Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You wrote the highly informative book Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation. In your view, is it inevitable that we have to put up with the deadly capitalist system?
Grace Blakeley: It’s easy to look at the state of the world around us and feel hopeless. We live in an era marked by war, climate breakdown, political polarisation, economic inequality and widespread poverty. Most of us feel deeply disturbed by the knowledge that our world seems so profoundly damaged, yet we often feel powerless to do anything in response.
The problems created by capitalism seem so deeply intractable that responding to them feels like a lost cause. Yet it is precisely this sense of powerlessness that underpins the stability of the status quo. The powerful have a vested interest in making us believe that the world is the way it is because it could not be any different – that any other way of organising the world would require us to sacrifice the basic freedoms we all rightly hold so dear.
As individuals, we feel powerless to confront the capitalist system. Which is why it is so important that we do not try to do so alone. We have to organise if we want to change the world – in our workplaces, in our communities, and on the streets. That’s what my new book Vulture Capitalism is all about.
Capitalism produces nothing but ruin and disaster, and has failed all over the world. In your opinion, how can we bury it once and for all and move on to something else? Aren’t certain currents, notably the social democrats, who want to reform this morbid system mistaken?
Unless we socialise and democratise the ownership of society’s most important resources – unless we dissolve the class divide between capital and labour itself – there can be no true democracy.
Any attempt to democratise our economy will encounter massive resistance from capital. The only route to a democratic economy will therefore run through struggle. The first step towards building a democratising society is building a movement capable of resisting the vested interests that would seek to prevent us from reaching this point.
Control over the state is important for achieving democracy at scale. If capitalists want to disrupt a political movement, they can stop investing – capital strike – or move their business elsewhere – capital flight. Even where resistance does not come from capital itself, the capitalist state is generally both willing and able to act on its behalf. Reactionary governments have frequently unleashed extraordinary violence on movements seeking to challenge the status quo.
The way in which state power is exercised is, as we know, dependent upon the balance of class power in society as a whole. Were an organised working class capable of resisting these strategies, workers could organise within state institutions both to limit the direct use of state power against organised labour and to undermine capital’s power to strike or flee.
The potential effectiveness of these strategies is precisely why vested interests fight so hard to undermine worker organising and prevent left-wing governments from coming to power. It’s also why thinkers like Ralph Miliband argued that there was no route to what he called ‘parliamentary socialism’ – i.e. the transformation of state institutions using democratic processes. Yet the examples I outline in my book show that powerful political movements can elect progressive candidates, and those candidates can achieve meaningful reforms when in public office.
Socialists must struggle within and outside all social institutions – including those of the state – to shift the balance of power within society in favour of workers. Developing policy proposals is therefore as critical as laying out democratic alternatives to the status quo that can be built in our communities today.
Don’t we need a real workers’ movement to defend the working class throughout the world? And how can we rebuild a real fighting Left?
The shift towards a more democratic economy will not happen on its own. Working people must organise to fight for it. Traditionally, this fight has been organised in the main by the labour movement. Working people came together in unions to fight for better wages and conditions and successive victories made them steadily more confident in articulating wider political demands.
In Vulture Capitalism, I outline the example of workers who organised to take control of Lucas Aerospace as an example of how the labour movement plays a dual role of both protecting workers in the economy today and supporting them to build a better world tomorrow. In Germany, the largest union has been campaigning for the introduction of a four-day working week, based on evidence that doing so would boost productivity and employment while improving living standards. In both the US and the UK, a network of unions mobilised behind proposals for the Green New Deal, working tirelessly against fossil fuel lobbyists attempting to convince workers that the green transition could cost them their jobs.
The anti-union laws imposed by neoliberal governments all over the world should be removed and sectoral collective bargaining introduced – and this must be viewed from a transnational perspective, including workers throughout the value chain. Unions must also take measures to democratise their internal structures and give greater voice to rank-and-file workers, as well as supporting those working to unionise precarious workers.
Worker organising can support the transition towards worker ownership. One of the best known historic attempts to expand worker ownership is Sweden’s Meidner Plan. In the 1970s, trade union economists developed an initiative to steadily socialise ownership in the Swedish economy by requiring all companies above a certain size annually to issue new shares that would be transferred into a worker fund. In this way, workers would become owners of the firms in which they worked. Worker representatives, selected through the unions, would then take seats on corporate boards on behalf of the worker-owners of the company.
In the UK, the Labour Party developed a similar scheme through which large companies would have to place a certain portion of their shares each year into a worker fund that would confer some decision-making power and distribute dividends.
It is also critical to build unions that can organise across global supply chains. On Black Friday in 2022, Amazon workers across thirty countries went on strike in a coordinated campaign over wages, conditions and decarbonisation. Workers in the global North need to work with those in other parts of the supply chain to put real pressure on bosses in the rich world.
Don’t you think that the European Union primarily serves an oligarchy rather than the peoples of Europe?
Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual godfather of neoliberal economics, heavily influenced the creation of what became the European single market, with its commitment to the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital. And the Eurozone economies are forced to keep government spending within certain limits to enforce so-called ‘fiscal discipline’. This policy has been disastrous for many of the poorest people in the bloc, who have faced years of cuts to public services, which have helped to drive down living standards.
What’s more, the EU’s migration policies are extremely regressive, and have led to countless deaths in the Mediterranean Sea. And there are now 1,800 km of walls and fences surrounding Europe – equivalent to 12 Berlin walls.
It is undoubtedly true that EU has also introduced some progressive policies on the environment, workers’ rights and tax avoidance. But overall, its role is to maintain the status quo.
How do you explain the rise of the far right in the West? And how can we combat this trend effectively?
Governments across Europe have utterly failed to shield citizens from the impact of the cost of living crisis. Between 2021 and 2022, household living standards fell in half of EU countries, and real median disposable incomes fell by 2 percentage points. Growth and productivity have been stagnant in many major European economies for years, and some tipped into recession in 2023. Last year, the German economy shrank by 0.5%, while Italy’s grew by just 0.7% and France’s by 1%.
But things don’t look so bad for everyone. According to Oxfam, between 2020 and 2023, Europe’s billionaires have increased their wealth by 1/3. The wealthiest five billionaires saw their wealth increase by 76% over the same period.
Without action to address the gaping inequalities that exist within and between European countries, these challenges will not abate. Absent investment to boost productivity, create well-paid, secure jobs and deal with the impact of climate breakdown, economies will continue to stagnate. Absent redistributive policies to support those on low incomes, resentment will continue to grow.
In other words, people will come to feel even more powerless than they already do. And they will respond to that sense of powerlessness with either apathy, or rage. Apathy benefits the centre, but rage benefits the far right.
With left parties mainly defeated thanks to years of centrist onslaught, the only parties able to profit from rage against the status quo are those of the far right. These parties will blame migrants and ‘woke’ green politics for falling living standards, rather than decades of failed neoliberal economic policies.
Voters will lend their support to nihilistic politicians pledging to burn the whole corrupt economic and political system to the ground. They will not promise to make people’s lives better, but they will promise to take revenge on those they claim have made people’s lives worse – whether migrants or the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’.
The only way to get out of this cycle of falling living standards and reactionary support for the far right is to build political movements that can transform people’s rage at the current system into a movement against the status quo. In Vulture Capitalism, I look at lots of different examples of attempts to do exactly this – and discuss the changes we need to make to make our movements more effective.
In our fight against capitalism and imperialism, don’t we need alternative media to counter the oligarchic classes that rule the world?
Alternative media is critically important in supporting left wing movements that can give people an alternative perspective, and help them to organise against the regressive systems that dominate their lives. That’s why I write for Tribune Magazine, a British socialist publication, and why I appear regularly on shows like Novara Media.
Most of our campaigns – whether unions organising for better wages, citizens protesting against human rights abuses, or communities organising alternative economic models – are denigrated by the mainstream media. We need a left media to support our organizing efforts and allow us to build movements that can change the world.
Interview realised by Mohsen Abdelmoumen
Who is Grace Blakeley?
Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune Magazine and author of several books, including ‘Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom’ – as well as ‘The Corona Crash: How the pandemic will change capitalism’ and ‘Stolen: How to save the world from financialisation’.
A supporter of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party, she left the party in 2023 because of the new party leader Keir Starmer’s support for Israel.
She is the former economics commentator for the New Statesman, and a former Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research. She appears frequently in UK and international media, including appearances on BBC Question Time, ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Talk TV’s Piers Morgan Uncensored and MTV News.
