Vulture capitalism
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Good evening. Hello. I would like to start by welcoming our in-person and our online audience to this public event at the London School of Economics and Political Science. My name is David Madden and I'm Associate Professor of Sociology at

here at the LSE and I'm very excited about this event tonight. As I'm sure you all know, our main speaker tonight is Grace Blakely.

Grace is an author, journalist, and political commentator. She's written for The Guardian, Tribune, and New Statesman, among many other publications, and appears regularly on television and radio. You may also know her from her podcast, A World to Win, which she produces with Tribune. We're also going to hear tonight from Michael Vaughn.

who is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute here at LSE. And Michael researches and writes about topics such as digital political participation, far-right politics, and the politics of economic inequality. And I should say that this event is produced tonight by the Inequalities Institute and the Department of Sociology.

Tonight we're going to discuss Grace's new book, "Voltercapitalism," which was published in 2024 by Bloomsbury. "Voltercapitalism" argues that when you look at how capitalism actually works, as opposed to how it pretends to work, it's clear that it is not a self-regulating system of free markets. In fact, Grace writes, "Capitalism is a system of pervasive centralized planning."

It is centralized planning by the owners of capital in their own interests. The book explores the consequences of capitalist planning and tries to imagine what an alternative system based on genuine democratic planning would look like. So there's a lot there for us to discuss. I think that

now is, for those of us in the business of critical political economy, it's a strange time. It is clear today that capitalism is utterly triumphant. It has colonized nearly every corner of the globe and nearly every moment of our waking lives. And indeed, Grace's book begins with a journey

through the everyday life of many people around the world who already, before breakfast most days, have interacted with five or six predatory global corporations. So we live in a world where capitalism seems to be alone, unchallenged, and omnipresent. And yet, the fragility of the capitalist system and the unstable destructiveness of the world that capitalism has created are also obvious to everyone.

I mean, we're what, not even a fortnight into 2025 and it's already a global train wreck. It is clear that the current system is unstable and untenable. It might seem like there's no alternative today, but in reality, there's no alternative to finding an alternative. So Grace's book is an important part of that discussion and I look forward to

hearing her thoughts about it and eventually to hearing from the audience as well. So let me just quickly go through the format of tonight and then we can get started. If you want to comment on tonight's event on the social media network of your choice, you could use the #LSEevents hashtag if you're into that. And note also that this talk is being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast

assuming no technical difficulties. So first we're going to hear from Grace Blakely, and then Michael Vaughan will add some of his thoughts. I'm going to ask them a few questions, then there'll be a chance for the in-person and the online audience to pose your own questions. Afterwards we'll have a reception just outside the theater, so please join us to continue the conversation. So yes, now let's turn the floor over to Grace Blakely. Thank you.

Hello everyone, thank you so much for being here tonight on this very cold evening. So as we've just been hearing, I'm going to talk to you a bit about vulture capitalism today and why I think the topics that I explored in the book, which I started writing over three years ago, which feels like a very different world now, why they're still relevant and why they're actually more relevant than ever.

So the central thesis of vulture capitalism is, as we've just been hearing, that capitalism is not really a free market system. It certainly isn't a free market democratic system, as we're used to hearing. And on the other side of that, I also argue that socialism is not, as people often claim, defined by state centralized planning.

This is the kind of division that is held up and has been held up throughout history. It's held up in our politics and economics as between these two very clearly defined systems. One of capitalism as a free market democratic system, often, you know, with overtones of liberalism and the end of history and the people who are on the right side of that battle. And then socialism is this dead system.

rigid, archaic ideology defined by a centralized planning that is not fit for the kind of dynamism of modern societies. And you see this today, echoes of this even within our own politics. The divide between left and right is constantly seen as this battle between people who want a small state and lots of space for the free market and people who want a big state and to contain the dynamism of the free market. And that's basically completely wrong.

That's not what capitalism is about. Capitalism is not a free market system that requires a small state. It is a system that is defined by massive monopolistic corporations that dominate the world economy, that have nothing to do with free markets, and which are able to undertake a significant amount of centralized planning. That thing that we're told defines socialist societies. It's also not defined by small states.

You look around the world everywhere now over the last several decades, indeed over the course of the history of capitalism, and a recurrent theme is big states stepping up and intervening to support the interests of those big monopolistic corporations.

Today, we are living in an era of Elon Musk working with and through the American state, two very close allies, these almost hegemonic forces, working together to pursue a particular idea of what constitutes the interest of America. That, I argue, is actually a defining feature of capitalism. It's not an aberration. All the way back to the East India Company, which was this joint venture between the British state and British merchants.

That link between huge monopolistic corporations and their guardians within powerful capitalist states is a defining feature of this system. So if capitalism isn't defined by free markets and democracy, and socialism isn't defined by centralized state planning, then what does define these two systems? Now I'm going to tell you two stories which ultimately, as I discovered over the course of my research, are interlinked.

to try and illustrate what I think the divide between these two systems looks like.

The first story is a story about a company that you may be familiar with. It's called Boeing. It's a big aerospace company, produces planes. Many of you will have flown in a Boeing plane at some point in your life. You may have also seen that Boeing has been in the news over the course of the last year. There have been strikes amongst its workforce. Whistleblowers have come forward to attest to a toxic corporate culture. Some of those whistleblowers have died. The door blew out of a Boeing plane mid-flight.

And this all comes on the back of two big disasters that many of you may remember back in 2018 and 2019, the Boeing 737 Max disasters. Now, these took place when two Boeing planes nosedived out of the sky, seemingly inexplicably, killing nearly 350 people in two separate plane crashes. Now, when these crashes occurred, there was lots of speculation as to what happened.

Boeing, the company, initially tried to blame the pilots, but it was later revealed in investigations that there had been a mechanical failing in the plane, specifically a failing of a piece of software called the MCAS system that caused, in both incidents, the nose of the plane to dive down into the earth with the engine still on, so really plummeting into the ground at astonishing speeds.

Now, this MCAT system had been brought into the plane at a relatively late stage of its development. This plane was being developed by Boeing in a bid to kind of dominate the global aerospace market and particularly in a bid to maximise value for shareholders.

The development of the 737 MAX came in the midst of the kind of shareholder value revolution where CEOs and senior management were all invade to maximize value for shareholders. That was their one singular responsibility. And so in Boeing, this looked like a big transformation of the corporate culture within the company.

So first, of course, as they always do when they're told that they need to maximize value for shareholders, the company went after the unions within Boeing. And what was once a company that kind of lionized engineering expertise and had a good relationship between management and labor inserted layers and layers of middle management whose role it was to undermine the unions and to enforce cost-cutting measures throughout the organization.

And this is when whistleblowers started to come forward saying, and there have been several books written about this actually, saying that whistleblowers came forward before these disasters saying that if this corporate culture is not changed, people will die. And ultimately that turned out to be true because costs were cut, corners were cut, and that ultimately resulted in the development of

of an unsafe plane, basically in a bid to create a plane that was cheap to manufacture and which didn't have to have any kind of big significant changes to the training of the pilots who were going to be flying this plane. Boeing's idea was to basically create this new plane but insert lots of different new kind of engineering, new software into it, but tell the pilots that this was the same as all the old planes that they had been flying.

So out came the 737 MAX, which was this kind of monster that had been developed, you know, as I said, with this desire to cut costs, cut corners, pushing back against the workforce, all really in line with this kind of managerial philosophy of maximising value for shareholders. Now, there have been lots of people who'd come forward saying this plane is potentially not going to be safe. There were lots of problems with the plane over the course of its development. So what happened? You know, this is kind of a classic case of corporate greed, really. Maybe we wouldn't be

that astonished by it. This is kind of the classic corporate philosophy. But surely the government should have been there as it is supposed to in a kind of regulated market society. Surely the government should have been there to make sure that this corporation was properly regulated and that it wasn't going to do anything to a responsible.

Well, at the time, the FAA, which is the Federal Aviation Authority, had been governed by a philosophy of self-regulation, which was the same philosophy that underpinned how the banks were regulated in the run-up to the financial crisis. So Boeing at the time was being regulated by a unit of the FAA that sat inside Boeing and whose workers were being paid by Boeing.

So naturally there was a significant conflict of interest here. No one at the FAA wanted to assess this particular plane because they all knew that there were so many problems with how it had been manufactured. But in the end it was cleared as safe despite the fact that many engineers had said there are all these different problems with this plane.

It actually just so happens that just before the 737 MAX disasters, a new round of deregulation for the aviation industry had been passed through Congress amidst intense lobbying by the aerospace sector.

And the argument that was made in this round of debates within Congress, a congressperson stood up and said, no airline manufacturer would manufacture an unsafe plane because they would be punished by the market. Their competitors would start to erode their market share. It wouldn't make any sense for these companies to manufacture an unsafe plane. And yet, as we know, capitalism isn't a free market system. So what happened when Boeing did manufacture this unsafe plane? Well...

After the 737 MAX disasters, over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Boeing was on the verge of going under, it received a huge backdoor bailout from the US government. This was just after the US government had been investigating senior executives at Boeing for the manufacture of this unsafe plane. As it turned out, senior executives in the company had known about the problems with this plane before it had gone to market.

And yet nothing happened to them. They got a small fine and then the company got a massive bailout during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, all throughout the development of this plane, Boeing had been the biggest recipient of corporate welfare in the US. It had been getting subsidies and tax breaks from state governments all across the country. And in fact, if you look a little deeper into the story of Boeing's transformation,

you see the hands of the American government all over that story as well. Because everything started to change at Boeing in the 1980s when it merged with a failing aerospace firm called McDonnell Douglas. Why did it merge with McDonnell Douglas? Because McDonnell Douglas provided a lot of inputs that were used by the Pentagon and the American Department of Defense. So the US government said, "Boeing, you're going to take over this company," much as it did to the banks in the wake of the financial crisis.

and the toxic culture that was in McDonnell Douglas ultimately ended up being transplanted into Boeing. So throughout the whole history of this story, right from the very beginning of the shareholder value revolution, through the manufacture of this plane with the FAA, up to the disaster itself, and then the aftermath of disaster, you see this fusion between this big powerful corporation and the American state.

You don't see a free market with lots of little aerospace firms all manufacturing different planes and if one goes down then the others take up their market share. You see one big powerful American company with a competitor that is one big powerful European company, that's Airbus. That's also been embroiled in all sorts of corruption scandals recently. But you have basically one big company and it doesn't exist in a market, it's a monopoly.

And when it does something wrong, the government does not punish it. It doesn't properly regulate it. Instead, it rides to the rescue. It provides it with subsidies, with tax breaks, with a bailout when things threaten to go wrong. And in fact, as you look deep into the relationships between these two institutions, you see how deeply imbricated they are as part of this American military industrial complex.

There are lots and lots of firms like Boeing that are kept within a very close orbit of the American state. And the relationships between the people who run these companies and people within the government are very close and often corrupt. You see this with the fossil fuel companies, for example. Another example I use is that of ExxonMobil. CEOs at ExxonMobil knew about what they called the greenhouse effect in the 1970s. They had their climate scientists research this effect.

when they realized that burning fossil fuels would lead to climate breakdown, they cut funding for the climate research team, took that funding and directed it into climate denying groups that would cast doubt on the science behind climate breakdown. And they spent vast sums of money lobbying Congress, lobbying groups all around the world to...

not implement any legislation that would harm the interests of the fossil fuel industry, all the way up to very recently when the former CEO of ExxonMobil was made Secretary of State in the US government. So these close links, this fusion basically between public and private power lies at the very core of capitalism and particularly of the hegemonic

power that rules over the global economy today of American capitalism. This is a country that talks about free markets and democracy, but it is an economy that is dominated not by free markets, but by monopolies.

And it is a democracy that has been slowly, but very powerfully eroded by vested interests to the extent that it can't really be called a democracy anymore. And we see the apogee of that today with the extraordinary private power wielded by one or two men, powerful men, people like Elon Musk. So capitalism isn't a free market system and nor is it really aligned with the values of democracy.

So what is its alternative? What is socialism? Historically, the idea has been that if capitalism is a free market system, the problem with free markets is that they're chaotic. You get periodic financial crises, you get economic crises, but if you had a powerful centralized state,

then it could plan economic activity so that it wasn't so irrational, so that everyone could have a job all the time and that things would basically run a little bit smoother. That's the kind of system that we had in many advanced economies in the wake of the Second World War. And that's really kind of overtaken our idea of what socialism is today, at least in part because of the example that we had with the Soviet Union. But if you look back to the earliest theorists of socialism, whether that's Karl Marx or indeed the people who came before him,

That's not what socialism was seen as. Marx famously wrote that the capitalist state is nothing but a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie. He did not have any faith in the ability of the capitalist state to tame this market system. Instead, the idea was that ordinary people

should be able to actually run the enterprises in which they worked. That people would be able to come together and run this system democratically, socially, collectively, much better than any one or two individuals at the top of any big institution, be that a big multinational corporation or be that a government. And there's a story, which as I said, turns out to be linked to the case of Boeing, that I think illustrates this point very clearly. And it's the story of the Lucas plant.

Now, back in the 1970s, there was another aerospace company in the UK called Lucas Aerospace. And it was basically going under. It was being undermined by international competition. And its workers were very concerned about losing their jobs. So they went to a minister in the then Labour government, one of my personal heroes, Tony Benn,

And they said, "We need you to nationalise us because we're all going to lose our jobs." Tony Benn said, "Look, we can't do that." Lots of different reasons, economic problems. Also, you know, that's not necessarily going to be the best way for you to escape these problems. Why don't you guys go away and come up with a plan as to how you could transform this company, how you could make it viable again?

And the unionists went away and initially they were a bit stumped so they wrote to experts and local government and people within the aerospace sector and they said, "What do you think we should do?" And they didn't get very many replies.

So then they went to the workers within Lucas Aerospace, thousands of them, and they said, what do you think we should do with this company if we had the capacity to kind of take control over it and change it? And the response they got was astonishing. This was ordinary workers, engineers, managers from across the company. They replied basically all saying the same thing. We don't want to produce weapons anymore.

We have skills and expertise that we believe could be used for the betterment of our society. We want to produce socially useful technologies and we want to do it democratically, fairly, where we are all in charge of what's going on. We get to be part of the decision-making process that governs this firm.

All these ideas came together. There were ideas as to how they could use the resources within the firm to produce wind turbines, dialysis machines, all different sorts of progressive technologies. They came together to form the Lucas Plan.

And this was kind of a lightning rod in British society at the time. This was the 1970s, a time, as some of you may remember, characterised by profound conflict between organised labour in the form of very institutionalised unions and a state that was trying to manage the relationship between labour and capital. And then suddenly this document comes in saying, well, actually, there's something beyond this battle between the market and the state.

And that's actually the interests and the views and the capabilities and the talents of ordinary people who are saying, if you gave us power, we could run this economy, this society far better than any of you could. So the Lucas Plan was discussed in Parliament and one MP stood up and said, this document is a threat to the very ideology that underpins capitalism, which is that the bosses will order the workers around and the workers will do what they're told.

The peace movement held it up as an example of how to move away from militaristic technologies. The environmentalist movement held it up as a way to transition to a better and more environmentally sustainable economy. The union movement said this is a really interesting new way of empowering workers. Even the Financial Times wrote that the workers at Lucas had achieved something really remarkable with this document.

The guy who was responsible for all this, Mike Cooley, who became a pioneer of what was known as the socially useful technology movement, was fired by Lucas Aerospace for spending too much time on union business. But for a while it looked as though the Lucas plan might have some legs. The workers were fighting for it, people were fighting for it in Parliament. Then came 1979 and Margaret Thatcher came into power. Now Thatcher's whole ideology

was that people wanted a small state, that we needed to return to the roots of free market capitalism, which required a focus on individual freedom, a reduction in the size of the state, greater levels of competition. But what Thatcher actually did

It had nothing to do with any of those things. It wasn't about restoring free markets. It wasn't about restoring personal freedom. Instead, she did, as most ardent free market capitalists do, use the power of the state to boost her allies and to crush her enemies. We saw this very clearly with the labor movement in the miners' strikes, but it also applies to the Lucas Plan.

After Thatcher gets into power, the Lucas plan is shredded. Many of the people who were involved in it go and work for the GLC, the Greater London Council, which was ultimately disbanded by Thatcher a few years later because it became such a hub of resistance.

to her model. There was even a democratic plan for how the people could take over the area of the London Docklands, which ultimately became this kind of privatised hub for financial capital. The people in that area submitted this plan to the GLC, the People's Plan for the London Docklands, and they said, we want to take over this area, inspired in part by what happened in Lucas Aerospace, because we believe that our children deserve better to be more than lavatory attendants for passing businessmen. Now that plan was crushed as well.

So what happened with the re-emergence of this kind of free market movement, this movement that was spearheaded based on the idea that human freedom was all important? Well, all of these people who had been putting together these plans as to how they could reclaim their freedom from the oppression that they were experiencing at the hands of the state and of big business, they were crushed.

Lucas Aerospace was ultimately sold off. And this is something that I found out to my amazement over the course of my research. Lucas Aerospace was sold off, chopped up into little pieces, sold off to different companies. And part of what was once Lucas Aerospace ended up being bought by the company that produced the faulty input for the Boeing 737 MAX plane that crashed all those decades later.

And I think those two stories illustrate what capitalism and socialism are about. They illustrate the fork in the road that we faced at that point in the 1970s, when in some ways the power of the labour movement was at its height. This is a choice not between markets and states. It is a choice between centralised, oligarchic authority that is exerted over society by a small class of people within both the public and private sector.

and democratic collective power of the kind that brings us things like the Lucas Plan, like the People's Plan for the London Docklands, like many, many other examples of this kind of democratic planning that I list over the course of the book.

And I think this is something that it's really important to remember as we go into what I think will be many, many years of much greater levels of fusion between public and private power. Because if progressives continue to couch their arguments as we want a big state to protect people from the ups and downs of the market, people are going to say, but the state has only ever screwed us over. The state is in bed with the big businesses and it will be very easy to prove that. For me,

socialism, progressive politics, whatever you want to call it, it has to be couched in terms of human freedom, in terms of that promise that was made by politicians like Thatcher and ultimately completely broken. It has to be couched in terms of real democracy that is giving people power back over their lives. Thank you.

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.

Thanks Grace and thanks everyone for having me here. I'm really happy to be here because I'm a big admirer of Grace's work and the reasons why I'm a fan of hers are basically the reasons why I'm a fan of the book because I think it does two things that are tricky individually and very tricky to do together and that's firstly that it takes seriously these intellectual questions about what is capitalism and

and dealing with thinkers from Marx, Hayek and on and on. But then secondly, it's also centrally interested in questions of mass politics, not just by trying to explain those intellectual debates clearly, but directly grappling with the questions of what is to be done. And also talking about examples of successful collective action like the Lucas Plan.

So having established myself as a non-objective reader, I do want to touch briefly on three of the book's themes that stuck with me and some of the questions that I thought I could bring to a discussion about it now.

And the first, naturally enough, is capitalism. My reading of vulture capitalism is that it makes a kind of argument for continuity in capitalism's essence from Marx through to today. So essentially that vulture capitalism is capitalism.

But I do think that we can set that kind of continuity claim against other ways of seeing the moment that we're in now, whether that's transformation or total departure. And so there are lots of examples, but the one that comes to mind is Yanis Varoufakis and his book Technofeudalism and this idea that actually capitalism is dead and it's been replaced by something much, much worse.

And for me, this kind of question does come into focus in thinking about the boundaries between economic and political power, which Grace already touched on. Because in the book, this distinction is talked about as one of the kind of essential fictions of capitalism, that political power and economic power should be distinct.

But I admit that for myself, when I look around and I think that the tech oligarchs have come up a couple of times already, and that is an example where I see this fiction, this useful fiction to disguise a capitalist state planning becoming thinner and thinner and kind of requiring even less and less of a commitment to uphold by capitalists themselves. So

I know that one of the goals of the book is to help people understand capitalism and so my question, I guess, would be how important is it to adjudicate between these different accounts of is it the same old capitalism, is it a virulent new strain or is it something else completely? Or is the most important thing to set in this capitalism-socialism distinction?

The second theme that stuck with me reading the book is class.

And I mentioned already that I read Vulture Capitalism as a kind of a continuity story from Marx onwards, and I think in class it's a similar story, because the book asks us to see the world as divided into two groups of people: those who own everything we need to produce things, and those forced to sell their labor power for a living.

And I can absolutely see the political usefulness in drawing an antagonistic frontier on that line and the necessity of an antagonistic frontier of some kind.

I do have more trouble seeing that as the most accurate way of mapping class structures and maybe that's my own position not knowing where to stand comfortably in that schema but I'll give a couple of concrete examples why.

Firstly, there's the question of whether work is the central defining criterion of the class structure today. So here I want to give a shout out to some colleagues at the International Inequality Institute where class is a central question. So Nora Vitkus, Mike Savage and their collaborator Maren Toft have written recently about the

the question of whether wealth and assets have an increasing role to play in class structure today. So, in other words, could it be less our jobs alone and also our assets and wealth that determine our life chances? Divisions between, for example, who owns investment properties and who rents them as structuring these antagonistic relations.

and processes of reproduction through inheritance, for example, or capitalist accumulation and interest-bearing assets. So also, particularly if we take into account the role of assets, I do find it harder to divide society into these two neat groups because...

Many of us are implicated in a range of different ways in these processes of accumulation, particularly in the face of a shrinking welfare state. So setting aside the disturbing number of landlords, even for people who are lucky enough to buy their own home to live in, they become literally invested in an economy built on asset inflation.

or all of us saving for an insecure retirement through our pension pots. So to come back to the question of political usefulness,

a question for discussion might be, is it better to try and defend the model of two classes, workers and capitalists, or to try and work with an idea of class that is more differentiated and sensitive to the centrality of assets and wealth in determining life chances today?

So the last theme that I wanted to bring to the discussion was crisis. And so for me, I read this book as resolutely optimistic and I'm grateful for that. Crisis plays a big role, not just who has paid for it and who has benefited from the crises of the past, but also present crisis as an opportunity for change.

So when it comes to the present crisis, the book encourages us to peer through the cracks in the system to imagine what might replace it. And I don't want to bring the mood down, but I want to ask what happens if we peer through the cracks and we see something much darker and much worse? For example, conservative authoritarianism and a resurgent far right.

So how do we negotiate the impulse to defend democracy against its own crisis of legitimacy without being trapped into fighting some kind of rearguard action defending the status quo writ large? One answer could be that we need to focus on offering an alternative.

remembering Ralph Miliband's observation that authoritarianism generally prevails over bourgeois democracy when the labour and socialist movements are bitterly divided and deeply confused, a description which might resonate uncomfortably with some people in the room, I'm not sure. And in that sense, even though the book doesn't advertise itself as addressing a threat posed by the far right, I do view it as...

in a sense showcasing how to go about that. Because it does show, in my view, kind of remarkable restraint from sectarian debates within the left despite a wealth of potential material. And showing a kind of determination to look outward into where the power actually lies.

So I personally already take a lot from the book in how to respond to the crisis in democracy and the threat of the far right, but I would also love to hear your thoughts. So congratulations on writing a brilliant book, and I look forward to the discussion. Thank you. I'm wondering if you want to start the discussion by responding to any of Michael's questions, which I summarise as... The first one was...

Is it still capitalism? Does it matter if it's still capitalism? The second question was class. What is the divide today in the asset society argument? And the third was about crisis, with a sort of Leonard Cohen-esque undertone of, do you want it darker? All really brilliant questions, thank you. And thank you for summarising them so clearly. I think I'll take the class question first, because I think it's possibly the most important. Because my definition of capitalism is...

In the absence of being able to refer to it as this kind of free market system, in the absence of being able to define capitalism based on the presence or absence of markets, which is how many observers have defined it throughout history, I say the definition of capitalism is that it is a class-divided society.

It's a society in which production takes place based on the fact that there are a small number of people who own all the resources we need to produce things and then a vast mass of labour which is forced to a greater or lesser extent to participate in that production under threat of destitution and then a vast mass of people who exist even outside of those labour relations to be able to draw on as a reserve army of labour.

in the case of overproduction. Now, this is, as you highlighted, a very antiquated Marxist view of the world.

And lots of very clever, far cleverer than me sociologists have done a huge amount of work on class over the centuries, well, century and a half, since this kind of division was first posited. And I don't mean for my definition of class to be kind of hegemonizing. I don't think it should overtake these views of class that we have within sociology, which, as you say, point to class as a determinant of life chances. That's absolutely not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that the most important thing

determining where you'll end up in society today is whether or not you are a worker or a capitalist. What I am saying is that to understand the way that capitalism works, to understand what kind of society it is, we need to be able to understand that it is based on this divide between labour and capital.

between people who own the stuff and the people who are forced to work for a living. Now, that divide is not very clear at the level of our own national economy, but you cannot understand capitalism at the level of any one national economy. It is not a system that is confined to national boundaries.

If you look at the global economy, it is a much, much clearer divide. You see a very tiny, tiny, tiny class of people who own all the resources that everyone else on the planet needs to survive. You see a vast mass of...

of hyper-exploited labour all over the world. You see perhaps an even vast amount of people who are excluded from those social relations and forced to subsist in order to survive, occasionally being drawn into those social relations when it's required. And then you see this middling group between labour and capital of managers, of accountants, of financiers, of salespeople, the people who make up this city, basically.

Now, if you look at our economy on its own, you just see basically lots of managers, quite a lot of owners, and then not very many other kinds of people that, you know, that we don't have manufacturing anymore. And, you know, the service workers that we do have are hairdressers or work in the gig economy. This isn't a divide between labor and capital, very clearly.

Certainly not in the way that it was at the very origins of the capitalist system when this divide was being developed. But my argument is that what's happened as capitalism has become globalised is that a divide that Marx once identified as existing within, say, the UK, which was industrialists who owned the factories and workers who were forced to work in the factories and then a bunch of peasants and some managers of those factories, has now extended to the global economy. And our economy is the one where all the managers and the owners live.

The other economies are the ones where all the workers live. And this is true across the developed world. We have become economies that are characterised, defined by people who manage globalised production processes. So when you look at the whole world, you still see that very clear divide between labour and capital, but there's also this managerial class, which Marx, by the way, did identify. He talked about the managers of these big enterprises and how they were co-opted into becoming agents of capital by being given

enough money to buy assets that would give them good lives not quite control over the means of production but enough to allow them to have good lives of themselves and their kids and that's what happens to our economies it's what has really kind of consolidated

the bargain between ordinary people and elites within the rich world, within societies that have the most power. It's basically been like, we'll give most of you good lives in exchange for you participating in this process of managing global production. We'll own all the stuff and the economy will grow and you'll get to own a house. What's fascinating about today is that that bargain is breaking down.

So at the same time as you see the working class all over the world rebelling against a system that has kept them in just horrendous conditions,

pretty much non-stop over the course of the last several hundred years, you also have the breakdown of that bargain between the managerial class that lives here and the owning class that is also largely centered here in the US. So that's my understanding of why it matters to kind of retain that view. But also, you know, that isn't to say that those kind of sociological understandings of class are unimportant because they're clearly incredibly important for our politics.

I'll try and answer the last two relatively more briefly. An argument for continuity or change? I think it was a good way to start this by saying, is this an important question? It's certainly a question that I think...

leftist academics divided loosely between kind of progressive academics and let's say Marxist academics could spend a lot of time debating. This was certainly something that I noticed when I wrote my first book about financialization, another thing which is like, is it new, is it inherent to capitalism, etc.

I personally think that the features of capitalism that I analyze in this book are pretty much inherent to the way that the system works, but that isn't to say that there haven't been astonishing changes in the way that that system works over the course of its lifetime, not least globalization, the globalization of production, which is probably the most fundamental thing that has changed the politics and economics of capitalism over the course of its history. In terms of the tech and feudalism argument, I

I really like Yanis. I think he's a great, a great thinker. I actually did his book launch with him in the South Bank a while ago, which was good fun. And we had this conversation. I kind of put to him, well, I think the defining feature of capitalism is the class division of society rather than markets versus, yeah, rather than free markets, which obviously kind of don't really exist in the same way as they once did. And we had a good back and forth and, you know,

we're still friends and we still basically are completely aligned on most of the subjects of substance that we work on together, so I have a view, others have a view, I don't necessarily think it's that important to litigate. One interesting quote that I do like to go back to though on this subject is, um,

I think if you understand the full history of capitalism, you start to see the points of continuity more than if you just look at the last hundred years. So there's a really interesting quote from Adam Smith looking at the emergence of the East India Company. This was way back at the very origins of capitalism. And he calls the East India Company a strange absurdity because it's a market in the guise of a state. And these kinds of companies existed forever.

all around the world at this point in time. And Adam Smith was like, this is odd because this isn't the way that capitalism, the system that I've imagined in my mind, is supposed to work. And yet here it is right in front of me. And I think that those forms of kind of corporate power and state power go way back to the origins of capitalism. And in terms of this question about crisis and the far right, you know,

Yeah, this is something that I spend literally all of my time thinking about these days. And, yeah, it's something that I've become more and more preoccupied with. And it's why I've decided to write quite a different book. I'm now moving on to the next book, just as this one's coming out, just as everyone's getting used to the ideas in this one. I'm now like, right, well, actually, there are more important things to be dealing with than theoretical questions about the nature of capitalism. Because...

The thing, it was kind of linked to why I chose to write this book. I chose to write this book because firstly, I've been involved in the Corbyn campaign. We came out of that campaign and I was going on TV during the pandemic and all of these political commentators were saying to me,

well, Corbyn lost, but now the government is spending loads of money in the economy, so you basically got what you want, and I had to disabuse them of that idea and remind them that that is not what socialism is, nor is it what capitalism is. But it was also because during that campaign, during 2019 and 2017,

the most pervasive sentiment that I encountered talking to people, going door knocking everywhere in the country. It wasn't anger, it wasn't anxiety, it wasn't hate, it wasn't any of those things. It was disempowerment.

It was a sense that nothing is ever going to change for us. That things have come and gone, politicians have come and gone, movements have come and gone, and our lives have remained utterly the same. And they've continued to get worse, and they will continue to get worse. And I have no control over that.

I have no control over what happens at work. My boss tells me what to do. I have no control over what happens in my community to the extent that I even have a real community anymore. I have no control over what happens in politics. I have no control over my life, basically.

And that, more than anything else, more than any inherent hatred, more than any inherent divisions within human society, more even than kind of economic anxiety itself, is, I think, what's fueling the rise of the far right. There is this deep sense of anger and powerlessness

And when politicians come forward and say, I will act with the power that you feel you do not have to crush the people that you think are hurting you, that provides people with a sense of this fire of like, I feel important again. I feel like my voice matters again because this person is speaking on my behalf. And the left can't answer that.

by saying that guy's mean and bad, we're nice and good and also right about everything and we're going to protect you. The only way to respond to that is by saying actually you're wrong. You do have power. Here's how you need to use it.

And that's, I think, what I'm going to be looking into much more from now on is how people are realizing that they have power and doing things to make use of that power in order to change their lives, their communities, their workplaces. Interesting. There's a lot there. I take your point about...

focusing on practical activity and not getting lost in theoretical debates. I did want to ask about another concept that you talk a lot about in this book, though. And that is the concept of freedom. You use this term a lot in the book, and it's a term today that I think is more often invoked by conservatives and even by the far right. And I'm wondering...

why you think it's important for the anti-capitalist left to use this term and to engage with this idea. And I mean, specifically, you write at one point, you say, under socialism, the freedom offered to all is the freedom of the architect, the power to create worlds. So I'm wondering if you could talk about the utility of the concept of freedom and elaborate on this idea of freedom as the power to create worlds. Yeah.

That sentence draws on this quote from Marx, which is the architect and the bee. And he, I can't remember it off the top of my head now, but he basically says, you know, spiders construct these elaborate webs that are incredibly beautiful and complex and kind of beyond what we could probably do ourselves. In the same way, bees construct these elaborate hives, these amazing structures that we could kind of look upon with, you know, awe, basically.

But the difference between a man and a bee or a spider, the difference between an architect, you know, a human being that constructs these kinds of structures, is that they bring these ideas to being in their heads before doing so with their hands. His argument is basically that this, that man is a creative being, an inherently creative being, one that

for whom imagination and creativity and kind of constructive agency are really inherent to the way that we function. And this view really resonates with me. It reminds me of, there's a study that they did on a bunch of little toddlers. Toddlers love going into lifts and pressing all the buttons.

Why do they love to do that? Because it lights up the areas of a toddler's brain with joy when they do something and then something happens in the world. This idea of like an action and a response of something that you do, something that you've thought to do in your mind and then enacted with your hands, having an impact on the world around you. And that, I think, is something that's really inherent to the human condition. It's also something that we are pervasively denied in a society where...

not only are we denied the capacity for creativity or imagination, because in most areas of our lives we're kind of drummed into these very rigid roles, but also we're often denied the ability to see even the results of our actions, even actions that we haven't chosen to do. This is a thesis that David Graeber put forward in his Bullshit Jobs book. David was a good friend of mine and in part the inspiration for this book.

And he wrote so much about joy and creativity as integral to our idea of what freedom should mean. And that's kind of what I'm getting at here, which is it's kind of, you know, it would be a very David thing to say right now that freedom has to include play. It has to include the ability to be creative, to build these structures in our heads and then put them into being with our hands.

and the kind of oppression and the unfreedom that so many of us experience today is the inability to express that creativity, the inability to express that imagination, and the inability to see the results of our actions play out before us. So for me, when I'm thinking about this concept of freedom, yes, there is very important liberal freedoms that are being eroded and that we as socialists need to fight very, very hard to retain. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom to vote, etc.

Then there are the kind of economic freedoms that are also very, very important. I really love Soren Mouw's new book, Mute Compulsion, which is all about how basically we have our freedom removed in capitalist societies where the choices do this or, you know, not be able to eat, basically. So there's that kind of economic compulsion that takes away our freedom. But also the ways in which our creativity, our playfulness, our imagination are restricted

in societies that funnel us into these rigid and oppressive bureaucratic structures.

I think a real socialist view of freedom is one where we all come together in our communities, in our workplaces, in our movements, and we say, what are the problems that we are facing and how can we work together to develop solutions to these problems? Now, we're all very, very cynical about our capacity to do that. I know because we have for so long been denied that agency and denied that capacity to actually work with each other to do things.

But the thing I'm working on now and the next book I'm going to be looking at is literally just looking at examples of people doing just that. And there's lots. How do you think this translates into a working political project? I mean, you quote Ralph Miliband, who I think actually had a very complicated view of parliamentary socialism. But you say that you don't think that

parliamentary politics really is ever a sort of route towards replacing capitalism. Where do you think that leaves us in terms of how to sort of move beyond it?

My views on this question have changed a lot. Obviously, I was very involved, as I've already mentioned, with the Corbyn movement. And this kind of characterized my entry into politics. It was like, right, okay, well, there's this movement that's going to gain power over the British state. I actually had been up to that point studying African studies. And I was kind of like...

my interest in politics had basically been fuelled by the fact that I was like, you know, Africa loses three times more, sub-Saharan Africa loses three times more in capital flight facilitated by the City of London, often via secrecy jurisdictions that are under the rule in one way or another of the UK. So a democratic project to transform the British state, take on the power of

the City of London and UK Finance would transform global capitalism and, you know, do a huge amount in terms of human development, not just here, but all around the world.

And it was very much the view of, I think, any young socialist activist, which was that you just get control over the state, the state does good policies and then things change. And it was really my participation in that project, the end of that project, and then all of the thinking that I've done since then that led me to realise that that view was always problematic. And indeed, people like Ralph Miliband, Marxist theorist throughout history, would have told you that that view was always problematic.

and that the issue wasn't so much the idea that the state is important and necessary for determining the kind of society you live in. Obviously it is. The issue is the idea that you can do anything

As a kind of, and there are going to be some Leninists who get annoyed at me over this, the idea that you can do anything just as like a vanguard, just as a small group of people who go in and shift things up. Now, obviously, there have been a lot of cases throughout history of people doing that. I'm not saying that isn't true. But we're talking about a fundamental transformation of society, which, again, requires a fundamental transformation in how we think as people. It's not going to come from that kind of politics.

The things that I'm looking into right now, and again, you know, one of the reasons that I wrote this book was this question of disempowerment that I spoke about, I think is kind of the defining political emotion of our era. That, I think, can basically be attributed to this incredibly powerful ideology of individualism.

It's basically like we are all on our own. You have to fight to survive. Your job as a worker is to enter into the labor market and push other workers out of the way to get to the top. The better you are at that, the more successful you will be. And fundamentally, if you mess up, nobody is coming to save you.

you know, this idea of the kind of, this is where I think there is a clear, very clear divide between the modern left and right, which is this idea of you are on your own, you know, you see the kind of rugged individualist philosophy of like Ayn Rand pursued, who's read

by all of these libertarian billionaires who ironically enough actually relied upon the state to acquire their fortune. But their idea is that man is alone in the world fighting for his right to survive, right? A kind of, you know, very individualistic understanding of what it means to be a human being.

And I think that all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, have imbibed that ideology. It's certainly what the tough guys think we should be doing, right? And if you don't think about humanity in that way, if you think that we need to care for each other, that we exist in a kind of inherently, in a situation of kind of inherent interdependence, of kind of collective, yeah, collective dependence that requires us all to be there for one another,

to a greater or lesser extent. If you accept those ideas, then you're a soft leftist who doesn't understand the way that society really works.

And we even, yeah, we have internalized those ideas. And I think that is the biggest thing that stands in the way of political transformation. Because if we all tomorrow suddenly realized we need each other, we can work together if we choose to. And if we did work together, if we all say suddenly decided to withdraw our labor from this system, the entire thing would come crumbling down.

It exists so much more powerfully in our heads than it does in statutes or in bureaucracy or in, you know, these kind of objective things that we assume exist out in the world, which is why I have moved so much more

to a politics that centers around how we emancipate ourselves and each other yes as the foundation for a political movement that will be able to gain control in corporations in the economy in the state whatever but that fundamental shift away from individualism is i think the prerequisite to anything good that is going to happen in the future in politics

And it's a question that I think is inescapable given the conditions of crisis that Michael was referring to. I mean, it is crumbling before our eyes. We're living the crisis and living the crumble. And I think it really generally is a matter of how do we respond to that, not trying to imagine that it's not happening.

I don't know if you want to jump in on any of this. Well, I mean, the only thought that sprang to mind is it was interesting that you started out in African studies and then you moved into a kind of very different sort of grassroots anti-capitalist mode of organising now. But I...

might make a brief plea for not leaving the state completely behind. Just interestingly, you know, in the last three weeks, you know, there was a vote on a UN framework convention on tax that the UK was one of nine countries to vote against, compared with 119 countries. Four of this had been developed and spearheaded by the Africa Group. And so while... And this...

is a step towards a more just form of international cooperation on designing our international tax system, which is the basis for a lot of these kind of issues of ongoing extraction that you mentioned.

And so while we are working to imagine a better world, I also think we can't take our eyes off the ongoing decisions that are being made in our name by our representatives, including in the last month. I totally agree. And what I would say is that this wasn't the Tories. This was the Labour Party. You know, it's not like we can just say, go out and vote and things will be different.

Like, if we want a Labour government to change, that is not going to happen just by us knocking on the doors of Labour MPs and saying, have you considered not voting against measures that will impoverish millions of people all around the world? It has to come from organising and from, you know, basically demanding and making demands that cannot be ignored.

and that starts in the grassroots. So yeah, I totally agree. I'm not one of these people that just thinks socialism will spontaneously arise or indeed any form of social transformation will spontaneously arise without transforming any of our key social institutions of which the state is probably paramount. But I think we're on a much longer journey, unfortunately, and it starts a little bit earlier. Yeah.

Yeah, and maybe really includes reconstructing the institutions of political life from the ground up. Let's open up the discussion and take some questions from the audience. Maybe we'll start with

from our in-person audience, and then we can turn to questions from the online audience. So if you want to ask a question, raise your hands, and please state your name and affiliation, if applicable. And there are microphones circulating, so maybe we can just start here with the woman in the scarf. Yeah, I wanted to ask about Asley and what we think the laws are.

Why don't we take them in groups of three. I see a question over here as well. Hi.

Hi, my name is Lucas. I'm a visiting fellow here in the Department of Government. Thanks to all three of you, really. I wanted to come back on the point about the globalisation of the working class and it has echoes of this idea of the labour aristocracy, right? So this idea that actually people in the West, the working class is actually very conservative and that there isn't really any revolutionary potential in the West.

I think that raises a question, if we're playing to that idea, it raises a question around the centrality of imperialism and of where the real locus of revolutionary or fundamental change in the world is. And it would suggest that that locus is not in the West, it's somewhere else, whether that be in Palestine or in China or wherever. So could you say more about how you think that feeds into your understanding of political change? Yeah, thank you.

Great. And maybe we can take one more. I see here in the front the I Heart Unions button here. Yeah, see that.

Steve Ballard from London Hazard Center. I was a critic of the set of the labor-focused things because it never got to grips with the philosophical issues. But Marx and Engels made very clear the role of nature, the work of nature, of which we must carry on consciously what the rest of all the other species do unconsciously if we are all to survive on this planet for as long as humanly possible. Now that's...

I would have preferred, I think you might have, your case would have been stronger if you'd started making that case to this audience because that was why they were saying that the role of the working class is to, it has to take on the work of nature, it has to take it on quietly. We can all survive and so I'm hoping you'll address that in the remaining minutes.

Great, thanks. So while more people are formulating their questions, maybe you can speak to these three issues. One was the neoliberalization of higher education, the locus of revolutionary change, and Marx's conception of the work of nature. Yeah, great questions.

I mean, I don't need to tell, I presume, anyone in this audience about the just astonishingly negative impact that the ideology of neoliberalism has had throughout higher education. It's perhaps one of the places, maybe not that has implemented it in its purest form, but certainly the ideology has been pushed in very clear and concrete ways by

across a number of different institutions. And of course it has also been resisted. I won't go into detail in talking about the horrendous state of higher education in this country, the cuts to which institutions have been subjected, yes, but also the gaping inequalities that exist within those institutions between the upper levels of management and often poorly paid, casualised staff, some of whom are

there have been cases of junior academics living in tents because they literally cannot afford to survive on the zero hours contracts that they're often provided. At the same time, there is this kind of marketization of the relationship between student and teacher whereby you are a customer and in some senses you expect to leave a university not necessarily with a kind of

critical capacity or a particular kind of knowledge but with a set of skills that will allow you to succeed in the labour market. It is in many ways the font of individualisation is higher education at the moment because it is where you learn this idea that you are an isolated atomised worker. You have taken out a loan to

to invest in your human capital. This idea of human cap, this is very central to the kind of Foucauldian understanding of what neoliberalism is, but the idea of the human subject as a little bit of capital, the idea of taking out a loan to provide for your education really pushes that idea. It's in the same way that you take out a loan to purchase an asset like a house because you believe that that asset is going to appreciate in value.

When you take out a loan to invest in your human capital because you believe that asset is going to appreciate in value, it has all sorts of implications about how you view your relationship to your professors, your employers, and indeed your co-workers. You're much less likely to be able to take part in a labour movement, for example, both because you are often required to repay these debts, but also because you have this different sense of your own subjectivity. So...

Yeah, that neoliberalization of higher education has affected not just the kind of structure and economics of universities, but also the way that people understand themselves going through those universities. And at the same time, as you kind of alluded to, there has been huge resistance to that.

So it's not a coincidence that students have been, as they always have throughout history in these cases, at the forefront of resistance to the genocide in Palestine. And that has been something where we've seen the strong arm of the state work with these neoliberal institutions to crush that form of resistance and that protest.

And it's been on the picket lines of, for example, striking lectures, for example, or indeed during these Palestine demos, where you've seen that kind of collaborative approach to knowledge sharing really come to the fore. And I know people who, for example, during the UCU strikes, students who were like, we heard from these lecturers who came in and did kind of teach-ins, and we learned so much in such a different way, and were able to kind of discuss these ideas. It was a transformative experience for them. So yeah, you kind of have...

in some ways, a very embedded, deep-rooted neoliberal model there, but also, because it's so deeply embedded, very, very strong resistance to that as well, which I am always and everywhere solidarity with unionists across the education sector, and indeed, sixth form college teachers are on strike at the moment in the UK, so send your solidarity to them. Solidarity to those teachers everywhere, and those professors, and anyone within higher education.

A hand for the teachers. The question about labour aristocracy and imperialism. Yeah, great question. I was going to kind of go into all of that when I started talking about class, but I realised it would have probably let us down a bit of a rabbit hole. Yeah, so this whole idea of the kind of labour aristocracy, I mean, I kind of think that when Lenin writes about this, there's obviously a clear point there, right, which is the portion of imperialism

what was once the working class gets bought off in service of capital in the same way that marx writes about this happening at the level of an individual factory certain workers are plucked from obscurity and told you are manager of your colleagues and you get to have power and you get to have higher wages and rather than having solidarity with their co-workers they're kind of bought off and this process happens to kind of to entire societies and undermines

because this particularly steps up in the 1980s with the increase in globalization and with the kind of professionalization of sections of the working class in the rich world. And it undermines what was once

what were once very deep links of solidarity between different parts of the labor movement around the world. You know, there's the classic example of the workers in Scotland who refused to manufacture and ship planes to Pinochet's Chile out of a sense of international solidarity. You see this today with, you know, for example, dock workers who refuse to load cargo that's on its way to Israel. There is this deep tradition of solidarity amongst different parts of the labor movement that's really

clearly undermined by the, what I would say was the kind of clear and intentional division of the working class within the rich world into these different groups. Now, where is the locus of anti-capitalist struggle in that context? I mean, yes, very clearly and very obviously, the energy for capitalist transformation is most clear in those societies where a critical mass of people

are being sucked into those highly exploitative capitalist social relations where people are becoming hyper-exploited workers. And we have this narrative of capitalist progress as though everyone's lives are getting better all the time. But actually, if you look at the conditions being faced by workers in Foxconn factories in China or people mining coltan out of the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the conditions that they're facing are

in many ways just as bad or if not worse as those faced by workers in the UK in Dickensian times. This narrative of progress is pretty for the birds. The issue, of course, is that the difference between the workers that existed in the UK in Dickens's times and the workers that exist in the factories in China and in the DRC today is that

The workers in the UK only had to contend with their capitalists and their state. Now we have a global system of, as you say, imperialism, whereby if the people of one nation do decide that they want to elect a progressive leader who is going to be able to enact liberatory policies for them, they will be crushed.

As we have seen many, many times throughout history, there's a fantastic book written by my friend Vincent Bevins called The Jakarta Method. And it looks at, he basically takes this point that was made by a historian a long time ago, which was that the number of people who died in CIA-backed violence around the world...

over the course of the Cold War exceeded the number of people killed in Stalin's purges. And yet this is not something that we're ever told about. This was a mass effort to undermine socialism all over the world, and it largely succeeded. But that's, I think, where the importance of the struggle in the rich countries comes in, because we need to at least kind of mute the power, the imperial power of these ridiculously regressive imperialist governments.

And there's also, I think, increasingly the opportunity to do that. And I alluded to that when I said that this bargain between the owners and the managers is starting to break down.

20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, if you got a nice managerial job, you would be guaranteed a nice house and the just the hope, the surety that your life would get better, that your children's lives would be better than yours, that you would get richer, that your shares would go up in value, that things would get better. Today, that's no longer true. And you are seeing this revolt, particularly among younger sections of what would once have been the professional managerial class, people

coming out of university with massive debt, unable to afford a house, unable to get a good job, collapsing public services, collapsing environment, and saying, maybe we don't want to sign up to this bargain anymore. So I think there is still the importance of kind of transformation within these kind of core countries.

But also, I increasingly think there is the opportunity there. Although, of course, as we've been hearing, that anger and that rage is currently much more successfully being channeled by the far right. So I think, you know, the stakes of that battle between left and right here will have repercussions, obviously, for the whole of the capitalist world system. And finally, nature.

Of course, incredibly important. And I do talk about this a bit, well, extensively in the book, because this is the crisis, really. What I've spoken about so far, a lot of it has been backward-looking, really. It's about understanding what capitalism is and how that's remained constant over time. But if we look to the future, the crisis, the crisis for us, the crisis even for the capitalist class, is climate breakdown. And actually...

you know you mentioned there that uh man i think you said man needs to do the work of nature the the way i like to think about it and the way that some marxist ecologists have written about it is that man is nature and this idea of a divide between humanity and nature is the product of a particular strain of enlightenment thinking that casts man versus nature

reason versus emotion, east versus west, man versus woman. And a real kind of progressive politics actually accepts the unity of man with nature. This is not something out there that we can control and oppress. It is something that we are. And we have to be able to accept that dependence

on the natural environment, which is not something that an individualistic culture is willing to accept. An individualistic culture like ours is about dominating nature and asserting our own power over it, much as men assert their power of women, much as reason is supposed to be asserted over emotion, you know, all of these classic dichotomies. So kind of getting over that

you know, getting over that divide, that rift, and indeed lots of Marxist psychologists refer to this idea of a metabolic rift between man and nature, basically. The idea that nature provides resources as free gifts

and those are metabolized in the workings of capitalism and produce wealth for those who owns the means of production. And that that relationship is basically breaking down as those free gifts are depleted. So the question of, you know, what we do next. Yeah, I mean...

the biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet are, some of the biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet are the fossil fuel companies who are so integral to the functioning of our economies, of our democracy, they hold kind of almost unparalleled power. And obviously, we need to take on their interests. We need to be fighting them at every step of the way. But

But there's also, I think, really exciting stuff happening at the community level about how we repair this rift with nature. There's a really nice example that I like in the book of, I went to this small town in North Wales called Blaenau Ffestiniog, and they're doing this model of kind of community wealth building from the grassroots.

And a big part of why this happened was that they saw there was this big multinational energy company that had set up a hydroelectric power plant in the mountains near the town and was extracting all of that energy and selling it on international markets. So they said, well, if that company is doing that, why can't we do that? So they set up a community energy company that worked through hydroelectric plants installed all through the mountains and that provided

cheaper energy to residents and the funds from which were also used to do things like buy up shop fronts that could be used to house community companies. So repairing that metabolic rift, repairing that division between man and nature

It requires an offensive politics, yes, of taking on the interests of the fossil fuel companies and the climate movement is very creative as to how we do that and I am, as always, fully supportive of those tactics. But also a politics of repair about how we, yeah, kind of like get over that man versus nature divide within ourselves and within our communities and start to rebuild something that's more sustainable.

Great. We've got time for a few more questions. I see a hand on the upper deck here. And try to keep them brief so we can maybe take three quick questions and a quick answer. Hi. You talk about a method of the breakdown of capitalism being withdrawing labor. And I guess it kind of links to what you were just saying about the rift between nature and people.

I feel like that's a philosophy change that's going to be really, really big. How do we do that? Because withdrawing labor equals kind of like a sacrifice of pretty much everything. How do you convince people to actually sign up for something like that? Because it's kind of like the ultimate sacrifice. Great. There's another question right next to you. That's it.

Thank you very much. How do you think around this seminal moment in time that we're in right now with the advent of AI and next year we will build hundreds of thousands of humanoid robots and probably the year after in the millions? Great. And might as well, there's a man back there with a scarf. You can ask him.

How do you think identity politics has affected the mass mobilization, power or ability of the working class across the world? How do I think what politics are? Identity politics. Oh, okay. Great, and well done keeping everything very concise there. I will try and keep my answers. Yes, exactly. We've got withdrawing labor, AI, and identity politics. Yes.

In nine minutes. In five minutes, right. Okay, cool. That's fine. How do you convince people to withdraw their labor? There was a very easy answer to this question back in the day, which has become much harder now.

to make a case for because of individualism and the answer to that question was solidarity. It was that basically you would do, you would withdraw your labor together, you would be supported by each other, you would be supported by your community, by your union, by your society more generally and there have been so many examples of, you know, if you look at, there's a fantastic documentary about the miners' strike called Still the Enemy Within and it looks at

at the just, you know, ordinary acts of solidarity and comradeship that drove people to basically put their lives on the line often to participate in this form of strike action. And it was the same sort of logic as what you see among troops, which is that you're fighting as much for the guy next to you as you are for some overarching vision.

So this sense of solidarity is very difficult to rekindle in people in an age of individualism. But once you do it, it becomes self-reinforcing because it allows you to reconnect with a part of your humanity that has been taken away from you.

And that's something that I think people are doing in the labour movement across the country in loads of different ways, in loads of really different, exciting ways. So it's just, I think, a mental shift of moving from that individualistic mindset to one based on solidarity and comradeship.

What do I think about the advent of AI? Lots of things and also nothing. Lots of things in the sense that it's obviously a huge shift in the nature of capitalist production. However, we are currently obviously in the midst of a bit of an AI bubble, so it probably seems more transformative than it is going to be over the long run.

And I'm very much of the view of someone who tweeted something like, I want AI that does my dishes and laundry so that I can do creative work rather than the other way around. In terms of why this isn't as transformative as perhaps I think it's going to be, lots of reasons, but mainly this is part of, I think, a longer process of

that has come to define modern capitalism. This is kind of like the Yanis Varoufakis argument, which is that actually we're living in a kind of different type of capitalism because the impetus is no longer for production or really innovation. It's about taking stuff that's already there and enclosing it. So, like, intellectual property rules allow companies to, you know, take...

for example, and say, this is my seed, and if you want to plant it, you have to buy it from me. That's not productive. That's enclosure. In the same way, AI basically involves enclosing human knowledge and finding new ways to sell it back to us or encourage us to buy things in exchange for access to that stuff.

And it is like a, you know, I would say pretty often regressive process, particularly for the people who are having their intellectual property infringed upon, which is ironic for a regime that claims to prize intellectual property rights, certainly when it relates to things like generic drugs.

So how do I think the advent of AI is going to change things? I do think it represents a kind of deepening of a number of different trends towards, yes, what people like Varoufakis and Cédric Durand have called techno-feudalism.

And yeah, it's extractive, basically. It's not productive. It's a form of rentier politics that could only be undertaken by the kind of massive monopolistic companies in bed with governments to such an extent that they can secure their power over these resources much better than anyone else. So I have, I would say, a fairly dim view of the AI revolution.

That's not to say that it isn't important because it obviously is in terms of transforming the way things are produced. Identity politics, how do I think it's changed things?

It depends what you mean by identity politics. If by identity politics you mean the fact that we now have more female CEOs of weapons and fossil fuel companies, then no, I don't think that's a particularly progressive thing. If by identity politics you mean the breakdown of traditional barriers to organising for women, for people of colour within the labour movement, and the construction of different forms of union activity, of

solidarity, of the acceptance of kind of different forms of struggle that come along with those different identities. And I think it is resolutely and unquestioningly a positive thing. The issue is, of course, that a movement that started by attempting to get what was largely a kind of white male

on the left to reflect on that fact has been co-opted by a capitalist class that thinks that it can basically say it's progressive and nice by putting people from various different oppressed social groups in positions of power where they no longer really get to retain their identities as

members of oppressed social groups because they are meeting out much more oppression on other people than they are actually receiving themselves. And that is obviously what has been the cause of an immense amount of anger amongst people who are on the receiving end of that oppression. If, for example, there's the classic cartoon of, I think...

that bomb was dropped by a woman. Or if you're a worker in a massive corporation and you can say, well, you know, our CEO is now paid the same amount as male CEOs in our competitor, but you as a worker are paid one four hundredth of the amount that she pays, then yes, I can understand why you were annoyed about identity politics. But the issue is the fact that that

movement has been co-opted rather than the fact that it didn't have legs to stand on to begin with and really you know if we're going to build a cohesive powerful movement that has roots in communities in workplaces in people's daily lives then you have to be able to account for all the different ways that people do experience capitalist oppression which does vary based on your gender based on your race etc it's just a question of you know where that impetus is coming from top down or bottom up

Great. We have about three minutes left, so I'm just wondering if... I did that quicker than I expected. I was rushing so much. Very well done. Michael or Grace, if either or both of you want to leave us with a really brief thought here to summarize your position on all of these topics we've been discussing.

I'll leave the grand sum up to Grace, but just to briefly tack on to the previous discussion about identity politics, though, I do think that it is interesting the moves that we're seeing from some of these fair-weather friends away from... How DEI is shifting in terms of what it signifies in the context of this more naked alliance between big tech...

oligarchs and a kind of ethno-nationalist far right in power and the fact that when that alliance is a little more front stage then suddenly DEI as the kind of nice extra SOP to a kind of larger customer base really gets ditched pretty quickly. So I think that that's something that is unfolding right in front of us and I think that

for people who are interested in multiple forms of justice, including a kind of recognition-based justice and redistribution-based justice, we should be alert to the opportunities that that presents to identify how those multiple forms of justice can be pursued together by a coalition that has sort of been identified in inverse by that ruling coalition.

I think that's a really good point. And I think, you know, hearing you say that makes me come back to that idea earlier about this kind of dichotomous thought that sits at the heart of the kind of the way that we understand things often in Western societies. And the fact that the new right positions itself as basically the

one half of those two sets of dichotomies. So it is the strong, rational, masculine West that is asserting its dominance and its strength in a very naked and clear way. And just as much as kind of racism, misogyny is at the core of that project,

as is a kind of dereliction of our duties towards nature, as is a denigration of the very idea of care, basically, and of emotion and of interdependence. It is the idea of the kind of rugged individualist that I think sits at the heart of that vision.

And yeah, it's why kind of asserting a politics of care, but not just asserting it, actually showing people what it means is so important. And I guess that's kind of where I want to leave you guys.

This conversation has made me think about a conversation I had not long ago with an Albanian organizer, a trade union organizer, who had to go into, well, didn't have to, ended up choosing to go out into the kind of far reaches of her country to talk to mining communities, basically about how they could get organized and form a union and resist their exploitation. And when she got there, she found a lot of men with very regressive attitudes, and she ended up staying in their homes.

And she would often experience things like, you know, she would be chatting to the man about trade union issues and the woman would be in the back cooking the dinner and she would go and try and talk to the woman about the same sort of issues and then the man would come forward and say, well, you know, you shouldn't be doing that, you should be talking to me. And she basically said that she couldn't go in there with the

the kind of zero-sum attitudes that you would expect among most leftists. She couldn't be like, you're wrong, that's bad, stop doing that, because she needed these people to organise, she needed to get them on board. So very slowly, by embedding herself in this community, she gained the trust of the people involved, they did form a union, and she was slowly able to not shift their ideas, but start to begin to challenge certain ways of thinking. And...

I now really do fundamentally think this is the only way we're ever going to be able to challenge the far right because they are so powerfully, we live in an age of scarcity and fear. Things are going to get worse. The economy is going to go

to shit. The climate is not looking good. Our politics is getting more and more regressive. People are going to get more and more scared. It's not like crisis just creates opportunity for the left. Crisis creates fear. Fear creates kind of scarcity mindsets. Scarcity mindsets encourage us often to kind of turn against each other. And that is, you know, makes most people putty in the hands of the far right when they spread these videos saying these people are coming to take X and Y and Z for you. Your brain is already primed

to believe that someone is coming to take something from you. You cannot fight back against that politics from the top down by saying these people are wrong, they're bad, they're mean. Listen to me.

You have to be able to rebuild a sense of trust, hope for the future, solidarity, care, interdependence, safety within people's communities. You have to be able to give them a sense that actually, no, you don't have to fight everyone all the time. People aren't coming to get you. There is this fundamental feature of humanity, which is that we care for each other, we support each other, we have solidarity with one another. And when we work together to solve our problems,

we can actually achieve far more than if we just fight each other all the time. So that sense of like being rooted in community is I think really important. And actually, I would end by saying that I'm currently doing this research, basically looking at examples from all over the world of grassroots struggles for economic justice, of the kind that I've kind of mentioned here and there over the course of this talk.

And I've started a sub stack dedicated to looking at these examples called "What can we do?" And I really want everyone, if you've got ideas about things that you've heard about, things that you've seen, things that you're involved in, to tell me so I can talk to you, do some more research and put together a much wider understanding of the cool things that are happening everywhere, all across our movement, all across the world, that could give people a bit more of a sense of hope.

Well, that's a great place to leave it. We are out of time, so I just want to thank you both for being part of this great discussion and thank the audience for coming tonight. Yeah, we'll leave it there. Thanks a lot. Good night.

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