Ep 318 - The Death of the Left? with Simon Winlow & Steve Hall

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:42

: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today's guests. It's a two banger. I've got Simon Winlow, professor of Social Science at Northumbria University, and our guy, Steve Hall, emeritus professor of Criminology at Teesside University. These guys are the authors of the book the Death of the Left, Why We Must Begin from the Beginning Again, Policy Press, 2023. And these guys, they've got an idea, they got an angle, they've got an approach to assessing the cesspool that makes up the neoliberal order and what has basically consumed all Left activities to the point where it's indistinguishable from neoliberal centrist policies. It has literally eliminated the voice of the Left. It has basically killed the Left. And I do believe a lot of us are out there begging for a different way. And so I decided that I would bring these two gentlemen on to talk about their book, identify their plan, kind of get a feel for the history of it all and where they think we need to go to move forward. So without further ado, I bring on my guests, Simon and Steve. Welcome to the show.

Simon Winlow: 00:01:55

: Oh, yeah. Thanks very much for inviting me.

Steve Hall: 00:01:58

: Me too. And thank you from Newcastle.

Steve Grumbine: 00:02:00

: Absolutely. All right, gentlemen. You guys wrote the book, man. I mean, I've been living the hell. You've been living the hell. But you guys wrote the book, and you guys wrote the book to kind of lay out the land of what is effectively the Left today and how it's dead. Who wants to take a crack at starting us off with how this book was put together and give a little history of why you wrote it?

Simon Winlow: 00:02:23

: Sure, I'll go. We've obviously been academics for many years, and we've watched on as the world has changed and the social democratic order crumbled and broke down. And we've looked and investigated in great detail the social consequences of the removal of welfare systems, Social Security safety nets, services gradually diminishing year on year. And we're also Lefties. And we looked on with growing dissatisfaction at the growing redundancy of the Left to do anything substantial for ordinary people. It became shouty, politically neutralized. And I think the book is really motivated by our desire to tell this story in detail. So, you know, we were quite involved in Leftist politics and academic Leftism and just wanted to push things in a different direction. Totally dissatisfied with the kind of embourgeoisement of the Left, the kind of increasingly liberal and increasingly middle class aspect of Leftist politics. Totally disinterested in the kind of idealism of the Left and the move away from material reality, the move away from ordinary experiences of life. And we wanted to push things in a different direction. We found very little support. And it encouraged us to look in detail at the kind of historical transformation of the Left, the move away from the material interests of the working class. I'm just making the point that we wanted to look in detail at what had happened. How on earth did we end up at this complete & utter disaster where the Left is being politically neutralized, is unable to do anything reasonable, anything significant for ordinary people. And so we started this historical investigation. We looked at what the Left was going back to the 19th century and we looked at how gradually the Left moved away from a concern with the material interests of the working class and moved towards this kind of idealistic, very liberal account of how the world made it the change which virtually ignored the material aspect of everyday life. And so the book is motivated by an attempt to tell that story where a working class movement becomes kind of purloined by liberal middle class and dragged away from them. And now we face this terrible situation where the Left is entirely redundant or is actively pushing forward the neoliberal project and cares not a jot about the gradual diminishment of everyday life for the majority.

Steve Grumbine: 00:04:57

: Very good. Steve Hall, you have anything to add, sir?

Steve Hall: 00:05:01

: Well, not really. In terms of the motivation behind the book, I suppose I could add that being the elder partner, my experience of the shift from the old social democratic platform, that of course was initiated by the New Deal in the 1930s in the USA and by the [Clement] Attlee government, the Labour government, 1945 in the UK and sort of lasted up until the stagflation era of the 1970s. We need an inquest into stagflation. What element of sabotage was involved in the social democratic project at the time. For instance, a 10% subsidy on oil would have probably dampened down inflation in the 1970s. And why were the banks releasing so much cheap bank credit in the run up to the shift from the gold standard, the abandonment of Bretton Woods. I mean, there's a lot of inquest. Healy's credit swap with America in 1976. A lot of skull-duggery going on that we need to investigate. But I experienced life on the social democratic platform as an adult. I've always been a democratic socialist. I never thought social democracy went far enough. It was too fragile. It didn't intervene in the economy as much as it should have done. It was essentially a Keynesian project, Keynesian economic management combined with welfare. It was quite centrist in its own way. And there's an awful lot of tension in both the American Democrats and the British Labour Party between the center and the Left. But I did experience a life of hopefulness, a platform on which we thought we could build a more socialistic and a more durable and a fairer world, which started to disappear after the entry of Baroness [Margaret] Thatcher and your famous Ronald Reagan, the actor turned politician in 1979, that just simply disappeared. And at that point, the Left, which had made noises for a long time about being a genuine economic interventionist party, revealed itself as a very soft, very light touch Fabian reformist party, very, very keen to expel members, genuine leftist members of the various parties, which of course manifested in 1981 in the split in this country of the Social Democratic Party, which were the sort of liberal centrists of the Labour Party, and they formed their own party, split the vote in 1983, and made sure that Mrs. Thatcher got back in. Of course, the Falklands War had increased her popularity amongst the more belligerent members of our population. Does Britain have any belligerent people in it. Well, I suppose those who suffered under its imperial escapades 200 years before that would say, you know, definitely, yes, there are plenty of belligerent people to attract to politics. So there we have it. 1983, the Left sort of disappeared overnight and turned into what Nancy Fraser called progressive neoliberalism. In other words, they all agreed with the monetarist and neoclassical dogma that was running economics departments and universities and running political infrastructure in both America... And I mean, I don't know, Steve, if you remember Milton Friedman coming on the scene and preaching this stuff, there was a loony in our country called Sir Keith Joseph. I mean, you get knighthood for doing very strange things these days in England. You don't have to kill dragons or rescue maidens anymore. You know, you can just talk a lot of nonsense or you can set up a business and get yourself very rich and automatically get knighted for some reason. I don't understand the modern world sometimes, but he was rampaging around like a lunatic with a copy of [F.A.] Hayek's Road to Serfdom. You remember, you know, this sort of libertarian Bible.

Steve Grumbine: 00:08:57

: Yes.

Steve Hall: 00:08:58

: What a load of, you know, it's a family show. That's a load of hardline libertarian nonsense that all socialism, all collectivism is slavery and you find your freedom in the markets, you know, apart from being in debt all your life to mortgage lenders and all the rest of it. You find your freedom in markets. He was rummaging around and as if this was the Bible, you know, I mean, the bloke was completely mad. And Mrs. Thatcher kept a copy in her handbag. I think you ever noticed that Mrs. Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, sorry, has a sort of quite large handbag. That's because it had to accommodate a copy of Hayek's tome in it. And all of a sudden the atmosphere suddenly changed. You know, it's not like a cold spell suddenly came across Britain that I hadn't encountered that before because, like I say, the swinging 60s, the 70s, full of hope, Tony Blair's, National Enterprise Board. We were going to use North's oil, Sea oil revenue, to refurbish, modernize British industry, try to keep up with the French and the Germans, the Americans, of course, and retain jobs. We had a welfare system. I remember the 70s being an exciting time and quite an upbeat sort of time despite the stagflation, but then gradually sort of wound down towards the late 70s. And then we had this complete change. And in the 80s, some of the older socialists such as moi, well, I wasn't old at the time, but some of them were traditional socialists such as myself, couldn't quite work out what happened. So this book is an attempt to actually work out why that sudden sea change appeared and what it is about the history of the Left that allowed it to happen. Instead of, you know, thinking this is, this is simply ideology, the old althusserian ideas, ideology, he posed. And Gramsci's hegemony, you know, what was it about the Left itself. Why did it allow itself to be wrenched away from its traditions and placed on this road towards progressive neoliberalism. The sort of thing that we have now, as you know, our leader of the Labour Party is trying to go around like an old fashioned armed services press gang trying to convince the population of Britain that they should go to the Ukraine and have their bodies torn to shreds by Russian drones in order to support something they don't fully understand. So the change has been incredible and the book was an attempt to sort of work out why the Left allowed itself to be dragged in that direction.

Steve Grumbine: 00:11:19

: Very, very good. All right, so Simon, you know, obviously what Steve said plays into this, but I want to know from your perspective. You know, I would be young, I guess, compared to Mr. Hall here.

Steve Hall: 00:11:30

: How dare you. How dare you.

Steve Grumbine: 00:11:34

: I was born in '69, so I have a little bit of an understanding of the world around me. And I am curious, though, you know, from a working class perspective. I know in the United States that that term working class in terms of class in general as an organizing concept hasn't been here. Like we somehow or another in the United States, we did not really have class awareness, class consciousness. They did everything in their power to eliminate any awareness of what class was. I don't have as good a view or an understanding of Europe. But I am curious, where do you think class died. Where do you think the concept of class fell out of favor and fell prey to this weaponized identity politics?

Simon Winlow: 00:12:22

: That's a great question. I think if we had a time machine and you could take you back to maybe the 60s or something like that, and you were to travel around Britain, you could see with your own eyes class gradients very clearly. You could go and see in class neighborhoods, neighborhoods that were obviously middle class and obviously working class. And there was a demonstrable difference between the classes in terms of taste, in terms of style, and also in terms of, you know, how they approached identity and social life. Then all of that kind of gradually petered out as the economy begins to neoliberalise. And I think one of the key features here is repeatedly the Left, the Labour Party in Britain refused to use the concept of a working class. It used to be the very foundation of Labour policy was the working class, right. So the Labour Party is created to advocate for the working class. That's why it's called a Labour Party. But in the 1980s, probably from [Neil] Kinnock onwards, they simply dropped that phrase and talked instead about working people. And it was an individualizing discourse. It was anti [against] the universalism that lies at the core of class analysis. It's trying to say that you're not the same as the people around you. You don't share interests with your neighbor, you don't share interests with the peopleyou work alongside, you're individuals who are building a biography yourselves by the choices that you make. And of course, this is an essentially liberalizing discourse, right. It's moving away from collective forms of analysis and trying to propel us towards this very individualized view, and I have to say, a much more American view, where you know you're not the same as you try and distinguish yourself from other people rather than accept the things that you have in common. And so, you know, that gradually dropped out as part of left wing politics in Europe, and especially in Britain, but also in the social sciences. And here I have a more kind of detailed knowledge. Class analysis was considered to be old fashioned. It was considered to be consigned to the 20th century and that people were taking kind of control of their lives and asserting their kind of autonomy and making choices about how they constructed self identity rather than simply kind of living an enclassed life and using the signifiers given by class background, instead choosing who they were by listening to music or dressing in a particular way. Consuming became a big part of analysis in terms of how we construct self identity. And all of the social class stuff, which was, you know, the very foundation of especially British social science in the 20th century, gradually fell from favor. And instead sociologists, social scientists became interested in how decisions were made about, you know, tastes and subcultural identities and things of that nature. And all of this kind of marginalized the old tradition of class analysis, which still, I felt, going through that process of the changeover as we moved into the 21st century, had so much to offer in terms of social analysis.

Steve Hall: 00:15:38

: Yeah. In some of our earlier work we coined the sort of phrase that working class throughout the 20th century, from its self recognition, its first identifying, its act of identifying itself in the 19th century, right through the 1950s, 1960s, its heyday was something to fight for. And from the 70s and 80s it became something to escape from as an individual. It became traduced as something as old fashioned, restrictive, that would hamper your life chances and it was something that would crush your individuality. And where I remember the working classes absolutely stock full of characters and characters, incredible characters who had very much their own identity. But we had done work previously tracing this process of individualization right back to the 12th century in our mind in England, and I don't mean Britain, I mean England was the site of the first wave of hyper individualism in Europe, which was transported across to America. And as usual, you do things over there 10 times harder than we do, you know, so you actually increase that individual distinction. We trace it back to the 12th century with the spread of the laws of primogeniture and entail throughout the social structure, where they only pertain to the aristocracy throughout the rest of Europe, which essentially set the family at war. It gave the firstborn son the rights to the estate after the female spouse had died and the male, you know, the death of the parents, which set the firstborn son against all the other siblings. So the basic family and community unit was atomized into a competition to curry the parents favor and to curry the favor of the community and those who felt they were going to be on the losing side, the younger siblings, had to move out of the communities. And that fueled the urbanization and marketization process as they started to buy up land, particularly after the plague in the 14th century, starting to buy up land, move into urban centers, move out of the family. That was the first phase of this hyper individualization process. So the working class of Britain in the 19th century wasn't on very firm ground anyway. It was built on a very individualistic culture, but it found its collectivity. You know, I mean, my father always used to say, you know, our community. I was born in a coal mining village in County Durham, as opposed to your equivalent would be, you know, up in the Appalachians there, the coal mining areas over the pond. And we had a very strong sense of class and collectivity, but it was around work. The only reason we were there was because the coal mine was there and we had to find ways of getting on. We were forced into finding ways, which we did, and we started to identify strongly as a class, as waged laborers in conflict with those who were trying to extract the surplus value that we were producing. A good old sort of Marxist analysis there thrown in free of charge.

Steve Grumbine: 00:18:52

: Yeah, we're here for it.

Steve Hall: 00:18:55

: Yeah. You know, I'm not a Marxist, but I mean, I'm a magpie when it comes to theory. I collect from all sorts of areas. Marxist, modern monetary theory, post Keynesian, you name it. But that, you know, is fundamentally right, that surplus labor at the time when most work was done manually. Less so now, I have robots and artificial intelligence. I wish I hadn't thought of that nightmare. Never mind. We had developed a strong sense of collectivism, but only around that work. So the work Simon and I did, you know, 25 years ago was around work. It was industry that gave us our identity. When that industry went, and we would deindustrialize so rapidly throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was quite incredible to see that once giant shipyards, you know, once that the shipyard down the road from me, it was called Swan Hunter. And in 1971, I think we made the world's largest ship, the Esso Northumbria. The ship was so large, the tower to build the houses, it was bigger than the streets that were housing the workers that were making it. It was a wonderful site. If you Google Turnberry in a place called Wallsend, you'll see photographs of this absolutely giant ship, when it was launched onto the River Tyne, which has a very wide estuary that had tugs at the back end of it to pull it to one side, to stop it hitting the river on the other side. It was so massive. And we made these huge things and we dug stuff out of the ground. And I'm getting choked up here, Steve. I'm starting to think of a world that is gone, you know. [Yep], this is why we were there. We did very well in some ways in constructing a collective identity around the industrial rhythms, you know, and all of the social life that went with the sports clubs and the shopping and the unions and all the rest of it, it had a rhythm, it had a purpose. Then that purpose disappeared and we weren't strongly identified enough to carry on when that purpose of our existence disappeared. That, I think, was the work of liberal individualists, as Simon said, working within the Left. And they've been there for a very long time. And we can trace them back to the Fabians at the turn of the 20th century, who were always trying to turn the Left into a liberal individualist project, a project about freedom, about individualism, as Simon was saying.

Steve Grumbine: 00:21:18

: So I'm looking back on this and I can clearly see some major divides. Globalization, the shift of the Mont Pelerin Society, all the libertarian think tanks, your friend that you brought up, Milton Friedman and all the rest of the gang pushing for this massive concept of anytime the government spends it's inflationary, so we can't do that. And so we brought about austerity. We bought into cinching up our belts and the work got exported out of here and, you know, everybody was sold 'Hey, it's going to be a service economy. We're all going to be happy now that the real dirty work is going to be sent to these other countries that are, you know, lower down the totem pole than us.' Right?

Steve Hall: 00:22:06

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:22:07

: Well, I guess my question to you is this. As we've watched this happen, and yes, there has definitely been the weaponization of identity politics. There has been traditionally real life problems that various communities have faced. And in trying to bring about a revival of working class politics, those real issues are still there. And those people are like, well, hey, wait a minute, I know you hate the neoliberals. I hate them too. But, what about my issues. How come I'm able to get fired because they don't like who I go on a date with. Or they don't like the way I wear my hair so I'm going to be unable to earn an income for my family and so forth. So part of what I have found as part of this working class. I've been called a working class reductionist and I don't believe I am because I still believe in the intersectional fights that we have to do to make up the full working class. But the fact is, is that I do believe in class consciousness, I do believe in a class analysis and I do believe in class based politics. So I'll throw this out to you and since you just spoke, I'll throw it over to Simon. My question to you is this. How do you create a comprehensive working class unity, solidarity fight when we don't have coal mines like we did anymore, when we don't have shipyards like we did anymore, we don't have manufacturing plants like we did, we don't have the shop floor where we can hang out and we don't get off at 5 and crack a beer at the local pub. I mean, what is it that we can do to bring this about. Because again, that rigorous individualism, that rugged individualism that has been pushed from Ayn Rand and the rest of the libertarian/liberal ideology carrying folks, has permeated society in every way. From the commercials we see on TV to the actual way people play local sports. I mean, everything has become hyper individualistic. I've got to win, you've got to lose. There are no "all ships rise" in this environment. How do you change that?

Simon Winlow: 00:24:13

: Well, I don't know if you've read any [Jean] Baudrillard, the French theorist, he makes that exact same point. He pretty much said that we can't reintroduce the factory walls in that particular moment in history where people came together and identified the issues that they had in common in industrial settings can't be reproduced now. That time is gone. That model of working class identification simply can't be reinstalled at the heart of Leftist politics. And it's an interesting enough point. Baudrillard is always an incredibly dour analyst and very frustrating to read, but it's an interesting point we should take seriously. I guess my very fleeting idealism suggests that security is diminished throughout working class life to such an extent now that people, diverse working class individuals from across the cultural range are suddenly going to or increasingly going to find themselves in a position where they can identify others who are being similarly affected by the ongoing process of neoliberalism and our gradual shift towards what seems to be a kind of technofeudalism. And I think we get together by saying that the problems that you face in finding some kind of security for yourself and your family are very similar to the person working next to you in McDonald's or whatever it might be, or, you know, delivering pizzas and things of that kind. And if we acknowledge the things that we have in common, then we have a basis to kind of begin the pushback. We have the basis to build a politics that can actually intervene. And I think there has been, certainly Steve's involved with the Workers Party here in Britain and I think that gives us a great sense of optimism that it doesn't have to be, as Baudrillard suggested, the end of that kind of particular form of working class politics, that we can actually reduce universality, can encourage people to move towards collectivist responses to neoliberalism. [Yeah], and it's difficult. And I certainly wouldn't want to say that, you know, there's going to be a remarkable about turn and we're suddenly going to rediscover class analysis and we're going to develop a new Leftist working class politics. It's very difficult to break through that entrenched 40 years of neoliberal individualism. It's a fight. We have to rise. We have to get up off the floor and start swinging.

Steve Hall: 00:26:41

: No, I absolutely agree with that. What Simon's saying, we have to reimagine ourselves and we have to reposition ourselves. We can only do that by understanding the conflict. I think it was right that Baudrillard nailed that so well in the 70s and 80s that that whole world was disappearing. He was attacked by Marxists, he was attacked by postmodern post structuralists who agreed with the likes of [Michel] Foucault that we should keep the neoliberal market a chance. Let's see what freedoms it can provide for us and let's see if it gives us the air to breathe, if we can change. If Foucault is completely wrong, of course, and Baudrillard got it right. But what we have to do in order to fulfill Simon's ambition is to begin to understand what the conflict's really about. And I know, Steve, you're interested in modern monetary theory and other heterodox positions in economics, [Michael] Hudson and other people.

Steve Grumbine: 00:27:32

: Indeed.

Steve Hall: 00:27:33

: And I think we can get some clues from that because I think the Marxists misunderstood the class struggle to some extent and misunderstood the real conflict of interests. I've been very interested in Hudson's work for a long time because my background is in sociology and economic history rather than economic modeling and theory. And I realized a long time ago that there's another conflict that underpins the class conflict. And that actually brings together what Marxists call the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or some of the bourgeoisie, the smaller business owners and the workers together. And that is the conflict between creditor and debtor. Although, or the small medium enterprise. You take the local cafe or take the local diner. Do you still call them diners over there, Steve?

Steve Grumbine: 00:28:23

: I call them all sorts of things, but yeah, hole in the wall diner.

Steve Hall: 00:28:27

: Yeah, yeah, that was a diner when I was over there was the expression. And you take the owner, the local diner. Now does he have interests with the guy who,or the woman who's working there, you know, behind a bar or serving the food. Yeah, because the surplus labor the owner's extracting is going off to pay debts. It's going off to pay debts to banks or if it's on the market of bigger enterprises, paying debts to shareholders and private equity and hedge funds and all the rest of it. So that conflict that Hudson recognized is four and a half millennia of conflict between those who lend out money for interest and governmental authorities. Of course, we first saw that in the old palace economies of the Bronze Age could actually issue currency. They were sort of tally stacks and debased coins and all sorts of things issue currency without interest to circulate. And your very own Ben Franklin knew that, didn't he. Unfortunately, it was about war, but the colonial scrip, it was introduced. And also Lincoln's greenbacks, of course. It's funny how he was murdered, wasn't it, when he went against the bankers. But this conflict between creditor and debtor brings the small business owner and the worker together. Very interesting book written by a guy we know of called Dan Evans. What's it called again, Simon?

Simon Winlow: 00:29:45

: Nation of Shopkeepers.

Steve Hall: 00:29:46

: A Nation of Shopkeepers about the petit bourgeois. Napoleon once bemoaned the fact that his great army was beaten by a bunch of shopkeepers in England. That's what I thought were pretty tough shopkeepers, I think at the time. But we're very commercially orientated culture. But those shopkeepers and those small builders, you know, everyone from the business of dog walking to builders to IT to these small businesses have something in common with the workers and that's the survival of business. And they must pay off debts. They're indebted to what Hudson calls the creditor class. That's a conflict of interest, I think, and around which we can build a new solidarity.

Intermission: 00:30:26

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Steve Hall: 00:30:48

: We're all being ripped off. We're giving away our money to people who have the ability, as you know, as your own understanding of economic modelling, which is very good. You know, I've known you for a while now. We know that private banks have the ability to create money out of thin air. And we know that they can lend it out for compound interest and returns, capital returns and compound interest returns. That gives us an enemy, that also gives us a point of solidarity in conflict with that enemy. And we can present an argument for more public investment and better terms and far better ways of rebooting both the American and the British and European economies by using public investment and rebooting our businesses to create a much fairer economy. So that's partially Keynesian, although Keynes, as you know, was still hampered by the household analogy. But we're not restricted by the amount of gold reserves we have. With a fiat currency, we can invest in the way we want. As long as we expand goods and services to meet the money in circulation, the value of the money in circulation, we won't cause the dreaded inflation. Because a lot of myths about inflation, you know, the causes of inflation, it's mainly supply side. Yeah, we know all that nonsense. So the ideology we're fighting is framed in that conflict too. And that's coming to the fore. So that gives us something to get a hold of and something a conflict. If we can increase understanding about it, then we can visualize and understand that conflict. I think we can start to create new solidarities and understand that the small business owners and the workers are really the same people.

Steve Grumbine: 00:32:26

: You know, I don't disagree with that. I would say this, and I don't want to get stuck on inflation, but I do want to say this real quickly, that when governments spend money into the economy, they are the de facto price setter.

Steve Hall: 00:32:37

: Absolutely.

Steve Grumbine: 00:32:38

: Because they're paying that first dollar to whatever law they've written that exacts a payment. And I am really upset with the lack of democracy we have in the United States and really globally. But one of the things that just came out, guy named Marc Andreessen, who is one of these Silicon Valley billionaires, he comes out and he says the quiet part out loud. Now just read this real quick. He says, "democracy is always and everywhere fake."And I believe this to a very large extent, that in a true, like this is the framework that the oligarch has set up for us to vote in. I can't imagine capital allowing us to, "vote away their power", right. So the idea of just voting, and this is what a lot of normies say, and normies are, unfortunately, working class people that don't have a lot of analysis and they think that we could just vote our way out of this. And I think to myself about the working class struggle and how far behind we are and how far away we are from actually making a dent. And then I look at the apparatuses that we have at our disposal, the tactics, the approaches, and I say to myself, I would say 75% to 80% of the people believe they're going to go in once every two, four years, whatever, cast their ballot, put an I voted sticker on their forehead, walk out and think, hey, we're going to have change. We're going to take down the capital order right here. And I don't believe that. And it's been a brewing faction in my head, like, what is more important - to acknowledge that we don't have a democracy or to acknowledge that we have to build this working class solidarity. It's really two prong, right. I think we have to understand that if capital and power are not going to let us just vote away their power, we're going to have to do something. We're going to have to come together and unite like the workers used to do. And you know, when I read working class struggle, Steve and Simon, I don't read a lot of stuff of these guys just sitting around kicking stones and going, oh, shucks, they got us. You know, I see people literally storming the Bastille. I see people striking. I see the workers. Like, for example, I live right down the road from where the first police in the United States came. They were, you know, for profit police that went after the coal miners to get the coal miners to go back to work. And they were killing them, shooting them up. And so I know that labor came with the price of blood. And I know that today people don't want to give up the price of missing their favorite sitcom, much less actually organize and do something meaningful. What are your thoughts based on the inputs and outputs of your book. What are your thoughts on tactics and strategies that we have available to us, and what is the likelihood in your mind of any of them coming to fruition?

Simon Winlow: 00:35:30

: I think there are some positive signs. I think there is movement at the margins in terms of development of new populist political movements. I think people are beginning to tune in and think anew and listen to what were previously marginal voices. And all of that's positive. But I accept your point. Absolutely, Steve. I think in most cases people aren't willing to make the sacrifices necessary to create a truly political moment where we can push off and push history in a different direction. And I think the institutions we're beginning to develop, I mentioned the Workers Party before, have to be coldly Machiavellian.They have to know ahead of time about the strategies that have been used to suppress populist Leftist politics in the past. I think they have to know about security services. I think they have to know about the forms of defamation that is going to be thrown at them online and in the press. And we have to forge ahead regardless of those things. We have to join together and push through those barriers rather than simply capitulate and as you say, you know, sit in front of sitcoms and complain a little bit more, do nothing at all. Politics requires human energy to really change things. You've got to get off your ass, you've got to join with other people, you've got to put your shoulder to the wheel. And it's not just talking. I accept that, absolutely. I mean, the battle ahead of us is immense, but the prospect of not fighting it is worse still, isn't it. We have to find a way. And it requires small strategies, convincing others, drawing people towards a realistic understanding of the problems we face. It involves very Machiavellian strategies about how we negotiate press coverage and how we try and sidestep the kind of forms of defamation that are so common. And we have to think clearly about how we present ourselves to the voting public.  You know, cynical voters. How can we re engage cynical voters with images of a better future. How can we encourage those voters so that they see something better for themselves. Not just grand terms about we're going to build a new society. But how do those disengaged individuals do better. You know, we have to think about policy solutions. We have to think about personal engagement and building the forms of solidarity which are so difficult to create now, but so necessary.

Steve Hall: 00:37:58

: No, I fully agree with that. It's going to be very difficult, of course, to come back to your point, Steve. You know, this has happened in the past. My grandfather Joe Hall, in 1932 was at the forefront of the hunger marches. Now, when British history is written in school books and they talk about the marches in the 20s and 30s, working class, they always talk about the Jarrow March 1936 which was actually quite a tame affair. It was a bunch of workers putting their best boots on and walking from Newcastle tank site to London, which is over 300 miles. So it was quite a feat. And protesting Parliament. But before that, 1927, 1928, 1932. In 1932, the hunger marches, which are erased, they're air brushed out of the school history books and my grandfather was involved. In 1932, 100,000 marches were faced off by 60,000 armed police in London. It was almost a civil war. Almost. You know, there was..."I predict a riot." I can't remember who said that, you know, but it was almost a civil war. And of course, the Labour Party distanced itself from that. MacDonald was very much a centrist of his time. People like MacDonald and Henderson distanced themselves. So we've done that before. And when we did that, we didn't ask the people on the hunger march what they thought about sexuality or gender or race or anything, any of these identitarian issues. We didn't ask them anything. We just asked them, do you want a job. Do you want a future. Do you want some political representation. And then they joined that march. They didn't ask any questions about identity. And there was a sustained effort by liberals to push identity politics from the 1970s to divide the Left. Now, we're often accused of being anti identity, and we've even been accused of racism, sexism in the past. But if we take Kimberle Crenshaw's notion of intersectionality from 1992, we actually agree with Kimberly here that intersectionality was an attempt to bring these issues of racial and gender oppression together with class. But it was a failed attempt because the identity politics that preceded a very good idea had already burrowed into the left and divided very badly. So to get ourselves out of this, I've always been interested in what the tremulous, terrified liberal centrists, these people in their blue marine glasses, on their bikes with little wheels and everything, you know, what they're terrified of is horseshoe theory. I've always been interested in horseshoe. A horseshoe would've been very handy, maybe to hit Milton Friedman over the head with it or something like that. You know, back in the day, it would have been a very useful thing. But as a theory, it's also quite useful, because, as I say, on those marches in the 30s, no one asked about nationalism or globalism or cosmopolitanism, whatever. They were there for a specific purpose because they were against what the government was doing, against what the coal owners and all the industrial owners were doing, and against what the bankers were doing. Defending the gold standard, causing austerity, mass unemployment and misery because there wasn't a developed welfare system in those days. So the Horseshoe theory that the liberals are terrible, you see it all over social media. It's a horseshoe theory. People are against the Ukraine war and against these thousands of Ukrainian men getting slaughtered on behalf of a freedom and democracy that doesn't exist in the west, are accused of being far right, and the far left meet the far right in the Horseshoe. Well, in the Workers Party there are a handful of people who once considered voting far right nationalism. You've heard of the AFD Party in Germany, of course, and the Reform Party in the UK and in France and Italy there are all sorts of far right parties. But we regard the far right as being misled as to the causes of their misery but not misled about the misery itself. They can see things falling apart just the same as the so called far left. In fact, the far right and the far left don't really exist. There's just a group of people who are experiencing this insecurity and this misery caused by austerity neoliberal policies. And they could quite easily come together if they could focus. We call it in our work objectless anxiety. In other words, they have a fear but it's not really a fear because there's no object. They can't work out what the object is. Yeah, neoliberalism, what's that they say, you know. So, we in the party have talked to people who once considered, or one guy I know particularly well who once voted for a far right party in Britain. We persuaded him not to and we persuade them we share interests. So let's make this horseshoe that all of the liberals are terrified of. Let's persuade people who would vote for nationalism who might be listening to JD Vance at the moment talking about Europe at the end of the Ukraine Russia war and going against these awful European leaders who are, you know, I mean it's like a mouse roaring at a bear, isn't it. You know that idiot [Slim] Kallas in Estonia says he's going to break up Russia into it. Oh yeah, really. Well, you know, I'll hold your coat, pet. You know, you get on with it was utterly ridiculous leaders. Let's make this horseshoe. Let's see what this horseshoe looks like by persuading people who have been misled by the far right that we all share these interests against the ruling order of neoliberalism which let's face it, is run by a creditor class, to use Hudson's terms I know you've had Michael Hudson on your program before [quite a few times]. Yeah. And he, I think he, I'm not sure I think, I think he coined that term, but I think it's a very good term. He is, that's the enemy. We know who the enemy is. We know that the enemy are a bunch of people who prefer austerity and rising interest rates in unemployment and business closure to protect their income streams and their hoards of money because they use money as a store of value and an income stream rather than a medium of exchange in a unit of account. We know this and this is what economic theorists can try to get across. You know, I think sometimes MMT economists and the post Keynesians over complicate things. We need to get these basic messages out that this is the problem, these are the people who are causing problem and we are in conflict with these people. We're not necessarily in violent conflict, you know, as long as they give up easily. No, I'm only joking. Not necessarily in violent conflict, we're in conflict with these people. We need money to do its job. We need to control the means of production of money because all businesses run on credit. We need credit to reboot economies, to construct clean energy infrastructure, to re industrialize on a green ticket and all the rest of it to create good services, get the services back up and running. And in America, I know to prepare the infrastructure because half your bridges and railways are falling to pieces, you know, [rated D plus]. Yeah, yeah. Huge, huge re infrastructure. You can look at China and, and you just envy. They're forging ahead with the state backed policy banks with these huge metro stations and railways and bridges all over the place and, and they're constructing a thorium salt reactor at the moment which is clean nuclear energy. You don't even need fusion because thorium salt will give you clean nuclear energy and they'll get off fossil fuel. We can do incredible things if only we had control of credit. The enemies are the ones who restrict credit because they can't lend it out to line their own pockets. If we can create solidarity, join the horseshoe, convince people that the far right nationalism is not the way to go, then we can start to get some action.

Steve Grumbine: 00:45:28

: Yeah, I want to say this and Simon, forgive me, I want to just cut in because we haven't had an opportunity really to talk. But you know, I am a modern monetary theory activist and you know a lot of people call it a cult and call it this, that and the other. But let me tell you what it did for me, I came from the far right. And for me, what it did was it pre litigated a lot of old ideas that I thought that I had misunderstood. And it fundamentally changed me and pushed me so far to the Left I'm falling off the edge. And so I am of the mindset, when I think about governments, and I don't think of governments and banks, I think of people and banks, but I don't think of governments and banks. I think of governments as the currency issuer by law, by fiat, by decree, by the ability to write a law and create currency through that law, and to be able to do whatever we need. So my point is, when I'm watching what's happening in the United States today, in the shadow of your book, what I'm seeing happen in the United States today is Elon Musk, Donald Trump are literally tearing apart the social fabric of the nation. That may be good in some ways, it might be bad in some ways, but what it's doing is creating austerity based on this disgraceful idea that it's our hard earned tax dollars, it's that standard working class value, our hard earned tax dollars, our hard earned tax dollars are being wasted. And it's in that vein, that lie. And it is a lie, it's a pernicious lie that they are using all these working class dupes to run around and cheer as 200,000 families are going to be put out into the streets without employment. Plus, that's just several of the agencies, they're shutting down, many, many of them. And what they don't understand fundamentally, and what I worry many other people, even in the heterodox space don't understand, is that when you spend money on these jobs, you are putting money into the economy that is now money that floats around, that enables the economy to survive the ebbs and flows for everybody. Once you start trimming that away, once you start cutting that away, once you reduce deficits and reduce spending, you create the very conditions for that austerity that you were talking about. And that is what really, really kills the working class. And they don't know it because quite frankly, they're not educated on this. They cheer for their own demise. And to me, this is ground zero of my version of the world. Because even though I believe we have to get the class analysis correct, we have to understand what working class even means and build that strength. If you don't understand the capabilities, you're always going to be thinking, that poor gay person over there is taking my lunch money. That poor Black person over there stealing my money. Them damn foreigners are coming to my country and taking my money. And so if you don't understand that the economics of it all isn't about taxpayer money, that Margaret Thatcherism, "there is no such thing as public money. There is only taxpayer money." Right. Once she lied like that and Reagan did the same thing, it polluted the working class to a point where I don't know if we can recover, if we can't get rid of that lie. What are your thoughts on that?

Simon Winlow: 00:48:41

: Well, first time ever, I'm going to let Thatcher off the hook here. I expect Thatcher to lie about that kind of thing. Right. I don't expect the leaders of the Left to accept it and then reproduce it. Yes, this is the real tragedy. Yes, it's perfectly okay for Thatcher to say there's only taxpayers money. We have to be very frugal and we have to cut back on spending. That's to be expected. She's an advocate of the power of the creditor class. She has got very little interest in the material interests of ordinary people. What I don't accept is when the leaders on the Left meekly capitulate and just say, sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a point of argument and those kinds of arguments we cannot afford to lose.

Steve Hall: 00:49:22

: Absolutely.

Simon Winlow: 00:49:23

: We should have been incredibly forthright at that point. We reject this. Absolutely. We should have come out very clearly and talked honestly to ordinary voters about what the money system involves, where power truly lies and what we can actually achieve. What a government fully conscious of the power within it has at its disposal, what those governments can actually achieve and then make promises and build blueprints for the future in which allow people to see how we can build a new world. Then we've got the movement.

Steve Hall: 00:49:55

: Absolutely. Yes.

Steve Grumbine: 00:49:56

: I'm ready to vote for you, Mr. Winlow.

Steve Hall: 00:49:58

: Vote for me. Yeah. I'm in the Workers Party, I'm a member of, I mean, we were sixth, you know, in terms of votes. We came in sixth. That's a fringe party. We came in eighth. We came and reunited the fringe. Then, you know, we might start getting somewhere. But just to reiterate what Simon is saying there - in the book, we focus on that refusal he's talking about of the left to actually oppose monetarism, to point blank refusal and buying into monetarist and neoclassical orthodoxy and have no alternative to offer the people, you know, this sort of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling saying there's no money left and all the rest. These are labor politicians who I don't know if they're ignorant about economic modeling or they know all about it and they're just lying. I don't know. You have to be a fly on the wall to know that. But we know that they completely bought into monetarism and see that as the third phase. That's the actual deathbed of those deathbed of the Left. The first phase was in this country Fabianism in the early 20th century, turning the Left into a soft liberal Bloomsbury goop sort of protest movement. In America, it was of course, your racial divide, you know, and initially the racial conflict was used to divide the Left after the Civil War. But in this country there was a Fabianism turning in this soft sort of literati thing. And then in the 60s and 70s pushing identity politics to divide the Left in the way that America had already been divided. You know, as Gore Vidal said famously, "America's a melting pot. But the political temperature never got high enough for the parts to melt."You know, it was this antagonism between various ethnic groups that always bedeviled America was promoted in this country. So that was the second stage of the Left dying. And the deathbed was when it bought into monetarist neoclassical economics. So it was ill, then it was seriously ill, then it died. That was the three phases of its death. And we have to resurrect it. And we can only do that by looking at the horseshoe and seeing what it's made of and trying to create some sort of solidarity by the people who are suffering from the creditor classes. What do they do. Profits in real industry have been falling since the 1950s, so they blew a derivatives bubble. They start buying bonds and playing about on the foreign exchange with money. It's happening to Argentina. The bondholders are coining it in, filling their trouser pockets, while the Argentinians in working class, the construction industry and other industries fall to pieces and state services are cut back. Now, hopefully [Javier] Milei will get nobbled by his latest bitcoin scam, his crypto scam. That might be the end of him. But Argentinian inflation we know is because it has to pay off debts in a foreign currency that can be paid only in US dollars. We know that. But the creditor class must line their pockets. That's the only thing they're interested in, is lining their pockets so the money will go on bonds. They won't invest in industry because it's too risky. They'd rather look at risk free bonds. They'll even buy Japanese bonds at 0% rather than invest in industry. They'd rather buy bonds or negative interest rate, you know, so we need this money must come from the public. It must come from the sovereign currency, the ability of states to use their sovereign currency to invest in a whole new infrastructure in this country. Because some towns in this country, Steve, and you would be shocked. I'm sure you have these places in America, but they're just closed down. There are no shops in the street.

Steve Grumbine: 00:53:29

: Oh, it's all over.

Steve Hall: 00:53:30

: Yeah. And this is awful. Yeah. I remember seeing an incredible video on the net of your Bethlehem Steelworks, that giant steelworks, you know, in Bethlehem just rusting closed down. And the whole community was. I'm starting to well up here, I'm starting. I'm literally starting to choke up thinking about this, what they've done to us.

Steve Grumbine: 00:53:51

: We are in a horrible position. Out here in the United States we have malls, these huge malls with anchor stores and lots of little boutique stores. And almost all of them are dried up and are empty. They're just laying there dormant. And, you know, something's totally unrelated, but sort of related. In this country, we had these things called drive-in movie theaters where families would go in their car, they would sit there and they would watch the movie together and they would go out and play on the playground with all the other kids. And then they would eat popcorn in the car and go and just see. Austerity breeds crime. Austerity breeds precarity. And, you know, those things are gone now, too. All the things that we grew up loving are gone because they're dangerous now. They're no longer safe. Why are they not safe. They're not safe because we have allowed austerity to be the rule of the land. And we have allowed everyone to go without, all in the name of keeping capital, some cheap labor, ready to pluck off some cheap labor. And it's devastating. All right, listen, we are at that time, so I'm going to give each of you a chance to close us out. I'll start with you, Steve, and then I'll go to Simon. Steve, what is your parting thoughts here. If folks are to pick up your book and to think about uniting the Left in a new way, rebuilding the Left, coming to a new understanding of the Left, what would your advice be to them?

Steve Hall: 00:55:13

: Well, my advice would be to read the book, obviously, and to brace themselves for a grim story that's contained in the first few chapters. Because it has been a grim story of failure, of ideological missteps and division and foolishness and ignorance, even on the part of politicians, has got us in this perilous state at the moment. And to just grit their teeth and get through that grim tale and understand why we failed. And if we understand why we failed, we can start understanding how we can succeed by defying the progressive, centrist, liberal current that overwhelmed, flooded through the Left from the 1970s and 80s and turned it into something that it never was, something totally powerless. And how it alienated working people, which forced many to drift. The far right was just a silly bedroom fantasy in this country in the 1970s. You have these idiots in the National Front, you know, rampaging down the street. You count them on the fingers of one hand. But now you've got people voting for genuine nationalist parties. Well, reform parties are fake, of course. It's not a nationalist party at all. [Nigel] Farage is in globalist banking for God's sake, you know. But they're voting for something I think is nationalism. They're becoming more racist again. We've got racism rearing its ugly head and they're being misled. But if they understand we, we go through the economics carefully, both at the beginning and at the end, and, and we, we suggest a few pointers for change of ways we can change, clean energy, re industrialization, et cetera. If we start to get together, understand this stuff and convene around it, then we can start to activate the fringe and get people understanding things and to form a movement against what are their enemy, the creditor class.

Steve Grumbine: 00:57:05

: Simon?

Simon Winlow: 00:57:06

: Yeah, I think, well, I would encourage people to read the book and you know, investigate this long story that Steve mentioned. You know, it's easy to say that the left has failed now and maybe, you know, in situations been redundant for like a decade or more. But the, the troubles we face now are, you know, have been developing over more than a century. And if we trace back the roots, we can learn about how we got to the position we're in now. I think I will mention that I know it's difficult for American leaders to think about, but we have a bit of a go at the counterculture, the post 60s liberal counterculture, which often offends some Americans on the Left. But one of the phrases that sticks out from that whole deal there, that the kind of libertarian aspect, the liberalization, the cultural liberalization of the left, was that we should dare to be different. I posit the exact opposite. I would encourage now people dare to acknowledge the sameness, that you've got things in common with the people around you, that their sexuality, their skin color really doesn't matter too much. They're in exactly the same material position as you and if you can acknowledge that if we can join hands together and form a movement based upon the things that we share, we've got the numbers, we've got the ability to push back against this crippling austerity. And if we don't start to make movements in that direction, things will gradually begin to heat up. And it certainly doesn't bode well where we take in the full gamut of pressures we've face and the things that will emerge in the near future.

Steve Grumbine: 00:58:46

: Very well said. I appreciate the feedback from both you guys.  I, I love both you guys. This is great. I really enjoyed the conversation. I will just tell everybody. You know, please go get this book. We'll have it in our show notes. So by all means pick up this book. I do want to say that Real Progressives is a not for profit organization. We are a 501c3 so your donations which we live and die on are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a donor. You can either go to our website realprogressives.org you can go to our Substack at Real Progressives, you can go to a Patreon at Real Progressives. But in the end, we live and die by your contributions. So, on behalf of myself and my guests as Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits: 00:59:39

: Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.