Can you tell us what you learned from that analysis?

What you learn from the analysis of history is that austerity acts as a very powerful weapon, especially in moments when there's demands from the general public for social and economic transformation.

So what you see again is that austerity unfortunately cannot be reduced to a policy mistake from the part of the legislator, and this is actually un- unfortunately a weakness of a lot of Keynesian analysis is to reduce austerity to a policy mistake.

Austerity unfortunately is extremely successful in operating to disempower our ... imagination for how to organize society in a more democratic, in a way that actually satis- satisfies and fulfills our needs, and instead in favor of a society that is meant to fulfill the priorities of capital accumulation.

So, um, this is the first thing you- we learn is that in 1919, it was a moment in which there was extreme demands for a real radical change of the fundamentals of our economy, and especially the c- the objective was to challenge wage relations, so again, the, the fact that our society is based on the relation of exploitation, meaning that very simply that the workers produce much more value than the value they put in their pockets at the end of the month.

And this is indeed, uh, according to classical political economy analysis, which I, uh, participate in, this is the fundamental, uh, element for economic growth under capitalism.

So it was in after the First World War that actually wage relations were challenged in favor of forms of actually democratic management of production and distribution in which workers would have a central role in actually running, uh, their own activity and in knowing where the output of their labor went.

Is austerity ultimately self-defeating for capitalism?

And when she has spare time, she would work pro bono for one of the civil rights agencies in the South that's been currently defunded by the federal government because they receive a lot of funding from the from the federal government and you can see the wealth creation on one hand suppose that wealth creation on one hand through the ipo of companies like spacex while at the same time government is decreasing funding for agencies that are serving the people on the actual ground And even that wealth creation, the supposed value of doing a public market IPO is to give capital to a small group of shareholders and allow them to further invest into supposedly productive capital so that in the end, according to a most benign interpretation of capitalist value production, you can have some trickle down valley down the line so that people that are outside of the organization can benefit from the capital investment but i want to talk about the title of the book from what you just discussed so we know and i think a lot of our audience would agree with you that policies such as austerity they enforce the twin pillars like you mentioned the wage labor the private control of capital these standard issue like definitional elements of capitalism but your title escape from capitalism i want to ask you what do you think we should envision when we're thinking about a system an alternative to capitalism

Thank you.

Just a data point of what you mentioned, the new, you know, big, so-called big, beautiful bill now of that Trump.

And again, Trump is not the rotten apple.

It's just like the acceleration of a tendency.

We have $500 billion that are going to be carved out of Medicaid in the next 10 years.

And this will leave actually like over 10 million people without any forms of coverage of health care coverage and other 200 billion taken away of food stamps.

But what are the other criterias of an ideal alternative to capitalism beside a political will dominating the private control over capital?

Can you tell us about that period and the way that people who we would recognize as the economic experts of our time and policymakers and so on came to a consensus about how to save capitalism and repress opposition from below.

Thank you.

I think it's so important to use historical analysis in a key that can be emancipatory by actually situating the economics discipline in moments in which it was mostly challenged.

And it's here that you see how these repressive and classist nature of economists are really part and parcel of the soul of the discipline itself.

So it's a moment in which there is in fact a widespread opposition to exploitation as the foundation of our economy.

And I really do want to specify that exploitation has nothing to do with just bad pay.

It's all about how much we produce more value with respect to the value we get in our paycheck, but especially of the fact that we've lost agency in the production process.

So, well, then let me ask you just what you were talking about then, which is if attacking those things that are in the public good are actually part of the way that capitalism operates, then what about reforms to the system, such as were attempted by the social democracies in Europe, which people in the U.S. look to? Can capitalism be limited by reforms? Are those going to be short-lived? How do you understand the reformability of the system?

Anyway, there it is.

Absolutely.

Yes.

On the point about the market, the most important thing is to avoid what liberal and neoclassical economists do, which is just like think that the markets are like one size fit all and that all market, that the capitalism is nothing different from any other stage of humanity.

It's just the... increase of the market, which is, again, this most efficient way to better ourselves, right? And that's exactly the key of the critique is to say, well, actually, under capitalism, markets mean a very, very different thing because they subordinate us exactly because we've become dependent on them.

So it's not an optional extra.

It's actually the way in which we the system keeps us trapped, right? Because in fact, we've lost our means of subsistence.

Exactly.

In, in those two contexts in particular, what do you see as substantively new in, in the politics of today?

One has to keep in mind that we are at levels of unprecedented inequality, um, levels of inequality that in the UK is represented by the fact that there's 58 billionaires now around.

There were 55 last year.

And there are, uh, 31% of the children in the UK are in poverty.

So in a class of 30, that's over nine kids who are in poverty.

And so, um, what we see today is really, I would say, the most obvious manifestation of the violence of this economic system.

And of course, um, right outside of the UK, we see that, um, we have an area in which we have the highest density of, uh, amputated children, the highest density of orphan children, and the highest density of, uh, acutely malnourished children.

[laughs]

... share, and that means that, like, uh, they're just taking more of what workers are producing than they have historically.

Exactly, and then one more point I wanna make of what you said that is important is that, you know, a lot of the left is like, "Oh yeah, it's because of financialization.

It's neoliberalism that brings about financialization." This is a scapegoat.

The point is that financialization is not in opposition to the supposed real economy, right? [laughs] The, it's, it's part of how the real economy operates, and this has been true from the very beginning, from the very time I study it during the First World War, as Ro- Rosa, Rosa Luxemburg, for example, saw very clearly.

So this is the whole point, is that financialization is only, like, accelerating the inequality, the extraction, but it's not a qualitatively different phenomenon.

And this is also why, you know, there's no distinction between the market and the state, and this for me is very important.

Again, another category that a lot of lefties like to say, "Oh, it's because of the markets.

Once you're locked into the concept of, okay, we have to grow, austerity comes in and makes sure who gets the bigger slice of the pie of that growth.

So let me begin by asking you, what is this new book about? What, what is the escape from capitalism you're talking about? Is it an escape from the system? Is it an escape from the way the system has been taught to us, how we should think about it, or both of them together?

Thanks, Rick.

I, uh, I'm a huge admirer of your show and everything you do, so it's an honor.

It's definitely both of them.

Uh, in order to organize and struggle to collectively think of alternatives and put them into practice, we need to re-see our economy, and this is why action and theory go together for a better future.

You can't, um, really acknowledge how much our capitalist economy is truly oppressive and unsustainable if you don't start problematizing what our mainstream media and our economic colleagues like to just obscure by taking for granted.

So, the capital order, for example, is really a name that tries to label the, what is normally invisible.

charges more to people who have the greater capacity to pay, then why don't we solve our economic problems by charging those most able to pay for the solution of those problems? We never even asked the question, let alone do it.

Yeah.

Dependency theory tells you that the Global South is poor because the Global North is rich.

So, the fact that the Global South is hit stronger by austerity, the IMF has been imposing austerity measures in the Global South, um, for much longer than the neoliberal period.

So this is, for me, very important.

We should stop just thinking that the problem is neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an escalation of certain key feature of our system that we need to understand.

And I'm sorry, the United States is a very terrible, dehumanizing model that nobody should follow.

Mm-hmm.