Born and raised in Doncaster, England, I was pulled from school when I was aged 11 and taught at home by my mother, who battled education authorities to do so. This anti-establishment education meant I was barely able to scrape by through further education and into higher education, with supporting statements from Doncaster College media tutors who felt I had a fairly unique understanding of their subject, leading me to be accepted onto a three-year media degree at Barnsley College, dropping out with just a few months left in order to go travelling a bit, work for Rotherham Council as a youth and community worker, and eventually set up my own not-for-profit media projects, and I ended up screening my guerrilla documentaries in different countries, and delivering talks about the related issues.

One such speaking engagement was at the University of Huddersfield, where Bruce Hanlin, lecturer in journalism and media, invited me to give a talk to his students because, he told me, “Your ‘alternative’ and varied way into the media might look more realistic at a time when the established media are in retreat and job opportunities at a virtual standstill.” In the talk, I touched on topics such as journalistic integrity in an era of elitism in journalism, and how the BBC’s cloak of “impartiality” protects it in suppressing voices of dissent – after all, as Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” But importantly, it was interesting to me that, for this talk, I was seen as part of the “alternative” media, but very telling that Hanlin also used the term “established” media. I think this can be useful.

As part of my development of SilenceBreaker Media, I have worked with numerous volunteers, often students, and one I recently met talked about her media research looking at both the weaponisation of the media and the victimisation of the media – as a reflection of the current climate. I found this interesting.

Another talk I gave was as a brand-new Fellow of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, where rather than discuss what SilenceBreaker Media would be as a not-for-profit entity, I instead told two stories from my area as examples of the need for “alternative” media: the BBC’s manipulation of footage that falsely portrayed striking coal miners in a negative light in 1985, and The Sun’s coverage of the Hillsborough disaster that told lies about the Liverpool FC fans, 96 of whom died. Both of these examples of deliberately misleading media narratives demonstrate acts of propaganda for authoritarian brutality. Noam Chomsky once stated that “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” With The Sun newspaper essentially banned from the city of Liverpool and readership in decline nationally, trust in the BBC has decreased as well.

And so the research of that student I met with becomes particularly pertinent, because the weaponisation of the media and the victimisation of the media have become linked. As faith in “established” media has fallen, authoritarian world leaders like U.S. President Donald Trump and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson have exploited this and in turn complained about “fake” news – calling an exposè or a story “fake” because they just happened to disagree with it, or because it challenges their authority itself. This gaslighting has left the public confused, and more vulnerable to further misinformation – for example, the supposed saviour of social media itself for dissemination of information has been controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, on which, in the run-up to the recent U.K. general election, a staggering 88% of Conservative Party posts were “misleading.” (Facebook did ban one of their ads, but only because it infringed the BBC’s intellectual property rights.)

Aside from the data-mining, advertising revenue-raising, private corporate social media models of the likes of Facebook and Twitter, the mass media in general is in the hands of very exclusive interests: just 5 companies dominate around 80% of British news media – Guardian Media Group, Telegraph Media Group, Reach, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, and the Rothermeres’ Daily Mail and General Trust, the latter three of which dominate more than 80% of the newspaper market specifically, and the latter two of which have been notoriously right-wing historically (though none of the above, by any stretch, are even remotely left-wing in any way, shape, or form); Murdoch was an ardent supporter of Bush, Blair, and the invasion of Iraq, for example, while the Rothermere family had their newspapers back the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and their editorial narrative hasn’t shifted much at all since.

It’s wrong, then, to refer to this elite group of establishment interests as “mainstream” since they aren’t accountable to the general public and don’t represent them or even their views. Taxing the rich; increased workers’ rights; rent controls; free university tuition; universal healthcare; a Green New Deal; de-privatisation of key industries…too often – in polls too numerous to cite in their entirety here – such policies have proven popular with the general population in both the U.K. and the U.S. while the mass media messaging suggested the exact opposite. In 2016, polls showed that the British public were actually quite keen on socialism, and this was reflected by the 2017 U.K. general election results, which saw the biggest swing to the Labour Party since just after the Second World War and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s policies themselves remained incredibly popular.

This is why David Edwards and David Cromwell of Media Lens have often questioned the term “mainstream” when referring to this mass media. As Bruce Hanlin suggested in what might well have been an off-the-cuff remark to me, “establishment” media might be a more fitting tag. Because it isn’t just the corporations in control of much of the media that have retained a right-wing stance – as I suggested in my speech at the School for Social Entrepreneurs, the BBC have been just as guilty as The Sun, if more high-brow and fact-checked. But as we’ve seen from Orgreave, these facts can be cherry-picked, with plenty more omitted, to serve an establishment agenda – and when the job of a journalist is so immensely class-exclusive, it becomes inevitable that the voice of the working class mass majority in the country go unheard.

Both state-controlled and corporate-controlled media, then, are part of the establishment. They are the “establishment” media. So this suggests that, rather than accepting a counter to this as merely “alternative” and quirky – destined to be on the fringe – we instead need to represent the mainstream of the working class mass majority and become “anti-establishment” media. But how do we do this? What should anti-establishment media look like? And how would we define it?

First, we have to start by analysing the inherent traits of establishment media that lead it to failing us today.

These mass media institutions are either led by the state, or by corporations (or, arguably, both). A counter to this must feature a quality of public ownership. As seen with the union movement clashing with Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks – a “progressive” media company funded by advertising and venture capitalists in addition to donations and subscriptions – a private media model is immediately at odds with the anti-capitalist cause. A good anti-establishment media model would be free from the profit motive as well as state funding or ownership. A not-for-profit co-operative model would be an ideal way of ensuring this, with a commitment to such ownership encoded within its articles of association.

A related issue here is that even with a co-operative model, there is a risk that relying on traditional journalists from similar backgrounds will offer similar narratives as found in establishment media anyway – and, as seen with, for example, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar laughing along with jokes about Jeremy Corbyn on TV shows and writing for The Guardian (a leading thorn in Corbyn’s side), there is a risk that journalists will still see such a co-op as a stepping stone to seeking opportunities with establishment media anyway. This is, of course, difficult to avoid, apart from perhaps offering a public declaration of intent to the contrary of such careerist manoeuvrings – contributing to a genuine culture of anti-establishment media that, at best, deters the careerist in the first place, and at worst, scuppers their quest for success in establishment media through association.

In addition to the journalists providing the work, though, there is also the issue that a co-operative model still does not protect the journalism itself from being co-opted by capitalist interests that could realign editorial narratives. If there’s one thing you can say about capitalism, it’s that it is highly adaptable: capitalism actually quite likes co-ops, and has co-opted many of them to still exist within the capitalist economy. And the survival of our planet as we know it, and the people who live on it, depends entirely on the unquestionable, unashamed, unequivocal commitment to ending capitalism. Time is running out. We must be “mainstream.” We must capture the zeitgeist that is the desire for a post-capitalist world.

This is what we’re trying to take on board as we move SilenceBreaker Media forward. What began as a not-for-profit limited company ten years ago – only to understandably take a backseat to the immensely successful FreeTech Project – is free once again to offer the above-mentioned solutions on offer in combating establishment media. The idea is to develop quality content committed to anti-capitalism, with a building pool of writers, and SilenceBreaker Media remaining donation-led to cover costs as a not-for-profit organisation until such a time as the writers’ pool is large enough and successful enough to enable it to formally become a media co-op.

I hope you will support us on this journey, mapped out in a way that sets us apart from almost every other media group out there – whether it be “mainstream” or “alternative.” We are committed to bringing you anti-establishment (and, yes, anti-capitalist) media in the weeks, months, and hopefully years, to come.

A community educator and lifelong anti-capitalist activist, Jay Baker (he/him) is the founder of SilenceBreaker Media and has written, produced, and directed documentaries in addition to writing for numerous newspapers, magazines, zines, and websites. His own website is at dukeofhardrock.com.

“Capitalism has long been defined by collars,” he explained. “Blue or white: collars have crudely demarcated belonging, status and position. A different collars is now taking on a defining role in contemporary capitalism: the crew neck. Like the collars that went before, this collar symbolises an underlying agenda and logic.”

This ‘crew-neck capitalism,’ argued Beer, “projects a certain image, of a non-hierarchical, non-commercial and carefree status.” It conjures an image of the casual attire sported by billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg up until his recent appearances before U.S Congress. “An apparently anti-elite elite is created that has positioned itself in a way that seems to render it immune to the anti-elite sentiment,” added Beer.

Zuckerberg is probably the poster-boy for this ‘crew-neck capitalism.’

While a student at the prestigious Harvard University, Zuckerberg created several innovative computer programmes that proved popular on campus, from enabling his peers to better plan their courses and study groups, to the arguably stolen and more crude Facemash, designed to enable students to pick the ‘best-looking’ person from a choice of photos, leading to a ranking system for ‘hotter’ students, separating the supposedly good-looking from the rest. This was the beginning of Facebook as we know it today – no surprise a cause of lack of attention, addiction, stress, jealousy, bullying, and suicide.

The structure of the site and its subsequent social interactions (or indeed anti-social interactions) are merely the tip of the iceberg, however, when it comes to the ice-cold world of Facebook – now a tax-avoiding multi-billion dollar corporation with its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. While joining the site may not cost a monetary fee, Zuckerberg’s a billionaire for a reason: the personal preferences and information each user has entered into the Facebook site has provided them with a perfect opportunity to conduct free and easy market research for advertisers, and in turn offer advertising platforms to market directly to those users based on not only their Facebook ‘profiles’ but even their browsing habits online that Facebook had been tracking after the user had left the Facebook site (and they were tracking you even if you hadn’t registered with Facebook, but had visited facebook.com; Facebook refer to you in this case as simply a ‘non-registered user’!) Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is planning a residential and retail area for Facebook employees to live on, right next to their work, raising all kinds of questions.

One employee who probably won’t be expected to live in Facebook’s own town is former Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg – he instead got his own £7million mansion just down the road after being appointed Vice-President for Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook. As part of that role, he will be assigned the task of tackling such public relations as the above, and also utilising his extensive political reach as a lobbyist, just what Facebook needed considering their recent scandals and battles with government officials.

Nick Clegg is the man who in 2010 formed a coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservatives, arguably the most right-wing government in British history, warned by Oxfam at the time about its Victoria era policies – a government infamously overseeing the dismantling of the welfare state and the opening up of the National Health Service to privatisation, while using the global financial crisis caused by the market deregulation of their friends as an excuse to shut down or sell off parts of the state entirely, introducing a devastating austerity programme that has been condemned by the United Nations.

David Cameron didn’t need Nick Clegg after 2015, when incredibly he won a majority against a pre-Jeremy Corbyn Labour party failing to offer genuine radical alternatives. But of course Cameron deserves some credit for his own performance: his smarmy public relations rhetoric came with his shtick inspired by Tony Blair, and his propaganda about pulling communities together and empowering them through his ‘Big Society’ was ‘BS’ indeed. Whenever a politician from the right, such as Ronald Reagan, talks about getting the state out of your business, it’s usually code for them continuing with a neoliberalist agenda while taking away any of your safety nets to save you from its devastating consequences. Cameron knew this, and he used the code well.

The Conservatives, with such a small membership, are still not the bringers of democracy and power to the people by any stretch of the imagination. The media talked about Theresa May being ‘next in line’ to the Conservative leadership after David Cameron’s resignation following his EU referendum which resulted in ‘Brexit,’ in direct opposition to his calls.

But it’s important to note that Theresa May herself has adopted the same techniques as David Cameron – the same trickery as Ronald Reagan. The same ‘crew-neck capitalism’ as Mark Zuckerberg.

While she believed her own hype – presumably by watching the Sky, ITN, the BBC, or reading The Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, or even Owen Jones in The Guardian – in 2017, May called a general election to take on Jeremy Corbyn, a man those around her, on screen and in print, were calling weak, but if they were honest, they were simply hoping it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Corbyn’s two massive leadership elections have defied the Labour establishment, turned Labour into the largest left-wing party in the entire continent, and proposed popular policies, all delivered by a man who had no leadership ambitions and dedicated his life to activism. “Are you a Marxist?” the BBC’s Andrew Marr almost tripped over himself to rush to finally ask Corbyn on his television programme.

May undid Cameron’s majority – or, rather, Corbyn did. Again, the media figures who gave grovelling apologies after Corbyn’s incredible election performance likely suspected that was the inevitability, hence their vitriol and smear tactics against Corbyn himself (that have started up yet again, and will – rest assured – continue until Corbyn and his game-changing politics are gone). Again, May herself maybe didn’t know; perhaps these people really are just that out of touch. But either way, she was browbeaten, and left with an even weaker government to try and handle the whole Brexit saga.

But her leadership speech at the Conservative conference after that election battering was delivered while wearing a bracelet bearing the image of Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo, of course, was a feminist artist and activist who had a love affair with Leon Trotsky and was herself a Marxist. Andrew Marr never bothered to ask Theresa May if she was a Marxist – he already knew the answer. We all did. Of course not. Wearing that bracelet was all part of a technique still being applied by politicians seeking to co-opt symbols and images and even criticisms. It’s the ‘crew-neck capitalism’ Prof David Beer was talking about. It’s even why, when she’s a bad dancer, May’s advisors encourage her to co-opt the bad dancing itself and robotically strut on to the stage – even as she visibly dies inside – so that the corporate news sources can all talk about what a good sport she is, in the same way they did when Cameron and Clegg held a double-act press conference together after the 2010 election and had a good old laugh with us all before going about ripping apart the fabric of our society and increasing inequality.

What matters are actions. Not comedic press conferences, or self-deprecating dances, or bracelets, or slogans. Actions, based on policy, are what matter – and also what receive less coverage. We are forced to look beyond the headlines, behind the news ‘stories,’ in order to learn that, for example, so many of Jeremy Corbyn’s policies are wildly popular, as he pushes parliament to declare a climate emergency. Yet it’s the same government in power, one that does nothing after such a declaration. Just as it did nothing on Windrush, or Grenfell, or the food bank epidemic, or Brexit itself – a calamitous state of affairs with a crucial turning point for the future of the people of Britain, used instead too often for politicking.

So you may find it hard to feel sorry for the ‘crew-neck capitalists.’ Judge them on their actions alone, and you may feel no sympathy whatsoever for the likes of Theresa May.

A community educator and lifelong anti-capitalist activist, Jay Baker (he/him) is the founder of SilenceBreaker Media and has written, produced, and directed documentaries in addition to writing for numerous newspapers, magazines, zines, and websites. His own website is at dukeofhardrock.com.

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.

The following year, Abby found a platform for her work by joining RT, who gave her a slot with her own show called Breaking the Set, which opened with an impressive intro featuring her taking a sledgehammer to a television set with CNN on it. In episode after episode of Breaking the Set, she dared to break the silence on subjects from Monsanto to Nestle, and from Barack Obama to Israel, playing no small part in RT’s expansion based on its perception as an ‘alternative news’ station, despite being funded by the Russian government.

In 2014, Abby made headlines around the world when she ended an episode of Breaking the Set by personally condemning the decision of the Russian government to proceed with military intervention in Ukraine. RT later admitted that her remarks were “not in line with our editorial policy,” yet claiming, “RT doesn’t beat its journalists into submission, and they are free to express their own opinions.” The following year, Abby parted ways with RT “to focus on investigative field reporting.”

But let’s stop for a moment, and go back – way back, to the Cold War, when 1950s American culture was geared towards the increase of capitalist ideals in opposition to the overtly oppressive state communism of the Soviet Union led by brutal dictator Joseph Stalin, a useful tool for American business interests when seeking an example of what Americans would have to endure if they abandoned capitalism; it was capitalism or Stalinism, they presented, and it was a juxtaposition of binary options that would be utilised for decades to justify capitalism in all its forms, right up to more recent neoliberalism.

But it began in this post-war era, when U.S. strategist George Kennan stated, “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. Our real task in the coming period is to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality…We should cease to talk about objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratisation.” He believed the Cold War was a battle of ideas.

Therefore, a key weapon was an anti-communist CIA front organisation: the National Committee for a Free Europe, which set up Radio Free Europe, a station that distributed anti-communist propaganda in order to help provoke unrest and uprisings. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) was seen as such a threat to the Soviet Union that KGB agents actually orchestrated an attack on its Munich headquarters in 1981.

Of course, by 1990 the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany as a social democratic soft capitalist country. With that, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev pushed forward with his two key agendas of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring): promoting freedom of the press, and radically reforming the political system to becoming more democratic, with an independent constitutional court. Gorbachev embraced the principles of social democracy, its significant success in Scandinavia providing what he felt was “a socialist beacon for all mankind,” and planned a process of free market economics with key industries retained under public control alongside strong social safety nets.

And so these moves in Russia were not useful to American powers – again, for decades they had claimed that there were only two binary choices: Capitalism, or Stalinism. With their roll-out of neoliberal ‘Reaganomics,’ these interests in the United States would find it harder to enforce their approach – like ‘Thatcherism’ advocates in Britain with their slogan ‘There Is No Alternative’ – if the largest country in the world effectively transitioned into a social democracy, highlighting the successes of such a model in much of Scandinavia such as higher tax rates, larger public spending plans, strong welfare states, free universal healthcare and education, and liberal unionisation laws, with greater social mobility. Hardly radical, Scandinavia’s more equal societies were still products of a softer version of capitalism that American powers have ignored and even distracted from for decades, and the idea of Russia making a high-profile success of such a model, and potentially thriving after the Cold War had ended, must have had many of the elites nervous.

So, instead, these influences set about stopping such a peaceful revolution towards social democracy in the Soviet Union. The Washington Post and The Economist called on Russia to be made more like Chile under the brutal right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, who had opened up his nation to American and British capitalist interests and remained a good friend to Reagan and Thatcher who stood by him even after he tortured and murdered thousands in his own country. Presenting himself as a protector against old Bolsheviks, Russian president Boris Yeltsin cleverly formed an alliance with two other Soviet republics, effectively collapsing the Union, and thus ending the Soviet Union itself, forcing Gorbachev’s resignation. As Yeltsin announced to his people that the Soviet Union was no more, standing in the Kremlin with him was American economist Jeffrey Sachs, who called it, “The most incredible thing you can imagine.” It was a population of 150,000,000 in complete shock. Yet according to Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, 67% of them would state they still believed workers’ cooperatives were the best way to restructure the centrally controlled economy that had existed for decades under the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, the task to implement a strategy fell to president Boris Yeltsin, the most powerful man in all of Russia, and he was not interested in democratic discussion, debate, or processes. Moscow’s mayor Gavriil Popov said there were two options for him: “Property can be divided among all members of society, or the best pieces can be given to the leaders…(so) there’s either the democratic approach, and there’s the nomenklatura, apparatchik approach.” Guided by not just Jeffrey Sachs but also what Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta called “a team of liberals who consider themselves followers of Friedrich von Hayek and the ‘Chicago School’ of Milton Friedman,” Yeltsin preferred the latter approach, apparently promising to end economic uncertainty if politicians effectively reversed Gorbachev’s democratisation process and granted him a year of executive powers where he could issue laws by decree instead of bringing them to parliamentary votes – which, while the country was in chaos, he achieved, claiming “for approximately six months, things will be worse,” before recovery would commence, followed by stability, and prosperity.

When his year of special powers had ended, Yeltsin simply declared a state of emergency, which promptly restored them. Still the Americans openly supported him, president Bill Clinton claiming Boris was “genuinely committed to freedom and democracy,” and Clinton’s friend at the World Bank, Larry Summers, stressing that “privatisation, stabilisation, and liberalisation must all be completed as soon as possible,” with much of the Western media – from the Financial Times to the New York Times – portraying the Russian politicians in parliament opposing Yeltsin as merely old Bolsheviks, when in fact they were the true democrats in the conflict. Yeltsin’s later attacks on protesters, and the parliament building itself, also remain fairly unheard of in the West, simply because he carried out an agenda friendly to Western interests; Yeltsin sold off the people’s assets on the cheap, and for many of us in the West, the term “oligarch” for the first time became a household name, while 80% of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, about 70,000 state factories had been shut down, unemployment increased, suicide rates shot up, and the amount of people living in poverty had skyrocketed from 2 million to a staggering 74 million people, according to the World Bank’s own data. Russia was shaken to its core; an ex girlfriend of mine, a Russian who had grown up in Moscow, said she had never seen such homelessness and desperation than in the post-Soviet Union years, a major motivation for her leaving the country.

With media oligarchs – both East and West – firmly behind him, Boris Yeltsin also spent 33 times more than the legal amount allowed in elections in order to guarantee retaining power in the 1996 election, and despite all of his scandalous actions and approval ratings of as low as 2%, he hand-picked former KGB agent Vladimir Putin to take over for him in 1999, in return for being granted legal immunity for his many misdemeanours. Russia expert Padma Desai said the Russian people by this point “were ready to settle for a mild dose of authoritarianism providing further stability and steady economic growth, rather than opting for a Yeltsin-type liberal order that had aroused their expectations but largely excluded them from the hoped-for benefits.” And with Vladimir Putin, as we have seen, a mild dose of authoritarianism is indeed what they received, to say the least.

These horrific consequences are examples of the lengths neoliberals will go to in order to avoid any credible alternative to their project proving a success. Democracy, ultimately, is of course at odds with their mission for the 1%.

With democracy choked out in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West was now left with a completely different type of problem: no great threat to scare the population at home; no great horror abroad to convince citizens how bad any alternatives were. But that all changed on September 11^th, 2001, when the U.S. was under attack from planes hijacked by terrorists, most of them Saudi. Two weeks later, then-president George W. Bush Jr seized the opportunity to present a quest to defend American capitalism: “One of the great goals of this nation’s war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry,” he said. “It’s to tell the traveling public: Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” Combined with this newfound domestic threat provoking panic-buying and stockpiling, this call for consumption effectively reversed an American economic recession within months, and military contractors made a killing in Bush’s subsequent ‘War on Terror’ bombing campaigns overseas.

Through several books, Naomi Klein has reiterated the argument that the tragic events of “9/11” were exploited to stifle debate about unrest overseas caused by previous American foreign policy, and this is exemplified no better than with Bush’s infamous declaration that “you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists,” as he deemed entire peoples evil with the “Axis of Evil” tag used on any countries remaining in conflict with American interests – Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and additionally Libya, Syria, and Cuba. Uncritically embracing Bush’s narrative, American corporate media was overwhelmingly supportive of the invasion campaigns that followed, even more than usual, something investigative journalist John Pilger has frequently exposed.

When the Al-Jazeera news station offered an alternative perspective, it was bombed during the attacks in an operation the RFE/RL-targeting KGB might have admired. Unfazed, Al-Jazeera created an English language channel, and such was the demand for critical coverage of the wars that millions had protested against, it became a surprising success – today, while the BBC response to the New Zealand mosque massacre was to provide a platform to far-right representatives, Al-Jazeera are busy releasing findings of their brave undercover investigations of the same fascist faction. BBC News (as with the Daily Mail, The Sun, and yes even The Guardian) are on a downward spiral, with audiences turning away year after year, citizens seeking other sources of information.

Due to such rising demand, Russia Today capitalised, transcending its own language to an international audience as simply “RT.”

RT is an interesting entity. It was created in 2005 after the Russian government backed the creation of an ‘Autonomous Non-Profit TV News Organisation,’ with official Svetlana Mironyuk stating, “Russia is associated with three words: communism, snow and poverty…we would like to present a more complete picture of life in our country.” (As is typical of life in Russia under the rule of Vladimir Putin, she criticised his later decision to abolish her department, only to backtrack the next day, suggesting any criticism of his decisions destabilises the country). By this time, the West had largely backed off in its support of Russia, distancing itself from the destruction it helped to cause – and the resulting strong-arm dictatorship, oppression, inequality, and ‘oligarchy’ associated with the country as it returned to a super-power status able to butt heads with the U.S. once again. Western media has loved presenting Russia’s situation as one caused instead by either incompetence or corruption, with its oligarchs merely representative of this. In actual fact, the power of these businessmen is typical of global capitalism standards. But again, the key is to avoid acknowledging the inherent flaws and failures of capitalism at any and all cost.

Of course, in keeping with its original mission, RT has lacked a thorough critical coverage of domestic affairs under Putin’s regime, but deftly escapes it by re-focusing the attention of the audience on the seemingly endless examples of Western upheaval and hypocrisy, and the collapse of Western ideals, from American exceptionalism to neoliberalism itself and the financial crisis. This, in turn, has enabled RT – much like Al-Jazeera – to provide a forum for the alternative perspectives many people may have felt starved of during the ‘War on Terror’ and its aftermath.

With Western media seemingly hell-bent on avoiding acknowledgement of Western capitalism’s key role in destabilising Russia, they play right in to the hands of RT, who in turn continue their criticisms of Western capitalism as though it is an ideology exclusive to the West. And so, this allows a platform for perspectives barely aired in Western media establishments, such as the views of economics broadcaster Max Keiser, as evidenced by his career migration from the BBC, to Al-Jazeera, to RT, from which he can present a very different yet very well-informed perspective on global financial issues.

This rise in ‘alternative news’ has even worried the UK’s BBC which was very rightly – so I was taught in media school – set up as a public service to “inform, educate, and entertain” the British population (when in fact, as Tom Mills has documented at length, it “has always been formally accountable to ministers for its operation”).

On the one hand, then, RT was set up by the Russian government which has influence over it. On the other hand, the BBC was set up by the British government, which has influence over it. So what’s the difference, other than the fact we in the West have come to trust the BBC over the last century?

Well, according to Google’s disclaimers on their respective YouTube channels, RT is a ‘state broadcaster’ while the BBC is a ‘public service broadcaster.’ Which would you trust more: a channel provided as a ‘public service,’ or a channel broadcast by the government? (This has always been a useful choice of words, as former U.S. president Ronald Reagan demonised the government as overbearing and interfering, rather than a public institiution of democratically-elected representatives). That other monolithic technology corporation, Facebook, have also sought to differentiate, adding disclaimers to the investigative journalism work of In the Now because it’s owned and operated by a subsidiary of RT, whereas PBS, NPR, the BBC and even RFE/RL (yes, the former CIA operation) apparently require no such disclaimers on the social media website.

RT is considered unique by these Western corporations – and it wouldn’t be too cynical to suggest it’s because of double standards. Disclaimers on RT’s social media pages are forcibly added by the web owners because RT is operated under the Russian government, so therefore is a ‘state broadcaster’ rather than a ‘public broadcaster,’ and again this is a useful distinction. ‘Public broadcaster’ sounds positively fluffy, and this is terminology that is flipped on its head whenever – beyond Ronald Reagan – present-day politicians want to criticise public institutions (for example, ‘public services’ become ‘state services,’ ‘public ownership’ becomes ‘government ownership,’ etc.) Neoliberals have always been careful about their use of language in these cases, because if they can take public interests and repackage them as Soviet-style government interests, they can dismantle them and sell them off. Conversely, state-affiliated Western media, whether RFE/RL or the BBC, can be rebranded as ‘public’ institutions, and apparently independent.

Look up RFE/RL online and you’ll likely come across a declaration similar to this: “RFE/RL is registered with the IRS as a private, nonprofit Sec. 501(c)3 corporation, and is funded by a grant from the US Congress through the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) as a private grantee. RFE/RL’s editorial independence is protected by US law.”

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? But as Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) have argued, “the head of RFE/RL is appointed by the head of the USAGM—a government official picked by the president. That’s a funny kind of ‘independence.’”

As for the BBC, Tom Mills further explained: “Governments set the terms under which it operates, they appoint its most senior figures, who in future will be directly involved in day-to-day managerial decision making, and they set the level of the licence fee, which is the BBC’s major source of income. So that’s the context within which the BBC operates, and it hardly amounts to independence in any substantive sense.”

So it’s been important to demonise the likes of RT in juxtaposition to the BBC, even though the West’s utter denial of capitalism’s destruction of Russia is what feeds RT’s anti-capitalist narratives, despite the fact that Russia is rampantly capitalist to this day. While this denial continues, no meaningful critique of RT can be carried out – and in fact, many much more meaningful critiques are taking place on RT as a result, where Thom Hartmann can interview Kate Raworth about distributive economic systems from a Marxist perspective, Max Keiser can call JPMorgan Chase’s CEO a ‘banking terrorist’ who deserves ‘syphilis,’ and Abby Martin can expose corporate abuses over and over again, something former anchor turned anti-RT activist Liz Wahl claimed to be “a narrative that I find to be propagandous and hostile toward the West.”

The battle of ideas goes on. It sometimes seems everyone in the West has a criticism of RT in comparison to the BBC. Former UK prime ministers Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher both set up massively influential think tanks. Blair’s praised the BBC as superior to RT, while Thatcher’s claimed the BBC was biased in favour of the left.

It’s a common myth that has been perpetuated for decades, in the U.S. and the U.K.: the ‘liberal’ media, a fiction that has long since been exposed time and again by Media Lens. But the idea that the BBC is anything other than conservative is probably the most absurd, since it’s actually been found to be in opposition to left-wing politics. “The available evidence on the BBC centre of gravity does not suggest a leftist tilt,” said Professor Justin Lewis of Cardiff University, an expert on the BBC. “On the contrary, its dependence on certain dominant institutions – notably in the business world and the national print media – would appear to push it the other way…The most plausible hypothesis is that the BBC has, under pressure, been pushed to the right.” In an op-ed for The Independent, Prof Lewis elaborated: “(The interests of) Conservative politicians who share the ideological suspicion of public service broadcasting…are also strategic, since political pressure – they hope – obliges the BBC to bend over backwards to avoid accusations of a leftist tilt…It is these accusations (the BBC) most fear.”

So what creates a reliable news source? And what definitive criteria make the BBC more reliable than others? Even The Guardian admit we’re splitting hairs when comparing the BBC and RT. And there’s a possible explanation for their own decline, as well. Award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald told Democracy Now: “I have a lot of respect for the reporters and editors there (at The Guardian). They do a lot of great reporting. But one of their big flaws as an institution is they develop personal feuds with people they cover. And when that happens, they dispense with all journalistic standards. So, one of the people who they have particular hatred for is Jeremy Corbyn. And over and over, they have produced journalistic garbage about Corbyn in pursuit of their feud.”

But personal differences are often influenced by political differences, and The Guardian are another pillar of the establishment. The list of excellent anti-establishment writers there who were ousted is quite something, from John Pilger to Mark Steel to Jeremy Hardy to Jonathan Cook. Media Lens have highlighted this purge, and it remains the reason so many journalists operate outside of that institution, with audiences demanding their sort of critique.

And this brings us back to Abby Martin.

About her work at RT and her rebellious on-air criticism of Russia, Glenn Greenwald had this to say the following day: “That that network has a strong pro-Russian bias is unquestionably true. But one of its leading hosts, Abby Martin, remarkably demonstrated last night what ‘journalistic independence’ means by ending her Breaking the Set program with a clear and unapologetic denunciation of the Russian action in Ukraine. For all the self-celebrating American journalists and political commentators: was there even a single U.S. television host who said anything comparable to this in the lead-up to, or the early stages of, the U.S. invasion of Iraq?”

Media Lens made it even clearer: “To realise how incomplete and distorted is BBC News coverage, you only have to listen to the superb independent journalist Abby Martin, who has risked her life to report what the corporate media is not telling you about Venezuela. It is little wonder that, as she discusses, her important news programme, ‘Empire Files’, is currently off-air as a result of US sanctions against left-leaning TeleSUR, the Venezuela-based television network.” Conversely, they have added, “The BBC continues to offer a daily dose of propaganda.” On Venezuela, explained Media Lens, “We have witnessed a comparable BBC propaganda blitz centred around opposition claims that President Maduro has ‘eroded Venezuela’s democratic institutions and mismanaged its economy’. The BBC campaign has again been characterised by daily reports from Venezuela presenting a black and white picture of the crisis: Maduro ‘bad’, opposition ‘good’. The BBC has again promoted the sense of an escalating crisis that will inevitably and justifiably result in regime change.” And yet – following the aforementioned pattern – high-profile American news pundit John Stossel claimed Abby Martin “does government-funded propaganda for TeleSUR.” Because again, the West’s good guys have ‘public’ broadcasters, whereas the bad guys are controlled by political enemies in government towers.

Ultimately, as these media institutions maintain their position as guardians of power – even in the face of dwindling audiences and revenues – there will be openings for alternative sources of information that are in high demand. Not all of those sources will be reliable, but so long as hypocrisy fills the offices of the long-standing media establishments and they remain trapped by their traditional editorial and behavioural patterns, seemingly incapable of breaking off into widespread journalistic integrity in the interests of citizens, there will be room for RT, Al-Jazeera, and yes, The Young Turks and, sadly, even Breitbart and Infowars. This is the natural conclusion to a decades-long increasing abandonment of true journalism, the lack of honest, critical coverage of the West’s meddling in the Middle East and in Russia, where RT was born.

The BBC’s Andrew Marr of course dismissed the idea that he works for a conservative pillar of the establishment because he didn’t believe he had ever self-censored. Noam Chomsky had this superb explanation for him, which is a fitting conclusion:

A community educator and lifelong anti-capitalist activist, Jay Baker (he/him) is the founder of SilenceBreaker Media and has written, produced, and directed documentaries in addition to writing for numerous newspapers, magazines, zines, and websites. His own website is at dukeofhardrock.com.

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.

Popular British newspaper the Daily Mail supported fascists in the build-up to the Second World War, and its owners – the Rothermere family – have maintained control of it to this day. It can be argued that they have certainly not shifted their ideology a great deal as it shapes its editorial guidelines, and opinion pieces (and even readership).

What isn’t up for debate, however, is its poor journalistic standards, not least due to its high level of sanctions from the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). IPSO is the main industry regulator of the press in the UK. Even Wikipedia has grappled with the acceptance of the Daily Mail as a reliable source of information. However, the state-of-the-art web browser extension, NewsGuard, rejected the Daily Mail as a trustworthy platform, only to reverse its decision after a Daily Mail executive met with NewsGuard representatives, who suddenly accepted that they “should not be over-relying on IPSO’s process for our judgement on this criterion.” So after meeting with the Daily Mail, NewsGuard suddenly decided the standards of the largest press regulation body in the UK was beneath them; not to be “over-relied” upon.

Yes, there are issues with NewsGuard as it positions itself over and above official independent regulators as arbiters of news, while developing relationships with corporate interests in the private sector. Gaining interest and support from the advertising industry whose clients are cautious about being associated with ‘fake news’ stories, NewsGuard is officially funded by the Knight Foundation, but its biggest corporate backer is public relations company Publicis, whose subsidiary Qorvis has provided propaganda for Saudi Arabia.

Award-winning propaganda critics MediaLens had their own valid concerns:

‘NewsGuard is run by news industry veterans and says it is trying to establish industry-standard benchmarks for which news websites should be trusted.’

Just look at that word: ‘industry’. Veterans of a profit-maximising, ad-dependent, corporate industry are judging ‘standards’. https://t.co/YKFuYTyzYs

— Media Lens (@medialens) January 23, 2019

So how are we to judge news? Obviously, an important part of news is not what is covered, but what is omitted. For example, it’s fairly easy to invoke fear of a neighbourhood to be simply dismissed as a sinister ‘no-go area’ when covering increasing crime statistics, while not, at the same time (or instead) examining increased poverty due to, say, jobs shipped abroad for cheaper labour, a failing welfare system, or government cuts – the latter coverage would invoke sympathy for the deprived community, and anger towards the rich and powerful, which would, after all, fit the original role of the news: “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” said writer Finley Peter Dunne.

This vision has developed from the days of Dunne’s ‘Mr Dooley’ into a consensus among journalists. For example, the American Press Association cites nine principles of journalism, which are available for further scrutiny but which I’ll paraphrase here, for brevity’s sake:

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth; regardless of the outcome of the pursuit of truth, journalism has a responsibility to dig for facts and present them to a public informed so they may make democratic decisions.

2. Its first loyalty is to citizens; news organisations are only credible if they maintain a commitment to the public interest regardless of vested interests involved in that organisation, be they advertisers, shareholders, or owners.

3. Its essence is discipline of verification; while journalists themselves are not expected to be free from bias (in favour of, say, oppressed communities), they are however expected to be able to verify their information and maintain as much transparency as possible in their research methods, and these can overcome and keep in check such bias.

4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover; so, they are to be unaffiliated with the parties they report on.

5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power; journalism essentially serves as a watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens.

6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise; steering away from influences and prejudices, news media has a duty to present accurate facts fit for provocation of public discussion.

7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant; media is about more than building an audience or even reporting on what are seen as important events – it’s about more than giving the audience what they want, it’s about giving them what they need.

8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional; truthfulness is heavily reliant on keeping news in proportion and not omitting important details.

9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience; journalists are still expected to have a moral compass and a sense of ethics.

SilenceBreaker Media is a non-profit initiative run by the charitable organisation, Libre Digital, which is operated and controlled by a Board of Directors who are from the community and who receive no monies through the company. SilenceBreaker Media is essentially a grassroots group of largely unpaid volunteers, often without an office (I’m writing this in a coffee shop), and while it has procured grant funding and overseen the production of documentaries, the delivery of workshops, and the development of a news aggregator app, it is still a small initiative with much work to be done and much room for improvement of journalistic scale and standards.

As part of a guerrilla documentary I made for SilenceBreaker Media when it was in its infancy, I looked at the reasons for a country’s citizens moving abroad. One popular destination for British people, for example, was Mallorca, Spain: there, I interviewed people who wanted a better life – some simply sought warmer weather, for others it was a chance to get away from ‘Blair’s Britain.’ Whatever the reason, each felt their rationale was simply exercising their right to freedom of movement to make a personal choice to live somewhere far away from where they were born and raised.

As I pointed out in the documentary, like many others from Britain, these people were not seeking refuge in the same way as Sudanese, Afghans, or Syrians were seeking refuge, of course – and yet, understandably, they felt they had every right to choose to visit, stay, or even indefinitely move overseas. Meanwhile, however, as I demonstrated in the documentary, the British press has had an unhealthy obsession with migration into the UK; its coverage has been disproportionate to the issue. These double standards suggest such views are a result of Britain’s colonial legacy and its associated racism, reflected in a media predominantly owned and operated by rich, right-wing interests who seek to help divide-and-rule. But it’s not just the Daily Mail and Daily Express that have been constantly covering the topic and demonising these people seeking a better like in the UK.

One week ago, alongside headlines of Brexit, U.S. President Donald Trump’s government shutdown reversal, BBC News saw fit to feature a special report on ‘illegal migrants.’ Roving reporter Colin Campbell visited various European ports to follow people desperately seeking refuge in Britain (a sensible move, since British colonialism also happened to spread the English language around the world, making it the leading language of international discourse, the third most-spoken language in the world, and the most widely learned second language).

Two things were particularly striking about this perhaps otherwise seemingly innocuous news report.

First, even though the causes of such displacement include such typically newsworthy topics as war and conflict, natural disasters, disease and climate change – and examination of causes provokes empathy in the viewer – no such causes were mentioned here; it was editorially decided that this piece was instead to be entirely focused on the high levels of asylum seekers arriving on British shores, and the bureaucratic challenges this creates for the UK system put in place by the powers-that-be (who are, ironically, often making decisions that contribute to such unrest in other countries).

Second, in a segment that seems to be missing from some of the clips available online, Colin Campbell actually called over to inform a truck driver that his cargo contained “four migrants.” It was an incredible moment: a journalist was not only getting involved in the incident he was reporting on – he was also exposing not the oppressors, but in this case the oppressed. We never had chance to see what happened to these poor desperate people, or ‘migrants.’ (Perhaps knowing that their constant categorisation of these ordinary people as non-British ‘migrants’ was controversial, the BBC’s web page on the report attempted a rather defensive explanation of their use of the term.)

Roger Simpson, PhD, a professor of communication at the University of Washington, has further examined the rules of engagement for journalists, citing the sentiment of journalist Maxwell McCombs (regarded as a founding father of empirical research) that, in fact, the dominant stance of modern journalism is one of professional detachment (which has actually been found to have a traumatic effect on the reporter when they have tried to refrain from helping people in oppressive situations – conversely, helping such people in moments of crisis has been found to possibly “contribute to the resilience and mental health of news workers”).

So, figuratively speaking, news reporters are expected to maintain a distance from a situation, and indeed a rule of thumb often used is, “Do not intervene in situations in which you might endanger a life.” What I found astonishing was that in their report, the BBC’s journalist in this case chose to intervene, but not on behalf of people in crisis. No intervention was even needed.

More than that, here the BBC could actually be found to be in opposition to not just one but almost all of the above-cited nine principles of journalism: They did not remain removed or independent from the situation, and they did not speak truth to power, instead reporting on the challenges faced by those in power from a bureaucratic standpoint as more people seek asylum in the UK, rather than monitoring those in power who either a) contributed to the displacement of these people in the first place, or b) set up a bureaucratic system that cannot easily accept or accommodate those within their rights to seek asylum.

The fact Campbell called a trucker’s attention to the desperate migrants in the truck is quite disturbing. Even simply sticking to basic journalistic standards and, well, doing nothing, those involved in reporting here could have made life easier for those people struggling for a better life: the reporter could have said nothing, and the truck driver could have continued on with his job in blissful ignorance. Instead, the BBC chose to make the driver aware, putting responsibility on his shoulders under mass television scrutiny.

Ultimately, who at the BBC decided that for a Friday night prime-time audience it was more important for a public with anti-immigrant sentiment to see a de-humanising report on ‘migrants’ rather than the cause of migration, and the displacement of asylum seekers and refugees? Rather than taking the road less travelled and giving its audience what it needed – presenting a much-warranted and important perspective on migration issues – the BBC chose the easiest option: it decided to contribute another piece in-keeping with the current flow of immigration narratives that are undoubtedly in dangerous territory.

So we are left to wonder what happened to those people the BBC pointed their cameras at and simply labelled ‘migrants.’ More than a tag, these real people of flesh and bone and blood flee poverty, disease, famine, drought, chaos, and conflict. They know their time here on Earth is fleeting, and precious, as it is for us all. They want a better life for themselves and their loved ones, and in this way – regardless of the corporate media’s passive or even proactive attempts to differentiate and dehumanise them – they are of course just like us, whether we watch events unfold on BBC news, or enjoy a cocktail in the bars of Mallorca.

A community educator and lifelong anti-capitalist activist, Jay Baker (he/him) is the founder of SilenceBreaker Media and has written, produced, and directed documentaries in addition to writing for numerous newspapers, magazines, zines, and websites. His own website is at dukeofhardrock.com.

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.

While in its formative months, SilenceBreaker Media produced a guerrilla documentary that I worked on called Escape from Doncatraz, about the threat of rising racism and fascism on British Isles of controlled borders under a growing surveillance state in the post-9/11 era.

In the film, it was argued that part of the appeal of emerging extremists to communities battered by neoliberalism was the fact that these characters usually weren’t professional politicians. It was the beginning of a rejection of the careerists in Westminster. The film served as a warning that unless progressive, authentic, credible candidates were put forward, fascists could become a dangerously regular by-product of public apathy. Indeed, fascist BNP leader Nick Griffin made an historic appearance on BBC Question Time – long known for its prominent platform for a majority right-wing and centre-right views – and made the monumental achievement of evoking sympathy for him when he was juxtaposed against their usual political guests, who attempted to outgun each other on abusing him, since they couldn’t convincingly beat him on policy when it came to bread-and-butter issues like the postal service, for example. (We’ll return to the forbidden media topic of policies later.)

The apathy towards traditional party politics in Britain was only exacerbated with a scandal about MP’s expenses that dominated television and print media for months due to its often meaty, sometimes seedy, and at times utterly shocking revelations. It was initially exposed by an American: born in Pennsylvania but growing up in Washington state, Heather Brooke worked as a crime reporter for various newspapers before moving to Britain, where she was taken aback by the unapproachable and aloof nature of British bureaucrats and politicians.

After working on Your Right to Know: A Citizen’s Guide to Freedom of Information for Pluto Press in 2004, Heather Brooke began to request the details of MP’s expenses from the House of Commons Freedom of Information Officer, Bob Castle, but all she received were bulk stats and summaries rather than individual break-downs of expenditures. Fortunately for her, by 2005 the Freedom of Information Act 2000 came into force, giving more power to her requests for specific data. However, her requests for details of salaries were rejected, information on second homes was denied, and even evidence of travel expenses was refused.

These attempts to procure such information were turned away time and time again throughout 2005 and into 2006, with such excuses as it supposedly being too expensive to provide the data. Unperturbed, Brooke continued to make requests and battled back and forth with the system throughout 2007, as it became apparent that there were concerns in the corridors of power. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s expenses were suddenly shredded ‘by mistake’ (and later, as Leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman tabled a motion to exempt MP’s expenses from being subjected to exposure through the Freedom of Information Act).

While I was working on Escape from Doncatraz at this time, I interviewed human rights expert Shami Chakrabarti about state surveillance and invasion of privacy, which she stated was used by politicians under the terrible slogan of “(if you have) nothing to hide, (you have) nothing to fear.” Ironically, the politicians themselves were by this point having a really hard time applying their own slogan back onto themselves.

But of course, Brooke succeeded, and the expenses were eventually exposed:

Derek Conway had been using public money to pay his son for work that was never carried out; Caroline Spelman paid her nanny out of it; Eric Pickles got a nice second home paid for even though it was near his actual home; Douglas Hogg got his country estate’s moat cleared on taxpayer’s money; Sir Peter Viggers had a lovely little ‘duck island’ made for his garden pond; Jacqui Smith had the public pick up the tab for her husband’s pornography. This is just a few, but the greatest gem was probably this:

Anthony Steen spent nearly £90,000 of taxpayers’ money on his second home. If that’s not enough, he then said the scandal was simply due to the public’s “jealousy” of his “very, very large house.” He added: “What right does the public have to interfere with my private life? None.”

Heather Brooke returned to Washington, receiving a “Key Award” from the Washington Coalition for Open Government, in addition to further praise and recognition for blowing off the lid and shedding light on the proverbial viper’s nest. She has gone on to write several more successful books and articles.

The British press certainly dedicated a lot of time and effort to the scandal. It had great ingredients, from corruption, to hypocrisy and arrogance, to even pornography without it being on Page 3 of the daily paper. It not only dished dirt on powerful people as they so relished, but this time was also undoubtedly in the public interest.

Outspoken activist, actor and television personality Stephen Fry said, “Anybody can talk about snouts in troughs and go on about it, but for journalists to do so is almost beyond belief…I know lots of journalists…I’ve never met a more venal and disgusting crowd of people when it comes to expenses and allowances.” He added: “Let’s not confuse what politicians get really wrong – things like wars, things where people die.”

One anti-war activist and politician also happened to submit the lowest expenses claim in the country: £8.70, for an ink cartridge. He was almost unheard of at the time. His name? Jeremy Corbyn.

But the press lost interest in the subject when it became of little use to their big business owners any further. And in fairness, another, even bigger scandal, was emerging.

Along came the global economic crisis of 2008. Years of financial deregulation by neoliberal governments had led to a kind of casino capitalism, with bankers running amok. In Britain, money that couldn’t be found for the people was suddenly printed, and used to bail out the banks. What followed was what activist and author Naomi Klein calls “shock therapy” – the opportunity to inflict upon a confused people in crisis a series of financial measures designed to actually benefit the rich and powerful (often those who caused the crisis itself). Austerity was a perfect example of this: In Britain, with few alternative ideas having been found, encouraged, nurtured, or presented in political spheres, the Conservative government used this tumultuous time of uncertainty to sell off public services into private hands and remove social programmes, with a stunned population – still reeling in the wake of the crisis – largely accepting of these measures (at least, for the first few years until the “shock” wore off and alternatives were finally heard).

With all the news of the exciting financial markets of London and Washington, DC, what many of us forget was that it wasn’t just English-speaking nations that were affected, many different countries were – and some suffered, in many ways, far more devastating consequences.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis summed up his experience:

The over-indebted Greek state was finding it impossible to roll over its debt. Had it declared its bankruptcy, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal would follow suit, with the result that Berlin and Paris would have faced a fresh bailout of their banks greater than €1tn. At that point, it was decided that the Greek government could not be allowed to tell the truth, that is, confess to its bankruptcy.

To maintain the lie, insolvent Athens was given, under the smokescreen of “solidarity with the Greeks”, the largest loan in human history, to be passed on immediately to the German and French banks. To pacify angry German parliamentarians, that gargantuan loan was given on condition of brutal austerity for the Greek people, placing them in a permanent great depression.

Referring to this time negotiating with European Union officials, he added: “I was locked in a confrontation with some of the most powerful organisations and institutions in the world, and yet the individuals making the decisions were, for the most part, caught up in a machine over which they had no control.”

This is why Yanis Varoufakis – like Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – has since that time campaigned for a ‘remain-and-reform’ approach to the EU: Both stated it was best to remain within the European Union, but it had to be reformed. This is why they pleaded with people to reject ‘Brexit.’ As touched on by our own Jane Watkinson in her recent piece on the EU, such a massive neoliberal institution cannot be countered easily by countries unless they’re part of it and can change it from within. As a bloc, it is absolutely gigantic.

So why did Britain choose ‘Brexit’?

The lost faith in politicians and their institutions – due to examples such as the expenses scandal and the bank bail-out – is self-evident; for years politicians told communities there was no money for their youth centres, libraries, and leisure facilities, no money for jobs creation, or social security, or free education or healthcare. And at the same time, they were finding money at the Treasury to help them clear their mansion moats and carry out gardening at Balmoral-like homes, they were finding money to drop bombs in the Middle East, and they were finding money to give to bankers who were giving themselves bonuses for crashing the economy. It was essentially – as tax justice expert Prem Sikka told me in Escape from Doncatraz – “reverse socialism…where the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.”

But further than that, we can go back to the 1970’s and 80’s and the rise of both neoliberalism and the EU: as it turns out, a lethal cocktail – here in Britain, for example, the rise of inequality was matched only by the rise in EU integration, and with so many UK communities hit so hard economically, this – alongside the rise in xenophobic narratives from successive governments (both Conservative and New Labour) – meant the EU was an ideal place to direct anger when EU membership was put to the people via a referendum. Of course, as this was developing, corporate media only reflected the above-mentioned xenophobic narratives, rather than challenged them; they were more interested in immigrants, less interested in bankers – even less interested in the few honest politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn, because there was no scandal in that.

Ironically, a referendum on the EU was something promised by David Cameron as part of his Conservative campaign running up to the 2015 general election – a proposal backed not by Labour leader Ed Miliband, but Cameron’s coalition friends the Liberal Democrats, as well as the Green Party.

Lib Dem and Green enthusiasm for a referendum on the EU is particularly surprising upon realising that neither party then accepted the result of that referendum – indeed, the Lib Dems and the Greens now call for a re-run of the vote (in the seemingly futile hope of getting a different result). And yet the Lib Dems call themselves both ‘liberal’ and ‘democrats’ with no irony whatsoever, while the Greens said they only wanted a referendum at the time to “respect democracy.”

But ultimately it is the responsibility of Cameron’s Conservatives in government, and while in the run-up to the referendum so many of them promised the British people that they’d benefit from Brexit, after the referendum they then turned around and told them that, in fact, under every single scenario, ordinary people will suffer after Britain leaves the EU. This turnaround is staggering, even by contemporary political expectations, and it reveals that the Conservatives – funded as they have been historically by big private interests – may well be quite happy with the divisive chaos of Brexit, because it’s another way of reinforcing the message that ordinary people must inevitably suffer (while at the same time billionaires increase their wealth).

Amongst the Brexit battles, there has been much talk of ‘protectionism’ – but all this shows that it’s starting to become clear what is truly being protected by the whole process: financial elitism and the inevitable inequalities that come with it.

Yes, here we are. Few people remember the expenses scandal any more, and even fewer people talk about it. It served its purpose; it may have even successfully buried bad news. The press very rarely mention Jeremy Corbyn’s impressive track record – on expenses, or apartheid, or war, or the EU. They focus not on those things, but on personality, on leadership credentials – anything but policy. After all, his policies would mean a redistribution of wealth and power to the people. The entire system could be shaken: renationalisation of key public services, investment for communities, education, healthcare, and fewer military interventions. Incredibly, says historian Mark Curtis, “Corbyn would be the first anti-imperialist to win power in a major Western country.”

So even in Westminster, alongside the press corps, politicians have tried to manoeuvre in a manner ensuring that this current system is kept in place, and Corbyn is kept out, since his entry into Downing Street would mark an end to ‘business as usual’ for the press, the politicians, and the bankers. Part of the Brexit “shambles” that the press talk about (and even blame Corbyn himself for in his role as Leader of the Opposition) is actually partially a result of the machinations from across the parties to stand firm, immovable, and keep Corbyn out at all costs.

The Conservative government itself just suffered the greatest defeat in British history, with an incredible amount of Conservative MP’s voting to reject their leader’s Brexit deal. Normally, this would result in resignation(s) or even a complete collapse of government, but in another typical turnaround, the following day these same MP’s declared their confidence in her to govern – a perfect example of their dogged determination to do whatever it takes, even inflict further chaos and damage to the country, in order to keep Corbyn out. (It has even emerged that those in power may have also used government money on a campaign to discredit Corbyn.) The press barons, the big banks, and country club circuit expect nothing less – and they are confident they will survive, whatever disorder ensues. After all, they survived the expenses scandal and the bailout’s transfer of trillions of pounds of public money into private hands. They’re still here.

But that could all change, and it may even be certain now. Regardless of what happens next, the struggle remains one for a more democratic media, a more democratic system, and a more democratic society, something the mass majority seem to be in agreement on. The economic elites, as we can see, fear a redistribution of power and wealth across a wider population desperate for empowerment; the rich and powerful fear democracy itself, and with neoliberalism on its last legs, understandably so. They may well be simply staving off the inevitable.

A community educator and lifelong anti-capitalist activist, Jay Baker (he/him) is the founder of SilenceBreaker Media and has written, produced, and directed documentaries in addition to writing for numerous newspapers, magazines, zines, and websites. His own website is at dukeofhardrock.com.