“In the book, Grace Blakeley takes on the world’s most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crises are the result of the economic system we have built – ‘a toxic melding of public and private power’. It’s not a broken system; it’s working exactly as planned. It can’t be fixed. It must be replaced.
From Amazon’s attack on employee wages through its domination of regional economies, to how Boeing flies in the face of free markets despite its 737 Max disasters, and from the likes of Henry Ford to Margaret Thatcher, Blakeley considers the past and present of our current crises to pinpoint exactly how it all went wrong.”
“The 30-year-old describes her book as a critique of modern capitalism from a Marxist perspective, which isn’t a phrase that major writers on the left tend to attach to themselves these days.
Instead of reduced taxation, the Office for National Statistics is forecasting that by 2027-28 the UK will have the highest level of taxation since the second world war. Rather than a smaller government, UK government spending as a percentage of GDP is higher now than it was at the start of the 1980s.
Instead of deregulation unleashing dynamic ‘free markets’, many industries are dominated by monopolies or oligopolies. Widening income inequality, declining social mobility and reduced life expectancies are further examples of this policy failure.
Blakeley argues that neoliberalism’s underlying mission was to restore the authority of capital over labour, “a redistribution of power and wealth away from workers and towards owners and senior managers”. As examples she cites Amazon’s success at avoiding corporation tax, and Boeing’s change in management approach that prioritised profit maximisation over design safety.
Boeing was a great success for the financial markets: it “distributed $24.6 billion dollars in dividends to shareholders – many of which were executives within the company – and bought back $43.4 billion worth of shares.”
Blakeley also points out that “the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were set up and financed by Wall Street and therefore represent the interests of investors, not workers. And she criticises international trade agreements for being negotiated in secret, and for including anti-democratic provisions like investor state dispute settlement (ISDS).
These enable investors to take legal action against governments using their democratic prerogatives to tax, regulate and prosecute corporations. Chevron, for instance, used an ISDS in 2018 to overturn a US$9.5 billion (£7.6 billion) fine imposed by Ecuador over oil pollution in the Amazon rainforest.” (The Conversation’s review)
“It was exposed recently that the private train operator, Avanti, had celebrated the opportunity for ‘free money’ since they could harvest profits from tickets sold to the public while the costs of investing in rail infrastructure were covered by the government.”
Blakeley disagrees with those who think these problems can be solved by tinkering at the edges:
Businesses choosing profits over safety and governments bailing out bosses while letting people starve do not represent a perversion of capitalism. These things are capitalism.
Yet that’s not to say that she’s calling for a revolution. Her answer is for workers to come together, join unions and push collectively for change.
So far so good, but her exemplars amount to a fairly limited blueprint for success. Several reach all the way back to the 1970s: trade unionists’ alternative plan to save ailing British firm Lucas Aerospace certainly demonstrated workers thinking strategically, but it was swatted aside by management. Similarly, the more widespread attempts at democratic planning in Chile under Salvador Allende were crushed by Richard Nixon.
A more recent example is Iceland, where voters rejected a proposed UK-Netherlands bailout after the 2008 financial crisis. This led to the establishment of a democratic platform called Better Reykjavik, where citizens can make suggestions about how their budget is spent. This has been fairly successful, though we’re talking about a city of 123,000 people – that’s not much more than half the size of Bournemouth [in England].”
Capitalism is, at its core, defined by this divide: the divide between the people who own all the stuff required to produce commodities, and those who are forced to sell their labour power to the capitalists to buy those commodities. The profit of the capitalist comes through the exploitation of the worker – the interests of the two are diametrically opposed’. (Vulture Capitalism, p. 29)
Yet neither Blakely nor The Conversation’s review call for nationalisation and democratic control of the key sectors of the economy, radical change in the way things are produced and consumed – an economy of need not of profit. Neither is even hinting to a change in property relations, i.e. ownership that is at the core of capitalism and social life, which decides what is produced and controlled, the natural environment we live in, and the role of the nation state in oppression and domination.
Blakely discusses the need for ‘demoratic planning’, but could you plan what you do not own and control?
Blakely stesses that the fundamentals of capitalism remain unchanged; it is the class power of capital over labour that really defines the system. To escape the class exploitation and crises of capitalism, she proposes ‘the thorough democratization of our entire economy’. Apart from what sounds another national framework, how can one change the fundamentals without dealing with ownership and property relations?
Another review highlights the post-WWII planning, regulations and public spending. However, the review ignores a crucial if not a fundamental aspect: the context of which those measures and policies were pursued by states. It was the context of the aftermath of the biggest destruction in capitalist Europe, the US role in rebuilding Western Europe to prevent revolution and the ‘spread of communism’, the biggest boom of capitalism, the social democractic compromise …followed by a falling rate of profit that ushered in ‘neoliberal capitalism’.
Dominic Alexander is correct in pointing out to one of the weaknesses in Blakeley’s analysis of the capitalism of the period she focuses on. “The ruthless dismantling of the social-democratic welfare state, and the relentless attack on workers’ rights and standards of living worldwide, stem not simply from the rise in the concentration of capital, but from the difficulty capital has had since the 1960s in maintaining the rate of profit. The ongoing profitability crisis of capitalism, which erupted again in 2008, and from which there has been no real recovery, has driven the neoliberal stranglehold on economic policy domestically and internationally.“
“Citizens in the west,” concludes Harry Cross, “have come to accept a state of permanent crisis, springing from financial crashes, global pandemics and foreign wars. Paradoxically, although each crisis deepens poverty and inequality, economic debate seems to be falling further and further from public discourse – even more so for debates that present left-wing views of economics and public policy. Instead, political debate is dominated by other issues, while working-class politics is increasingly being co-opted by the radical right and framed as a form of identity politics.”
Indeed. That acceptance is part and parcel of ‘the ideology of (neoliberal) capitalism’. Capitalism is not just an economic system; it penetrates all aspects of life, fosters consent, ‘national interest’, fear, insecurity, and even complicity and silence before a genocide.
New (generation of) left thinkers like Blakely are good at exposing what has gone wrong, but they are afraid of proposing a radical change. If they do, they will not have the ears and the platforms of the mainstream pundits and institutions.
“For long stretches of Vulture Capitalism, Alexander concludes, “Blakeley seems to be arguing strongly that corporate-planned capitalism needs to be entirely replaced by a democratically planned economic system. If that is the right impression, then the only answer is to build a mass revolutionary movement to bring such a system about. Wasting time working in existing social-democratic parties is not going to get us anywhere.” Furthermore, as Thomas Foster reminds us, Blakeley seems to forget that “Allende failed because he didn’t break the power of capital and the state.”
And without an internationalist perspective, the nationalist approach and strategy will be limited as well. Capitalism is global and everywhere. It cannot be challenged nationally.
In the contemporary period, the divesting machinations of capitalism have continued and expanded into a global system of geopolitical violence and integrated production processes which afford it coercive and disciplinary capabilities with an unprecedented international reach. The fluidities of finance capital, ‘just-in-time’ production, and logistics have only sharpened this sociological multiplicity – the international – into a machine of tyranny. Today, as always, wage repression, deteriorating work conditions and anti-strike practices are actively determined by variegated labour processes in different societies across the globe. In these ways, unevenness and combination act as disciplining features that maintains the capital relation as the basis of social existence. (Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, 2015)
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