The failure of Neoliberalism and how to solve it | George Monbiot interview

Foreign States own our Public Services, it is difficult to understand that and this is the party of sovereignty, but the people who proclaim their patriotism most loudly are always the first to sell us down the river, it is literally a spectacle, yes, there is no other. way to describe it and it had to happen, so when Mrs Thater said there is no alternative, that is, there is no alternative to

neoliberalism

, in that case she was describing what has become the political reality in this country that we can overthrow Against all odds. powerful and nefarious forces of

neoliberalism

and restore harmony on earth George Mia hello, how are you doing? great, yeah, great to see you, great to see you too, so glad you're here, welcome back to the political basement Joe, and congratulations on publication day too, thanks.

Yes, it's a little scary, but something to celebrate no less. Yours and Peter Hutcherson's Invisible Doctrine is coming out today and we're going to talk about neol ISM, we're going to talk about mental health wellness, but before we get into matters of such importance um for people who aren't familiar with maybe your work or who are you tell us what you do um I'm a professional journalist and activist Troublemaker or so I'm told um I've been in this business for 39 years now surprisingly um and I've failed at almost everyone, even more than when I started a great job yeah okay fact, something to be proud of, um, let's start with mental well-being, then, um, let's get into it, I mean in terms.

In global comparison I think there's only one other country that beats us in terms of how poor mental wellbeing is and I think that's Usbekistan according to Global so we beat Usbekistan and good and good things as we beat them. There's a wonderful survey of 71 countries and we're second to last for mental wellbeing, general mental health and people might say they might not find that particularly surprising but I would suggest that when you combine a statistic like that with the level of economic development that exists in a country like Britain, in some ways it goes well if we talk about material gains in terms of standard GDP, well, maybe not living standards anymore, but certainly from a historical perspective, you know, the dividend of the peace etc, what the hell is going on?

What do you think drives this? The things that they told us would make us happy, but what has happened for the last 4 5 years is that we have been living under this system that tells us that we are alone, effectively, you are a consumer you are no longer a citizen you are a consumer and you are sitting at home and you're making your economic decisions you don't have any political power anymore we really don't have any psychological power anymore there's no such thing as a society just men and women in their families like Margaret Thater said um and we're being good little citizens good little consumers um obedient non threatening to power disconnected from each other and we are falling apart and the thing is that social solidarity is essential for mental well-being we are together or we fall apart mentally and social solidarity has been crushed in this country and it has been splashed in ways quite deliberate because from then on the program was to atomize and govern and when she said that there is no such thing as society That was a Manifesto, that's how she wanted it to be because society exists, but basically you can destroy it and she said you know that The purpose of economics is to change the heart and soul and it did and, tragically, afterward.

Governments have sustained her agenda, you know, she saw Tony Blair as her greatest legacy. Tony Blair saw her as perhaps her biggest influence and it just continued and our minds are overwhelmed by that separation from each other, that feeling that we're not all in this together. that feeling that we are now an Us and Them society and that America has to be perpetually repressed if we step out of line if we protest if we do something a little different we are immediately demonized they attack maybe we are prosecuted we are scared and we are alone so , is it Wonder M that we have a mental health crisis?

Well, you probably have to say no, right? You and I would love to talk more about that kind of sovereign individual and the consequences of that when it comes to questions about welfare, but I'd like to investigate this point further about the kind of uniqueness of the UK's position there. because yes, okay, Margaret Thatcher was not the president of France, but you would still think that I could well say that the economic consensus in general terms exists a degree of alignment between these nations. What makes the UK different? And it is true that this type of global ideology called neoliberalism has spread throughout the world.

It affected all countries, but the United Kingdom was its main laboratory in the rich world, it is where in the rich world it began in 1979, in poorer countries like Indonesia and Chile it had already suffered coups d'état through military force, but this It was the first country. where it was done through a nominally democratic system and part of the purpose of neoliberalism is to individualize blame, the individual is to blame for their circumstances or they may be credited for their circumstances if you are rich, it is all due to your hard work and enterprise , it doesn't matter that you were born rich, it doesn't matter if you have advantages of class, color or whatever, a little learning from your father, exactly, it's completely up to you, you know, so Donald Trump is like the epitome of this, You know? the fallacy of self-attribution.

I did all this myself, yes, apart from the billions you received from your father, um, but if you are poor, it is also internalized, you are to blame for being poor, it is because you have no effect, it is because If your son does not is an entrepreneur, it's because you're a bad parent, not because we have this obesogenic industry, but because these corporations, which are the vectors of obesity, push us towards junk food, not because the school playing fields have been sold for development uh by the government no, it's your fault and the guilt is instilled in us all the time until we come to believe it, we internalize it and you think that yes, I really am a person, I am a useless person and that in combination with what I was arguing before that the atomization of society is devastating to our psyche, yes, I think M Fisher writes about that right-wing capitalist realism, the kind of fatigue that sends WE and how politically corrosive it is because if you can destroy people's imagination if you can destroy the ability to imagine a better world, a better future, you essentially destroy your political opposition, yes, in terms of younger people in our society, because certainly, here in the UK, if we look at the severity of the frequency of density, actually As far as mental health issues go, we see a high degree of pronounced in that younger population and a lot of the rhetoric around it is very similar to what you just described, basically, you know, your generation It's soft, you know you didn't do it. we have to go through rationing, whatever it is, choose between the excuses and, if we really apply that structural contique, if we reject the idea that the individual is responsible and we go well, then what is the system that is the young now? entering is an insecure job market yes it is uh I would go further than saying it is insecure I would say it is a broken housing market you know in terms of the classic things that a society typically promises its citizens Improvement of life better standard of living As we live, we have essentially broken those promises.

I don't think it's surprising that we then look at them and go well, they are depressed and anxious. Well, as a young person, you are simply bait, now you adjust a unit for profit. that can be moved, exchanged and extracted. So you take out the rent on the home, you take out the rent in the form of interest payments for your student loan. um you have um how you extract labor in the most fragmented and um and undermined sense. that you know that young people have no job security at all and effectively young people are exchanged as if they were units and this has its effect on children in care and young people in care because they are now marketable um a young person in C changes hands between private equity funds and sovereign wealth funds per 100,000, that's what they're worth now because each of them represents a profit of £910 a week on average for one of these corporations and these corporations have rigged the system so that it can' Indeed, it cannot be reformed because they pressure against any reform of the system.

Everyone knows what's wrong with it. Everyone knows that it is total chaos and that it is bankrupting the local authorities. Local authorities because they cannot establish their own provisions are having to do Emer Mercy. cash purchases of supplies from these private equity companies, these venture capitalists, these sovereign wealth funds at huge and outrageous prices, their business model is based on building or renting houses in the cheapest parts of the country and then, when an authority local opens a market demand say we have we have a child needs care say yes we can provide that place which means the child could be moved hundreds of miles from home breaking all ties with family with friends with teachers with everything you can give some sense of trust and belonging, so they are uprooted simply to serve this corporate machine, it is not for the benefit of the child, it is not for the benefit of the public finances, it is only for the benefit of profit making and these companies are profiting 20% a year. on average, that's an average profit, that's a stupendous level of profit from these marketable assets called children in care, so yes, that's the extreme, but there's a whole spectrum of young people who are being exploited in ways that end up in that logical extreme. so tell me more about that kind of um, the most surprising part for me was the relocation just hundreds of miles away, you end up disconnected, dissociated almost in a broader social context, and particularly in it, in which the proliferation of technology Digital means that our days... today's interaction, whether it's just a face-to-face conversation, spending time together, particularly again.

I'm speaking from a younger perspective, but we've outsourced a lot of that to these huge digital corporations and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit. a little bit about the consequences of that for social fracture, social atomization, so when social networks appeared I thought this was the best thing that had happened to us because I thought we could break the strangulating control of the main media, which It was essential because most of my major media outlets are owned by offshore billionaires whose interests are the polar opposite of ours, but they spend all their time trying to persuade us that what's good for them is good for us, but it's also good for us. will unite into something greater and more powerful. citizen movements that we've never seen before, if you look back in history and look at the Levellers' revolts or the Diggers' revolts in the 164s.

If only they had social media, they could have all risen up at the same time instead of be eliminated. one by one by the new one, that's exactly it and that's what I thought social media was going to offer but of course as usual I was naive about these things and they are taken over or created by billionaires who again have opposing interests to ours and is simply another form of predatory exploitation and of course fits very well with neoliberal ideas of constant competition and comparison. Oh, he has more likes than me, more friends than me, you know, you're always comparing yourself to other people, but B to some kind of transcendental form of yourself that you can never aspire to, so you know you have all this kind of digital manipulation that can make you look much more beautiful than you really are, and that's the image you present. but of course you can never live up to your own image so you end up wasting yourself competing with yourself and on top of everything else, I mean, I don't think it's a cause of booty, but I think it exacerbates all these other trends we have.

I'm talking about it, it just blows your mind, I think because when I talk about this I think, on the one hand, it could and has, I think it still has the possibility of actually being quite a democratizing force, you know? it's good, I don't think the Arab Spring is necessarily the best example of these powerful revolutions, you know, all-encompassing changes, but they had a good start, yeah, yeah, some started, got there, started getting there. towards the right thing, but you know that the Fa has changed, the regime is still the same, but I don't know.

School climate strikes or black lives matter, yes, particularly in the wake of George Floyd and the kind of global reach of that execution. Okay, it's not as simple for me as saying: you know this is net negative. I think it's clear whether it's civic engagement, direct democracy initiatives, participatory budgeting could be an idea, for example, and that actually, if we did it, I think. challenge the type of power bases, the concentration of power andcapital that these companies possess, there is a model there that could be useful and enrich our society, it is a set of tremendously useful tools that if they were not in the hands of billionaires but were in our hands if social networks were controlled by cooperatives if they were the Commons, in other words, property of the community that uses it, would be the most powerful common good that humanity has ever invented and we could do incredible things with it, among other things transform democracy because digital tools give us the opportunity to intervene in the making. of decisions every day whenever we want. be permanently politically active citizens who shape the decisions that shape our lives and instead we have this 18th century system.

I mean, it is quite surprising that in the 21st century we continue to work under this system in which every five years parties stand for election. They publish a Manifesto with several hundred articles that no one reads and then they campaign based on one or two of them or even a three-word slogan achieve Brexit, the party with the most votes then comes to power even if it has a minority of the vote total and assumes a mandate for everything that was in the manifesto plus everything that was not in the manifesto that can pass through Parliament for the next 5 years it assumes consent for its entire program we do not accept the principle of presumed consent in sex why it should be accepted in politics is a powerful point Really powerful point uh, we, we've covered the doctrinal aspect, I think tell me more about the invisible part of this, what it is that makes this ideology us.

Pointing to multiple examples here, I mean how invisible it is, yeah, well, that's the amazing thing that we could say, oh, this is going wrong, that's going wrong, and oh yeah, and all those other things are going and we don't connect them. Look, everything is part of the same Doctrine and it is a Doctrine with a name or it used to have a name neoliberalism that's what they called it in 1938 the people who promoted this Doctrine came up with this new term neoliberalism is not a very good word but that is the word they gave it and um and it was a very different Doctrine than those that prevailed at the time um people many people thought it was absolutely disgusting and outrageous they were horrified except that the very rich people thought it was the best thing they have ever found because yeah , this is all we want.

Great, end taxes, end redistribution, end regulation, end public services, end the economic safety net, destroy unions, destroy protests, effectively destroy political choices and just have this thing called a market. . in which everyone will make their decisions in the market and through buying and selling we will discover who are the worthy and unworthy people because the worthy people will have the grace of the Invisible Hand granted upon them and will know who they are. They are because they are rich and the unworthy people will know who they are because they are poor, so the rich loved this, but otherwise it was very unpopular, so it had to operate under the radar and it had to build what has been described as an international neoliberal network of think tanks of academic departments, departments of meek journalists, of meek government officials who would secretly build this program, which they did very, very effectively, and you get these little glimpses of the occasional autobiography and the occasional comment, um reckless, about how we made it and we weren't supposed to see this and in a couple of decades they took the name off it and the whole story they told us was good, that's the way it is, it's just an order natural, humanity.

We're just selfish and greedy and that's a good thing and the richer people at the top get richer because wealth will trickle down and if you go against this natural order you know you're frustrating the way human beings it should be and so by getting rid of the name and not replacing it with any other name, they left us totally confused, but they were able to create the impression that this was not an ideology at all, that there was nothing new about it. There was nothing strange about it, there was nothing scandalous about it, that's just the way things are and we ended up in the extraordinary situation that an ideology that was as dominant as communism was in the Soviet Union is unknown to the majority. from the people. in our society, can we talk about this in the context of our two main parties here in the UK?

Because I've actually said this before and it got a few laughs, I think, when I was on the BBC and I said in Laura kbur shows that essentially you know the Thatcherite consensus has continued since the 80s and there will be people who you know, um, I don't know how describe them, possessors of acceptable thoughts, opinion formers, should we say who? in a way, well, how on earth can you look at the political programs of, say, the new Labor government and at that time the Conservative party that competed with it? How can you look at David Cameron's Conservatives and um Ed mban, for example, and say this? two people have the same political platform are they, um?

Don't people who argue that way understand that there is essentially a broad socioeconomic consensus behind this and that we are just circling the edges or am I a bit glib and naive to suggest that no, there is this whole range of political thinking? that exists beyond the Kingdoms of this actually very narrow place that our electoral politics occupies. Well, I'll choose option one. I thought you could do it. Yes, yes, like that. So if you look at the new Labor government of Tony Blas, yes, in opposition, they had promised to renationalise certain privatized public services, like the railways for example, they had also promised to bring prisons back to the public sector that were being privatized um and everything. a lot of other things that you know made them look pretty good and you think yeah, okay we want that to be cool, as soon as they get into power they abandoned those promises and instantly started privatizing more prisons.

We have had Mariana Matsuko here, who has spoken at length. about a kind of capitalism for the rich and essentially a kind of statism, I wouldn't say communism, but you know, a centrally planned economy for the state in programs like that, you essentially socialize risk, it's not the fallacy of capitalism. take the risk you reap and you make profits, but actually what we were seeing with something like PFI or otherwise, um or you know, the 2008 financial crisis, okay, the capitalist response to that is always to say well, I I fear your bank is collapsing. but, uh, the game is the game, you know, it's obvious now, obviously, it doesn't have much more important consequences and I think there is no world in which you can allow the financial system to collapse, but everything is fine anyway Yeah, we've been doing it big. for decades and yes, you know, Gordon Brown, the bank is collapsing now, but you really have no choice but to bail us out and therefore the risk is exactly socialized, they make the profits well and this is particularly the case. in public services because you can never allow a public service to completely collapse, there will be a revolution, you know, if the NHS just collapsed and the hospitals just closed their doors, yes, people would take to the streets despite all the protests and everything I could. you could put it back in its bottle, there would be an annoying noise, yes, yes, there would be some and maybe some bad smells, yes, I think so, yes, and I, then, you have to bail it out, you know, no matter how It's bad that it's a public service.

Understand that you can't allow it to completely fail, you can allow it to get really bad, but not completely collapse, and that means corporations can just walk away, they can extract enormous levels of profits that we're seeing. This in the water industry right now you know they have extracted 72 billion in dividends since privatization, most of which was extracted with the help of debt, so they loaded themselves with debt, took the money out as dividends and then left the debt in the system knowing that one day they are going to collapse and they just walk away from the debts, leaving the state not just a complete W and debt, but rivers full of sage and a totally failed water supply system, you know, everything I could literally walk in.

We talked a little bit about, look, you're talking about the waterways right now. I mean, there have been some headlines in recent weeks about the environment and you're planning to do these tests at a variety of different sites. I think there are about 400 different places to swim. Places across the country say they will monitor things like eoli and other harmful bacteria to determine if these swimming spots are safe. I mean, beyond closing the bar door after the horse has bolted, is there any solution to this problem that doesn't? including public ownership does not include a total reform of the sector I mean I don't think I asked you about waterways last time so I would be interested to hear your opinion on that, well I mean when Mrs Thatcher tried to justify the privatization of the water.

In 1989, she said, you know you people in the labor banks, you are just talking nonsense, you will wait and see, you will see what the results are and you will see that it will be a much better system than it is at the moment. To be fair to the water companies, you know that at least 90% of the water that comes out of our taps is actually water, so you know, trio for privatization, and some of the water that flows through the rivers is also water, yes. You know, so it's not a total

failure

, a

failure

now, oh, a total failure, the rivers seem strangely warm and most of the time, but that's great for swimming, isn't it?

Yes, it is, yes, yes. I, it's just I mean, it's literally a show, yeah. there's no other way to describe it and it had to happen and the thing is you know people like Bob cry, this Labor MP at the time was predicting exactly what was going to happen and correctly describing it as legalized theft from the public. because these priceless assets were sold for a fraction of what they were actually worth and huge fortunes were made overnight by the people who had bought those assets and then disposed of them, they are now held almost entirely by foreign capital from the Private capital. companies but also sovereign capital, so this extraordinary situation where the government has banned the UAE from taking over the telegraph because the telegraph is absolutely essential to our national character, identity and well-being, as we all know very well, but it is perfectly permissible and in fact it has happened now, this is a case where the UAE countries have taken over much of our water system and much of the residential care for children and also Be careful, that's fine, perfectly acceptable, railways are also a great example. of the European powers own the franchise and the foreign states own the public services.

It is difficult to understand that and this is the party of sovereignty. These are the people who constantly talk about their patriotism. They love the country. Britain comes first. keep the foreigners out, you know, the people who most loudly proclaim their patriotism are always the first to sell us down the river, yeah, what's the benite idea of ​​sovereignty, the pen, the sword and the purse, and we, well, We have outsourced the defense. sword to the Americans, um, we have recently reclaimed our sovereignty from the EU over our legislation, and we have lost economic sovereignty in the sense that you just described, to back up a bit. a little bit and we were talking about the Labor Party and I'm asking about Tony Blair but I'm doing it with a view to the conversation we'll have about Kster and Labor in a moment about whether or not an opposition party has ever been more radical in the government than in the opposition because what you described there with the workers was bold, bold, well, they may not actually be such bold or radical ideas, but ideas like public ownership that are moderated in the government, whether by the soft touch type. of the Civil Service, uh, the reality of the situation that they face when they actually get under the hood and say, "Okay, this is how things are set up, this is how they work, it's all a political imperative and right now there's a kind of dance in which I have been told well, yes, you know, the laboratory party as it is now is not promising for the world because it would be irresponsible to do so, but wait until they come to power and then you know the power. , the power of reform, the power of the radical things that we are going to do and I look at, for example, the new work and it seems to me the complete opposite, it is what you just described and I don't know if there is an example. of an opposition party that once it comes to power is actually more radical than when it was in the opposition.

If an opposition party wants to do radical things in power, it has to prepare people for that, it has to.explain it. You have to establish a clear program for radical change. If you throw it at people without any preparation, people will be horrified and they won't know what to do with it, they won't understand it and they will react. con, that's a simple R of politics, we have to prepare people, but also if this story were correct, which clearly means that suddenly, when Start is in power, the real radical Karma will arise that none of We have so far been able to detect if this were the case. right, then your opposition, the Conservatives and others could in a perfectly reasonable way say, well, this wasn't in the manifesto, you don't have the mandate to do any of this, you know, if this wasn't the package you sold. to the public and it was nowhere in that package and suddenly you land this on people after the election, well then that's illegitimate, it doesn't even match our extremely weak and thin system that we call democracy, it conforms to the standards minimums that we've set, yeah, yeah, okay, we'll talk about that in more detail in a moment, but come on. back to text back to book I mean, something you wrote about is how neoliberalism has led to this epidemic of loneliness.

Could you talk about that in a little more detail so we're the ultrasocial mom, um uh, with the possible exception of the naked mole rat, who is technically a social Manel, you like to be and was, but we'll leave out the Naked mole rats and it's probably best not to talk. Make the outdated version that human beings are the ultrasocial manales, yeah, um, who are they? more connected to each other than any other species, a certain creation and that disadvantage is absolutely essential to our well-being now, the neol liberal myth is that we are Prim selfish and greedy, right? and we don't have even a bit of selfishness and greed in us, you know, we can't deny that the values ​​surveys show it very clearly, but there aren't any in the vast majority of people our dominant characteristics our dominant human characteristics are empathy the altruism kindness towards others Family feeling Community feeling wanting a better world not only for you, safe for you, but also for others, that this really distinguishes us and that it is a very strong determination of our Humanity, but we have been convinced everything this time that we must be self-made men and women as if such a thing were.

It may be a complete chimera that you can be such a thing and that to become that thing you must isolate yourself from other people and that state of splendid isolation will surely aspire towards and all the time what we see in public life. It is that selfishness and greed are being modeled because those who dominate a society are actually very different psychologically from the majority of people in those societies. Generally speaking, we are a society of altruists ruled by psychopaths and here we are, in our little bubbles, being the good guys. consumer SL Citizens We are supposed to be the good guys, but it is that way, doing what we are supposed to do, consuming things in our own rooms, browsing social media watching the TV isolated from each other and lo and behold.

It has devastating effects on us, who would have guessed? And if it reaches third spaces too, true, it is a kind of war. It could be as simple as the pub. It could be formally. It would have been a youth center. You already know. City. Town hall places like that are also degraded in that public sphere, yeah, yeah, um, and we're losing that civic life, that civic is a very old-fashioned term, civic life, people in civic society don't use it anymore, but It's actually a really important term because that's where our humanity is best expressed, it's in the places and the events that we come together for, you know, we come together, we meet, we make common cause, we connect and you know you can do it. . in a quite negative way, you know you can have fascist marches, which is a very negative form of what you could call a kind of Community of togetherness where the same type of people come together and exclude differences, but you can also have your Community of union where very different people from different backgrounds and different experiences come together and form a community and you know millions of examples of how to do it very successfully, but the type of neoliberal effort is a war against that, it is a constant attempt to frustrate that union , is there a world where Do you see the work really connecting to

solve

this problem?

It's very easy to reduce it to one type of economic activity, you know, monotonous work with drones, etc., but is there a world in which meaningful and fulfilling work really connects with a kind of revitalizing rejuvenation enhancement um of these things we're talking about Civ Civic Society, for example, yes, well, first let's not forget that the long-standing promise was that we would all work a lot less, yes, we would have a lot more. interesting jobs, we could eliminate monotony and we would have much more free time than almost all economists, like 50 or 60 years ago, predicted that would be the case when a certain level of wealth was reached that we all have to work much less well we have arrived we have surpassed that level of wealth and we are working like ants we are working our asses off despite that or because you know the neoliberal plan was never that you stop working you become forever better drones for capitalism um and then you know, yeah , you know you can, absolutely all of us should aspire to a satisfying job, ideally, much less and many other satisfying activities in our lives, but the kind of work that makes you most well-rounded is the one that gives you a sense of usefulness and purpose that really We need, everyone needs to feel useful, that's a really important aspect of the human psyche.

You want to know that what you're doing means that something will get better, things will get better, other people will benefit from it. If people will see you positively for what you do, all of these things are very important to us, but for millions of people that opportunity is disappearing with the gig economy and with all these models that make work insecure. with the fake freelancing type. which we are forced into by the lack of continuity in the workplace, you know, and I don't romanticize the kind of massive work environment that we used to have, which could often be incredibly boring, very oppressive, dangerous, sexist, racist , dangerous, very, very bad.

Things are happening, eh, but at least it helped engender some forms of social solidarity, no it's not the ideal form sometimes, but it helped. You know, I've always been a little suspicious of building our politics around the workplace because automatically a large number of people are going to be excluded from that, I mean, even at the height of industrialism in 19th century England, there were more people working in domestic service than in factories or mines and, of course, those people, who were quite isolated, were isolated from the rest. labor movement, of course, the labor movement was absolutely essential, but it could never be the end all, it could never be the answer to all your problems because only some people, by definition, can be part of that movement, so I think we have to do it. finding our political roots in the community in the neighborhood, an inclusive neighborhood that brings together anyone who wants to join within that neighborhood, but investing in meaningful participatory deliberative democracy that begins at the neighborhood level and in participatory economies based also on local resources commons that I control rather than allowing some private equity firm based in the Cayman Islands to control or some sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi to control that actually this is in our hands and then we start to build something that we can belong to and that belongs .

We don't want to go back down the path of last time we talked about kind of agrarian localism and these ideas, but I would just direct viewers to that conversation if they want to see that those ideas were discussed, but it's a logical conclusion to the things that you're advocating so you know local community would end up being a pretty radical idea of ​​a kind of degrowth economic platform right it's radical it's certainly a departure from orthodoxy and in a way that people who say you know If it's I don't know, you know 4 days a week, three days Bender if we produce our own food and it stays in the local community, whatever that is.

In a way, it's quite U. I wouldn't say extreme, but it's a radical idea, isn't it? You would have to say it, yes, look, we also need global action and global activism, yes, because we are facing the global. Issues like yes, food distribution, yes, we cannot do it. I mean, most countries can't do it all at home, they just don't have enough fertile land, enough water to do it. Climate collapse is a global problem, um, um. security War and peace are global issues, you know, we can't just focus inward, we have to build outward. I'm very interested in some of the ideas of Maray Bin, the great social ecologist, he himself was. a founding neighbor, organizer, um, who wrote some very powerful arguments in favor of building your national policy and ultimately your global policy from the neighborhood to the neighborhoods, um, and yes, degrowth can be incorporated into that or Rather, the dethroning of growth, something we do not do.

We no longer depend on growth, uh, to avoid economic collapse, which is fine these days. You know no, you shouldn't need perpetual growth to prevent economic collapse from happening, you need to have an economic system that is sound. can be sustained without absorbing resources from around the world, on which growth basically depends. It is a colonial model. I mean, this thing we call capitalism is basically colonial plunder. I follow Jason Moore's geography. I think there's a very powerful argument to track it. Returning to the island of Madira in 1450, the roots of capitalism was then when a first capitalist system was established and that system then took over the world and from the beginning depended on slavery, ecological destruction and the depletion of sources of income. local resources on highly exploitative relationships, uh, on the way along the chain and then on giving up when you run out of resources and moving on to the next frontier which was Santé and then the coast of Brazil and then the Caribbean and that was a new economic system that I know people, one of the things that surprises me is that you see people in the Telly who spend their lives defending capitalism, well, it is the only system, there is no other way to do it and you think that they don't know what it is the capitalism.

This is really strange. We're talking about a system and they obviously don't know what it is and then on the other side you see all these people saying I hate capitalism and anti-capitalism. I'm not really sure you know what capitalism is or know what it is. It's very strange that we all talk about this without really defining it and when people produce a definition, I'm sorry, that doesn't distinguish this economic system from all the alternatives that existed around the ROM, what there was before capitalism appeared, which It was also buying and selling, but in a very different social and cultural context and with very different limitations and with all its own oppressions and everything else, but with very different social and ecological outcomes.

This was a new system in the 1450s that has swept the world with devastating consequences and what it has done is allow for a unique exploitation of the world's most accessible resources and is now making its way up the entropic food chain, so in ecological ways you can see this very clearly, you know. We will start by targeting the big fish, tuna, marlin, swordfish, Patagonian toothfish and then we will get smaller and smaller until we catch Bak fish and then feed them to raise salmon to try to move up the chain again. of value. I could see it with wood, you know they'll come in and take the mahogany, the ironwood, the rosewood, the PO Brazil and then they'll look for the less valuable species and then they'll keep going down until they turn all the rests into pulp, right, and this happens over and over again, it happens in social terms, you also know that they will plunder societies and take the most accessible resources in terms of labor in terms of everything that those people have built for you.

It's like we build the NHS and then they come in and plunder it and take what they can out of the NHS and then they go for the next most valuable thing and the next most valuable thing and they're just degrading the common stock of wealth they're degrading the natural wealth and This is supposedly making us richer, don't you know, in terms of wealth what counts is making us much poorer even when it generates more GDP. You mentioned a possible economic collapse in that answer, so I will make a reference to Liz, trust that you are right that his policy was almost the purest expression, perhaps of the right of neoliberalism or he was following it to the letter and we saw the consequences of what that meant. um for oureconomic political system and I would like us to have a conversation with Starma now and, as we get to the end of the

interview

, about how much do you think he is a deviation from said system, said ideology, if we say yes.

We say that British politics is defined in the sense of the extent to which we consider the likely next Labor government to represent a departure from that consensus. Yeah, well we shouldn't, we'd just be disappointed if you're just disappointed. just disappoint you, I mean, you know, to be fair, you know he keeps us in our safe space of two-faced lying politicians who break every promise they make, so you know we're kind of comfortable with that because that's what we're used to it, but yeah, of course, he's not breaking that consensus because he knows where the discipline lies and the discipline comes from the multi-billion dollar press, mostly owned by offshore billionaires, it comes from corporate donors, it comes from the rest. corporate power infrastructure comes from the garbage tanks, these dark money think tanks of TFT and Street, um, it comes from this whole panoply of persuasive tools that are used to tell people that if a government or political party gets out of line the line, we saw this with Corbin.

They are the devil incarnate and must be destroyed and Yes, he saw what happened, he saw what he had to do. He runs for office, represents little else, and knows that to have a chance at power in this country you have to do what they tell you was his. today he gave a speech about the first six steps for a Labor government and the political promises that are going to follow and this discussion, at least immediately afterwards, was very recent a couple of hours ago, but the type of discussion has been Is it correct to evaluate it? as Blair's heir?

Is it correct to understand the star ISM? And I think there are still some pretty big questions about what that really means, but there are a couple of pieces, I think last week one of the new statesman maybe an unheard of trying to define it and whether or not we can understand it as a deviation from the continuation of and I guess in a way it's a way to have a conversation about, to some extent, the connection between the two, you know how. involved Tony Blair is in the Labor party to this day or is certainly a possible source of inspiration for K lady, so there is a spectrum of possible who is this target, yes there is a spectrum of acceptable policies who are this target , so I feel it here, quite close to the far right, yes, you know, and it moves a little more in that direction every year, and the technocratic politician Savvy knows where he has to be if he wants to get in Blair knew it and Starma knew it knows and you.

It has to be basically conservatism lite, that's a test you have to pass if the people who really make the big political calls, which are the newspapers, are the BBC, are the political donors, are the infrastructure of the economy. power in this country if they are going to allow you to pass without throwing everything at you that they have and they have many, they have many, they have many weapons that they can use to make sure that people do not vote for you and you have no hope unless you are in that small spectrum, so when Mrs Thater said there is no alternative, that is, there is no alternative to neoliberalism, in that case she was describing what has become the political reality in this country we can understand that political reality that window that crack that crack of politics sorry electorally I was going to say politically electorally cable electorally successful politics we see that as a consequence of neoliberalism how are the two connected? each other, sure, what tends to happen is that one story dominates politics, um, and if you tell a persuasive story that is of interest particularly to certain powerful factions, that story will come to be adopted by almost everyone and neoliberals will have much success. and consciously told a powerful story: the world has been thrown into disorder by the arrogant state that crushes human freedom and leads us towards eventual totalitarianism.

The welfare state may seem benign now, but you'll end up with Joe Stalin, that's the only way to do it. He is going to be gone, but the hero that is the brave businessman will rise up against this oppressive State and against all odds, he will overthrow it and, by regaining freedom and enterprise, he will restore harmony to the land and that story captured the entire spectrum political. as Keynesian history did before, which used the same narrative structure but with the opposite message. um I think it was Richard Nixon who said we're all Keynesians now, well we're all neoliberals now, so to change this we need to change. history we need a new history The only thing that can replace a history is a history and this is what the left has spectacularly failed to offer.

That's why in 2008, when neoliberalism collapsed, it collapsed financially, it collapsed politically, it collapsed intellectually, it collapsed morally with the financial crisis it had caused, we took a step forward out of nowhere and ended up saying well, maybe we should get a little less close to their liberalism. or how about we go back to Keynesianism, there is an idea you know as if you could go back as if capitalism had We have already figured out how to destroy Keynesianism as if Keynesianism stimulating consumer demand was a relevant solution in an era of crisis environmental. You know, we haven't managed to produce a new story.

We have a lot of great new ideas. We have many. of big new policies, but it's like trying to weave a tapestry without a loom, you know you just received a bunch of thread and no one can see it, no one can see the picture you made, a story that says this is where we are and where we are here and why we are here these are the people we oppose these are the people who stopped us from having the best life we ​​could have these are the heroes basically we, you know, us, the people who come together, the middle classes and workers come together um to reaffirm our sense of community, our sense of humanity, our incredible human capacities of empathy and altruism, to rebuild the community, both political, economic, and social community, to rebuild the community, to rebuild a new power , we can overthrow these powerful and nefarious forces of neoliberalism against all odds and restore harmony.

To the earth George Mambo thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much Le for