empowerment.

Today, the Left/Right divide in most advanced economies is the Left saying that the government will protect you, and the Right saying that the market will give you freedom. We played into that. We said capitalism’s failed, but don’t worry, vote for a Labour government because they’ll protect you from all the worst excesses of the capitalist market. Then they come into power and not only do they largely fail to protect people but actually end up working on behalf of the interests of big business and embroiled in all sorts of forms of corruption.

So, people look at that and they think that these people are untrustworthy; and then the Right profits from that by saying the government’s corrupt, so let’s shrink the state and give more power to the market. Then you get massive corporate scandals like Boeing planes falling out of the sky and people say: well, capitalism’s broken, so what’s the other option?

What I’m saying is that those two things aren’t separate. The foundations of political power in a capitalist society are also economic and the foundations of economic power in a capitalist society are also political. This isn’t a new argument. But it has implications for the kinds of politics that we have. If the Left says: give us power and the government will do nice things for you, people aren’t going to believe it. They’ll say: “How stupid do you think we are? We’ve had so many Labour governments and my life hasn’t gotten any better.”

That’s the problem with trying to organize an electoral political project that doesn’t have a mass base. If you want to convincingly argue how things will change when a Labour government is in power, that has to be rooted in people’s experience of a collective political project. It has to be like: we did community wealth building and all got involved and voted on how the local government spent its money and we built a cooperative and it created jobs, or we built union organization. That means collective empowerment. We didn’t have that foundation, though. All the more successful socialist movements in the world did.

Helmer Stoel

Often the word “populism” is used to mean just anything different from the established order. Should we embrace it?

Grace Blakeley

There are different kinds of populism. There is a didactic populism, where there’s a leader speaking to a bunch of different individuals, so many tiny dots connected to the leader but not to each other. That’s not going to work. There’s another type of populism which is communities, workplaces, and groups of people connected to each other in places through a movement, who are also connected to a party or an institution or a leader or a wider group. That’s the basis of a potentially successful populism. But it is built on the foundation of collective organizing.

Then there’s a technocratic anti-populism, i.e., rule by experts, which is a part of the neoliberal settlement that was aimed at depoliticizing policy. We now live in a world where because that’s become so dominant, anything that isn’t that is described as “populism,” but actually that’s just the whole of politics.

Helmer Stoel

You are involved in several left-wing media outlets, such as Tribune and Novara Media. What advice would you give to those involved in left-wing media?

Grace Blakeley

I think you have to meet people where they are. The Left is infected with the focus on the individual. I think a lot of left-wingers spend too much time focusing on how to accumulate as many ideas as possible in their own heads and in doing so they unconsciously create a huge separation between themselves and everyone else, because the vast majority of people are not going to have access to most of those ideas.

Having access to a broad range of ideas is always good for understanding the world — but unless you work really hard to avoid it, this will also make it harder for you to communicate with everyone else. You’ll be taking for granted stuff that nobody else knows about. The more deeply you become embedded in academic institutions and discourses, the harder it is to have a common language with the average person. Your world is so far from theirs that it’s difficult to build bridges.

Intellectual debates about Marxism and capitalism — at least how those arguments are expressed — have hardly any relevance for most people’s lives. So, the best thing is to go and talk to the people who we’re trying to talk to, listen to the language they’re using, listen to the stories that they’re telling, and start thinking: How can we speak that language? How can we tell our stories in those same ways? We have to confront our own egos and focus much more on talking to people who our ideas are meant to be relevant to than convincing each other we’re clever.

Expressing your ideas and your values in their language requires embedding yourself in particular communities. The best example is the Belgian Workers’ Party. Look at how they deal with anti-immigrant rhetoric in the communities they’re in. They have a network of activists and organizers who go into those communities, have barbecues where people who’ve been involved in the far right come, and they talk to them.

You’ll never convince some of them — fine — but other people are in this weird space of “I’m angry but I don’t know why.” The far right appeals to them because it makes them feel powerful. We need to be thinking about how we can speak their language.

Helmer Stoel

People often equate Marxism with equality, while in fact Marx himself was quite critical of this ideal and more interested in freedom. How do you see it?

Grace Blakeley

The idea of equality only really emerged with the development of capitalism. Any society historically is structured according to a particular hierarchy. Some people will have more power and influence than others. Equality, in an extreme sense, could mean dismantling any form of hierarchy. That’s not a realistic understanding of the way human societies work and the obsession with equality only really emerges as a preoccupation for humanity when inequality becomes so significant. Inequality obviously stems from the divergent ownership of resources, as a negative consequence of the monopolization of ownership.

But there are many other negative consequences, and another big one is that it undermines people’s freedom and autonomy. I’m thinking about what makes a good life, which is really what we’re all considering when we’re thinking about politics and socialism. You need a minimum amount of resources to survive. But if I’m thinking about what’s going to make my life better, having a sense of control and autonomy is more important than a perfect sense of equality or even accumulating a lot of resources.

I believe a more equal society in which we all had a sense of control and ownership and autonomy over society’s resources would be better for the rich as well. It would make them less narcissistic and psychologically self-obsessed. A good life also involves community and connection, and that’s something that we’re really missing today in society. We’re so individualized and isolated that we focus on this little package of stuff that we own rather than thinking about the links that tie us together in our communities, in our workplaces. And yes, I think that impoverishes our lives.