A conversation with Grace Blakeley, the British writer and activist whose book Vulture Capitalism argues that capitalism has never been a free-market system. Blakeley recounts working for a left-wing think tank on UK economic policy, then becoming the commentator broadcasters wheeled out to defend Jeremy Corbyn's anti-austerity economics because the rest of the political establishment opposed him, before writing for the New Statesman and leaving London for Cornwall. She traces the book to rereading Marx's Capital during COVID, in particular the passages on the concentration and centralization of capital during crises, and to interviewers including Piers Morgan asking whether bailouts meant Britain had adopted socialism. She describes existing capitalism as concentrated markets fused with states that intervene for big business. Pinchbeck presses her on the transnational oligarchy he sees consolidating across borders.
Guest: Grace Blakeley
In brief
- Blakeley argues that every actually existing capitalist society combines highly concentrated, unfree markets with a large state willing to intervene on behalf of big business.
- Blakeley says the COVID bailouts bore out Marx's account in Capital of capital concentrating and centralizing during moments of crisis.
- She argues that socialism means pulling power down from elites to ordinary people rather than expanding the state, since politicians are already aligned with bankers and bosses.
- She recounts being used by broadcasters committed to balance as the lone defender of Corbyn's economic program, which accelerated her public profile.
- She recommends tenants unions such as ACORN and the London Renters Union as practical entry points for people who feel atomized and want to organize.
- She argues that a badly run union is an argument for getting involved in it rather than for staying out.
Full text
Maybe we can start out and just um yeah, tell me a little bit about you and and how you got into, you know, uh socialism and capitalism and how you ended up writing vulture capitalism. Sure. So, I am Grace Blakeley. I'm a a writer and activist. Um and I started out I guess my career as working for a think tank. So basically kind of researching problems with the UK economy and helping to kind of develop policies uh that we could then kind of pitch to political parties. And I wrote I I I worked sorry for a think tank on the kind of left of the political spectrum and we produced lots of kind of thought leadership on the British economy and and how to fix those structural problems and then worked with the Labour Party um under Corbyn to try and get some of that uh kind of put into policy put into practice.
Um and it was at that time that I was also at the same time kind of quite involved in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. I was doing much more kind of media and TV basically like the BBC and various other news shows that have this commitment to kind of balance were like freaking out because the entire commentariat and political establishment all hated Corbyn. So they needed to find these new voices that would be willing to kind of defend his policies. And I was the one who was kind of wheeled out to defend uh the kind of anti-usterity economics. Um which ended up kind of catapulting me into the public eye much more quickly than I otherwise would have been.
Um and that was after that point. Um that was when I started writing more for myself. Started writing books. Ended up writing for a kind of left of center political magazine called the New Statesman. Um and yeah then then started writing vulture capitalism and during that period I actually ended up moving down from London to Cornwall which is where I am now so I can kind of write and exist in peace apart from the the horrors of the the kind of British commentary and political circles in Westminster which after having spent my 20ies in that world I now find basically impossible to deal with. Um so yeah that's that's me basically.
Cool. And yeah, so the the thesis of the book um I mean um yeah, let me hear your your just you know your elevator pitch on it so people get it. Yeah. So, you know, we were just talking about CO. I mean, the the idea for the book really came out during COVID. I, as I often do during moments of crisis, went back to this guy, to Markx um and started rereading capital and I got to a point in that book where Markx talked about the kind of concentration and centralization of capital and how that tends to happen during moments of crisis. Basically, that just means, you know, a smaller number of much larger and more powerful corporations.
Um and it was very obvious that that was going to be one um result of co was kind of greater centralization of the economy both in terms of economics in terms of corporations and also in terms of politics because the state was once again going to step in to ride to the rescue of capitalists. And the idea for the book really came out um as I was doing the rounds of kind of breakfast TV shows and kept getting asked by you know great minds like Piers Morgan questions like well you know the government's going to step in and uh you know provide lots of cash to corporations and bail out workers and do all this stuff. Doesn't that mean that we basically have socialism? It's almost like Jeremy Corbyn won the 2019 election. And it was whilst doing all those interviews and having read what I'd read of Marks that I realized there were these profound misunderstandings that were very widespread about what capitalism is and relatedly what socialism is.
Cap people seem to think that capitalism was this kind of nice free market decentralized system of lots of small businesses competing with one another and that those kind of market interactions were entirely separate from what went on within the state. Um and a real capitalist society is one with a free market and a small state. And if you look at all actually existing capitalist societies, they have highly concentrated unfree markets and very big powerful states that are willing to step in to support the interests of big business. So that's basically what the book is about. It's about how capitalism is not a free market system. How there is a fusion of economic and political power and service of vested interests at the top of society.
It's a Marxist interpretation. So it looks at how um you know the power relations within capitalist societies work at the level of the corporation where you have this divide between owners and workers at the level of the state uh where basically you see politicians consistently intervening to prop up the interests of those capitalists um and how that looks at the international level as well. uh when it comes to imperialism and then at the end I kind of chart the way out of this and show that um you know if capitalism is this system of basically kind of like centralized oligarchy of businesses, politicians, financial institutions all working together to consolidate their wealth and privilege then socialism doesn't mean like a big powerful state because the politicians are in bed with the bankers and the the bosses. It instead means the kind of redistribution and decentralization of power. So like pulling power back down from those elites to ordinary people.
And so I look at how that is happening right now. Amazing. Thank you. Yeah. I mean um you know just I was looking at the book again this morning and and um you know feeling into it. But I mean obviously we have a very very uh extreme circumstance going on in the US and um yeah I mean I think um the desired outcome I share with you would be redist redistribution of power uh you know to some extent redistribution of financial resources maybe to a great extent um you know it's it's and I and I appreciated that you were being tactical and trying to sort of like um look at you know examples of where that's occurred and how that could occur.
Uh, of course, I mean, I'm, you know, it's hard not to be a little pessimistic at the moment, uh, you know, in terms of what's happening, uh, around the world. It just feels that these, um, kind of transnational, you know, mafioso oligarchy has really, um, you know, hit its stride and they've all kind of like found each other and they've kind of like determined, you know, kind of what the model is for the future. And also they very much think that with um artificial intelligence and drones and robots it's it's you know it's it's soon going to be an offer that you know we can't possibly refuse. We just don't have the ability to refuse it. So I'm I'm very curious because I think we're in this you know actually very like you know crucial few peri you know few year period where you know maybe there's still a way out from this thing.
Um but uh yeah, so I'm very curious just to you know, yeah, maybe go into that like um with you like uh where we're at now. Um you know, and from a left leftist perspective, kind of like a perspective that that wants um human freedom and socialism and a true democracy and so on, you know, what what can we actually do at this point? Um, and I know England and America are slightly different um, situations, although you know, have a lot of similarities and and resonances. So, yeah, that's that's like a big that's like my big question or my big thought around the situation. So, um, I've been doing a lot of researching into the sort of tech oligarchs and how kind of like, you know, because these a lot of these guys were like Obama Democrats and they suddenly for, you know, a whole host of reasons got pulled to the right and ended up, I mean, Peter Teal was obviously like the bellweather and and then all of them have now um joined forces, you know, with uh this sort of fascist unfortunately kind of regime.
Um um so anyway, yeah, I don't know if you want to reflect on any of that or I can or Yeah, I think um you know, kind of going back to what you were saying about how this is like a it's hard to feel hopeful during this moment. I think depending on your understanding of how capitalism works, it's easy to overestimate the novelty of what we're seeing right now. Um and actually, you know, I wrote Vulture Capitalism. It came out last year before this stuff had happened. And the whole argument of the book is that the nature of capitalism is that corporate, financial, and political elites work together to secure their own wealth and privilege.
That oligarchy and capitalism basically go hand in hand. And you can track that all the way back to the very origins of the system with the East India Company, this like joint venture between the British state and a bunch of merchants with the aim of colonizing uh the Indian subcontinent all the way through to you know I look at um I track the evolution of the Ford Motor Company which is supposed to be this kind of brilliant capitalist enterprise and Ford is this kind of um you know free marketeteer and I show the deep interreationships between Ford and the American state. Um, and how the American state really supported Ford in basically waging war against his workers to consolidate his own power. Um, I also think there's a very interesting parallel there because Ford was a fascist. He was a vehement anti-semite.
He was mentioned positively by Hitler in mine camp uh as as like a good guy. Um, and a lot of that came from not only his kind of weird interpretation of Christianity, but also his like absolute hatred of unions and the idea that if anyone stood up to his power and his authority, that was the worst possible thing they could do because it would mean disorder and chaos. And you see echoes of that kind of thinking, I think, today across the alt-right, but particularly in Elon Musk, who's obviously also makes cars, also has very close links with the American state, also quai kind of fascist, who hates unions and has gone to war with his labor movement. So again, very clear historical parallels there. Um, and I also think, you know, another interesting example is who did Donald Trump make secretary of state in his first term?
Rex Tillerson, this former CEO of Exxon Mobile, a company that knew about climate breakdown in the 1970s. and so took funding out of its climate research team and redirected it into climate denialism. Like all of this stuff has been happening for a very long time. It's just become much more obvious and much clearer partly because the people whose interests are now being disrupted are people whose interests haven't up to now been as disrupted by these patterns. So if we're thinking about the kind of technological shifts, then it's mainly um kind of middle-income office workers who are seeing these shifts affect them right now. When we're thinking about Trump's trade war, then uh well, it's everyone really in the economy who's being affected by that.
But it is having a significant impact on, for example, people's pension wealth and their stock portfolios. Um, and it's obviously kind of taking aim at the free trade and I use that term loosely, consensus that's dominated the mainstream media and you know liberal and I use liberal in the British sense by the way which just means kind of like moderate thought across the Republicans and the Democrats um for a very long time. So people are now suddenly being like oh wow this horrible oligarchy is happening and it's coming to take my stuff. But actually, if you look at capitalism in a cleareyed way, you can see that this is always how this system has worked. It's just becoming obvious because we're in this moment of really profound crisis for a lot of different reasons.
Whether you're looking at looking at that in economic terms, in terms of growth and productivity, whether you're looking at in terms of climate and ecology, whether you're looking at it in terms of kind of the trust and faith in democracy and that being eroded by rising inequality, all these crises kind of coming together to expose the weaknesses and limitations of the system that is supposed to govern our interactions with each other. uh whether those interactions are economic, political or social or whatever. Um and yeah, people are basically suddenly starting to realize that capitalism is is corrupt and doesn't have the interests of the majority at, you know, our leaders don't have the interests of the majority at their at at heart. And um yeah, if we don't do something about it, this system will bring us down, our societies down, our planet down, and all the things we value down with it. Um, so yeah, I think it's important not to overestimate the novelty of this moment, to recognize that these trends are kind of integral to the way that this system works and to take faith and hope from people throughout history who have also experienced this kind of corruption, this kind of oligarchy and worked together to fight back against it.
Because those people let's say you know the earliest unionists who were working to build power in the context of not having the vote in the context of a brutal industrial system that was resulting in them dying at very early ages without much education without really a kind of historical tradition of unionism to draw on. They had to do it and they did and that's why we have in the UK socialized healthcare where you got the New Deal and why we got limitations on working time. Um, so you know, people have been fighting this system since its origins. The history of capitalism, the history of the world is the history of class struggle. This has always been the case.
Um, I just think that now we're hearing a lot more about it because it has become quite clear that the way that we organize our society right now benefits almost nobody except those at the very very top. Um, yeah. No, thank I mean um I agree with you that the resonances with you know past historical moments are really uh obvious and extraordinary and yeah there's certainly continuation of a struggle. I mean obviously the um you know the resonances between what's happening in the US right now and the rise of Nazi Germany uh which they're you know intentionally uh seem to be um you know kind of like going for you know whether it's like Musk and Steve Bannon two of Trump's closest advisers making open Nazi salutes or the you know Nazi kind of dog whistles in the Doge logo uh or um the tariffs which was a playbook that Hitler used to to kind of um which ended up you know kind of like he was trying to create an utarchy in in Germany in the 30s and ultimately that led to so much you know frustration and deprivation uh that then led to the wars of territorial conquest as like the only way out of that like just grab other people's resources and um you know similarly we're now starting to talk about invading like Greenland and Canada and and Mexico um so yeah there's there's a lot of you know residents with with I mean unfortunately you know when you go back to the Nazi era you know the Nazis I mean I guess fascism has a tendency to sort of exhaust itself or maybe the leader dies and and then there's a vacuum or something but often it doesn't really stop until it has um created like a massive destructive kind of like outcome for the people who were behind it. uh and you know in the in the ' 40s you know that destruction ultimately came from America which was able to come in and finally you know fight back against Germany and build this huge engine to defeat that.
We don't you know we don't really have another America waiting in the wings right now. So as America tilts more towards this kind of like fascism uh it becomes more difficult ne you know in in in you know to see if it's not something within the system you know that that that can change the dynamics how that could happen. Um but sure I mean yes I mean um you know to to me I guess one question I I had which I've always had and reading your book just brings it up again is why is it so difficult? I mean, considering we have all these communication tools, you know, why is it so much easier for these oligarchic forces of destruction to coordinate and cooperate, whereas the, you know, the the left, the workers, the the liberals, the empathic people seem to, I mean, it's nice. You have all these little examples like you have um, you know, the Porto Allegre example, the uh the that that what was that was that car company or that you talked about?
Um yeah, there's nice little examples of people taking over companies and socializing, but the these generally, you know, remain as these sort of, you know, isolated like it sort of feels like if the democratic socialist alternative could was meant to kind of like evolve beyond the destructive oligarchic fascist paradigm, you know, it it it would have done that, you know, and instead it sort of feels like the oligarchic technocratic destructive paradigm over time is and I hope it I hope it's not the case. I'm all for this other alternative. I think we have to get very very very very very real right now about why that hasn't happened and and there's a little bit of those of us who have empathy for the human condition and care about like there's a little bit of you know I don't know if it's naivee or something but there's something about it which is like where we we don't we don't we don't seem to I mean we have little we have little wins but but we have these big losses right now you know that's just um trying to express I don't know if I perfectly expressed that but maybe you understand. Yeah. No, I do.
And I think um basically that the answer to your question as to why this system is growing in strength rather than being defeated, it's something I've just started reading your book which you sent over and you kind of talk you allude a little bit to to this. I think in um in the introduction to that book, which is the problem of individualism and the way that that breeds frustration and response to powerlessness. I mean, this is something that I highlight a bit in this book, but it's actually going to be the subject of my next book. Basically powerlessness is the defining political emotion of the 21st century. Why?
Well, because of all the reasons I've just highlighted. You know, we live in this kind of corrupt oligarchy in which the mechanisms that historically people have used to demand accountability, whether those be kind of democratic or um other forms of collective power and collective organizing, they've also been beaten back. So you confront this kind of all-encompassing um what seems like completely coherent system which fuses political and economic power in service of the interests of this ruling class basically. And you think well I'm not part of the ruling class. I don't have as just one individual any way to make Elon Musk or Donald Trump pay attention to me or my interests.
And there are basically two responses to that that knowledge. That knowledge that you as one single isolated individual cannot fight back against these organized forces of um of capital basically. And there's despair or rage. I think a lot of people on the left fall into the trap of despair which is basically to say there's nothing I on my own can do to confront this system. And often they've started way back by thinking, I'm I'm outraged by what's going on in the world. I want to do something to change it. So, I'm going to try and vote for this political party. I'm going to change my consumption habits.
I'm going to do all these little individual actions to that I feel maybe will shift the way that the system works. And that doesn't work and they start feeling a sense of despair and hopelessness about the future. The other response is rage. And this tends to be something that um mobilizes people on the right. And generally this also is more likely to come from men because there's a sense of I feel powerless. And you as a man are not supposed to feel powerless. You are supposed to have control over your world, your um the circumstances in which you live and exist. You're supposed to be able to have a sense of agency and power to influence the world around you.
And of course, the world that we live in today is one in which the vast majority of decisions are taken by people, you know, with zero accountability. So, you know, you're offered the illusion of choice, but really the options that you're choosing from that is a set of decisions that's already been made by someone else. So, you lose this sense of agency. You become overcome by the sense of powerlessness. And for some people, the only response to that is just rage. Um, and it's a kind of um, it's often their kind of blind rage, which means that, you know, you're very willing to vote for a political party or support a political movement that is almost entirely destructive in its outlook because you can project your sense of political agency onto someone like Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen or whoever else who seems strong, who seems powerful, who's going to give you back that sense of power and control and agency so that you feel like you have the capacity to kind of take on the system.
And it's really like one of those fascinating examples of how the far right is able to exploit the contradictions and problems created by capitalism. You know, we live in an oligarchic capitalist system. So that makes you feel powerless. And then in comes the right and says rather than challenging the fundamental relationships and and social structures that underpin that system, we're going to give you a sense of power back, a kind of similra of power that makes you feel emboldened, but it's not actually going to change anything. And actually the the kind of parallel the historical parallel that I like to think of most is is fascism in Italy because Mussolini was a former socialist.
Um and he knew very well the kind of um sense of like joy and community and belonging and collective power that can come when people organize. This is where he got the idea for the fascis which became the symbol for fascism. This is a bundle of sticks wrapped together with an axe in the middle. It's a Roman weapon and it's supposed to symbolize strength in numbers. And he is very clearly an illusion to the longstanding trade unionist tradition which has as it symbol the raised fist. And the idea of that is that it's easy to break one finger but you can't break a fist. This same thing is alluded to with the fascis which is like you can break a single stick but you can't break them when they're all bound together.
And this was like Mussolini's response to the economic turmoil and social turmoil that had um engulfed Italy at the time was to say we all need to band together to defend our nation, to defend our communities, to defend our country. And that's going to make you feel strong and powerful again. Going to make you feel like you're part of something. And you see that happening all over the world today. You saw it happening in the UK with the violent riots that took place last summer, which was people standing up to defend their communities again about exerting that sense of strength and power. You see it with Trump.
You saw it with the capital riers. It's this kind of like I'm going to take back what's mine. I'm going to take back my power and that making you feel some sense of strength and it all being an illusion because ultimately you're still being repressed by the people who are literally running the country like billionaires like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Um, so that's really why I think we we haven't gotten anywhere. It's because people are so wrapped up in these like individualistic responses to powerlessness that we've not been able to get out of these traps of either despair or rage. Because of course, the other alternative is to say, "Yes, those at the top are very powerful, but it's up to us to band together to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves, to survive, but also to resist, and to take this fight forward." And that's always what the left has been about historically.
You know, I like to say that the left didn't emerge from like clever intellectuals coming into working-class communities and saying, "Have you guys considered maybe forming a union to fight for higher wages?" The left emerged out of people's struggles for a better life. It emerged because people were being exploited, oppressed, they felt powerless, and they came together through these communities that were in the past probably much easier to form. And they got that sense of collective power and strength through that organizing. And ultimately they were able to transform the very nature of this system by doing so. Um and it's it's an ideological and a psychological shift that's required for us to be able to move through these like low-level reactions of despair and rage and towards a more constructive process forming ourselves into communities that can resist.
Yeah, I have all sorts of different responses to that. I mean um yeah I noticed you talk you you started the book with that Hayek quote where he's talking about basically how intellectual elites basically define society and most people are just followers and then you know you have counteracted that to say that actually following I don't know marks maybe that people are actually creative architects they're just not really given that opportunity uh and I you know and I do agree with you you know but I also think Hayek has a point too in that I I'm not sure that most people actually have I mean you know I think that intellectual um capacity is not something that's just like evenly distributed through society like you know mo most people um you know are kind of happy just to go along you know I mean there number of people recently have been talking about this sort of thing about how there's like 10% of people in a society are inherently you know kind of empathic and care about other people 10% are more inherently like you know sociopathic and only care about their own interests and their own ends. Then everybody else is kind of like in the middle and will go in either direction depending on you know what's uh what what you know what what what's what's being offered to them. I don't know if that has resonance to you at all but it just feels like that's kind of like what what's you know my my my when I look at you know my life experience you know there's always this thing about what we would want to be the case and what actually is the case. Um and well I guess I take the view that what actually is the case is like in in large part socially constructed.
So I agree with that intelligence yeah your your intelligence or the intelligence of a social group or the capabilities of a social group are shaped by the kind of society in which they live. And I think that living in an individualistic society encourages this ordering of human beings based on their allegedly kind of innate capabilities because you know the view is society is a big market, right? And we're all competing against one another to display our inherent worth. And those who end up at the top, the elites, get to the top because they're just better than everyone else. And those who are at the bottom, um, are at the bottom because they're just inherently inferior.
And, you know, that is the kind of way of looking at the world that was really encouraged by neoliberalism basically, which was projecting this this metaphor of the market onto every area of social life. I'm reading a really fascinating book at the moment now actually called Highex Bastards by Quinn Slovian which looks at how the neoliberals which who were initially kind of really just focused on on economics. A strand of thought within that movement ended up merging with a much more kind of regressive cultural conservative tradition to form the kind of paleo conservative/alttright movement which was to say society as a market. Um, and you know, there are innate differences between human beings and some of them said between races, when it comes to IQ, when it comes to, you know, their general capabilities and that we need to recognize and actually help to reinforce those um, kind of unequal structures so that our countries get the good, smart, intelligent people and all the worthless people are kind of shoved into into little enclaves where they can be exploited. Um, and that kind of vision of like this hierarchical society in which the market sorts the good from the bad.
I think that's actually like disempowering us so much because basically those at the top think, well, I don't have to be kind because I'm here because I deserve it. And those at the bottom think, well, I can't fight back because I'm just stupid. That's why I don't earn very much money. And actually when you see that the system is rigged so that those at the top end up at the top basically through corruption or cronyism or whatever you want to call it and those at the bottom end up at the bottom through largely exploitation and oppression or inherited trauma or like whatever else has gone into making them the types of people that they are then I think you can start to break those thought patterns that leave you trapped and leave you thinking that oh yeah this social order is legitimate because it just sorts the good from the bad. Yeah, I mean certainly there's a uh uh you know uh racist eugenic aparthide undercurrent uh under what's happening in the US right now and that's also something that we find in the sort of tech billionaire class uh like you know David Saxs TL Musk who all grew up in apartheid South Africa and um you know Curtis Yarvin who has become kind of like the philosopher for Teal and and and CD and JD Vance.
Um, you know, he's openly joked about, you know, maybe the useless underclass could be turned into biodeiesel for the buses. And he's also talked about um, yeah, kind of like racial differences in in IQ and and some some, you know, that some races are are naturally more predisposed to be slaves and all that stuff. So, you know, they're completely working with all those ideas which, you know, do have a very powerful grip on the sort of um, you know, sort of collective demonic aspects of the unconscious. Um, and yeah, I mean I, you know, what do you think about um, you know, do you think that the left in a way has made historical mistake around being, you know, kind of too pro-immigration at this point? I mean like people are pointing to Denmark as you know one of the few places where a leftist government has managed to thrive partially because they took a very harsh anti-immigration thing and you know for me I grew up in New York City.
I've always liked a multicultural society. I don't I I think it's I have no I don't see any particularly special great thing about like the white race or whatever. It's just not my stick. But, you know, it is the case that um, you know, 1965 with the immigration act like there were 13% non-white people in the US and now it's like, you know, 45% or something. So, I could see that if it was something that you had this kind of um unconscious instinctive kind of bias around, you know, you would begin to feel that, you know, the liberals are about to replace the the the white majority with, you know, people who are more going to be more on their side and want to redistribute wealth and take all the goodies away from the white people and so on.
So, yeah. I mean, do you think that the left has made historic mistakes around immigration and and actually there needs to be um and I don't even know how I you know, we can get to that next, but I'll throw that question out to you and and and how how do you feel that that has to be dealt with? Um, yeah, I think what's really interesting is that the places that have the most virulent views on migration are the places with the least migration, which suggests that this is less an issue that relates to the actual influx of people into places and much more about a psychological response that is being um stoked by particular sorts of people. You know, before we get to the question of like what level of immigration should we have, which is a policy question that needs to be decided based on a number of different factors, we should really be asking why at a moment of extraordinary inequality, political corruption, ecological violence, just constant crisis, immigration is the biggest thing that we're talking about. Why is that?
because it benefits those at the top for us to be talking about that issue rather than talking about all of the other issues that affect our lives. And it's worked really really effectively. Um, you know, if you think about that kind of intellectual movement that emerged out of neoliberalism and then became the far right, their concern was that demands for kind of collective power and for um, you know, social justice would basically sneak in through the back door as people became aware of issues like climate breakdown, as you know, inequality became much more pronounced. Um and as various different social groups made demands for um for equal rights, they were basically concerned that even though the neoliberals had after 1989 basically won the the battle, they might lose this longerterm war because of the language of social justice and they needed to find a way to kind of fight back against that. So this kind of appeal to the idea of an innate hierarchy of human beings and the idea that the weak were kind of coming for the strong is what they pushed.
Uh and it's it's been really effective. So you know the idea that like women are coming for men's privileges, migrants and the non-white population coming the privileges of white people. um really is effective in displacing people's anger from a of anti- elitist anger to a kind of intra interpersonal anger that focuses rage on groups that are much more targetable and this I think is why this move actually works right because if we go back to this question around people feel powerless their lives are getting worse they don't feel like there's anything they can do about it they confront this you know very pervasive elite that that kind of rules every area of their lives Um, how do you respond to that powerlessness if you genuinely feel like you are alone and there's nothing you can do to take on the billionaire class? You still need to feel like you have some agency. So again, going back to that example of Mussolini's Italy and fascism, you can take out that.
If if you if you think the enemy is those at the top, you feel powerless. If you think the enemy is someone who lives next door or someone down the road in your community or someone who's weaker than you, it makes you feel powerful. And that is historically the foundation of fascism. It is redirecting people's rage at their own exploitation and oppression onto groups kind of lower down the food chain than them. And it creates these kind of powerful social movements that completely avoid talking about issues of class and economics and instead mobilize that rage at people's disempowerment against social groups that are less powerful. And that's basically what I think we're seeing going on right now.
If you look at Denmark, okay, so the Danish example is very interesting. I was in Denmark not that long ago and their left government is basically like the Democrats in the US or Star here that they've done very little in terms of you know progressive economic policy. They've done some regressive things. They have done one or two good things on climate which does differentiate them from those other kind of red brown parties in other parts of Europe but they're not particularly progressive. And if you look at another parallel, which was the social democrats in the Netherlands, they also tried to pursue this strategy of kind of like middle-of the road, not too um not too kind of right-wing economics alongside regressive policies on migration that ended up just paving the way for the rise of the far right and Got Wilders and the Freedom Party.
basically because on the economic side those parties did not answer any of the issues that people were facing around living standards, around inequality, around the corruption of democracy and at the same time they fed into this very appealing narrative that the right has been pushing which is you're poor because of these people who are poorer than you and you should blame migrants and you should blame benefit scers and all those sorts of things. And when those narratives are pushed and become embedded, that only benefits the far right. We see it today in the UK. People like K Star, our prime minister. They're really concerned about the rise of reform because Star has again pursued basically a continuation of the economic policy of the Conservatives.
It's making inequality worse. It's making, you know, public services aren't functioning very effectively. Growth doesn't look like it's going to recover. We're going to go into a recession. And that is why people start looking at reform because they're like, "You promised our lives will get better and it hasn't gotten better." And so Karma answers that rather than by saying, "Okay, we're going to change the economy." By saying, "No, no, no, you're right. Reform is correct on migration and we're actually going to be tough on migration." But as soon as you say reform is correct on migration, people aren't going to vote for labor. People are going to vote for reform.
So it's really about you know what are the the cleavages that are most pronounced at a particular you know historical moment and why and you know I I wouldn't say that today the reason that we're having all of these debates about migration is that migration has become unsustainable. You know if you look at the communities in which people are most agreved about this they don't have very much migration because they don't have many jobs. So the migrants don't move there, but they are really pissed off about feeling powerlessness and wanting to have someone to blame. And when our political class reinforces that, it actually undermines their own base. And that's what I think's been happening.
I I completely agree. Um but I also feel that I guess there's like the ideal and the real, right? So it's like um now we're stuck with all these people who have been you know pulled deep into the into this sort of um bias psychology. Um and that's also where yeah I guess I feel a little bit you know kind of like overwhelmed. I mean it feels like you know 2015ish you know there was sort of a balance of like you know blue and red media. I'm not I'm not even a Democrat. I'm a you know Bury Booksh like social ecologist anarchist social ecologist. But I mean um no some somehow the balance between you know kind of the media system began to move more towards the red and so now in the US there's like an overwhelming dominance of uh you know reactionary right-wing media and it's just pulling more and more in that direction.
Um and so you have people who are very conditioned that even people know who are smart and have like decent values you know they also start to get offcenter because it's Joe Rogan or it's Owen or like Russell Brand or like you know even the RFK Maha kind of yoga spiritual pipeline. It's like um yeah, I mean it, uh it becomes harder and harder for me to envision when people have been sucked into all of these uh manipulations, how we we get get people back in into sanity. Uh so that's where I'm kind of curious. Yeah. Like be beyond the, you know, pointing to solutions like portable and look how nice were, you know, what what what can we actually do now?
Like here we have you know well we have 330 people they say probably have more like 200 some people signed off. Uh what you know what would you tell all these people? What do we tell me like what do I do right now? I mean I have ideas which I can share with you. Yeah I would love I would love to I don't I'm not I'm not a steel worker. I'm not going to be part of a union. You know I'm a freelance writer self-employed. I always feel I do feel sort of alienated from society. You know a lot of you know anyway. So yeah what what do we what do we do with all the people because people have they want to get involved.
They don't know what to do. You know, I just finished reading a great book which I would really encourage everyone to read called Don't Talk About Politics. And it basically shows that any form of political debate, it doesn't change people's minds that you don't change people's minds on politics by having a kind of rational debate about ideas. You can change people's minds about scientific principles by explaining the facts to them. But people's politics are too tied to their sense of identity to, you know, really be shifted through debate. And there's some really fascinating studies like, you know, she studies the history of like TV debates and how like a vanishingly tiny percentage of voters change their vote on the basis of those debates.
The only real impact it has is that if the debate goes badly for your candidate, you're much less your voters were much less likely to actually show up. So this like culture we have around politics of being like, "Oh, we need to convince people of our perspective by showing them the arguments is like precisely the wrong way to go." You know, the the kind of stuff that I do and that you do and a a lot of kind of commentators do, I think has to be about like mobilizing people and engaging the base. Engaging people to do what? To go and talk to people. She also shows that the only way people actually changed their mind was by having open and honest conversations with people that they trust.
We live in a extremely fractured society where trust is eroding across a whole number of different metrics. Trust in our political institutions, in cultural institutions, trust in each other for obvious reasons. You know, individualism is is just one of those. Um, and so those relationships that people do have that are based on trust are really important. And we need to figure out how to deepen and broaden and expand them. And that basically means we all as leftists need to be having conversations with people. We need to be showing up at meetings. We need to be showing up in our communities. We need to be, you know, forming collectives where we can actually talk to people and start to build that trust that is the foundation for really like political transformation.
And it's not just that it's the foundation for kind of changing people's minds. It's that all of these things I've been talking about, you know, the despair, the rage, they all stem from feeling as though you're confronting a powerful system on your own. Historically, when people have been much more rooted in these kinds of collectives and communities, they haven't felt they've been confronting the same sorts of concentrated forms of power, but because they haven't felt like they were confronting those things on their own, they've instead been like, "Right, okay, well, we're a group. We're a community. What can we do to protect ourselves?" And once they've done figuring out how to protect themselves, they then think, right, well, how can we protect those around us?
How can we start resisting this system because it's fundamentally unjust? And that sense of like collective power comes from going out and talking to people and realizing, "Oh everyone else realizes this system is and they want to do something about it as well." When you're just sat at home on your phone arguing with people on the right on Twitter, you think, "Oh, how is everyone else so evil and so wrong and I'm the only person who understands this and like, you know, I'm just completely alone, right?" Um, so it really is about getting out there in person, talking to people, building collective power. I know that your next question is going to be how do you do this? And to be honest, I think there are loads of different ways. I write on my Substack a weekly column called what can we do where I interview organizers from all over the world doing very different things about their approach to organizing.
So I interviewed someone last week who is talking about organizing federal workers um to resist Trump and Musk and forming a union for federal workers that's actually militant and can bring people out onto the streets. Before that, I spoke to students in Serbia who are protesting against their government, against corruption, and basically bringing down the nation state. Well, bringing down the government um and bringing the their nation to a halt. Um and I've spoken to union organizers who had, you know, just on like smallcale campaigns to fight back against like, you know, exploitative employers. I've spoken to people doing trade union political education, so like engaging workers in conversations about capitalism and class struggle.
Um, I've spoken to climate organizers or, you know, from everyone like from, you know, Justin Bole going out into the streets all the way through to the groups that are trying to target MPs to say write to your MP about, you know, changing this particular piece of political legislation. There are such different and various ways of getting involved in these these sorts of movements and like I'm almost 100% sure that anyone watching this call will have a route in like I'm also a writer who sits at home by myself. Well actually I go to a co-working space because I don't really like being by myself but generally I'm pretty isolated. Yeah, exactly. So, I've joined my union, the Society of Authors, and I'm working with a bunch of other writers to transform that organization into an actual union rather than kind of middle class bourgeois institution that can represent us.
And that's been a really exciting campaign to be involved in. I'm, you know, I live in a in in a in Cornwall in a a small town by the sea. There's not a lot of political activism going on here, but I still put events on. I still, you know, am a trustee of my food bank and go out and speak to people on the streets about the problems that they're facing. Um, there's so many different things that you can do that will get you engaged with other humans. And it doesn't even have to be explicitly political if you're worried about that. Just taking the first step of getting out of our little tiny bubbles and just being in the world, being in our suffering, and our grief and our fe fear and our despair with other people and realizing that we're all in it together and we all want a way out.
Yeah. I mean, uh, I hear you. I mean, I've been involved with different movements to some extent, like Occupy Wall Street. Um and then I actually was organizing with kind of like um millennial influencers who had large followings. We did a series of events work um at the Barry Hotel here. So I was working with Alexa Passion icon and Zoe K and Pen Badgely who started the Gossip Girls and so on. That sounds amazing. It was amazing. We did a few events and we had a little bit of a ground swell. But then um Pen, who was one of the, you know, main people involved, he was going to start giving us some some money.
He was like, "Oh, you know, I all I have to do is go to one event and wear a t-shirt and I get like $30,000. I don't like doing it, but I'll just go to some events and wear these t-shirts and I'll give you then I'll give our little group the money." Yeah. and and then he ghosted on us and I felt like you know manager somebody or had warned him you know not to keep doing this or Alexa Chung you know had made some comment about maybe fashion isn't that important and then she almost got you know thrown out drumed out of the business and so I feel like oh my gosh yeah well I mean I feel like these guys you know if you're in a in the successful group um you get a lot of subtle inducements to tow the line then you know you you know as long as you stay in the you know so anyway so it just felt like there was a huge attempt back then to create this platform for for social conversations uh and again with extinction rebellion and somehow they kind of reach a certain point and then they sort of disintegrate. I mean another problem we have I think or we've had on the left has been this kind of ideological purity test uh with cancellations and so on and I do think that that um has really limited uh the reach of the organization uh of these organizations and I don't know what what you think about that yeah again I think a lot of this comes from basically like posters brain it's like we are not just interacting with people in extremely hostile ways online, we are then taking those ways of interacting with people and applying them to real life. So, you know, historically, if you were a unionist, say, and you were trying to form a campaign to organize your workplace, you would have encountered so many people with very different political views than you.
Some of them would have been conservative, some of them would have been, you know, communists, right? And as part of that campaign, you would have had to learn how to speak to people with extremely different views to you and build them into a collective. And we've lost that because we've lost all these forms of collective organizing. are basically just these kind of individualistic um you know individualistic atoms who see politics as this process of um you know kind of forming our identities as humans as individuals rather than doing the actual real human thing of organizing ourselves into groups to not just like fight and kind of fight for justice and and kind of um really show up as powerful groups, but actually to create these senses of belonging and community that form the foundations of our capacity to listen to and understand other people. Because if you are working with other people in your community to say stop your library from getting shut down, you're working with other people in your workplace to try and get union recognition.
You have to move beyond these are the boundaries of my identity. this is what my politics is and I want you to recognize that. Two, how can we understand each other so that we can work on this issue together? How can we understand each other so we can build this movement that will ultimately meet both of our material interests as well as creating a sense of solidarity and connection and belonging that is a fundamental need of all human beings. Right? So I I don't think that it's just like you know people have suddenly become unhinged and evil and just obsessed with themselves. I think the fact of the decline of collective power combined with our social isolation and our increasing use of just social media as a way of projecting our politics has removed the need to listen and engage and form bonds with other people in the way that historically it was you know imperative to do that to form any kind of political organization.
Um and that's I think the problem. So again, if we want to fight back against that, there's no use, you know, wagging our fingers and saying you, you know, you've used this language wrong because it's it's the same as in reverse, right? If we say, well, you know, the the kind of wokeism has been the problem, and then we come back and say, well, you woke people are being too woke, we're just feeding into the same dynamic. We need to actually get out of these echo chambers and these divisive conversations and get out there and start working together to fight for the things that we need to fight the fight for our our lives, our planet, our dignity, and work together. not just to kind of resist this system, but often just to be able to survive and get through what is going to be an extremely challenging phase of um of of you know capitalism for for the vast majority of people on the planet.
Yeah. Um I agree with you. Uh I still think you know yeah just speaking personally and I think for a lot of people it's like um when you're in an atomized hyperindividualized society where you know like in terms of like you know even you know I make a lot of my living on Substack. I used to write for magazines even there there was a bit more of a cohesive like everybody there was likeology or whatever. So there's like the the the technology has this natural kind of atomizing tendency and more your own interests are are like made more your own private interests. Um, but I do wonder if some of the uh resolution does actually require like social media and social technology.
I don't know if you have you looked into the work of Audrey Tang at all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, that was going to be one of the well, it was one of the things that I looked at actually as a case study for the book, but didn't end up getting to include it because I didn't have time to those sorts of interviews. But um yeah, I think it can be you know look at um Barcelona they have a platform called Desi Din that facilitates um kind of citizen engagement and policym a lot of the experiments in participatory budgeting have used these kind of um you know have used various forms of of digital media less social media but you know particular kinds of platforms to facilitate people's engagement in you know setting local budgets and stuff.
Um, yeah, you know, with with these technologies, I don't think that they are inherently antisocial, but I think our tendency to use them at the expense of all other forms of human interaction is obviously antisocial. Um, and I do think it's easy to, you know, to kind of confront the conditions that we're facing right now and to respond to the problem of atomization and individualism by just saying, well, I'm on my own. The only thing I can do is kind of hustle and be an entrepreneur of the self and try and boost my human capital and compete with everyone else around me to get to the top. Um, but that's it's such a trap. You know, the only way we're ever going to be able to really revive left politics, the only way we're going to be able to survive as individuals, let alone as collectives, is by getting out into our places, into our workplaces, into our communities, and forming the bonds that will be required to facilitate our own survival and allow us to resist this onslaught from the top down.
And look, I'm not saying that it's going to be easy or even that it's going to work. It's just the only option that we have. Yeah. Yeah. It's I've never been in that situation in my life before where I'm I'm starting to feel like unease or fear about expressing myself uh online. Um, and you know, clearly they're terrorizing, you know, they're they're full out trying to terrorize the population here, uh, with grabbing kind of, uh, you know, naturalized citizens or legal residents off the streets for taking them to, you know, El Salvadorian concentration camps. I'm literally at the point now where like um, there's I don't know if you heard about the Albrego Garcia case here.
No, he was a uh, legal resident, Venezuelan guy, married with an autistic 5-year-old kid. no legal record. So they grabbed him off the street a couple weeks ago and they took him to this El Salvadorian prison or concentration camp. Yeah. Where there's no no legal hearings. Uh oh, did we lose you? You see me? Oh Okay. Uh no no due process. Um and um basically nobody leaves his concentration camp except in a coffin. Wow. And so they brought a few hundred people there now. and this guy is the most egregious because some most of them are legal immigrants which still obviously they deserve due process and it's necessary they have that.
So, I'm kind of like uh personally at this point where like if they you know now the courts are putting a lot of pressure on Trump, but he's he's in a way at this point just kind of like uh avoiding uh the courts. Um and because he controls the executive branch controls the marshals, the security, the army and so on, the the judiciary doesn't have a um its own enforcement form, you know, so they can censure him or whatever, but they don't actually have any way to go and like put him in jail or whatever. So if it reaches that point where there's basically no longer a rule of law in the US, I'm going to leave the country. Uh I think a lot of people will too. But I also feel the welcome in the UK.
What's that? What's that? The welcome in the UK. Although Yeah. I'm not sure what direction we're headed in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just um but I appreciate what you're saying. You're basically saying that um there isn't really a choice at this point except to try to fight this thing. Um and then the question is how do we do that most effectively? Yeah. Um, are there any organizations or groups where you're like, "Wow, what they're doing, the way they're organizing this thing." I mean, um, I think a lot about that movie, The Battle of Alers. Did you ever see it? No. It's a great It's a great movie.
It's about how the, uh, Islamic uh, resistance in Alers ultimately over overthrew the French government through this kind of cell structure which was highly decentralized where nobody actually knew who was in control in any way. Yeah. Uh, but yeah. what would the organization I'm going to say this and then I'm going to have to go because I'm already late for my next day. No worries. All good. But um thank you for making the time. I appreciate No, not at all. I mean, obviously we've got loads more that we could we could probably go on for another hour, couldn't we? So, we'll have to do it again.
I'm happy happy to do it again. Yeah, for sure. But in terms of organizations, um there are some great tenants unions that I think if you are one of those people who is maybe like a bit atomized and isolated and is looking for a way to get involved in a kind of form of community organizing, tenants unions are really great. things like ACORN for example or if they're in ACON is in the US and in the UK there's also like the London Renters Union those sorts of things obviously if you are in a sector that you can unionize in do try and form a union you might be disappointed with the way your union is run but that's just an extra impetus to kind of get involved and start having these conversations with people um and yeah you know I would also say there you there will be people on this call right now who will have issues that they are extremely passionate about whether that is climate whether it's the genocide in Gaza, whether it's, you know, whatever. And there will be groups organizing in your local area on those issues with whom you can start organizing as well.
Um, it really is just a case of of kind of yeah, sticking your head above the parapit and saying, I want to find other people who are concerned about what feels like the end of the world. Yeah, pretty much. Though it isn't. We can't say for sure. Oh, the movie I mentioned was Battle of Alers. Yeah. Okay, cool. I'll watch that. That sounds great. Thank you. Very cool. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for everybody who who came on board to listen to Aller Sun. And well, I'll put this out as a um on my newsletter and I'll add you as a contributor if you want to send out to your people, too.
And I look forward to having that more discussions. 100%. Thanks so much for having me, Daniel. It was great to chat. Bye. Bye.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.