On the back of the recent DiEM25 event “WTF Happened to Europe?” held on March 7, 2025, in Brussels, Chris Becker sat down with economist and political commentator Grace Blakeley to discuss the liberal Left’s misguided love for the state, her analysis of Europe’s deepening social and economic crisis, and the urgent need to reawaken collectivist action as the only path to meaningful social transformation.

Chris Becker: What are your values, Grace?

Grace Blakeley: Freedom and community and interdependence. Those are really important and they’re really interlinked. I have an inherently anti-authoritarian personality, which I think a lot of people of the left do as well.

It’s kind of ironic that we’ve ended up often being lumped in with statists, with people who are likely to respect order, authority and hierarchy. In the spirit of early Socialism, it is really important for us leftists to reclaim the values of freedom, respect for it and individual autonomy.

In my opinion, human freedom can only truly be realised as part of a community, where you work together with others to build the type of world that you want to live in.

Has the left lost the value of freedom in your opinion?

Yes, many leftists actually have. It has been a long process, which dates back to the Left’s adoption of Keynesianism.

After the Great Depression and World War II, Keynes had an understanding that the power of finance capital needs to be contained and that governments should invest when demand dries up.

The post-war Left took on Keynes’ ideas, assuming that the market needs to be contained by a state institution.

Which is a social democrat approach…

Exactly. And it’s not surprising that the liberal Left adopted those views because they became widely accepted within political circles after the war economies of World War II have proven to be very successful.

As a result, such a Keynesian, state-interventionist approach was adopted by unionists who realised that the social democratic state’s political safeguards for employment, public investment and redistributive measures would boost the power of the workers.

A lot of people argued that social democracy would disarm the labour movement because it would give workers what they wanted so they wouldn’t have an incentive to struggle anymore. But that was not the case. On the contrary, the more workers had access to healthcare and labour rights, the more empowered they felt to demand more.

For capitalists, this meant workers became too powerful. In fact, they became so powerful that they became ungovernable.

The ideology of Neoliberalism was a direct answer to workers becoming more empowered. It was an attempt to crush those movements and reassert the power of the ruling class.

And this is where the Left kind of got mixed up: leftists assumed that during the Keynesian economic order there was a big state, which ensured workers’ emancipation.

After the dawn of neoliberalism, the working class was not benefitting from state interventions so the Left concluded that the state is retreating.

But that was never really what happened. The state never retreated. It abandoned the working class in favour of serving the interests of the capitalist class: instead of giving money and support to workers, it started giving money and support to big businesses, financial institutions, while it used its power to crush striking workers, peace movements and so on.

Based on the misunderstanding that the state had retreated, the Left ended up arguing for a bigger state. This makes a lot of people uneasy, since most people aren’t too fond of the state. At the same time, it hinders us in terms of what we’re able to argue.

Take the financial crisis for example: in a neoliberal manner, we had a big state bailing out banks. In the pandemic, we had a big state bailing out multinational corporations. And today, we’re facing a European political class, which argues for a big state to militarise.

Because of this misconception that neoliberalism propagates a weak state, many Leftists assume that getting back to a war economy is a Keynesian project. But what we can see now is that governments are cutting the welfare state in order to build a warfare state.

That’s why we need to stop having this debate about big state versus small state or about markets versus governments. Rather, we have to start talking about the class dynamics that underpin how the state works and how money is spent.

Libertarians, who consider themselves passionate adversaries against a state power, advocate for a completely free market. Is Libertarianism a good answer to an interventionist state that supports big businesses and multinational corporations?

Generally, free market libertarians are really avid believers in capitalism. But capitalism has never been able to function without a big state.

Libertarianism is this utopian liberal dream that you could have a free market society with a very small and limited state, that you could have a capitalist society.
But our capitalist system that we have today relies on huge intensive deep cooperation between private corporations and the state. Financial institutions, government treasuries, the military and many more – they are all cooperating across the public and private sector.

The closest thing we get in reality to a purely free market are local farmers markets where people are selling their own products. But such a basic exchange system doesn’t work on a mass scale. In order to overcome this highly complex system, you cannot only look at exchange as Libertarians do; you have to consider the aspect of production as well.

This is what Marx identified in “Capital”. He tried to start his analysis with exchange but then realised that one can’t really understand capitalism by just looking at exchange. You have to look at production.

What if the libertarian claims: “Well, we don’t want these complex global structures anymore. We just want the farmers market”?

Great! In that case, they become our allies, even if they have a different vision of the future, because then they would advocate for a disruption of political and economic relationships which underpin the current status quo.

However, it is not what we see with Libertarians. Because libertarianism is always a cover for vested interests within the private sector; for people who want less regulation of their own industry. They claim “I want a small state” but what they really mean is “I want low taxes but I want a big state to bail me out when I struggle.”

You call yourself a democratic socialist. How is your democratic socialist vision not a utopia, in contrast to Libertarianism?

Democratic socialism is not utopian because it already exists on a small scale. For example, there is a village in North Wales where people share community ownership of energy: they set up a bunch of community wind turbines and they use that to fund small community enterprises that provide jobs for local people. This is a process that alleviates poverty and feeds into this democratic network of community ownership.

I’ve got loads of other examples like that in my upcoming book, for which I interview people who are creatively resisting the system and trying to build something new in its place. It’s amazing how many new cooperative democratic projects there are, designed to give people a stake in decision-making and in the ownership of society’s key resources.

The issue is that there is no collective, democratic ownership on the commanding heights of the global economy. We won’t get that as long as we live in capitalism. Whether or not you could build a democratic socialist economy at a larger scale is contested. Ultimately, that is something that has never existed.

But personally, I am convinced that it is possible. If you were a peasant in a feudal economy, you wouldn’t have been able to imagine what a capitalist system would look like. It emerged slowly as power dynamics shifted. I think the same is true with Socialism. What is and isn’t possible is profoundly shaped by the kind of political and economic structures that govern our daily lives.

How can such collective ownership models exist within our current neoliberal capitalist system? 

There are always gaps within the functioning of the system. If capitalism totally dominated then we wouldn’t be able to do what we were doing. Because wherever power is exercised there is always resistance.
In the gaps between state coercion and the coercion that exists within the private economy there are lots of interesting alternatives to neoliberal authoritarian oligarchic capitalism.

Democratic socialist projects on a small-scale do not pose a threat to the status quo for as long as they remain relatively small; which is why it is important to scale these projects up. The book I’m writing at the moment argues that the biggest barrier to social transformation within advanced capitalist economies is not the fact that people are fine with the current state of affairs; on the contrary.

The actual problem is that we consider ourselves isolated and divided from each other. As a result, we respond to the burning questions of our time by wondering “How can I change my personal behaviour to resolve the issue?”

People understand that climate change is a problem so they decide to buy different products. People understand that inequality is a problem so they try to work their way up to the top in order to create a more equal system from a position of power. Highly individualistic ideologies dictate: if something’s wrong, then fix it yourself first.
And that is highly disempowering because there’s no way to change the system as an isolated individual. If all these disempowered people started talking to each other and realised how passionate all of them were about social change, they wouldn’t feel so disempowered.

We have to reawaken that sense of collectivism that we’ve so lost over the last 50 years. That would be a massive threat to the status quo and the only chance of seeing actual change.

Many argue that they do have the awareness of these things. At the same time, they point out that they neither have the time nor the energy to participate in collective actions in addition to their packed work schedule. Others are afraid to be punished by their bosses for questioning their position of power. How do you answer these limitations?

People have to believe that organising can work. That’s why they need successful examples of where organising has been successful in order to learn how those examples work.

Take the Starbucks workers in the US for example: in their case, there was no big union supporting the workers. It was ordinary baristas across Starbucks stores in the US saying: “We’re being screwed over. We’re not getting high enough wages and the company we work for is complicit in the genocide on the Palestinian people.” With that realisation, they proceeded to form a union themselves because the big existing unions turned them down, deeming the step too risky.

These people took a huge risk, the Starbucks corporation massively threatened them and a bunch of workers did lose their jobs. But they were backed into a corner where they were left with no other choice.

As a result, they ended up building one of the most successful grassroots unionisation efforts against the power of a massive multinational corporation with the help of a powerful leadership structure and the awareness of prior success stories in labour movement history.

We can see a similar process happening with Amazon workers across the US and the UK, too. Just like the Starbucks workers, Amazon workers had been backed into a corner amid the cost-of-living crisis.

Initially, in these sectors, it was assumed that forming a union was just impossible, but previous success gave workers and employees the confidence to start a union anyway.

Are you implying with your examples that workers shouldn’t resort on the existing unions but rather start from scratch and organise themselves?

I think we need both. Ultimately, the Starbucks campaign succeeded because it did eventually get support from a bigger union.

Larger unions can be valuable allies, as they have access to crucial resources like experienced staff and institutional knowledge

However, we can’t wait for that bureaucratic effort to happen. If there are people today reading this, who think: “I’m not getting paid enough!” or “My boss doesn’t listen to what I want, I’m working too hard”, they should take the first step and start unionising.

Currently, Europe is finding itself in a poly-crisis. With the support of many European governments, a genocide is happening in front of our eyes, the climate crisis continues to escalate, war in Ukraine, rising costs of living and many more depressing issues. How do you explain this quagmire of worrying developments?

It’s a combination of a long-term economic stagnation in growth, productivity and investment on the one side while the climate crisis driving prices higher on the other.

As I’ve mentioned before, in the post-war period, the process of mass globalisation was overseen by a social democratic economic regime so the benefits of that process of globalisation were relatively evenly distributed within the societies of the Global North.Then, following the 1970s, financial markets entered a major boom period that continued up to the 2008 crisis. That created a middle class that owned houses and generated economic growth that governments redistributed; to a lesser extent than before, though.

In this long period from the 1940s to 2008, overall quality of life basically has been improving for most people in the rich world.

But after the financial bubble burst in 2008, no new model of growth was developed because of corporate interests that didn’t want the governments to act in a way that would benefit society as whole. After that financial crash, all the existing infrastructure could have been used to develop a new model of growth, such as the Mission Economy model that Mariana Mazzucato pioneered.

She suggests that governments should make broad-based investments into education, renewable energy, health care or housing to make sure that we have dynamic technological growth that benefits as many people as possible and spreads throughout the private sector. Similar to the mixed market model in China.

But what we got instead is a long-term stagnation of productivity because of the vested interests by the big capital that wanted to continue with the kind of financialised growth model of before 2008.

As a result, we don’t have enough investment neither in the public sector nor in the private sector. The current technological innovation is not sufficiently benefiting the majority of people. In fact, technological innovation under our current economic model is often deepening inequality.

The same is true of the globalisation that we have today. It tends to deepen inequality and create these big gaps between different sectors of the economy. This is what ultimately is threatening the foundations of economic growth in the rich world.

As a consequence, the vast majority of people have not seen their living standards increase since the financial crisis.

This long-term stagnation has been happening in the background. In their everyday lives, people see everything getting more expensive because it’s harder to grow food in a warming world.

At the same time, geopolitical tension will inevitably increase in a warming world because of more competition over fewer resources, exacerbating these problems.

All of this means shortages and rising prices.

When all these aspects occur together, it results in a scarcity economy, which is what we have now. In Western economies, there is not enough underlying productivity in order to grow more. Without any political change, this process is going to continue because we have a self-interested political elite that does not seek broad-based economic growth that benefits society as a whole.

There has to be a huge transformation of the ways we generate energy and we transport goods and services.

How have these processes led to Trump in the US, to the Reform Party in the UK, to the AFD in Germany?

That long-term stagnation has particularly badly impacted the middle and working classes. Especially young men and older people have seen their living standards taper off.

Young men have been negatively impacted by the stagnation because women are statistically much more likely to go to university, get a degree, come out and do relatively well. Moreover, women often perform better within the service economy, which constitutes the biggest segment in Western economies.
The living standard of old people has been stagnating in the last few years after increasing in the period before the crisis.

As a result, you have this coalition of people whose lives aren’t getting better anymore so they need someone to blame.

Right wing forces react to these grievances by asking: “What’s the one thing that’s changed over the course of the last 50 years? There are more brown people in your country, right? The reason for your grievances is migrants so we need to kick them all out to protect you and increase your living standards. ”Migration is a change that people can see so it became a compelling argument as to what’s happened for them, even if it’s not true at all.

The rise in migration is another symptom of the processes I mentioned earlier, not a cause for the decline of living for old people and young men. Because of rising global inequality due to globalisation and the technological logistical revolution, which has made it easier to travel around borders, governments have been moving money around the world. When you move money towards the Global North, people tend to follow. That’s the inevitability of the way our current global economy works.

But for people, particularly older people, it is more obvious that there has been this change in their societies. That provides ring-wingers with a very easy scapegoat.

Why hasn’t the political Left been successful with its own answers? 

Well, there are a lot of reasons.  First, the Left has spent a very long time tearing itself apart, not being able to agree on a lot of issues in the same way that the far right has been able to do.

In addition, there are external reasons: as I said earlier, the labour movement was crushed in the 1980s and never really returned. In the 2010s, we did have an electoral democratic socialist surge in the West, but it was crushed by vested interests in the media in a very vigorous and vicious manner.

But the main reason comes back again to the question of individualism. If you live in an individualistic society, you’re looking for simple, isolated, individualised answers to your questions. Under such a narrative, we are trained to think in the lines of: “I am not getting better off. Why is that? It’s because someone else is taking what’s mine”. We internalise this idea that we live in this competitive system of a free market so everyone is fighting each other for resources. It is hard for us to zoom out to see that the rules of this game have been set up by someone else, someone very powerful at the top, who isn’t playing the game but rather telling everyone what to do.

So, in an individualistic world, it’s easy for our sensemaking to draw the wrong conclusion that we’re struggling because of migrant neighbours as our mindset is so focused on competition, in which we’re pushing each other out the way to get access to the resources.

In a collectivist society, we would be able to zoom out and see what has been happening to us as a society. We would be able to say: “I’m underpaid, and so are all of my colleagues! So why don’t we all work together to get a better wage?” or “I can’t afford my rent but all of the other tenants that are on my street, can’t afford to pay their rent either. So why don’t we form a tenants’ union?”

That way of thinking does not come into the minds of most people because they are so focused on their own problems. That’s the fundamental problem for the Left today. More so than any of those other issues. It’s the fact that there is this really deeply embedded individualism that makes the idea of coming together to change the situation completely alien to most people.

The question is, how can we revive that spirit of collectivism? As I said, I think it’s possible because there are tangible examples of successful collectivist projects but it takes a lot of work.

So, the big task for Leftists is to re-establish a collectivist class consciousness?

Absolutely, yes!

Grace Blakeley is an English economist and politics commentator, columnist, journalist and author. She is a staff writer for Tribune and panellist on TalkTV. She is the former economics commentator for the New Statesman, and a former Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research. She appears frequently in UK and international media, including appearances on BBC Question Time, Novara Media, and many more.

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