Most of these companies exist and are able to do the things that they do because of their relations with the public sector.
SPEAKER_00Hello and welcome to Tech Won's Save Us, a podcast that wonders how long it will take for the angry mobs to come for Jeff Bezos. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Grace Blakely. Grace is the author of Stolen, How to Save the World from Financialization. She's also a staff writer at Tribune Magazine, and she's on the Labour Party's National Policy Forum in the United Kingdom. Today we're talking about how the tech monopolies are benefiting from the COVID-19 crisis and how we might push back against them and take that power back for workers. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That really helps us out. You can also follow the podcast on Twitter where it's at TechWon't Save Us. You can follow me, ParisMarks, at ParisMarks. And you can also follow Grace Blakely as at Grace Blakely. Enjoy the interview. Grace Blakely, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00Hi, it's great to speak with you. Obviously, you have written a ton about this really terrible economic system that we're in. And more recently you've written about how that is of particular benefit to these tech monopolies that are increasingly dominating the economy. So to get us started, I was hoping that you could explain kind of how this form of financialized neoliberal capitalism came to be created and how that has particularly benefited tech monopolies even before this COVID-19 crisis that we're now in.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so in my book, I talk a little bit about the kind of emergence of uh this kind of economic model that I refer to as finance-led growth. And I mainly focus on the politics of that and particularly looking at the changes that happened in the 1980s. And that's one way of looking at how we got here. The other way of looking at it is to take a more kind of orthodox Marxist perspective and look at the internal dynamics within the development of capitalism. So obviously, I think you have you have to look at both. You have to look at how capitalism develops in and of itself, and then you have to look at the kind of political structures that are erected around it that give rise to different institutional forms of uh of capitalist development. So, on the one hand, you know, you have inherent tendencies towards financialization and towards monopoly in capitalism. You know, Marx talks about this uh in volume one of Capital. He says there's a tendency towards centralization and anti-capitalism, um, and that the credit system exacerbates that. Uh, and that becomes particularly obvious during moments of crisis. Um, so obviously, when you have a crisis, uh smaller firms are more likely to go under, but bigger firms will survive, the bigger firms then kind of eat up the tusks of the smaller firms and become more dominant during periods of crisis. Um, so that tendency, accompanied with you know a bunch of other tendencies, for example, the existence of economies of scale that mean big companies can often provide services cheaper, uh, they're often you know able to hire more and better people, uh, all these sorts of things, those uh those tendencies exist within the normal functioning of capitalism. Um and we saw uh that we've seen that obviously happen recently over the last several decades, but it's also been a tendency that's happened many, many times. So, for example, the 1920s and 1930s were really big time for monopoly and financialization, particularly in the US with all the big trusts. Um, so that's the kind of an internal dynamic. But then you've got the politics of it. So in the post-war period, I think as a result of the kind of uh shift in the balance of power between capital and labor, between people who work for a living and the people who just own all the stuff, um, gives rise to kind of the Keynesian consensus, the post-war consensus. And that is associated with, you know, stronger labor unions, uh a bigger, uh more intentional state, and higher levels of state public ownership in the economy, uh, all these different sorts of things. And it gives rise to kind of golden age of capitalism, that period between 1945-ish and the late 1960s, where the economy in most parts of the rich world, in the US uh and the UK in particular, grows pretty well. You have uh rising wages, falling inequality, all these sorts of things. Um, and then it but then it kind of collapses in a crisis in the 1970s. And it's out of this crisis um that we get this new model, this model of finance-led growth. So the post-war consensus um developed, it encounters a period of crisis that you get in the 1970s. Um, I won't go too much into how that crisis is developed, but I talk about it a bit in the book. And in the 1980s, uh, we have a kind of a model that is built out of the ashes of that post-war consensus. Really, you know, the system that we get in the 1980s, finance-led growth, is really based on um an attempt to shift power back. So if the post-war consensus is developed upon the basis of a relatively strong uh labour movement, um and for many reasons a relatively weaker um global capitalist class, then the neoliberal period, the period of finance ed growth is based upon the inverse. So um a uh an attempt to actively weaken the labour movement, even as the labour movement is um fighting on various different fronts during this crisis of the 1970s, combined with an attempt to really strengthen the power of capital over labour and using the states really to kind of fight class war uh on the on the side of capital. In the 1980s, you obviously have in the US and UK the kind of assault on the labour movement um alongside uh the privatization of public assets, deregulation, the removal of restrictions on capital mobility, removal of exchange controls, all of these things are kind of weakening the power of labour relative to capital, and also at releasing the forces that exist within capitalism that have been constrained uh during that post-war period that give us that tendency towards financialization and towards monopoly. So unleashing the power of the banking system, unleashing the power of the stock market, removing restrictions on the ability of money to move around the world. And what all this did is it kind of, you know, unleashed, as I said, those inherent tendencies that you have within capitalism and brought us to a period where you started to see another big increase in monopolization. So you've had three waves of uh mergers and acquisitions activity since the 1980s that have dramatically consolidated a load of different markets. So that's not just the tech sector, that's you know, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, whatever. There's just much more concentrated markets in lots of these sectors. And it's also been associated with financialization, which is what I write about in my book. Um, and that basically uh involves the kind of increasing dominance of financial institutions and individuals, investors, bankers, etc., and financial motives and markets over the rest of the economy. Um, so basically uh the whole economy, whether you know individual consumption, business investment, government spending, whatever, comes to be organized according to the logic of finance, which is the logic of debt and wealth. So, you know, kind of expansion of the credit system and the expansion of kind of um wealth management and uh and asset management and thinking more about one's assets and managing those more actively. And that takes place in the household. So you have a massive increase in household debt alongside, you know, increase in uh individuals being involved in the stock market, um, you know, increase in home ownership occurs in businesses where you get a massive increase in corporate debt alongside, and this is particularly relevant to the tech monopolies, a massive increase in the kind of hoarding of cash and of financial assets by some of the really, really big companies, basically, the really, really big monopolies and oligopolies. And that's one really central feature actually of uh of the modern big tech firms. And it also happens in the state as well. And I go through this in my book, Stolen, kind of chapter by chapter, looking at how financialization affects each of these different areas of the economy, and then look at how that model kind of collapses in 2008, and why since then we've kind of been living in this like branching period uh where the old model is kind of dying uh but the new has not yet emerged.
SPEAKER_00And you know, hopefully it emerges soon, but yeah. Unfortunately, it it it kind of feels like that that might have been interrupted with like the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders in you know recent months, the past year, um, which which is a bit depressing, but at the same time, being in this period of crisis also offers the opportunity for people to form collective organizations, for unions to really kind of wield their power, and and for that power not necessarily to be exerted or or expected to be exerted through a political party, but to come from below and try to push change in that way, right? You talked about there being um like essentially a power struggle, right? And the the shift in the 1980s is an attempt for capital to really gain back some of that power that has been lost to labor in the post-war period. Um and I feel like we are really uh kind of seeing that playing out through this crisis, right? The degree to which um capital has gained so much additional power. Um, and we see that in the way that governments are responding to the crisis by I feel at least, really trying to center business and provide like massive subsidies to keep business going, and particularly, as you say, those massive um businesses, those parts of the economy that have been considerably consolidated and monopolized over the past couple decades. Um and uh clearly it has been a particular benefit to the tech monopolies um because of the way that their businesses work, right? Um they don't necessarily need for you to go into a retail shop or something like that for them to make their profits. Um so uh and obviously you wrote about this in a recent piece for Navarro Media. Um so could you explain how COVID-19 is really kind of benefiting these monopolized and and and consolidated firms and in particular the tech monopoly?
SPEAKER_02I'll start really with the with the point that you made at the beginning, which is this question of you know, we're in this this kind of moment of crisis where uh the potential for people to organize and the the um the kind of energy that can come out of that has um could have a potentially greater impact because the kind of the structures and institutions and norms that give capitalism a level of institutional stability during moments of uh well, of stability have been undermined by successive crises. So the financial crisis, um the kind of various political crises that were associated with that, and now this uh this new uh pandemic. And that kind of um, I suppose it breaks down the institutional stability and the ideologies and the norms that reinforce capitalism when times are good, and particularly this idea of capitalist realism, the idea that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. That kind of has been uh, if not completely broken and at least undermined quite substantially since the financial crisis. So we're in this period where obviously there's a lot of kind of potential energy around, but it comes from lots of different places. So on the one hand, it's on the left, um, and you know, the Sardis Campaign, the Corbin campaign, uh Ceresa, Podemos, um what's going on in Ecuador, what we've seen in Bolivia, like uh, you know, over the last four or five years or longer, all of these movements on the left have emerged from um that, I suppose, kind of crisis of capitalism that emerged in in 2008, uh, and the breakdown in the ability of the system to provide rising living standards for the majority of people at the same time as we're experiencing kind of widespread environmental breakdown. Um so the reaction to that on the left has has grown and has mounted, and we've also seen obviously an increase in labor movement activity in in lots of different parts of the world, which has been associated with that. Um, but we've also seen the same kind of level of organization on the right, so on the far right, um, whether you're thinking about you know the campaigns around uh Brexit that involves quite a big spray of the far right in the UK or Trump's campaign in the US, it's spreading quite a lot around Europe, the strength of the far right. Um, obviously mobilizing on the basis that yes, there has been this decline in living standards, but the right is able to translate that into a narrative that says the problem is not, you know, the structures of the economy is about that we're letting in too many immigrants or whatever. Um, so you know, that that energy exists there as well. But that energy also exists on the part of capital, as you were just saying. Um, so you know, on the one hand, there's this kind of uh vapid liberal response to these crises, which is, you know, uh when you see kind of billionaires saying we need to reform capitalism because uh it's not providing, you know, workers with enough to basically keep them quiet, and that threatens the stability of the system. You saw this with the Financial Times, for example, a couple of months ago. Okay, you know, capitalism needs a reset. It needs to uh kind of hit the reset button and really kind of change how it's working to make it fairer, to make sure it's more stable in the long run. But you've also got a big section of capital that is seeking to take advantage of these crises, right? Um, whether that's you know the vulture capital firms that uh took advantage of the massive fall in in house prices during the financial crisis, bought up tons of uh homes on the cheap and then became you know huge institutional landlords. Or, you know, today uh the pharmaceutical companies, big healthcare companies, but also the big tech monopolies, which are obviously seeing a massive increase in demand for their services, they are all able to kind of organize during these periods of crisis to take advantage of that. And then if you think about the fact that, you know, the way in which this extended period of crisis is going to be resolved is impacted by, as you said, that that class struggle, that power struggle between these different groups, then really, you know, what determines what happens next is who is able to organize better. Um, and obviously, you know, capital is smaller, more cohesive, more cognizant of its own interests and generally able to organize quite well in itself and with the state. So obviously there are always tensions and conflicts between capitalists that make it um you know difficult for them to come together completely. Also, you know, the far right has been very good at mobilizing based on people's fears and anxieties. The left, you know, we've seen a resurgence, but the level of strength that we would need to be able to take on the organized interests of capital in and outside the state and the far right at the same time is just massive and it's nothing like what we've got at the moment, both in terms of electoral politics, but also, as you mentioned, in terms of the strength of the labor movement. So, you know, we're face we are facing in in this crisis basically a potential power grab by the ruling classes, because they are much better organized than we are and will therefore be able to kind of shift and determine the way that we make sense of and adapt to this crisis, perhaps better, in fact, definitely better than the left will. And you're already starting to see, I've written a little bit about this as this crisis kind of developed, the beginnings of a new adaption of that capitalist model. So, you know, if the neoliberal era, the era of finance led growth, was one kind of adaption to the crisis of the 1970s, one that favored capital over labor, then what we're seeing emerge at the moment is uh uh one kind of model coming out of the chaos created by this crisis, which is this idea of state monopoly capitalism. So basically you're going to have, just as you do during any crisis, a massive increase in monopoly power. Small businesses that will go under small indebted businesses that don't have a lot of cash will go under big businesses that have big piles of cash, very strong links to the state, and often whose business models, if you're Amazon or Google or whatever, are tailor-made to benefit from this crisis. Um they're gonna survive and they're gonna thrive. And they're increasingly close links with the state, which will emerge from this crisis as well, because obviously you're seeing the state provide both much more explicit direct support for businesses in terms of loans, but also central banks provide a huge amount of more kind of implicit support, which they categorize under the heading of like supporting markets, but really involves the attempt to create huge amounts of very, very cheap credit in order to keep investors um solvent and keep businesses solvent and keep the system afloat. But of course, that amounts to a big subsidy for the wealthy, whether that's in the form of you know the very cheap loans that central banks are providing certain businesses or quantitative easing, which obviously boosts asset prices and makes the wealthy wealthier. So we're seeing this increasing coordination between these big international monopolies and powerful states that potentially when we get to the end of this crisis, that will be the kind of dominant model. So we won't be worrying so much about, you know, the state is too small, it's, you know, I don't know, not spending enough money overall, it's not investing overall, because you know, we might end up with uh states that are spending huge amounts of money. The issue is where they're spending it and how they'll often be spending it on keeping corporations afloat and allowing them to basically carry on business as usual, keeping the airline industry afloat, allowing it to go on, you know, massively harming uh the environment whilst paying out huge dividends to shareholders and supporting the pay of executives, same with the big tech monopolies, which will become increasingly important for economic growth and for the provision of basic services when this is all over, because so many other businesses will have gone under. There will be this much greater kind of strategic alignment between the interests of these different sections of the ruling class. And I think that will be used to basically try and consolidate this new model of state monopoly capitalism in a way that makes it, you know, even perhaps even harder for working people to resist. But as we know, every new adaption creates, yes, a level of consolidation of power on the part of the ruling classes, but also new vulnerabilities. So, of course, you know, the flip side to having a huge amount of economic activity concentrated in the hands of a very small number of companies is that if workers in those companies are capable of organizing, they basically have a stranglehold on the entire economy. Now that is a very difficult situation to imagine because obviously, you know, you're not just talking about organizing workers horizontally across a particular sector in a particular nation. You're talking about organizing workers vertically throughout the supply chain. So from tech workers to the cleaners in, you know, the Silicon Valley headquarters to the people putting these things together in China to the people literally pulling the minerals out of the ground in Central Africa. Like the idea of having a level of solidarity throughout those supply chains that would allow us to kind of allow workers to hold the bosses of these companies to account. That's the potential flip side of this consolidation of power. But it's also very, very difficult to imagine us getting there just because you know it has proven so so difficult to organize workers who are not located in one particular space in one area with broadly similar interests, similar kind of cultural backgrounds. So, you know, we can see a path through this where we end up, as Mark said, with you know, he always said that when we get to monopoly capitalism, that's the point at which capitalism starts eating itself. But there are also so many things in the way of that, and you know, you never know how these things are gonna pan out.
SPEAKER_00Right. And, you know, I think that's a really good point. I'm definitely going to come back to your point on workers, but before we talk about that, I also, because you mentioned how the far right is growing. Um, and part of the reason that they are able to grow and that you know people are frustrated and are kind of open to what they're selling is that things are not going well in many people's lives, right? Um after decades of this economic system that you describe, people's living standards are falling, people are not able to find the good jobs that they could have in the past, um, their services have been defunded or privatized. So there's a real frustration with how things are going. And the far right has seized on that um to blame immigrants instead of to blame the economic model that has caused a lot of these problems, right? Um and we also see uh that the tech companies are able to take advantage of this, and of course, not just the tech companies, you know, many companies do in the way that so many services have been privatized. I know. Over in the UK, it's been a real concern the degree of privatization in the NHS. And here in Canada, we are concerned about the degree to which healthcare services are also being privatized. So it's certainly not just tech, but tech in the way that it is increasingly moving into all of these different sectors because everything can kind of be digitized and technified and whatever. They always seem to have a solution to the problems that they promise are going to save us money. Governments are increasingly looking for those solutions. And obviously tech companies are ready to offer them. Just as we're seeing now with COVID-19, a lot of the focus has shifted to these contact tracing apps instead of the degree to which we should be, you know, funding our health services, funding, say shelters for homeless people or say victims of domestic violence and just funding all these different social services, but instead increasingly the focus is being narrowly focused on these kind of uh tech solutions that don't really address kind of the core of the problems that we're facing, right? Um so how do you see the tech companies kind of taking advantage of this austerity push um and and the larger problems that has for our society in general?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I mean, like like anything really, um, like any kind of innovation under capitalism, these technologies, whether you're talking about technologies used to automate production, used to um digitize information, whatever, um they are obviously not neutral, but they have a kind of dual character. So, you know, on the one hand, these technologies are being developed by private corporations for profit, often either like literally to explicitly increase the amount of profit they're able to extract from their workers, but often to also kind of help them consolidate uh management techniques that allow them to more closely observe their workers, to exert more control over workers, consumers, whoever else. So these tendencies towards kind of profit extraction and exploitation and control and observe are obviously wired into the way that these technologies are being developed. But again, you know, coming back to a Marxist analysis of these technologies, Marx was always also very focused on the kind of emancipatory power of technologies. Um the technologies that he saw developing in his day, he was like, yes, they're currently, they have been developed and they have been used to exploit and oppress working people. But in a socialist society, you know, the fact that we've reached this level of technological development, that means that if we were able to reorganize production along rational lines, then you know, we are at a point where we can imagine a very, very different kind of society, what based on cooperation rather than exploitation. Whereas, you know, several hundred years ago before capitalism, that was not something we could imagine because we didn't have that technology. So, you know, you can see how, on the one hand, the technologies that are being developed, if they were used in a way that was genuinely has at its core, if you know the aim of production in our society was to maximize human freedom, maximize development, um, you know, basically allow every individual to kind of achieve their full potential, then you can see how some of these technologies would be useful, whether it's in fighting pandemic or I don't know, like the fact that we're able to have these conversations from I'm in the UK or in Canada, like I've done various calls like this throughout lockdown that have had thousands of people on it. You know, you can see the potential within these things, but obviously they are being used, and that is inevitable under a capitalist system. They always will be. There's no question of you know taking these technologies and making them good under capitalism because they result from a particular balance of power, they result from a particular uh uh mode of production, and uh there's no getting around that without changing the relations of production that gave rise to them. So, you know, the technology that's being developed has this dual character, and the tech companies that are developing it and that are seeking obviously profit from it have one central aim, which is basically to maximize profits, and uh underneath that several other aims. So it's not hard to see how you know this pandemic is a way for them to kind of achieve those aims, you know, more successfully, whether that's the fact that obviously in certain areas of the workforce, these Amazon, for example, is taking on a huge number of workers who have been laid off in other areas of the economy. Um, and when you start to see a couple of firms dominating the labour market, it's something that's called monopsony, so monopoly but with an N monopsony, uh, it basically means the kind of the major the major buyer of a commodity rather than a major seller. And when you're the major buyer, you'll you'll have a significant influence of being able to set the price of labor. So if you're likely to see uh continued kind of layoffs and an increasing uh surplus population being created during this um during this pandemic, then the power of those companies who are still employing people like Amazon and others will increase um and they will be able to set wages, they will be able to set the kind of uh labor practices that they want implemented, they'll be able to say you aren't allowed to unionize. And so, you know, that's one major factor there. The other one is, of course, as you said, you know, the big tech companies are going to be the ones saying to the government, we are going to be able to develop amazing new technologies that allow you to either fight the virus better, track people who have the virus better, you know, increase the level of social control you're able to exert over citizens, uh, whatever. All of the innovations, partly because you know the state has been so eviscerated in terms of its capacity in recent years, but pretty much all of the innovations are going to come from private organizations. Now, often they will be private organizations provided with state funding, so with state subsidies, but generally, you know, it is going to be the government is going to look to uh big pharmaceutical companies to come up with a vaccine for this. So, you know, that's another thing we have to be thinking about is the fact that most of these companies exist and are able to do the things that they do because of their relations with the public sector, because they're able to take advantage of um close relationships with governments, uh, because they're able to take advantage of state subsidies, because they're able to take advantage of, you know, things like an educated workforce, all those sorts of things. And, you know, there's been a lot of, I've written a lot about how over the course of this crisis, we'll see a huge amount more corporate welfare being provided, and we need to be having this as a key demand when we come out of okay, you know, you've had a lot of state support to develop X technology, which is now being used by the state on the public. Where are the accountability measures there? What are the um conditions that are being imposed upon these companies um in exchange for their receipt of taxpayer money? And I think finally, we need to look at the way that these companies' business and financial models had developed before the crisis and think about how this crisis might exacerbate them. So these companies are sitting on really big piles of cash. Now that's kind of not how businesses are supposed to work according to the geoclassical model. Businesses are supposed to invest their earnings or distribute their earnings, they're not supposed to sit on big piles of cash because they're unable to find avenues to invest those. Now that doesn't count for monopolies because monopolies explicitly seek to restrict production, so not invest all of their earnings in order to ramp up prices or increase their control over the market or whatever else they want to do. These big monopolies, for that reason, and also because they've been avoiding tax and because they've had subsidies and all these different sorts of things, these monopolies are sitting on big, big cash piles. That's probably what's going to allow them to withstand this crisis because they have all that money available. Um, but this crisis is also going to augment that as well, because um they're gonna be focusing, you know, their their um activities in a couple of particular areas that'll be raking in profits, but um depending on the sector of the industry, their costs might not be as high. So you're gonna see the accretion of yet more cash, yet more wealth in the hands of these corporate executives and shareholders, and on all those fronts, and more, and the fact that, you know, basically by the end of it, as I've said, uh, we will all be much more reliant on big companies to provide basic services, the governments will be more reliant on them for tax revenues, etc. Our lives are likely to be much, much more dominated by Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc. How do we deal with that? What are the demands that we can have as a left movement, as socialists, um, that are kind of relevant to the emerging new economic order that is being constructed right now? And you know, on the left in the UK, I think it was slightly different in the US, but particularly in the UK, we've been very, very focused on austerity and saying the state needs to invest more, the state needs to spend more, the government kind of isn't spending enough money on X and Y or Z. And the issue with that is that you know, now we get to a point where we have a state that is probably quite willing to spend, but willing to spend on the basis of the class interests that underpin it effectively. You know, we are talking about capitalist states that are spending money in order to maintain and uh and reinforce capitalist accumulation. So we need to have a set of demands about right, okay, we've got this increasingly tight-knit cabal of big monopolies, big business, big finance, uh, and the government. How are we basically making sure or attempting to force some accountability into the decision-making processes that are now being undertaken by the small elite? And basically, the small elite is going to be planning most of what goes on in the economy, one way or another. So I think, you know, the left needs to shift its demands away from just, you know, give us more staff or give us free staff or whatever, to actually, there are a small, there's a tiny elite that is controlling most of what happens in the global economy. We need to make sure that that elite is accountable to people. And this is about pushing basically the principles of political democracy into the realm of the economy, saying we need to deepen and extend democracy, because otherwise we're going to live in this world where basically, you know, we're all being exploited as workers or consumers by this tiny ruling class in you know the form of right-wing politicians, the tech monopolies of big finance.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, I I think your point about the degree to which these monopolies are reliant on state funding, right? Is like so important because it's very much counter to the narrative that they try to sell us. Like, even when we look back to the history of the development of Silicon Valley, we see that it's not so much because there were these individual entrepreneurs who were creating businesses in their garage, and this is how this all got started. What we actually see is that there was massive investment in that region of the country by the military, by the federal government, by the state government in order to create this kind of agglomeration of different firms and to promote the development of this industry, right? And that's so often forgotten in the histories that we get. So that kind of cooperation between the state and capital is certainly not a new thing, but it does seem to be being taken to another level at this point, right? But just to kind of get back to the question of where we go from here, knowing that Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn have been defeated, um, you know, left movements in a lot of countries are kind of down from where they were a few years ago, right? Um so unfortunately the crisis came at an inopportune moment in that in that sense. Um but so you've talked about the importance of workers organizing through the supply chain, not just at their own workplaces. So there is that solidarity between different industries, between workers who depend on one another and rely on one another, and across borders, right? And you also talked about how clearly these companies are going to try to exert their power at this moment to grab a greater chunk of the economy. And we've already seen this with Amazon, the way that they are really trying to suppress any efforts from their workers to organize, to get to know each other, to push back against what the company is doing in response to COVID-19, right? So I guess firstly, what has been your response to the efforts that are being taken so far? Um, and I'm you know, I'm not so familiar with the situation in the UK if you've been seeing similar kind of organizing against these big companies over there. Um, and what do you think moving forward in the short term or long term is the most kind of hopeful path forward for challenging these companies and this larger system?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a great question. Um, and I mean it's the question, really, I think, for the left. Uh both because obviously we're going to see an increase in the power of these big tech companies, but also because of the model that they have for the ways of working that are used within those companies, which is much more decentralized, uh, often based on this these kinds of levels of like think self-employment is increasingly becoming the norm in other areas of the economy. So we really have to be able to learn to organize in these places, um, if you know we we stand any chance really of squaring up to the power of these big tech giants. And I think that's something that most people on the left now realize is that um plug for another book. I've got um another book coming out soon, which I edited. It's an edited collection with uh a bunch of amazing essays in it from loads of different people on the left, um, in mainly in the UK, but also to in the US as well. And there's an essay in there by James Schneider, which talks about how Corbinism emerges as this phenomenon which um is designed to basically bridge the gap between the desire for deep social change that existed in the UK, exists today in the UK and all around the world in the wake of the crisis, and the relative weakness of the social forces that once made up the left. Um, and kind of the role of electoral politics and a party politics, therefore, becomes very significant because the labor movement, community organizing, the tenants movement, um, you know, the institutions that once formed some of the foundations of working class life is so eroded. I think there's now a realization that electoral politics alone is not going to get us to where we need to go. You know, we can't just focus on trying to organize and win elections for a whole host of reasons, not least because if you don't have a powerful social base, it becomes very hard to win elections. So building the strength for the labor movement, as I think now recognizes like the big task for the left, and that comes in loads of different forms. I think it comes in the form of strengthening um and expanding trade union membership in wider society, and that often runs through the bigger unions. It involves democratizing the bigger unions to make sure that the rank and file are actually having a say in how um the decision-making processes are going, and that these aren't just turned into basically like corporatist vehicles for uh pushing the interests of management, and also thinking about uh learning from organization that takes place at the grassroots amongst workers themselves. Um, and there has been more of this in the UK recently, particularly amongst um Uber drivers and deliveroo drivers. The delivery is a platform that we have in the UK. I don't think that it is in the US, it's a food delivery platform. Um and these very precarious workers have, on a number of different occasions, organized to resist changes that have been imposed by these monopolies, who obviously, as they get a bigger control over the market, they're able to steadily erode the conditions of people who work for them and also to push for uh for more rights and for higher pay. And in sectors where people have been saying that it would be impossible to organize for you know decades, there was actually remarkable success for some of these strikes over the last couple of years. And I think you know, learning from those models uh which have been strikingly able to organize workers who are often from very different cultural and national backgrounds. People who are doing these jobs tend to be migrants, they come from all around the world. So organizing people from you know very different, uh, very different backgrounds who are not geographically located in one area and who actually don't even have a formal employment relationship with the people that they're organizing against. We can learn a lot from from those efforts, I think. And I know that at the moment, I haven't looked into this massively, but I know that at the moment there are efforts in and around Silicon Valley amongst tech workers who are saying we need to take the lead and try to do this. So we need to be organizing with cleaners, the guys who are doing the catering here, and also with, you know, people much lower down the value chain, even than that. That's really encouraging. And I think if you start to see more radicalization amongst those uh, you know, the tech workers who you would not put at the top of the kind of hierarchy of most exploited workers, but if you start to see some leadership from them, I think that could be could be really, really significant in terms of uh like because obviously they have the closest proximity to management, to the the executives, um, than many of the other workers, which I think is quite important. So there are, I think, a lot of reasons to be hopeful. I think one of the biggest issues perhaps is the slowness with which the big unions have adapted to the changing nature of work. Now, this is obviously partly based on the fact that in the US and the UK in particular, you've had uh since the 1980s quite severe anti-trade union legislation introduced by central government in the UK. In the US, you obviously have right to work in various different places, which makes it very hard for the big unions to kind of adapt. Um obviously, also you have this long-term decline in union membership, which again um kind of creates a kind of level of conservatism, I think, amongst amongst some of the unions. Um, and it just leads to a situation in which you know people at the very top often aren't that accountable to members. Um, and so it becomes harder to decide when and how strikes are going to take place and how they need to be organized. And um, that's actually something I think that socialists who are maybe thinking, right, okay, where next after having organized electorally can look at, you know, as well. I think in the US it's potentially easier for you guys because you know, yes, the SAMS campaign is is over, but you can focus on there's so many elections, right? And so many brilliant socialists are being elected to various levels of office at different areas in the states, which is which is great. And you can kind of focus on that. But in the UK, I think there's especially a sense that you know we've got probably five years until the next election. Yes, we can organize within local government, but we also really need to be focusing on the labor movement and getting socialists who are involved in the Corbyn campaign actively become part of their unions and to get involved in their unions at a branch level, which is not something I think a lot of people were doing before. So, yeah, I think there's an increasing recognition that that needs to happen, but it's challenging, it's really, really challenging for so many reasons. I think not least because the idea of solidarity is so alien to the kind of individualized consciousness that's created by neoliberalism, which basically says, you know, you're all individual competitors bumping up against one another in a free market. Your salary is determined by your personal abilities and you know, your basically your worth, how much people will pay you is how much you're worth. There is not that much of a sense of how things could be different. But I think in many ways, this crisis actually is kind of eroding that a little bit because you are seeing this amazing sense of solidarity re-emerging, whether that's you know, the healthcare workers or the mutual aid groups that are springing up in in various different parts of the country, which undermine that individualization. So, for that reason, perhaps more than any other, actually, I'm I'm hopeful that we might start to see more of that and just a society based on much more solidarity than the individualism that has underpinned uh neoliberalism for such a long time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I'm trying to be hopeful that that's what we're going to see as well, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Hopefully, after going through this crisis, people will be more likely to, you know, come together a bit more and try to work in the common interest instead of the individual good.
SPEAKER_01Let's hope. You know, anything could happen, but pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
SPEAKER_00Exactly, exactly. Well, Grace Blakely, it's been fantastic talking to you today. Thanks so much for taking the time.
SPEAKER_01Thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00Grace Blakely is the author of Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialization. You can get it from repeaterbooks at repeaterbooks.com, your local library or bookstore, or anywhere else that sells books. You want to follow Grace on Twitter, choose at Grace Blakely. If you like this conversation, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow the podcast on Twitter where it's at TechWon't Save Us, and you can follow me at ParisMarks at at ParisMarks. Thanks for listening.