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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summing up Lexit, Macfarlane says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The graph makes for depressing viewing.

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

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

IPPR North found:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In the area of poverty-related policy, the evidence points to the conclusion that the driving force has not been economic but rather a commitment to achieving radical social re-engineering…Universal Credit and the other far-reaching changes to the role of government in supporting people in distress are almost always ‘sold’ as being part of an unavoidable program of fiscal ‘austerity’, needed to save the country from bankruptcy. In fact, however, the reforms have almost certainly cost the country far more than their proponents will admit.”

In this article, I will however argue that this is also economically driven and part of a class political project: neoliberalism. You only have to look at the fact that “eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity” to see how economic and political power, relating to class, interrelate. Also, consider “Britain’s billionaires have seen their net worth more than double since the recession, with the richest 1,000 families now controlling a total of £547bn” as another example of the continued expansion of the super rich.

David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Geography at The Graduate Center, CUNY, has written a lot on neoliberalism, which he defines as the following:

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

Harvey talks about how Reagan and Thatcher were crucial to the transition towards this new system, leading a class assault to further their own interests with institutions and think tanks set up and funded to help promote this project. This related to the reduced role of the state providing public services, the emphasis on the freedom of the market alongside a rise in privatisation – especially of public services – and also the emphasis upon personal responsibility and individual liberty and expression (over genuine social justice organisation) while the state provides subsidies and assistance to capital and corporations. This has led to extreme levels of debt, especially personal, relating to contradictions in capitalism as people borrow to be able to deal with a crisis of living standards and stagnating wages and benefits, and reduction in important social programmes. Harvey refers to how capital doesn’t get blamed, it is protected. This happened so obviously in the 2007/2008 financial crisis, with banks bailed out and the rest of us taking the hit.

Importantly, Harvey argues that neoliberalism heavily relies upon legitimacy for it to continue to be a successful class project:

“The big problem for the neoliberal project is getting popular legitimacy. When it started out there was a lot of popular legitimacy. By the time you get to the 1990s and you are into the Clinton years of neoliberalism people start to realise…they are being had. So they went into alliance with the neoconservatives and so you get the neoconservatives and the neoliberals in alliance. Now you are beginning to see the movement towards neoliberalism and the connection to the neofascists/neo right wing, alternative right wing. So this is something that is really, really bothersome.”

In another article, Harvey explains the same problem:

“The neoliberal argument had a lot of legitimacy in the 1980s and 1990s as being liberatory in some way. But nobody believes that any more. Everybody realises it’s a con job in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But we’re beginning to see the possible emergence of an ethno-nationalist protectionism-autarky, which is a different model. That doesn’t sit very well with neoliberal ideals. We could be headed into something which is much less pleasant than neoliberalism, the division of the world into warring and protectionist factions who are fighting each other over trade and everything else.”

Harvey, talking at the relaunch of Tribune event at The World Transformed, refers to the power of the Koch brothers and how important they are for helping create this new version of legitimacy, after they funded the Tea Party to “create chaos in Washington” helping further apathy towards politics and establishment politicians, relating to the election of Donald Trump as President who has “done everything that is in the neoliberal playbook”. Harvey explains that the Koch brothers disagree with Trump on free trade and on immigration, but Trump has been key to further neoliberalism as a political project.

A similar thing can be said of the UK, with the rise of the far right – linking in with Brexit arguments of our little island succeeding on its own like the good old days of the Empire. With this, things such as immigration are blamed for the problems caused by capital and the increasing expansion of speculative finance and related crisis and inequality.

Alston’s report draws clear connections between Brexit and the implications this will have on people in poverty and inequality:

“In my meetings with the government, it was clear to me that the impact of Brexit on people in poverty is an afterthought, to be dealt with through manipulations of fiscal policy after the event, if at all. But Brexit will have serious consequences in this domain and the challenges need to be dealt with head on. A lack of clarity is preventing families at risk of poverty from planning for its impact. People feel their homes, jobs, and communities are at risk. Ironically, it was these very fears and insecurity that contributed significantly to the Brexit vote…The UK stands to lose billions of pounds in EU funds that will disproportionately affect the poorer areas that have most benefited from them, including almost £9 billion in poverty reduction funding between 2014 and 2020. Although the government has announced a “shared prosperity fund” to replace this funding, local and devolved governments told me they had no information about the fund or how it would operate—just five months before Brexit. Time is running out.”

This relates to concerns from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has written to Theresa May to ask her and the government to not ignore Alston’s report, that Tory Brexit will result in a “bargain basement Brexit” ushering in lower taxes for corporations whilst attacking labour power alongside human rights.

Alston’s report also focuses heavily on Universal Credit, providing a damning assessment of the hardship and pain this is causing to so many people:

“The Universal Credit system is designed with a five week delay between when people successfully file a claim and when they receive benefits. Research suggests that this “waiting period,” which actually often takes up to 12 weeks, pushes many who may already be in crisis into debt, rent arrears, and serious hardship, requiring them to sacrifice food or heat…One of the key features of Universal Credit involves the imposition of draconian sanctions, even for infringements that seem minor. Endless anecdotal evidence was presented to the Special Rapporteur to illustrate the harsh and arbitrary nature of some of the sanctions, as well as the devastating effects that resulted from being completely shut out of the benefits system for weeks or months at a time. As the system grows older, some penalties will soon be measured in years.”

Central to David Harvey’s work is analysing Marx’s theory of commodities and how key they are to capitalism. As part of neoliberalism, we have seen the commodification of essential public services that should not be commodities, including healthcare, housing, transport and education. This could be argued about the internet too, which Harvey uses as an example for how fast moving capital is and how efficient it is at co-opting things:

“we have the internet, which everyone thought of initially as a great liberatory technology that would allow for a great deal of human freedom. But now look what’s happened to it. It’s dominated by a few monopolies that collect our data and give it to all kinds of seedy characters who use it for political purposes.”

Rather than seeing access to the internet as a human right, something the creator of the internet argues it is, access and usage to and of the internet has become again part of the neoliberal project where lots of people don’t have the resources or skills to do so. However, as part of the government’s 2017 Government Transformation Strategy, Alston refers to the ambition for “government services [to] become ‘digital by default’” and “the inner workings of government itself will be transformed in a push for automation aided by data science and artificial intelligence.” Alston links this into the discussion around Universal Credit, which is “the first major government service that is ‘digital by default.’” As Alston states, “One wonders why some of the most vulnerable and those with poor digital literacy had to go first in what amounts to a nationwide digital experiment.”

Alston refers to several other political programmes and policies that this government and the Coalition government before have brought in, which disproportionately punish poorer people, including the benefit cap and reductions, cuts to legal aid, local authority cuts significantly impacting upon the community, public and statutory services and importantly argues that “poverty is a political choice”.

Despite all this evidence of growing inequality, poverty and hardship, the argument that the neoliberal free market is the best way to operate is one that our current Prime Minster and the Bank of England are readily willing to accept and promote, with Theresa May arguing in a Bank of England speech in September 2017:

“A free market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created… [it is] unquestionably the best, and indeed the only sustainable, means of increasing the living standards of everyone in a country.”

As Harvey argues, “Value is fixed by whatever price is realised in the market”, which puts the blame on the individual for not making it and training themselves to succeed in the current system rather than questioning what this value and price really means and the social impact this actually creates. On benefits? Your fault. Lost your home? Your fault. Can’t find a job? Your fault. The system is protected.

The response to Alston’s report from Amber Rudd, the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions? To attack it as “extraordinarily political” whilst denying the real stories and lives affected by this government’s cruel policies. But neoliberalism isn’t about about moralism, it’s about furthering the corporate, capital and financial interests of a few over the rest. And here again we can see what Harvey is talking about when discussing the increasing crisis of legitimately of neoliberalsm. However, the rise of ethno-nationalist protectionism, found in the arguments supporting Brexit for instance, show how this class project can adapt. These policies are forms of social control, repression, creating division and alienation whilst the media and political discourse help whip up the fear of the ‘other’ whether that be migrants or benefit claimants (as shown with Universal Credit) etc. But as Trump shows in the U.S, and Bolsonaro in Brazil with his inner circle stuffed of Chicago school economic thinkers, there are cracks and contradictions in neoliberalism, and people are mobilising against this political project.

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.