Several years ago I took part in a debate regarding all-women shortlists at my local Labour party branch. I argued that all-women shortlists will not tackle the root causes of women’s unequal representation in politics and that they also favour primarily middle class, white women. It wasn’t a popular opinion at the time, but it is great to see this type of perspective regarding the need for a radical approach to intersectional inequality gaining in popularity as typified by the development of the ‘red feminist horizon’. It links into the criticism found in the ‘Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto’ regarding what they term liberal feminism, which Hillary Clinton and her advocates have been a great example of, as women reaching and holding corporate roles and being in positions of power is said to be a victory for women’s rights and equality. This involves a complete disregard for the negative effects the decisions and actions these women have on others, especially other women. Like my argument against all-women shortlists at the time, liberal feminism is about tokenism and it will not address the real cause of inequality and oppression: capitalism.

This is why neoliberalism and liberal feminism can work so closely together. Neoliberalism is aided by liberal feminism legitimacy and liberal feminism is aided by political and economic corporate and capital acceptance. Except, this is increasingly being challenged by people not content to just tinker with the system and are instead calling for an interconnection of anti-capitalist movements and struggles. As outlined in ‘Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto’, “liberal feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women…By definition, the principal beneficiaries are those who already possess considerable social, cultural and economic advantages.” (p.11)

Central to this exciting intersectional, anti-capitalist feminist movement is the importance of something called social reproduction theory and its links with the labour movement and related actions/strategies, with these feminists reinventing the concept of striking itself. Women’s Strike is a radical new project led by feminists, as outlined in the ‘Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto’:

“What had been a series of nationally based actions became a transnational movement on March 8, 2017, when organizers around the globe decided to strike together. With this bold stroke, they re-politicized International Women’s Day…the strikes demonstrate the enormous political potential of women’s power: the power of those whose paid and unpaid work sustains the world.” (p.7)

This relates to the role of social reproduction theory at the centre of this movement, which the Women’s Strike UK calls “the conflicts and struggles over what it means to produce and reproduce not only labour power (and the wage relation) but life itself.” Adding, “without a doubt we have witnessed a ‘turn’ to the question of social reproduction across significant swathes of the radical left. However, despite this much needed shift in analysis – it is sobering that actually not that much has changed – or perhaps more correctly not nearly enough has changed…”

As Tithi Bhattacharya outlines in her article about social reproduction theory, central to Karl Marx’s work was the importance of labour for reproducing the capitalist system. However, there are limitations to this analysis:

“…Marx is frustratingly silent on the rest of the story. If labor power produces value, how is labor power itself produced? Surely workers do not spring from the ground to arrive at the marketplace, fresh and ready to sell their labor power to the capitalist.”

This is the crux of social reproduction theory. Labour power is produced and reproduced outside of the formal capitalist economy. Bhattacharya states that there are three key interconnected processes that reproduce labour power:

“1. By activities that regenerate the worker outside the production process and allow her to return to it. These include, among a host of others, food, a bed to sleep in, but also care in psychical ways that keep a person whole.
2. By activities that maintain and regenerate non-workers outside the production process–i.e. those who are future or past workers, such as children, adults out of the workforce for whatever reason, be it old age, disability or unemployment.
3. By reproducing fresh workers, meaning childbirth.”

This is done for no cost, primarily by women, and is central to reproducing and sustaining capitalism by reproducing labour. It is important to see production and social reproduction as interconnected; for instance, job cuts, wage reductions and service closures has an effect on the ability to socially reproduce labour. This critically takes apart the traditional view of labour and the worker and considers the wider aspects to this alongside also showing the need to be an anti-capitalist when advocating for feminism.

Furthermore, the traditional view of a worker doesn’t reflect labour patterns either, as “the employment rate among women of ‘prime working age’ (aged 25-54) is up from 57% in 1975 to a record high of 78% in 2017” with high numbers of “working-age mothers in paid work: up from 50% in 1975 to 72% in 2015. The rise has been particularly large among lone mothers and mothers of pre-school- and primary-school-age children.” This links into the dual role many women now have in terms of production and social reproduction.

Related to this, Carers UK provide some valuable statistics that makes the point regarding the centrality of women in non-paid carer roles and how key this is for reproduction and production and thus sustaining capitalism, as “women are more likely to take on caring roles than men. Of the 6.5 million unpaid carers in the UK 58% – 3.34 million – are women…[and] the economic value of the unpaid care provided by women in the UK is estimated to be a massive £77 bn per year.” Crucially, this has an impact on women’s ability to work: “women are more likely to have given up work or reduced working hours to care, particularly in their 40s-60s. Women aged 45-54 are more than twice as likely than men to have given up work to care and over four times more likely to have reduced working hours due to caring responsibilities.”

Essentially, “any issue to do with the workplace is actually also about women and gender. Policies that govern workplaces have the power to affect women both at work and at home” and importantly “the major functions of reproducing the working class take place outside the workplace.”

And there we have the bread (production) and roses (reproduction). Anti-capitalist movements have to be based on bread and roses to succeed. This influences the way we approach political strategies:

“An understanding of capitalism as an integrated system, where production is scaffolded by social reproduction, can help fighters understand the significance of political struggles in either sphere and the necessity of uniting them…This is why in the organizations where we fight for wages (e.g., our labor unions), we need to raise the question of reproductive justice; and in our organizations where we fight against sexism and racism, we need to raise the question of wages.”

A more specific example of the importance of social reproduction theory is the gendered nature of food bank use. Obviously we need to eat to be able to live and thus work. Eating is becoming increasingly difficult however, given politically motivated austerity from the Conservatives over the last 10 years. Three of the biggest causes of food bank use are low income; income shocks (such as rising food and housing costs) and benefit delays. Importantly:

“A recent study from the government’s Money Advice Service concluded that two-thirds of those in debt are women. Whilst 2.2 million women are now classified as ‘breadwinners’, this is generally in low-income households. Research from the Resolution Foundation found that most low paid workers are women, and another study by the Trades Union Council concluded that the number of young women in low paid jobs had tripled in the past 20 years.”

There is also the rise in period poverty, with campaigns interconnecting this with other issues; for instance, Bloody Good Period provide period supplies to asylum seekers and refugees.

Food bank use is only increasing, for instance “The Trussell Trust’s food bank network provided 658,048 emergency supplies to people in crisis between April and September 2018, a 13% increase on the same period in 2017.” These kind of statistics should make us worry about the increasing normalisation of food bank use in society and its acceptance by more people as being part of the welfare system. It is another way that capitalism and capital is reproducing itself by ensuring that the social reproduction essential to production and thus labour value continues to take place, even if it demoralises and depresses people in the process. This is why we have to fight until every single last food bank is gone and no longer needed. For that, we need to overcome capitalism. Reformism isn’t enough.

Crucially, it is not about “women’s issues” – it is about showing the interconnection of different struggles and how this relates to the capitalist system and the importance of feminism leading the way. As argued in ‘Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto’, feminism for the 99% needs “to join with every movement that fights for the 99 percent, whether by struggling for environmental justice, free high-quality education, generous public services, low-cost housing, labor rights, free universal health care, or a world without racism or war.” (p.15)

As well as gender, social reproductive theory “is shot through at every point by the fault lines of class, race, sexuality, and nation.” (p.22) The intersectional aspect is so important if we are to challenge capitalism through a networked counter-power movement. Joining up against capitalism can help unite these different but related struggles.

“The true aim of social reproduction struggles is to establish the primacy of people-making over profit-making. They are never about bread alone. For this reason, a feminism for the 99 percent incarnates and fosters the struggle for bread and roses.” (p.72)

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

a movement that began in August 2018, after 15 years old Greta Thunberg sat in front of the Swedish parliament every schoolday for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and it soon went viral. On the 8th of September, Greta decided to continue striking every Friday until the Swedish policies provided a safe pathway well under 2-degree C, i.e. in line with the Paris agreement. The hashtags #FridaysForFuture and #Climatestrike spread and many students and adults began to protest outside of their parliaments and local city halls all over the world.

It is truly inspirational to see young people leading the way when it comes to climate justice. We really do not have much time left to make radical changes required to prevent our own extinction. “If I don’t have a future, why go to school?” hits hard. Whilst it is exciting to see young people taking action when it comes to the most pressing problem of our history (given climate change has the power to end our history!), it is equally despairing to see the attitude by some – such as the U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein– towards these young people challenging the inept attitude and approach many in positions of power have towards the environmental crisis.

Something I read as part of the book, Fictitious Capital: How Finance is Appropriating Our Future, struck me as being a perfect example of what is wrong with the current political and economic relations and how this links with the environmental crisis we are facing. Essentially, hydrocarbon reserves are key for how companies are valued by the stock market, as they are central to the guessing of what future profits will be. However, as the book explains:

according to IPCC estimates, if we are to keep the temperature rise beneath the 2°C limit, then we will have to leave somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of these reserves unused. Companies in the energy sector, together with those in the directly affected industrial sectors, represent close to one-third of worldwide stock-market capitalisation. Taking the political measures necessary to halt fossil fuel extraction would immediately result in a knock-on destabilisation of the financial markets.

This shows how capitalism and the focus on profit over all else is at the core of the environmental damage. We have to challenge capitalism if we want to stop environmental destruction. As discussed in a previous article, Oxfam’s recent report shows that the “26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population” and that “2018 had been a year in which the rich had grown richer and the poor poorer”. The legitimacy of this unequal economic and political system is under attack, no more so than by those raising awareness of the seriousness of climate catastrophe we find ourselves facing.

We need to move towards renewable, clean energy, which as Greenpeace outline has two clear benefits:

Clean energy comes from the Earth’s natural resources – sunlight, wind, waves, tides and geothermal heat. As a source of power it has two great advantages: it will never run out and, unlike oil, coal and gas, it does not pollute the planet or cause dangerous climate change.

Given this, it makes it difficult for it to become a commodity that people can factor into value and stock market prices. It means that we tackle the monopolisation of access to vital resources, alongside the high prices that come with this. It also provides us an opportunity to tailor energy production via natural resources according to different geographical areas, encouraging decentralised, local democracy with the potential for democratic organisational forms, key to helping implement and run this (linking in with some of Murray Bookchin’s ideas regarding communalism and how this can relate to environmental justice). The increased local, democratic control over energy production and use would also help reduce international conflict, as shown by Venezuela at the moment with the US’s intentions towards the country very much influenced by the fact that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world (see my article on this here).

These reasons link into why capitalism is directly opposed to renewable energy – even if it would create jobs, it would be a big threat to a lot of powerful people’s and organisations’ profits and directly challenge the commodification and ownership of such invaluable energy by a few people. This applies to all basic needs, such as access to clean water as well. Look at what has happened to the water supply in Flint, Michigan, which Michael Moore covered in his latest documentary, Fahrenheit 11/9, where the people of Flint have been poisoned so that a few vested interests can make money – see more here. Only through challenging the unjust political and economic relations can this be stopped.

Greenpeace also argue:

Solar power alone has the potential to meet the world’s energy needs many times over. Here in Britain we have more than enough wind, wave and tidal resources to meet our own energy needs and export energy to other countries.

Additional to this, there are arguments that we would only need to utilise a small part of the Sahara desert to provide all of the world’s energy usage:

That means 1.2% of the Sahara desert is sufficient to cover all of the energy needs of the world in solar energy. There is no way coal, oil, wind, geothermal or nuclear can compete with this.

Oil and gas and other environmental-damaging practices are intertwined with the capitalist system. Some very powerful vested interests make a lot of money from this, and these vested interests utilise some of their money to help them politically. This is why anti-capitalism has to be central to all movements and organisations fighting for social justice. Without this we won’t have a planet left for much longer.

Feature photo credit: David Tong / WWF New Zealand

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

There is no such thing as a good and emancipatory technology that cannot be co-opted and perverted into a power of capital. – David Harvey

Working for a technology organisation, Libre Digital, which SilenceBreaker Media is part of, you might think that it’s strange I have included the quote above, especially given the important work The FreeTech Project has done in reducing social isolation and loneliness via technology – with technology a means to an end, rather than the end itself. However, importantly, what David Harvey is referring to is the power of capital, as a process, to adapt and co-opt, with this process central to our current political economy. We can only realise the true emancipatory power of technology once we overcome the contradictions of capitalism and the power of capital. Importantly, by capital, we are referring to the following David Harvey Marxist definition:

For Harvey capital is a process in which money is employed to make more money usually through the exploitation of labor power. Harvey claims that money, land, real estate, or plant and equipment that are not being used productively are not capital.

It was recently announced that Amazon, one of the wealthiest technology companies in the world, with their CEO and founder the richest man in the world, pulled out of their second headquarters deal in New York City. I discussed this proposed deal in a previous SilenceBreaker Media article:

You only have to look at how much state money has been thrown at Amazon in the US as they searched for their second headquarters to see how important the state has been for supporting capital, financial interests and the market. Richard Wolff discusses this in detail, referring to how Amazon invited all US States to bid and ‘compete’ to be the location. Key to Amazon splitting its second headquarters was the overwhelming response and attractive bids from the States, with Amazon deciding to have their headquarters in New York City, New York and Crystal City, Virginia with the total estimated cost for the headquarters standing at $10.5 billion and crucially subsidies given by the two states and cities amounting to an estimated $5.5 billion.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or ‘AOC’), a Democratic (Socialist) U.S Representative for the 14th Congressional District of New York, inspiring people across the World with her dynamic and principled approach to politics, was central to leading the revolt against Amazon coming to Long Island City, with her tweeting for instance:

Concerns regarding gentrification and people being unable to afford housing were key to people’s worries about the move. This is based on what has happened in Seattle, the main headquarters of Amazon:

In Seattle, rents have risen 39.8 percent in the past five years (in New York, rents had started to level off in many areas, and even decrease in some last year). In Seattle, as in New York, people of color have been threatened: the black population in Seattle’s historically black neighborhood Central District has shrunk, and some highly-skilled workers from countries like India who were once courted by tech companies were stuck in a visa backlog…Long Island City in particular was already undergoing rapid development and gentrification—it was dubbed the fastest-growing neighborhood in the country—and the Amazon deal immediately had an impact: Interest in local real estate spiked in the first couple of weeks in November, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon employees were laying claim to condos prior to the official announcement. Some reports suggested housing prices jumped before the move was public, too.

Land, wealth, power and property rights are all important when considering technology and its co-option by capital. Laurie Macfarlane wrote a great article looking at the “discrepancy between high levels of wealth and low levels of productivity” with this discussion relating to the importance of property rights:

The measure of wealth used by the OECD is ‘mean net wealth per household’. This is the value of all of the assets in a country, minus all debts. Assets can be physical, such as buildings and machinery, financial, such as shares and bonds, or intangible, such as intellectual property rights. But something can only become an asset once it has become property – something that can be alienated, priced, bought and sold. What is considered as property has varied across different jurisdictions and time periods, and is intimately bound up with the evolution of power and class relations…The lesson here is that aggregate wealth is not simply a reflection of the process of accumulation, as theory tends to imply. It is also a reflection of the boundaries of what can and cannot be alienated, priced, bought and sold, and the power dynamics that underpin them.

Importantly, Macfarlane, citing healthcare and pensions as examples, shows that a country that removes the profit motive and commodification of key services – which access to technology (especially the internet) should be considered as being – and therefore socialises these services, such as health care, education and energy, would look less wealthy according to this definition:

Because these benefits are non-monetary and accrue to everyone, they are not reflected in any asset prices and are not recorded as “wealth” in the national accounts… The way that we measure national wealth is therefore skewed towards commodification and privatisation, and against socialisation and universal provision.

Value is central to the concept of wealth:

The amount of wealth does not just depend on the number of assets that are accumulated – it also depends on the value of these assets. The value of assets can go up and down over time, otherwise known as capital gains and losses.

It is important to consider the structural and ideological power central to value and wealth, with ownership central to this and productive capacity not having any central influence:

For example, rules that favour capitalists and landlords over workers and tenants, such as repressive trade union legislation and weak tenants’ rights, increase returns on capital and land. All else being equal, this will translate into higher stock and property prices, which will increase measured wealth. In contrast, rules that favour workers and tenants, such as minimum wage laws and rent controls, reduce returns on capital and land. This in turn will translate into lower stock and property prices, and lower paper wealth. Importantly, in both scenarios the productive capacity of the economy is unchanged…..While future returns to capital and land get capitalised into stock and property prices, future returns to labour – wages – do not get capitalised into asset prices. This is because unlike physical and financial assets, people do not have an “asset price”. They cannot become property.

Intellectual property rights have been central to the success of ‘Silicon Valley’, a technology hub in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California, as technology has “facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power.” As brilliantly explained by Wendy Liu, Silicon Valley needs to be replaced, not reformed, with democratic ownership and the role of capital central to this:

The Silicon Valley model of technological development is structurally flawed. It can’t simply be tweaked in a more socially beneficial direction, because it was never intended to be useful for all of society in the first place. At its core, it was always a class project, meant to advance the interests of capital. The founders and investors and engineers who dutifully keep the engines running may not deliberately be reinforcing class divides, but functionally, they are carrying out technological development in a way that enables capitalism’s desire for endless accumulation. Consequently, fixing the problems with the tech industry requires revisiting the economic assumptions that underpin it.

Despite laissez-faire liberal state theory, David Harvey argues that the state has a central role in neoliberal systems:

In neo-liberalism it is accepted that the state play an active role in promoting technological changes and endless capital accumulation through the promotion of commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of powerful institutions (such as Central Banks and the International Monetary Fund) and the rebuilding of mental conceptions of the world in favor of neoliberal freedoms.

This is clear to see with the Amazon deal, where states were keen to throw money at one of the richest companies in the world to attract jobs without any clear conditions and through a lack of accountability, with this reflecting a general pattern of state aid for corporations:

According to The New York Times, American cities and states spend roughly $90 billion a year in cash and tax incentives to attract companies like Amazon. Because Amazon required each city to sign a nondisclosure agreement, citizens may never know what their elected officials offered the company.

Furthermore, AOC’s and others’ concerns related to Amazon as an organisation, given that it isn’t exactly a company with a very good track record when it comes to respecting rights of people that structurally have less power:

The company itself is rife with dubious practices. Its structure is set up such that other businesses are made to become dependent on its operations, feeding a litany of antitrust concerns and erecting a quiet monopoly. And it has been accused many times of bad labor practices, undermining unionizing efforts, and even participating with ICE to deport undocumented workers.

This obviously helps when it comes to increasing the value of assets, as discussed above, linking in with the concept of structural and ideological power. No wonder rich people are chucking money towards billboards attacking AOC for the collapse of the Amazon deal.

Technology was championed as having the potential to create a decentralised, bottom up, empowered, community driven society, but we have instead seen the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few very rich people. That isn’t to say technology itself is a bad thing. Technology has the power to be revolutionary. But we have to challenge the social, political, economic and ideological power structures that make this difficult to break through, where a very few rich people control some of the most powerful communication mediums in the world: Twitter and Facebook are prime examples. That involves challenging the power and role of capital as a process, it means re-examining the concept of value, wealth, and also challenging the concept of private property that is so key to such inequality and power divides. Democratic ownership of technology is key for this, and needs to be part of our counter-power structures.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

One of my biggest concerns when researching into this was the economic and ecological sustainability of the revolution’s reliance upon oil, as I wrote:

Nevertheless, there are rightful reservations regarding the revolution’s – and the related missions’ funded by the oil that target areas such as education, and social welfare – longevity…Venezuela is still integrated within the increasingly globalised neoliberal relations, especially through oil.

This is so important to remember when discussing the recent attacks upon Venezuela. As Pete Dolack argues in his recent article regarding the situation in Venezuela, Venezuela is very much integrated into a capitalist international system and is reliant upon capitalism for its economy to function.

However, whilst this is a concern it is one that has been used to take attention away from the effects of US sanctions, which violate international law. Supposedly in opposition to Venezuela’s human rights abuses towards protesters, in 2014 the US approved measures “to impose sanctions against Venezuelan government officials responsible for human rights abuses against protesters” which included “freezing Venezuelan government officials’ assets and preventing them entry to the U.S…[alongside authorising] $5 million to be spent on behalf of assistance to Venezuelan civilians”. In 2015, President Obama categorised Venezuela as “a national security threat…and ordered sanctions against seven officials” again citing concerns regarding human rights (whilst the US arm Saudi Arabia despite grave human rights abuses), as Obama’s administration “prevented Venezuela from obtaining much-needed foreign financing and investment.”

President Trump has talked up military action against Venezuela whilst bringing in more sanctions again citing concerns that “people are suffering, and they’re dying” (ignoring how people die every year in the US due to not having adequate health care or children dying at the US border because of Trump’s policies). Trump has also threatened US bondholders that meet with Nicolas Maduro – the President of Venezuela (even though many US corporate media channels don’t want to use the word ‘President’) – regarding re-structuring Venezuela’s public debt with 30 years in prison and potentially $10 million fines! FAIR explain the effects these Trump issued sanctions have had on Venezuela:

The US government added further sanctions that prevent Venezuela from doing what governments routinely do with much of their debt, which is “roll it over” by borrowing again when a bond matures. The sanctions also made it difficult if not impossible for Venezuela to undertake debt restructuring, a process wherein interest and principal payments are postponed and creditors receive new bonds, which the sanctions explicitly prohibit.

Trump has recently recognised the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó (with one poll showing that until recently “more than 80 percent of Venezuelans had no idea who Guaidó even was”), as the country’s interim President (which apparently “was pre-arranged following secret talks with Trump officials”), with this causing the breakdown of diplomatic ties between the two countries. In a brilliant example of American exceptionalism, the US State Department issued the following statement in response to Maduro issuing US diplomatic personnel with 72 hours to leave the country:

The United States does not consider former president Nicolas Maduro to have the legal authority to break diplomatic relations with the United States or to declare our diplomats persona non grata. (my emphasis)

The US’s support for Guaidó has been backed by Britain (who have helped by preventing Venezuela from pulling “$1.2 billion worth of gold out of the Bank of England” with sanctions seeing Venezuela relying on gold to raise money it needs), Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Chile, and France with President Macron tweeting, with absolutely no irony at all, as widespread police brutality attacks the yellow vest protesters, he “salutes the courage of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans marching for their liberty”. These supporters conveniently ignore how “the opposition was involved in lynchings, burning people alive, and erecting barricades that cause deadly accidents in 2017. Some opposition leaders, including exiles like Lorent Saleh, have ties to neo-fascists.” It ignores how the opposition have deliberately not wanted to sit down with Maduro and sort things diplomatically. Guaidó himself is a product of US interference and right wing politics:

While Guaidó seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming by the US government’s elite regime change factories. Alongside a cadre of right-wing student activists, Guaidó was cultivated to undermine Venezuela’s socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country, and one day seize power. Though he has been a minor figure in Venezuelan politics, he had spent years quietly demonstrated his worthiness in Washington’s halls of power…Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and writer for the investigative outlet Misión Verdad, agreed: “Guaidó is more popular outside Venezuela than inside, especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington circles,” Sequera remarked to The Grayzone, “He’s a known character there, is predictably right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program.” While Guaidó is today sold as the face of democratic restoration, he spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela’s most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another. His party has been widely discredited inside Venezuela, and is held partly responsible for fragmenting a badly weakened opposition.

The opposition has been central to political and economic turmoil in Venezuela, but this is not covered in the corporate media:

Maria Paez Victor notes that “The opposition orchestrated economic sabotage, corporate smuggling, black market currency manipulations, full scale hoarding of food and essential products. They closed highways, burned public buildings including a packed maternity hospital, from a helicopter dropped grenades on to the Supreme Court offices, have assaulted, lynched and even burned alive [at least 21] young men of dark skin ‘who looked Chavista’. This is a violent opposition steeped in racism and classism against their own people and in the service of foreign powers and Big Oil.

Importantly, recent US led sanctions have targeted the oil revenue of Venezuela:

The latest, issued on January 28, freezes all property and interests of PDVSA subject to U.S. jurisdiction — in other words, blocking Venezuela from any access to the profits generated by PDVSA’s U.S. subsidiary, Citgo, or any PDVSA activities in the United States. The Trump administration expects Venezuela to lose US$11 billion this year.

The BBC provided an analysis of the sanctions hitting the Venezuela’s oil sector and how they see this as key for their political and economic coup:

Now new sanctions will finally hurt the one sector that is responsible for more than 90% of the government’s revenues….US National Security Adviser John Bolton says the US wants oil revenue to reach Mr Guaidó, giving his National Assembly some economic power to combat Mr Maduro. One of the ways of doing so is through PDVSA-owned refineries based in Texas, through a subsidiary called Citgo. Mr Bolton has already met Citgo executives and there is an effort to change its management with executives appointed by Mr Guaidó’s National Assembly. In effect the opposition is trying to set up a parallel government to Mr Maduro’s with its own cabinet.

The role of Citgo is important:

Reuters described Citgo as “Venezuela’s most important foreign asset”; Bloomberg calls it “the crown jewel of PDVSA’s assets.” Citgo is the largest purchaser of Venezuelan oil, although crippling sanctions imposed by the Trump administration have prevented the company from sending revenue to Venezuela, starving the government of funding.

The fact the BBC openly admits that the US’s “end goal is to force Mr Maduro out of power either through a negotiated solution or by giving incentives for a military coup” shows we aren’t even trying to hide from the reality of US imperialism (even if the corporate media aren’t calling it out!), the same way John Bolton didn’t when making it very clear that the US want to control the oil supply in Venezuela with him saying it would make a big difference “economically” if “we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.” FAIR noted that John Bolton has “wasted little time in declaring Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua a ‘troika of tyranny,’ echoing the infamous ‘axis of evil’.”

The sanctions are damaging to Venezuela, as discussed by FAIR, hurting the population through affecting access to everyday and needed resources, as “the sanctions deprive the Venezuelan government of billions of dollars to buy foods and medicine.” FAIR have reported on the blind media support of US sanctions, citing the UN’s criticism of the sanctions, which has not been covered in the corporate media:

The UN Human Rights Council has formally condemned the sanctions, noting they “disproportionately affect the poor and most vulnerable”; it called on all member states to break them, and even began discussing reparations the US should pay to Venezuela. A UN rapporteur who visited the country described Trump’s actions as possible “crimes against humanity” (London Independent,1/27/19). This has not been reported by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN or any other US national media outlet.

Alongside sanctions, the US has engaged in other methods to destabilise and attack Venezuela. For instance, the US has been blamed “for the collapse in oil prices in 2014, noting that U.S. ally Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil in order ‘to weaken those opponents of Wall Street, London, and Tel Aviv, whose economies are centered around [state-owned] oil and natural gas exports,’ including Venezuela, Ecuador, Russia, Brazil and Iran” with John Pilger saying the “’current conspiracy between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil’ in order to cause a ‘coup’ in Venezuela ‘so they can roll-back some of the world’s most important social reforms.’” FAIR also mention how there has been little coverage of the protests against the US interference, with Western corporate media organisations being unapologetically pro-coup – see how The Economist and Reuters changed their Twitter headers:

Both Reuters and The Economist have changed their header images to photos of Juan Guaidó, the US’s pawn in Venezuela. They’ve abandoned any pretense of non-bias and are serving as regime change propaganda outlets. pic.twitter.com/CO8b1NfjBL

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) February 1, 2019

There also has been long-term economic and political interference and support from the U.S for the Maduro opposition forces, as The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) “filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013 and 2014, including funding for their political campaigns in 2013 and for the anti-government protests in 2014.” This reflects a history of US interference to stop the revolution:

This continues the pattern of financing from the US government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars were given to organizations from so-called “civil society” to execute a coup d’etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than $100 million in efforts to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following 8 years. At the beginning of 2011, after being publically exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the OTI closed its doors in Venezuela and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the US. The flow of money to anti-government groups didn’t stop, despite the enactment by Venezuela’s National Assembly of the Law of Political Sovereignty and National Self-Determination at the end of 2010, which outright prohibits foreign funding of political groups in the country. US agencies and the Venezuelan groups that receive their money continue to violate the law with impunity. In the Obama Administration’s Foreign Operations Budgets, between $5-6 million have been included to fund opposition groups in Venezuela through USAID since 2012…Another significant part of NED funds in Venezuela from 2013-2014 was given to groups and initiatives that work in media and run the campaign to discredit the government of President Maduro.

Oliver Stone, whose Untold History of the United States is a fantastic serial documentary about the scale and extent of US interference – often violent – in other countries, especially those that they see as threatening their ‘interests’, tweeted reference to an article that provides more context to this interference:

Since the end of World War 2, the United States has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected.

2. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.

3. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

4. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.

5. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.*

6. Plus … although not easily quantified … has been more involved in the practice of torture than any other country in the world … for over a century … not just performing the actual torture, but teaching it, providing the manuals, and furnishing the equipment.

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, so their resistance to opening this up to privatisation has been something the US have actively opposed and is central to their backing of Guaidó (who is also considering funding from the neoliberal structural adjustment fund obsessed International Monetary Fund):

The oil reporting agency S&P Global Platts reported that, in the immediate wake of the US anointing Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s supposed “president,” the opposition leader already drafted “plans to introduce a new national hydrocarbons law that establishes flexible fiscal and contractual terms for projects adapted to oil prices and the oil investment cycle.” This plan would involve the creation of a “new hydrocarbons agency” that would “offer bidding rounds for projects in natural gas and conventional, heavy and extra-heavy crude.” In other words, these are rapid moves to privatize Venezuela’s oil and open the door for multinational corporations.

Furthermore, it is not just Venezuela’s oil the US want control of:

Celebrated Venezuelan writer and member of the Venezuelan Council of State, Luis Britto Garcia, recently wrote: “The current economic situation Venezuelans are going through result from political actions undertaken by those who want to seize power of a country that has the largest oil reserve, the second largest gas reserve, and the largest freshwater reserve, gold and coltan in the world. They intend to impede the success of a system other than capitalism.”

Venezuela has also faced attacks on “its international credit rating (making foreign loans increasingly expensive), by weakening the foreign exchange value of the national currency through purposeful speculation” by the US and its allies. Private capital and neoliberal supporting institutions are key to making the situation harder:

Another economic warfare weapon that Curcio investigates is the “country-risk indicator,” a calculation that suggests the probability of foreign debt payment default by any country. The higher the country-risk, the higher the risk-premium, or the interest-rate paid on debt. Curcio reveals that the “Large banks and rating agencies are responsible for continuously monitoring the credit risk of countries.” Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings are involved in the country-risk calculation, as are “Credit Suisse, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank.” Curcio writes, “Since 2013, when an escalation of the country-risk [for Venezuela] started, to the present, Venezuela has paid US $63.566 billion for foreign public debt service [interest charges]. The country has fulfilled all its commitments in a timely manner,” and yet its country-risk index was “hiked by 202%”.

Hugo Chávez had broken off Venezuelan relations with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund through repaying Venezuela’s debts off early. Instead, Chávez helped set up the Bank of the South, promoting Latin American integration (Mallen). Chavez also promoted decentralised democratic organisational forms, as I summarised in my Dissertation:

Ellner refers to the Law of Communal Councils (2006), which created the communal councils with neighbourhoods receiving funding to form a council, with at least 150-400 urban families, 20 rural families or 10 indigenous families needed.

These new forms of organisation provided people with more power and involvement in community projects and issues:

Each communal council has a financial branch in the form of a cooperative. Eight months after the Communal Council Law was approved in 2006, over 12,000 councils had received funding for community projects. This has amounted to over $1 billion in micro loans (Ibid.). The councils and its members can raise additional resources through local fundraising initiatives and donations. Councils may also set up communal banks and use them to dispense loans to neighbouring councils.

I also wrote about the changes to the constitution that Chavez led on and how this was seen as a move forward in terms of women’s rights:

The Constitution (1999) was an important step for women’s rights, with Article 88 providing a government pension to those who undertake household labour (for at least 15 hours a week), for example. Furthermore, the non-sexist language used within the Constitution, as both masculine and feminine forms (Spanish) are utilised, has been widely praised. Despite problems with women’s representation within politics, Rakowski argues that many see the Constitution as meeting most of the demands women have been campaigning for since the 1970s.

The Constitution was also praised for its encouragement of decentralised, participatory democracy:

According to sociologist Jesús Pacheco, the Constitution contains some 70 articles dedicated to the promotion of citizen participation (Marco 2017). Article 62 in particular guaranteed participatory democracy in Venezuela by stipulating that not only do “all citizens have the right to freely participate in political affairs, directly or via their elected representatives,” but it is the duty of the state to ensure the “participation of the people in forming, carrying out and controlling the management of public affairs.” (Constitution, 1999).

The revolution also included funding missions addressing pressing social, political and economic challenges:

There are also the social programs known as “missions” that are based on the direct participation of the beneficiaries. Begun in 2003, there are more than two dozen missions that seek to solve a wide array of social problems. Given the corruption and inertia of the state bureaucracy, and the unwillingness of many professionals to provide services to poor neighborhoods, the missions were established to provide services directly while enabling participants to shape the programs. Much government money was poured into these programs, thanks to the then high price of oil, which in turn enabled the Chávez government to fund them. Among the approximately two dozen missions are Alimentación, which incorporates the Mercal network that provides food at subsidized prices and a distribution system; Cultura, which seeks the decentralization and democratization of culture to ensure that all have access to it and stimulate community participation; Guaicaipuro, intended to guarantee the rights of Indigenous peoples as specified in the constitution; Madres del Barrio, designed to provide support to housewives in dire poverty and help their families overcome their poverty; Negra Hipólita, which assists children, adolescents and adults who are homeless; Piar, which seeks to help mining communities through dignifying living conditions and establishing environmental practices; and Zamora, intended to reorganize land, especially idle land that could be used for agriculture, in accordance with the constitution.

I also wrote in my dissertation about the introduction of a Women’s Development Bank, again helping further women’s rights:

The introduction of the Women’s Development Bank (Banmujer) in 2001 has been essential to reducing inequality between men and women (Friedman). The bank provides women who are often isolated from economic resources, financial and non-financial opportunities (Spronk and Webber). Wagner provides a detailed outline of the bank’s structure. The bank has a network of promoters that visit poor and overpopulated communities each week to provide personal services that certain women could not otherwise reach. The group needs between 5-10 people to start its own business, and those who cannot read and write are provided a business partner to help whilst the bank promotes the Mission Robinson (government’s literacy campaign). The promoters help pick suitable projects to fit with the bank’s vision. Men can take part, but are unable to access loans. The bank also provides workshops on personal development and gender rights. However, there have been problems with loan defaults, with the follow-up system requiring reform (Cannon).

These missions and policies helping historically disadvantaged and marginalised groups and people aren’t exactly what the US wants the money raised from oil revenue to be going towards. Whilst there are problems that Venezuela has to address, this is something they should be left to do themselves through democratic processes. The historic and significant scale and extent of US interference has to be critically acknowledged and highlighted, alongside their total hypocrisy and double standards and long-standing role in destabilising countries that are seen as a ‘threat’ to their US neoliberal capitalist interests. However, this isn’t happening in corporate media, as can be illustrated in regards to the reporting of the 2018 Venezuelan election:

Last year, the Trump administration preemptively declared as fraudulent the elections they had previously been demanding, instructing the opposition (whom the US has been funding for two decades) to boycott the process. It even tried to “persuade” (i.e., intimidate) opposition presidential candidate Henri Falcón not to run. With complete unanimity of outlook, the supposedly oppositional US media served to delegitimize the elections as well (FAIR.org, 5/23/18), with the New York Times (5/20/18) describing them as “heavily rigged” and the Miami Herald (5/2/18) christening them “fraudulent,” a “sham,” a “charade” and a “joke” in one column alone. Yet this perception of events can only be sustained through the careful curation of information: informing readers of certain facts, while ignoring strong evidence to the contrary…In reality, Venezuela has one of the most intensely monitored election system in the world, and the government called on the United Nations to send observation teams. This was blocked by the US on the grounds that the UN would “validate” the elections. Despite this, numerous international election monitoring organizations attended and attested to the vote’s quality.

FAIR add:

Maduro won his first election in 2013, recognized by every country in the world except the US, and which even the Washington-funded organization the Carter Center declared free and fair. Indeed, former President Jimmy Carter in 2012 stated the Venezuelan election system to be the “best in the world.”

Despite all this, Venezuela is not a socialist country. It still has the private sector involved in some aspects of the political economy, who have also helped create problems in Venezuela that has hurt the mass population:

As Caleb T. Maupin wrote for Mint Press News last year (July 12, 2016), “It’s odd that the mainstream press blames ‘socialism’ for the food problems in Venezuela, when the food distributors remain in the hands of private corporations,” who are “running general sabotage” of the system. That sabotage by the private sector has taken the form of hoarding of selected items, price speculation, keeping supermarket shelves empty, sending food shipments to neighbouring countries, even setting food warehouse stockpiles on fire. This purposely-generated scarcity creates chaos and discontent, further undermining the government…A new book by Venezuelan economist Pasqualina Curcio Curcio – called The Visible Hand of the Market: Economic Warfare in Venezuela – reveals more precisely just how some of this economic sabotage is being done: through multinational corporations, whose brand names we all recognize. For example, Curcio shows that Big Pharma is “responsible for the import and distribution of 50% of pharmaceuticals in Venezuela,” while companies like “Procter & Gamble, Colgate, Kimberly Clark and Johnson & Johnson” control the Venezuelan market for personal and household hygiene products. In league with local private distributors, these multinationals appear to be re-routing and withholding products, and/or bypassing Venezuela completely.

This illustrates the problems and challenges socialist and democratic socialist political movements face given the international power structures and relations shaped by US dominance – relating to neoliberal institutional relations such as the IMF and World Bank – alongside the role of the dollar and capital and finance markets.

With a recent poll finding “86 percent of Venezuelans would disagree with international military intervention. And 81 percent oppose the US sanctions” it is important to look beyond faux concerns for human rights and see the US’s position for what it is: consistent with its capitalist, imperialist, violent approach to other countries that don’t fall into line. There are more and more people speaking up against this though (see here and here and here and here and here for instance) despite attempts to stop this (see here) and whilst the corporate media, as reported by FAIR, don’t want to use the term we have to call it out for what it is: a coup. When calling out the corporate media, FAIR rightly said “for a media so focused on allegations of foreign interference in US politics, it is remarkable how accepting they are of Trump becoming personal moral arbiter of Venezuela.” Venezuela is facing the full wrath of the neoliberal international system, as it refuses to conform.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

The wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population… The World Inequality Report 2018 – co-authored by Piketty – showed that between 1980 and 2016 the poorest 50% of humanity only captured 12 cents in every dollar of global income growth. By contrast, the top 1% captured 27 cents of every dollar.

These obscene levels of inequality link clearly with the growing problem and crisis of legitimacy of neoliberalism, as I discussed in my article here.

But, aren’t we told there is no money left? That the free market and capitalism is the best way? That we can’t curtail the freedom of the market as otherwise we risk a brain drain, a race to the bottom, or a lack of entrepreneurial spirit?

Fredrick Hayek – a significant influence upon the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s – was very critical of government interference in the market, arguing it was the manipulation of money by the government that created problems regarding malinvestment and savings linking to the Austrian theory of the business cycle. Criticised economically, it was politically that Hayek had his most significant impact, including influencing Margaret Thatcher, who as UK’s Prime Minister was central to the rise of the neoliberal project.

The other political economist that is often cited as having a central influence on Thatcher and neoliberalism is Milton Friedman. Friedman has talked about the influence Hayek had on him:

Milton Friedman emphasizes that he is “an enormous admirer of Hayek, but not for his economics. I think Prices and Production is a very flawed book. I think his capital theory book [The Pure Theory] is unreadable. On the other hand, The Road to Serfdom is one of the great books of our time.”

The Road to Serfdom was the first interaction Thatcher had with Hayek’s views, with the Margaret Thatcher Foundation arguing “in fact one can argue that few books influenced her more deeply at any point in her life”. The Foundation goes further when discussing the book’s influence on Thatcher:

She absorbed deeply Hayek’s idea that you cannot compromise with socialism, even in mild social democratic forms, because by degrees socialism tends always to totalitarian outcomes, regardless of the intentions, professed or real, of its proponents. And she saw that her own party had done just that, putting her deeply at odds with its collective leadership.

After the post-war consensus was smashed, the return of Hayek – marked by his Nobel Prize for economics in 1974 – was instrumental to Thatcher, with the Foundation stressing this was a political, not economic, influence:

While there is no reason to doubt Hayek’s emblematic significance to the Thatcherites in their search for new roots, it was as a political and economic philosopher that he mattered, not as an economist. And The Road to Serfdom counted for more than The Constitution of Liberty, the critique of socialism more than the vision of a pared-down liberal state.”

There has been an increasing interest in Hayek’s economic writings given the 2007-8 crisis, with people looking for alternative explanations to why the sub-prime mortgage crisis happened. Hayek historically is mostly forgotten in mainstream economic debates, with it often being summarised as ‘John Maynard Keynes vs. Milton Freidman’. Comparing and contrasting these three thinkers, Hayek and Friedman advocated for free markets with limited, to no (in the case of Hayek), government intervention whilst Keynes encouraged government intervention, yet Hayek and Friedman disagreed on monetary policy with the former believing it created boom and bust cycles (as discussed above) whereas the latter believing it helped navigate economic crises. Keynes’ focus on fiscal policy was something both Hayek and Friedman were against. Therefore, concluding:

If we look at interventions government has taken to help “stimulate” the economy, the actions are more akin to the economics of Keynes and Friedman, where Congress passes stimulus packages, and the Central Bank inflates the money supply. Mainstream economics is a hybrid of the Keynes and Friedman approach. However, from Hayek’s view, the actions of a “stimulus” and inflation sow the seeds to next bust. In one respect, Friedman is a “Keynesian”, but in another he is not. The free market usually gets associated with Friedman, but not all free market folks follow Friedman’s economics. Many free market economists follow Hayek’s vision of economics, Austrian Economics. Austrian Economics rarely uses any mathematics, but seeks to understand human action. It takes into account the human element of economics.

The market and capital interests have not been left to be ‘free’ and fail. If we are to follow a Hayek approach to the markets, the banks and financial actors central to creating the sub-prime mortgage crisis, they should have been left to fail. However, Cédric Durand in his book, Fictitious Capital: How Finance is Appropriating Our Future (2017), shows that:

Between autumn 2008 and the beginning of 2009, the total amount that states and central banks in the advanced countries committed to supporting the financial sector (through recapitalisation, nationalisation, repurchasing assets, loans, guarantees, injections of liquidity) has been evaluated at some 50.4 per cent of world GDP! (page 39)

You only have to look at how much state money has been thrown at Amazon in the US as they searched for their second headquarters to see how important the state has been for supporting capital, financial interests and the market. Richard Wolff discusses this in detail, referring to how Amazon invited all US States to bid and ‘compete’ to be the location. Key to Amazon splitting its second headquarters was the overwhelming response and attractive bids from the States, with Amazon deciding to have their headquarters in New York City, New York and Crystal City, Virginia with the total estimated cost for the headquarters standing at $10.5 billion and crucially subsidies given by the two states and cities amounting to an estimated $5.5 billion.

Let’s remember, the owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, and the Oxfam report shows how he “saw his fortune increase to $112bn. Just 1% of his fortune is equivalent to the whole health budget for Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people.”

The state supports the corporate and capital interests whilst politically we argue about the virtue of the free market. This goes alongside the Oxfam report criticising governments around the world for not investing in public services, meaning inequality is getting worse.

The concept of the individual over the collective, the critique of socialism and the advocacy for the free market are all related to support for the capitalist system. Whilst Hayek’s economic opinions might be becoming more popular for some, it must be remembered that this is a political decision. In search for creating an alternative argument – one that takes attention from the inherent contradictions and flaws of the capitalist neoliberal system – Hayek’s theory can quite easily be utilised to take attention away from the financial actors that have constructed financial instruments such as collateralized debt obligation with limited regulation, think tanks (such as the Mont Pelerin Society, which Hayek and Friedman, amongst others, founded) and spent lots of money to ‘buy’ politicians and political parties to create a political class project where a very few people own the majority of the world’s wealth.

For instance, Oxfam’s report found since the financial crisis, “the number of billionaires has nearly doubled…between 2017 and 2018 a new billionaire was created every two days” and to top this off, “the poorest 10% of Britons are paying a higher effective tax rate than the richest 10% (49% compared with 34%) once taxes on consumption such as VAT are taken into account.” This links into the problem regarding the concept of value, price and the market, something I discussed with Jay Baker in a recent vlog of ours as part of Jay & Jane.

The Oxfam report calls for a wealth tax to address the global wealth inequalities:

It said the widening gap was hindering the fight against poverty, adding that a wealth tax on the 1% would raise an estimated $418bn (£325bn) a year – enough to educate every child not in school and provide healthcare that would prevent 3 million deaths.

This relates to the problems of an unspoken acceptance of the ‘right’ of capital mobility, and how important capital controls are to bring in – alongside taxes such as a wealth tax – to address the global economic imbalances. This is something Grace Blakeley discussed in great detail when referring to the 70% marginal tax rate that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proposed:

The golden age of capitalism took place under the Bretton Woods system of exchange rate pegging, which permitted the use of capital controls (limits on the amount of money that can be brought into or out of a country). These controls were anathema to the global elite, which sought the right to move their money to wherever the most profitable investment opportunities – and lowest tax rates – could be found. Friedrich Hayek – the intellectual godfather of neoliberalism – called capital controls “the decisive advance on the path to totalitarianism and the suppression of individual liberty…Raising top marginal tax rates is the best moral and economic course of action for the UK, but any socialist government that attempted to do so would be punished severely by “the markets”. Without constraints on capital mobility, investors will continue to exercise a veto power over domestic states’ fiscal policy, and tax competition will only get worse.

We therefore need to be aware of the ideological and political theories and arguments that have underpinned the dominant economic arguments tied with Western governments and global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, and crucially central to the neoliberal project, if we are to tackle these global wealth inequalities. The market has been supported for years by the state, with governments only willing to bail out corporate and capital interests and then politically blame everyone else in the hopes of divide and rule. This has worked. But it is also facing a huge legitimacy crisis after the 2007 crash. It is about seizing control of this narrative, as key political actors across the world are, and arguing that democracy needs to be at the heart of the economy as well as in our political system and that capitalism is antithetical to this.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

In normal times, such a crushing defeat on a key piece of government legislation would be expected to be followed by a prime ministerial resignation.

But what do they mean by ‘normal’?

Previously, May called a General Election in 2017 after triggering Article 50, confident she was going to increase her MPs to ensure a smoother Brexit process. May and the Tories learnt through their damaging election campaign that there is a popular movement that supports and backs Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour led project. This project saw the Tories 21-point lead in the opinion polls dramatically reduce, with the Tories losing 13 seats and Labour gaining 30 seats. This relates to the radical transformation of what is considered politically possible, aided by the bursting of a political bubble surrounding Westminster.

Re-reading my blog post in 2015 regarding the General Election, where I used my own experiences of voting for the Liberal Democrats in 2010 to argue that people should vote for Labour in 2015, gave me chance to reflect on how radically different the political discourse is, and related opportunities are now, because of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour party leader in 2015.

Whilst I still stand by my 2015 election argument, given the context of that election and the devastation of 5 years of Tory rule at the time, it is also clear how different political discourse is now and how it is quite easy to separate most politics into two categories: the politics of fear (e.g. Tories, the far right etc.) and the politics of hope (as shown by the rise of Corbyn’s Labour and the concept of democratic socialism across the left). This new radical politics of hope looks at tackling the root causes of social, economic and political inequality and therefore has helped us reimagine what is possible in a broader sense. My blog post in 2015 was very pessimistic, it was an argument based on reasons why someone shouldn’t vote for the Conservatives rather than reasons for why someone should vote for Labour.

Corbyn was an accidental leader, placed onto the ballot by a Parliamentary Labour Party for a laugh as they didn’t imagine Corbyn would connect with the members the way he has (they wouldn’t have allowed him on the ballot if they had thought that was the case!). In August 2018, the FT reported on how Corbyn has been central to the Labour party becoming more financially sustainable through membership-led income rather than corporate backing, with Labour raising around £10m more than the Tories in 2017 (Labour had also raised more than the Tories in 2016), with a 150% increase in Labour party members under Corbyn’s leadership, increasing subs from £6m in 2014 to £16m in 2017. Donations are mostly made up by trade unions, bringing in around £18m. This is important to compare to the Conservatives who only received £835,000 in 2017 from subs, illustrating the differences in interests that these parties represent (people who’ve died and left the Tories their money contribute more [£1.7m] than living members!). Corporate and individual donations – mainly representing capital – was around £34m, again illustrating the interests that the parties are representing.

This widespread popularity for Corbyn’s Labour Party is reflected in a recent YouGov polling analysis, as displayed in the chart above, which compares people’s opinions regarding 9 Labour policies in the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and USA. YouGov summarise their findings, stating:

In none of the European countries surveyed are any of Corbyn’s policies opposed by more people than supported. In fact, most of the time they’re supported by the majority. Labour’s pledge to make university tuition free for all students garners majority support in every country listed, as does their proposal to generate 60% of electricity and heat from low carbon or renewable sources by 2030. In the UK this energy pledge is the most popular of all, being supported by 79% of people, followed by capping rents (74%) and raising taxes for the richest 5% of earners (68%).

YouGov reflect on why it is that this broad support for Labour’s policies do not translate even more in leader polling, but do not scratch under the surface of that clichéd ‘leadership’ discussion.

For instance, there are problems regarding media reporting and bias, relating to vested interests, with the Media Reform Coalition reporting that:

Just two companies, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp UK and Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail Group, control nearly 60% of national newspaper circulation. If you include online and mobile readers, the situation isn’t that much better with five companies accounting for 80% of all consumption, online and offline.

The LSE did a study into the media representations of Jeremy Corbyn, finding that:

Our systematic content analysis of a representative sample of newspaper articles published in 8 national newspapers between 1 September and 1 November 2015, however, shows that the press reacted in a highly transgressive manner to the new leader of the opposition, hence our reference to the attackdog metaphor. Our analysis shows that Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate. This process of delegitimisation occurred in several ways: 1) through lack of or distortion of voice; 2) through ridicule, scorn and personal attacks; and 3) through association, mainly with terrorism. All this raises, in our view, a number of pressing ethical questions regarding the role of the media in a democracy. Certainly, democracies need their media to challenge power and offer robust debate, but when this transgresses into an antagonism that undermines legitimate political voices that dare to contest the current status quo, then it is not democracy that is served.

Whilst not as bad as the right wing media, ‘left wing’ media such as The Guardian and The Independent were also criticised in the LSE’s research for their imbalanced negative reporting of Corbyn. Media Lens are useful for critical analysis of The Guardian and the problems created by the ‘liberal left’ newspaper’s not so popular take on Corbyn. Our own Jay Baker will be exploring these issues in his regular SilenceBreaker Media podcast that will be coming soon, so watch this space!

Furthermore, it is important to reflect back on the income streams of the two parties discussed above and how this connects with vested interests, especially where financial liberalisation, capital mobility and the market is promoted within a neoliberal system as being more important than ensuring a system of equality and fairness. For instance, our obsession with GDP is a good example of this, despite Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson demonstrating in their The Spirit Level book that it is inequality, not GDP, that has a correlation with social problems: the higher the inequality the more social problems there are.

Corbyn is a democratic socialist, which is a philosophy and political approach that has become more popular across the country and also in other countries such as the US through Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Democratic socialism in summary focusses on political democracy and also advocates for social ownership of the means of production – essentially meaning that workers have a meaningful control and say in how their work place is organised and run and also in how the surplus created is utilised and distributed. People are put at the centre of a democratic socialist philosophy, and after so many years of being told that the markets and financial capital cannot be controlled, people are finding hope in a philosophy and related policies that says different.

So what is this normal the BBC referred to?

Rather than a pessimist vote for the lesser of two evils, for the first time in a very long time people are given a choice to vote for something they believe in, to vote for hope and the potential for things to be different. There is an increasingly new way of doing things, with membership – i.e. ordinary people – driving the Labour party, and independent media becoming more and more diverse (something we are hoping to increasingly contribute to here at SilenceBreaker Media), tapping into a new political paradigm linked to hope, and framed by democratic socialist ideas. The political landscape and acceptable discourse has radically transformed challenging what the construction of normal is…

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

Britain’s household debt mountain has reached a new peak, with UK homes now owing an average of £15,385 to credit card firms, banks and other lenders, according to the TUC… The level of unsecured debt as a share of household income is now 30.4%, the highest level it has ever been at. It is well above the £286bn peak in 2008 before the financial crisis, the TUC said.

Related to 10 years of Conservative-led austerity, household debt has increased as a way to respond to the pressures of being able to afford basic necessities. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Geography at The Graduate Center, CUNY, discussed in his latest podcast the concept of necessities and its relation with the concept of freedom. It is often argued that freedom is an exclusive capitalist neoliberal offering, and that a socialist system would remove individual freedoms from people (this argument mostly relies upon comparisons with ‘communist’ regimes such as Soviet Russia, which are criticised by many socialists and would certainly have been criticised by Karl Marx). Whilst this may be true if your individual freedoms include being able to be very, very rich at the expense of the majority, socialism via the public domain, rather than the market, would provide more people more individual freedom by providing everyone with access to basic necessities. Harvey cites Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party policies as a good example of how this can work in practice.

The level of household debt reported by the TUC, which also as a note doesn’t include outstanding mortgage debts, also relates to the rise of insecure, low paid work. The household debt figure reported on included “the total amount lent in bank overdrafts, personal loans, store cards, payday loans and outstanding credit card debts. It also included student loans, which added a substantial amount to the figures.” The research also doesn’t include Christmas debts, which as I discussed in a previous article, takes on average 5 months to pay off!

The centrality of debt is not a surprise. David Harvey argues in his book Rebel Cities: From The Right to the City to the Urban Revolution that understanding the credit system needs to be central to a critical conception of how the system works and the increasing crises and instability it faces:

Internalizing the credit system and the relation between the rate of interest and the rate of profit within the general laws of production, circulation, and realization of capital is likewise a disruptive necessity if we are to bring Marx’s theoretical apparatus more acutely to bear on actual events.

The rise of fictitious capital has been central to sustaining the capitalist system but also creating pressures and demands upon it that resulted in the 2007/8 crisis (The Big Short is a fantastic film illustrating this very well). However, private debt was transferred into public debt, with well organised and designed campaigns blaming everyone and anyone, whether that be refugees, benefit claimants, ethnic minorities etc. to take attention away from the role of capital and especially fictitious capital in creating the crisis (it’s a lot harder to quickly explain what a Collateralized Debt Obligation is!). Related to this blame game is the political programme of austerity, which attracted condemnation from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, which I wrote about in a recent article, and has created an economy that the TUC report shows is more reliant on unsecure debt than ever before.

We have created a system where we ‘value’ the ‘rights’ of fictitious capital over ordinary people, where the failures of the market are protected by the state whilst the same state unleashes a political programme that creates record levels of household debt, insecurity and low wages, as local services are closed or cut. This relates to the contradictions of capitalism and neoliberalism, which David Harvey has written and spoke a lot about and which I touched on in my previous article regarding the contradictions created by demand side economics and supply side economics, with the former relating to Marx’s arguments in Volume 2 of Capital regarding the need for capitalism to be careful when depressing worker and labour power, as there is an awareness that workers need to be able to consume and spend to keep the system going and the latter relating to the issues Marx talks about in Volume 1 of Capital, especially regarding the need to destroy labour power in order to maximise the surplus value and profit relating to capital mobility and also the creation of fictitious capital.

These contradictions create instability and systemic problems, as shown by how there are concerns regarding another crisis happening in 2020 (see here and here for instance). The system isn’t sustainable nor does it work for the majority of people.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

It was something I explored in my Politics with Research Methods MA, researching into the social enterprise sector in Sheffield, UK and Pittsburgh, US to compare and contrast the sector in the context of changes in political, social and economic relations alongside related ideas/ideology since the 1970/80s. Once the news broke of David Cameron, the previous Prime Minister and former Leader of the Conservative Party, promising an EU referendum, I wrote an article that illustrates my then limited critical analysis of the EU as a structural and ideologically institution. I naively argued there was a simple conflation of the EU and the Eurozone and this was to further the right’s cause of leaving the EU; whilst there are obviously concerns regarding the sometimes merging of these issues, there are clear concerns for the left that liberalisation and capital mobility are core to the EU as a political and economic project – this is just intensified and easier to enforce when a country is also a member of the Eurozone (e.g. via structural adjustment programmes). My argument at the time therefore ignored this wider debate key to anti-capitalist and more progressive, alternative visions of economics, politics and society. For instance, in the article I argued:

It isn’t Europe as an institution, it is specifically the Eurozone with the related Stability and Growth Pact and the Fiscal Compact affecting countries such as Greece, which this referendum will have nothing to do with given we are not a part of the Eurozone or these related conditions.

But, in fact, as I will argue in this article there are real concerns regarding Europe as an institution that we have to understand and analyse. I will also argue that the distinction between a social democratic and democratic socialist position is very important when considering the left debates around Brexit and especially when considering discussions regarding the Labour party’s approach to it.

In recent weeks, there has been an increase in the bashing of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, and Labour’s approach to Brexit. When looking at the background of many of those doing the attacking i.e. namely centrist, pro-status quo figures and also the misrepresentation of Labour members’ views (see here and an analysis of this misrepresentation here) – it encouraged me to do more reading into the arguments of Lexit (left wing vision for leaving the EU). This approach wasn’t given much coverage during the EU referendum – mostly only visible from the stickers put up – including amongst the left (I hold my hands up here too, just look at my article cited above!). Furthermore, the right wing perspectives – focused on immigration – was the hegemonic discourse shaping the debate and covered by the corporate media. This links into this argument from prominent Lexit advocate Grace Blakeley:

The left was right to campaign against leaving the EU in 2016. Based on the tenor of the campaign, it was clear the Leave campaign would embolden the xenophobes and nationalists that exist across the class spectrum in the UK.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour leader (twice!) has fundamentally changed politics. One of the most crucial changes has been to reshape and reconstruct the boundaries of what is considered ‘acceptable’ debate and political discussion. Corbyn has given power to the notion of radically new ideas of how society, the economy and politics can work.

Dawn Foster wrote a perfect article on the EU referendum and Labour’s position and how dangerous it would be to go against the results and promote a People’s Vote. We had a vote – something the Greens and Liberal Democrats supported, and Labour didn’t – and we have to respect the democratic mandate of that vote or risk potentially isolating many people from politics for a long time – something Corbyn has done a great job in addressing through his different, authentic and relatable approach to politics. We also have to look at the reasons for why people voted to leave, which links into arguments around Lexit and the left critique of the EU – namely relating to the effects of liberalisation and capital mobility and what is perceived to be a lack of control in a lot of people’s lives.

David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Geography at The Graduate Center, CUNY, has studied Karl Marx’s Capital for many years, raising awareness of Marx’s work regarding the general nature and contradictions of capital, especially its need to expand and grow to create more and more profit, relating to the hegemonic capitalist obsession with endless growth. Harvey refers to how a crisis in capitalism is when there is surplus labour and surplus capital side-by-side and to resolve the crisis the two have to be put back together. Harvey cites US suburbanization post-1945 as a good example of this but that it also resulted in urban uprisings given the process mainly benefited the white working class. Harvey refers to how in the 1970s there was a movement away from demand side economics, which had dominated the 1945-1960 period. For Harvey, demand side economics relates to Marx’s arguments in Volume 2 of Capital regarding the need for capitalism to be careful when depressing worker and labour power, as there is an awareness that workers need to be able to consume and spend to keep the system going.

The 1970s was instead dominated by supply side economics, which relates to the issues Marx talks about in Volume 1 of Capital, especially regarding the need to destroy labour power in order to maximise the surplus value and profit. Key to this is capital mobility, and thus the concept of liberating finance capital and removing controls on capital flows. This is why Article 58 and Articles 63-66 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) regarding the need for capital liberalisation and the freedom of capital movement fundamental to The Single Market brought into Treaty discussion in the 1960s, are crucial components of how the EU is structured and therefore critically important to understand and recognise.

It is important to note, given Corbyn was roundly criticised during the EU referendum, that Corbyn was campaigning to remain but reform given the issues many on the left have with the EU in terms of capital mobility, competition and the potential problems Labour will have from the EU when implementing their radical political strategy if Corbyn is elected Prime Minister. These concerns are key to why the Labour party will look to renegotiate a Customs Union agreement, by trying to block Theresa May’s current deal, making sure there isn’t a ‘no-deal’ and encouraging a general election to win and enable them to negotiate with the EU (see here, here and here).

Grace Blakeley, who has written about the problems of financial capital mobility and its connection with “unproductive speculation and trading” and reasons for why the Leave vote won, summaries the concerns regarding the limitations placed upon radical policy from the EU, arguing:

Any attempt by a socialist government to limit capital flows into or out of the UK, or to direct capital into strategic investments a way that extended far beyond ‘correcting market failure’, would be resisted far more strongly than an attempt to limit free movement. This was made abundantly clear recently, when EU officials told the Times they were far more worried about Corbyn’s post-Brexit plans for state subsidies and a return to public ownership than the Tories’ plans for further deregulation and privatisation. They merely highlighted the latter ‘because it is better public relations’ – as though the EU was a multinational corporation looking to clean up its public image.

Blakeley discusses concerns the EU have re Labour’s policies and the EU’s desire for a ‘level playing field’ to be key to negotiations given this. The concept of a ‘level playing field’ is central to the EU’s discussions and actions around capital mobility.

There is increasing attention being paid to arguments from the left that are critical of the EU. For instance, in a New Statesman article, Joe Guinan and Thomas M Hanna argue, “ceding Brexit to the right was very nearly the most serious strategic mistake by the British left since the ‘70s.” Similarly, Costas Lapavitsas argues that:

EU rules would place severe restrictions on a future Corbyn government: State Aid, public procurement and nationalization…These are not minor issues. They lie at the heart of any attempt to transform Britain’s economy in a socialist direction, especially when it comes to industrial policy. As the debate over Brexit rumbles on it is clear that the EU would place unique barriers to a Corbyn-led Labour government—making even a reversal to WTO rules more advantageous than either EU or Single Market membership in these respects.

With regards to public ownership, Guinan and Hanna argue this has been “discouraged and disadvantaged” by EU law, encouraging privatisation (they cite Article 59 of the TFEU, for instance). Lapavitsas agrees, arguing:

There are likely to be challenges on introducing public ownership, if publicly owned firms received support that aimed to replace private provision and pursue wider policy goals…While the European Union includes many member states with nationalized industries and utilities, its rules are set up to steer a course towards privatization, and to make renationalization ineffective at best and impossible at worst…In practice, the EU rule of forbidding public monopolies means that the state could only own a provider of a service in a market, not abolish that market altogether. State providers would be forced to compete with other providers, who would often not be subject to the same constraints. The history of such arrangements across Europe and elsewhere shows how easily state providers are undercut in terms of cost by rivals willing to pay lower wages, or cut corners on health and safety, or even provide services only where they make money.

This relates to discussions regarding the EU’s fourth railway package and what potential consequences it could have on a Labour government’s policies for rail renationalisation. The fourth railway package refers to opening “up each country’s rail network to competition and ultimately create a single European market in rail services.” Jonathan Cowie argues “the only thing that the new system will almost certainly rule out is state monopolies that do not have to compete with rivals to win franchises, renationalised or otherwise.” Furthermore, critically reviewing Cowie’s argument, Nicole Badstuber argues “the EU package may not strictly require privatisation but it is definitely designed to create an environment conducive to this.” Moreover, Alex Gordon and Jonathan White state that the “EU single market membership frustrates any ability to create coherent, integrated, nationalised industries and utilities based on democratically agreed national needs” when discussing the incompatibility of Labour’s manifesto with the EU’s single market, citing how British Rail would not be allowed under these conditions whilst also mentioning the problems Labour would have in creating a national investment bank. There are also concerns that renationalisation of the NHS would be difficult for Corbyn under EU law, with healthcare now seen as an ‘economic activity’ meaning “EU rules on the internal market (free movement of goods, persons, capital and services), public procurement and state aid, in principle apply to healthcare services.”

In reference to industrial strategy, Guinan and Hanna argue that “Britain’s industrial production has been virtually flat since the late 1990s, with a yawning trade deficit in industrial goods” and for this to be fundamentally addressed there will need to be state aid. State aid refers to “the nurturing of a next generation of companies through grants, interest and tax relief, guarantees, government holdings, and the provision of goods and services on a preferential basis.” The EU will not allow state aid if they don’t see it as being compatible with the internal market and if there are worries it will undermine competition. Guinan and Hanna argue: “Whether or not state aid meets these criteria is at the sole discretion of the Commission – and courts in member states are obligated to enforce the commission’s decisions.” Lapavitsas even argues that in terms of State Aid, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules would actually be better, saying “the World Trade Organization rules — only brings into sharper focus how restrictive and neoliberal EU state aid policy is.” However, there are serious concerns with a no-deal Brexit where WTO rules would become the default. Recent polling shows that there is popular public support for removing the constraints of state aid even if this means sacrificing a close trade relationship with the EU.

Given these concerns, Laurie Macfarlane has written a very useful article looking at the options Labour have when it comes to the EU and Brexit, utilising a handy theoretical framework:

A helpful framework for untangling these issues is Dani Rodrik’s impossibility trilemma. This states that democracy, national sovereignty and cross border economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full. In the context of Brexit, it means that we can do any two of the following:
a) Retain the benefits of economic integration that come via membership of the EU’s single market and customs union;
b) Reclaim national sovereignty by returning powers to the British parliament that currently lie with the European institutions;
c) Uphold democratic principles by ensuring that we have a say over all the laws we are subjected to.

Given this, Macfarlane argues that Labour have two clear options:

This leaves two possible options which, on the face of it at least, do not involve a significant loss of democracy and sovereignty. Firstly, Labour could favour a harder Brexit which seeks to reclaim national sovereignty and take back control of our rules and laws, while sacrificing economic integration with the EU – and incurring whatever economic cost that might carry (hereafter referred to as the ‘Lexit’ option). This effectively combines options b) and c) in the list above, while sacrificing a). Secondly, Labour could favour a second referendum and campaign to remain in the EU, and seek to transform it from within – and incur whatever political cost this might carry (hereafter referred to as the ‘Remain’ option). This effectively combines options a) and c) in the list above, while sacrificing b).

However, whether it can be argued democratic principles would be ensured and C) met by having a second referendum and discounting those who voted to leave in the 2016 referendum is very dubious and contentious.

Macfarlane also argues that in terms of state aid and its impact upon Labour’s policies implementation, it will depend upon Labour’s policy details. This links into a crucial point regarding the left Brexit debate: the difference between social democracy and democratic socialism. Macfarlane explains:

Whether or not these rules are a barrier to Labour’s economic agenda depends on the scope of the Party’s aspirations. Labour’s 2017 manifesto was very much in the vein of moderate European social democracy. Nearly all of the flagship policies already exist in other northern European countries such as Germany and the Nordic countries, and it would be possible to implement most of these within the EU’s State Aid and competition regimes. The reason these policies have not been implemented in the UK so far is not because of any EU rules – it is because successive UK governments, including Labour governments, have been ideologically opposed to them… the UK has consistently spent significantly less on State Aid expenditure relative to other Northern European economies. However, while the EU’s State Aid and competition regime is relatively accommodating of social democracy, it is less accommodating of democratic socialism. At a basic level, the EU’s State Aid and competition regime is fundamentally rooted in the idea that goods and services are most efficiently produced by private firms operating in a competitive market, and that the state should only intervene in markets to ‘level the playing field’ or to correct certain identifiable market failures. If Labour plans to mount a serious challenge to this logic, and move beyond the moderate social democracy implied by its 2017 manifesto, then it is likely that this would place a Labour government on a collision course with the EU’s State Aid and competition authorities.

This is crucial and links into arguments made for a Green New Deal via EU State Aid (see here) for instance, and how EU State Aid helps stop corporate welfare (contra to what happened with Amazon in the US). However, this ignores democratic socialist arguments regarding radically restructuring the way society, politics and economics works and the different perspectives of democratic socialists and social democrats when it comes to capitalism and if it should be controlled or replaced. Replacing capitalism also links into the threat of environmental crisis and the incompatibility of capitalism with environmental justice (especially given its obsession with endless compound growth at huge costs to the environment). This difference between social democracy and democratic socialism is worth bearing in mind when reading any article about how the left should approach the EU.

Summing up Lexit, Macfarlane says:

Lexit therefore demands a hard form of Brexit, where post-Brexit arrangements with the EU are kept to a bare minimum. Any softer form of Brexit would mean that the UK government would not have control over the various policy levers that the case for Lexit relies on. Under such a scenario, the UK would have more flexibility over areas such as State Aid, although it would still be bound by WTO rules, which are narrower in scope compared with EU state aid rules. It would also be able to introduce capital controls if an elected government so wished…Even in a Lexit scenario, the UK would have to comply with European regulations and standards if it wants to maintain and expand its global production chains, but will have no say over these rules. For the same reasons, after Brexit the UK will be less able to hold multinational corporations to account compared with being inside the EU. An independent UK is simply not a large enough economic power to exert influence on large foreign-owned corporations…An independent UK – socialist or not – cannot fully insulate itself from the forces of global capital.

There are important points of discussion here and why many argued – including Corbyn – our best position would have been staying in the EU and focusing on reforming within (see here for suggestions on how to reform the EU), especially given the economic and political consequences of leaving the EU including the negative effect on trade, our service sector, jobs and possibilities for the far right alongside the problems with a hard border in Northern Ireland. On this basis, Macfarlane makes a convincing argument for a second referendum:

Although it would need careful planning, such a strategy could involve painting the Brexit impasse as a crisis engineered by the Tories, highlighting that the only way out of the deadlock is to have another referendum, and then campaigning in the referendum on a radical platform of ‘remain and reform’. With the Tories weakened by internal division and political crises, and Labour’s grass roots membership firmly in favour of Remain, the party would be in a strong position to win the referendum – and ultimately the next general election.

However, Dawn Foster’s article on the problems of another referendum are worth referring to again here; I don’t share the optimism that Remain would win and that it would be easy to disassociate the Remain campaign from the liberal elites who oppose Corbyn and see no need to reform the EU. I also don’t believe it is a democratic thing to do, and would risk inspiring the far right even more as they feel the establishment has ignored them again – something Corbyn has been trying to address with his authentic leadership.

Some, looking for an alternative, argue for a similar model to Norway. Ellen Engelstad, writing in Tribune’s first issue since its relaunch, argues that despite many looking towards Norway’s European Economic Area (EEA) agreement as something the UK should follow, there are many problems with this including the acceptance of the single market – and thus capital mobility – without much say in the laws and rules made and implemented by the EU. Engelstad argues that Norway’s membership with the EEA has been key to members of the public being opposed to membership of the EU, and citing many of the problems discussed above in terms of nationalisation, public procurement and state aid alongside the opposition to the fourth railway package and the undermining of workers’ rights and power under the EEA, sums up Norway’s relationship with the EU as: “not only has it meant more than two decades of neoliberal laws that undermine the welfare state and the workers’ movement, it has also in practice been undemocratic.”

In sum, it is important to acknowledge the complexity of this debate and the challenges this country faces and also the left faces in navigating the reality of a decision created by David Cameron, who promised a vote on membership for his own indulgence as he tried to be friends to all in the Conservative Party with no care for the consequences. Things to consider when discussing the best possible way for the left to move forward involve acknowledging concerns regarding the EU’s structural and ideological obsession with liberalisation and the markets – linking with the promotion of capital mobility – and how much this impacts upon left policies that Corbyn’s Labour wants to implement, relating to discussions regarding the differences between social democracy and democratic socialism. Social Democrats don’t see any issues with remaining in the EU (they might advocate some reform, but nothing too radical), arguing we can increase state aid within EU acceptable levels, encourage (part)nationalisation within a mixed economy and rely upon the EU to curb corporate power (namely through state aid). Democratic Socialists are critical of remaining in a political and economic union that has liberalisation and capital mobility at its core, as shown by agreements such as the fourth railway package and the concerns over how much change Corbyn would be able to do under such neoliberal framing. If Corbyn was able to transform the UK through democratic socialist ideas, the country could become a beacon for other countries to look towards and follow. There are obviously issues and concerns regarding adjustments to WTO regulations and the fact there is global financial capital flows with vested interests intent on stopping Corbyn’s revolution in whatever way possible. However, when we look at the predictions regarding climate change, time is running out. Can we really afford to be content with just reforming capitalism? There is serious potential for supplanting capitalism with democratic socialist ideas, it wouldn’t be easy, but it has to be considered when we think about navigating our way through Brexit.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

There isn’t a better example of how our system, economy and culture relies upon debt than Christmas. Research shows that “the average person will spend £923 on food, drinks and presents” at Christmas. Additionally, “over half of Brits will spend more than they earn in December and that the average time to pay off Christmas debt is five months.” This links into the concept of a ‘Debt Hangover’ – another example of how capitalism normalises debt and excessive consumption alongside related instability and imbalances through language (also, remember the use of ‘Credit Crunch’ to describe the international financial meltdown of 2007/8).

UK debt – including household debt, student debt and consumer credit – is increasing. As you can see from the graph below we are the second most indebted country in the G8:

This links to small or non-existent wage increases when taking into account inflation, as people turn to credit to cope with the increasing cost of living with The Resolution Foundation finding the UK “on course for the longest fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.”

Related to this is the concept of debt peonage that David Harvey has discussed:

I mean basically debt is a claim on future labor, and when people are indebted they have to labor to pay off their debts. And we see this with students, for example, right now. Many of them come out, they’ve got this huge debt, in a sense their future is foreclosed — they’ve got to pay off that debt before they can really have a life. And this is extremely, extremely difficult. That’s why I call it anti-value, because it’s not as if people have a right to the value they’re going to create. They have to actually create value in order to pay off the debt. So for them it’s a negative life that they’re living as opposed to a positive life…So this is the world we’re living in, we’re living in a world of debt peonage…their future is foreclosed by the way in which the capital is wrapped around them. This kind of thing about the good life is: borrow money and then everything will be OK.

This is an important concept to understand the reality of the system we find ourselves within. Debt constrains what we can do, it keeps us invested in a system we need to be able to pay for basic things but also to live up to cultural demands of consumption that things such as Christmas create. Described as a ‘golden quarter’, the Christmas period is considered a great time for business – with food shops and online shopping especially benefiting – and despite there being concerns about consumers tightening some of their spending, especially when it comes to the high street, there is still a big increase in consumption:

Total retail spending is expected to rise 4% in December, compared with the same month in 2017, to reach nearly £48bn excluding VAT, according to data from the market research firm Mintel.

The obsession with consumption also links into the biggest threat to our future: environmental crisis. Extinction Rebellion are an inspirational grassroots organisation raising awareness of this issue. The effect Christmas has on the environment was something Adbusters have highlighted in a recent email sent to subscribers:

Since manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of the global carbon emissions, choosing to buy as little as possible this Xmas may give our Planet Earth some much needed relief. And if you still need to be convinced to consume less, consider that if we heat up just 4 degrees more, we will witness the total and irreversible collapse of human civilization as we know it.

The Washington Post also covered why such an increase poses a danger to the world as we know it in a recent article here.

Alongside being critical of what is happening we have to be positive and hopeful about what we are for. Whilst I am critical of the capitalist co-option of Christmas, there are lots of good things about this time of year including: a healthier work life balance; focus on the importance of seeing friends and family; compassion, togetherness and caring about people in positions and situations of disadvantage and hardship. However, rather than being reserved for this time of year, they are things we should be focussed on all year around. It shouldn’t be part of a token appeasement tied up with capitalist driven consumption. That fun, enjoyment and happiness and concern for others and having a more cohesive, fairer and inclusive society for all should be something we strive for no matter the time of year. Only through a radically new way of doing things via systemic change can this happen.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

The graph makes for depressing viewing.

This isn’t an accident though, it’s systemic. It relates to my previous article about discussions regarding neoliberalism as a class project. As a reminder, David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Geography at The Graduate Center, CUNY, has written a lot on neoliberalism, which he defines as the following:

“I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labour.”

IPPR North found:

“As many as 2 million adults and 1 million children live in poverty in the north… Weekly pay has fallen by £21 in the north since 2008, more than the national fall in pay, and half a million people work in accommodation and food services jobs where weekly pay is half the national average. Northern neighbourhoods have the lowest life expectancies in England, the report found.”

North West, as shown in the graph above, have experienced the biggest real terms cut in spending. North West were also the first to feel the effects of Universal Credit, as “Universal Credit was introduced in April 2013 in four postcodes in the North West” and “the North West was the first area where UC was rolled out to all Jobcentres.”

Adding to this geographical picture, The Equality Trust have produced an analysis of economic inequality in the UK.

This graph shows how the average household income differs according to each region, with geographical divides clear. For instance, consider the difference between the North West and South East; North West has had a -£3 billion reduction in real term public spending whilst having an average household income of under £30,000 whereas the South East have had a £2 billion increase in real term spending whilst having an average household income of around £40,000.

If we add analysis of wealth spread geographically the picture gets worse, as an average household wealth in the South East is around £340,000 whereas in the North West an average household wealth is around £180,000 – that’s around a 90% difference! But it is the North West that has been hit with the most public spending cuts, whilst the South East enjoy the biggest increase and we are told that times are hard and austerity is unavoidable.

In fact, London “ranks second to the South East of England in terms of HNW (High-net-worth) population and liquid assets…HNW individuals in the South East, as well as their liquid assets, are expected to register the highest growth over the next five years.” This concentration of wealth and thus capital power is important in a geographical sense, linking with neoliberalism being a class project to protect economic and political power of the corporate class. David Harvey has also talked about how corporate capital class interests are protected by the neoliberal state, despite rhetoric saying otherwise.

The graph below shows how inequality dramatically increased with the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

This involves a move towards privatisation, the promotion of the free market, attack of labour rights and working conditions associated with a focus on supply side economics. Consider the closure of Consett’s steel works, with 3,700 jobs lost in the North East – an area with the lowest average household wealth as shown in the graph above – under Margaret Thatcher as an example of destroying labour power, symbolically and physically. Importantly, “the top fifth continue to dominate the income spectrum, taking almost half the income before and after the crisis.”

This geographical inequality is another example of the class project that has dominated the political and economic landscape of the last 30-40 years: neoliberalism. We are told there is no alternative, that austerity is a necessary evil as libraries are closed, education, social services and health care are cut whilst areas that are disproportionately wealthier see their public spending increase. This is hard to swallow and a big reason for why neoliberalism faces increasing threats to its ever decreasing legitimacy as more and more cracks begin to appear.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.