w- Economists tend to talk about economics
deliberately in a way that prevents most people
from being able to understand what they say, right?
Because, if working people
can't be involved in the discussion about economics,
then they can't push to change it.
I am an economist at a UK think tank
called the Institute for Public Policy Research
and I've just written my first book, called
'Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation.'
Since the financial crisis, you've seen a stagnation
in living standards.
You've seen a stagnation of productivity and incomes.
It was very easy for the far right to go into those places
where people were experiencing that
and say, "The reason that things are bad for you
"is because of migrants."
These guys who are telling you this stuff,
they have an interest in you blaming
powerless immigrants because it distracts attention
from the people that are actually causing these problems.
There are people who are benefiting from this system.
It is the billionaires, it's the corrupt politicians,
the bankers, et cetera.
This has been a problem that goes back a very long time
because people don't feel like they have a voice
in the current system.
I feel like I first got interested in politics
from like, watching 'The West Wing' when I was like, 13.
And I was like, "I'm gonna do this!
"I'm gonna save the world!"
And then a couple of years later, you're like,
"Oh wait, actually, that's not how stuff works."
It's not like a bunch of really clever people
walking through corridors
being like, "We're the good guys!
"We're gonna do everything right!"
I went to university, the course I did,
which was Politics, Philosophy, and Economics
was completely uncritical.
Like, we didn't have any real exposure to
ideas that were outside the mainstream.
And then I did my Masters in African Studies.
Suddenly, I was exposed to much more critical ideas.
When you look at the way that the system works
from the perspective of the most marginalized,
the most exploited, the most oppressed,
you start to see things that you just didn't see before
by looking at it from a perspective of the powerful.
- [Christianna] Do you ever feel like you need to downplay
your age when you're talking about the economy
or when you're talking about these really intense things?
- That's a really good question.
In certain contexts, it's an asset, right?
Because, you know, people want to understand
the like, Millennial perspective on the economy,
they wanna be like, y'know,
"Why do all these Millennials like socialism
"all of a sudden?"
At which point they can be like, "Hey, you're a Millennial
"and you're also an economist!"
But yeah, I mean in a lot of other contexts
you face similar kind of barriers as,
y'know, as you would in any career, right?
It is that if you are a woman, if you're young,
you are talked down to, you're ignored,
so, it just means you have to like,
you have to work a little bit harder
and you have to be that much better.
- [Christianna] Gen Z is not 100% onboard
with the capitalist system that they grew up on,
but they're also not 100% onboard with socialism.
So, do you think socialism needs a rebrand at all
or are we, is that what democratic socialism
is sort of doing for us right now?
- I feel like that is what democratic socialism
is doing for us right now.
I don't think people buy this idea
that you have a choice
between extractive US free market capitalism or Venezuela,
right?
People know that that is silly, like, there is another way
of organizing things,
even if it's difficult for us to imagine.
The ways that we organize our economy are determined by
the relations, the power relations between different groups
in society.
In the kind of post-war period, which is called
the Golden Age of Capitalism,
we had a little bit more of an equal relationship
between the different sections of the economy.
So there was this model of kind of,
of social democracy, I guess in the UK,
and to a similar extent the US,
where labor, so people who worked, and bosses,
people who owned the stuff,
would kind of negotiate with each other
in alliance with the state.
What I argue in the book is that
that system was always pretty unstable.
It was premised upon suppressing the conflict
between these different classes in society.
And using the state to do that.
But ultimately when you got a crisis,
the crisis of the 1970s when you had the oil price spike,
a bunch of other stuff,
that attempt to compromise broke down.
Because the bosses were like, "We need to cut costs
"because inflation's going up,"
but workers were also saying, "We need our incomes
"to rise with our expenses."
So then you get this conflict kind of exploding
into the national scene
in both the US and the UK, it happens at a similar time,
where there becomes this outright struggle
between labor and capital,
people who live off work, people who live off wealth,
as to who gets to build the new economy, right?
And it's at that point that finance capital,
that, y'know, bosses, owners, et cetera
gain control over the state
via Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US
and set about building an economic model
that worked for them.
Which itself has its own contradictions and tensions,
and then collapses in 2008.
And now we're in this period between the kind of
death of the old and the birth of the new
where there's again this battle going on
between people who live off work
and those who live off wealth
to decide what comes next.
The big line in the book is that a socialist government
needs to take on the banks the way that Thatcher/Reagan
took on the unions.
It's up to a kind of, a socialist government
to rebalance power in society
away from people who live off wealth
and towards people who live off work.
The book is really like a call to action,
right, and the one thing I want people to take from it
is the realization that we're in this really important
historical moment where a bunch of different stuff
is up in the air, we don't know what's gonna happen next,
and what happens next is up to us.
So, we need to get out there, we need to mobilize,
we need to realize our own power
and start building a new world.