‘A whole generation that has been radicalised by the experience of Corbynism’: Economist Grace Blakeley on corona crash, anarcho-communism and Labour future
Pi Media editor Angus Colwell talks to the socialist economist Grace Blakeley about her new book.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Many predict that the pandemic will usher in a new age of left ascendancy. Our politics are inexorably moving away from neoliberalism as governments intervene in the economy like never before, some say, and the virus will focus our minds on racial inequality, existential threats and the follies of capitalism.
Grace Blakeley disagrees. In her new book “The Corona Crash” - a 77-page pamphlet published by Verso which is half diagnosis, half prescription for our current predicament - the 27-year-old economist and Labour activist calls for a socialist response to the pandemic. Her thesis is that the crisis is currently strengthening the grip of “state monopoly capitalism” over our economy. Free-market capitalism does not exist, she writes, and since 2008 financial and non-financial institutions “have collapsed into the arms of the state, and appear set to become wholly and permanently reliant on it.”
When we spoke over Zoom recently, she told me that the last decade had seen “a real increase in centralisation in capitalist economies.” Responses to the 2008 crash saw power become “more and more centralised in a smaller number of hands”, and it is only crises, such as the current one, that enable this to happen so comprehensively. In this approach, she takes her primary influence from Marx, “who looks at the way in which capitalism becomes more centralised over time, and by centralisation he means rising monopoly power”. She told me that the primary beneficiaries had been Big Tech companies and the middle class that had benefited from the asset-price inflation provoked by quantitative easing, a money-creation instrument employed after 2008 and with new force in 2020.
She is therefore sceptical of the notion that our politics will inevitably turn leftwards after the crisis. I asked her if she was surprised by the government’s interventions at the beginning of the pandemic. “The rupture was an extension of a bigger shift that had been happening within the Conservative Party. There was a recognition from one section of the party that [austerity] wasn’t actually a sustainable solution and that there were going to be quite significant costs to continuing to pursue that strategy. The neoliberals lost the fight”. Instead, she says, we should be looking at where the spending is focused, and not be excited by the fact that there is intervention its own right: “the idea that the state can come in and be the fixer to all of these problems is naive about how state power works, and who controls these levers of state power.”
She wants to stress, however, that a financial crisis is not a crisis for all of us. “Upper middle-class people don’t have these problems - it is important to recognise that these intergenerational divides are also class divides.” House prices may continue to increase as they did after 2008, widening the gulf between the haves and have-nots. Using class as a crucial tool for political and economic analysis, her approach is unquestionably Marxian. Throughout her interview, she spoke of class interest, monopoly power and capital. “From a Marxist perspective, what we’re trying to do is analyse the totality of the system.”
Her left politics have been present since youth, and are not constructed in opposition to free-market parents. Her family has a strong intellectual commitment to socialism stretching back several generations, and voting Tory would have been “a deadly sin”. “When I was 14 I used to refer to myself as an anarcho-communist because it sounded cool”, she told me, “but for all my life I’ve been on the left.” She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, but lost interest in economics over what she saw as a stale curriculum: “it had been put together by smart old white men, based on the thinking of old white men”. Her MA in African Studies re-enthused her with an appreciation for Marxist analyses through the lens of African thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, and in “The Corona Crash” she is keen to distinguish between the crises facing the Global North and the Global South.
The result is that her work is focused on the future. In her book, she writes that “socialists failed to use the political opening generated by the 2008 financial crisis to move beyond — or even substantially alter — capitalism.” She is a renowned advocate for Lexit (a left-wing exit from the EU), but her commitment in this crisis is to a Green New Deal, and sees that as the framework with which we must rebuild. I ask whether the climate crisis necessarily entails government action, and if we might reach net zero by investors pulling their money out of oil and putting it into green energy. “I mean, no.”
“I’m very surprised that there is still a section of the population that still believes that financial markets are efficient allocators of capital.” For her, money is shifting towards sustainable energy because investors “know that regulation is coming. They know that things cannot continue as they are.”
Where does Blakeley see the political response coming from? On Keir Starmer’s leadership, she says that she “would like to say I’m disappointed, but that would imply I really thought that he was going to do anything other than what he’s done”, which is “using his power to try and crush the left”. She regrets that the left “did not do enough to exert discipline over other parts of the party when it had power”. Starmer will be “very short on substance, all style, and not particularly good style at that.”
Labour’s reorientation to the centre has personal meaning for Blakeley and other activists. She was involved with the Corbyn project, campaigning up and down the country in local and general elections, and was no stranger to an early-morning wrangle with Piers Morgan. “It’s quite dark watching the things you’ve worked for for such a long time being dismantled before your eyes”, she says, but the experience of the Corbyn years “gave people, and me, lessons and new ways of thinking about the world that we wouldn’t have had before. There’s been a whole generation that has been radicalised by the experience of Corbynism.”
Where she sees hope, she sees it on an international level. “The AOCs of this world have the mantle now, she says. “I have a certain amount of optimism.” Capitalism, she says, is unsustainable and “that energy is going to burst out again. I think this groundswell of discontent and a desire for real change could end up pouring out into the streets. I think the Black Lives Matter protests, which took place in a very different context, were a good indication of the scale of the energy there is around climate, racial justice and who is going to be made to pay for the course of the crisis.” The prognosis will require significant change, but hope remains on the left.
With thanks to Grace Blakeley for taking the time to be interviewed by Pi Media.
The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism is out now (published by Verso).