Episode 279 – Seeking Solidarity with Steve Hall

[00:00:00] Steven Grumbine: All right, folks. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest today is a new guest. I have not had this guest on here, which is nice. It’s nice to break new ground. My guest today is Steve Hall, who is a professor emeritus of criminology. He worked at the Universities of Teesside, Northumbria, and Durham.

He is a polymath, get that, a polymath, who has published in the fields of criminology, sociology, anthropology, history, economic history, political theory, and philosophy. And for today’s discussion, and this might be the most important part of it, class drives his understanding of the world. And for me, class is a part of the world that I’m trying desperately to incorporate as an American.

Americans didn’t get to experience a lot of the changes that Europe got to experience. They didn’t really understand class in the way that Europeans understand class. However, as we go forward, there can be nothing more important at this moment than class because we have no democracy in the US. We’ve talked about this with our other guest, Aaron Good.

We’ve talked about this with many of our guests. And as people become more open to recognizing the lack of democracy within the systems that we live in, we need to find common ground. And the common ground that we have is our class as workers, as the working class. And this has brought up a bunch of problems for me personally, because as a guy who started as a Republican, I was always a reductionist when it came to a lot of the oppressed people that I get to work hand in hand with these days as an activist.

And in witnessing the oppression and the ruthlessness of the ruling class on minorities within the United States and abroad, ranging from slavery on through to, gay rights. and even quite frankly, the drug war. I mean, this is class war but recognizing that not everyone experienced that class war the same has been very challenging because the neoliberal era has weaponized identity politics. It has cheapened many of these, real legitimate struggles. And as a result of the cheapening and the weaponization of those struggles and the outrageous huge backlash from what we would call cancel culture, even if some disagree that it exists, many do not disagree that exists.

In fact, many live their lives to end cancel culture. And so with these warring factions in play, how does one bring about unity in the working class to take on a capitalist class who has been ruthless and owns the levers of power in government and owns the powers of industry and literally fattens itself while the working class struggles.

So I brought on my guest Stephen Hall today to discuss this, because Steven has some unique ideas that maybe aren’t in line with what I would say, and I want to try to better understand them. And I want to find where we have common ground, because ultimately, in order to bring unity to the working class, there’s a lot of people that you probably don’t agree with right now that are part of that working class.

And you could see it in spades with what’s going on with Trump’s America and the bourgeois kind of elite that support Biden and ignore the struggle there as well. So you’ve got two sides of a capitalist class in the United States that rule over us, making us believe they care about us by plucking our heartstrings with identity politics.

And the weaponization has really wrought havoc to the working class. So that is the subject of our discussion today. And with that, let me bring on my guest, Stephen Hall. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:05:01] Steve Hall: Hi, and thanks for having me.

[00:05:03] Steven Grumbine: Absolutely. You heard my intro. What are your opening thoughts here? What do you think? Help set the stage, because obviously you’re quite passionate about how identity politics has sidelined the left. You frequently,point Death of the Left, that’s been recently published. I’m curious as to your thoughts as it pertains to, unifying the working class.

[00:05:30] Steve Hall: I think that class is a modern concept, isn’t it? It’s a fundamentally marxist concept. Which, by associating with marxism means most people in America will rule him out anyway.

But it is an ancient concept at the same time. You have Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s fantastic work about class struggle in ancient Greece. But the working class has always been regarded as the populace, and there’s always been, from the economic elites and the political elites, an antipathy towards the populace as the mob. The working class, the great unwashed as we call in the UK, has always been an object of fear, and an object of suspicion amongst middle class and upper classes in Europe. Huge number ofworks in the 20th century, for instance, Le Bon, people like Elias Canetti talking about Crowds and Power being based on this terrible fear of the mob. And so working class in Europe has never really been allowed to approach the levers of power.

We’ve had an independent Labour Party in 1905, which formed the Labour Party you know, it amalgamated all sorts of other fringe parties, which is what we’re trying to do now. We’re trying to talk about left unity amongst the fringe parties that are being successful in Britain at the moment.

I suppose you heard of the Workers Party, George Galloway’s success and is now an MP in parliament from what wasregarded as a fringe party by the British establishment. But the working class has never really been allowed anywhere near the levers of power. As soon as they’ve brought themselves together, coalesced into a political unity, a political force, an organization, the middle class have moved in. And we saw this with the Fabianism in the early 20th century.Middle class intellectuals, HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, and I was trying to think of Sidney and Beatrice Webb were the main,organizers of the Fabian group to move in amongst the working class and educate them and cultivate them and move them in their direction. Because the middle class left has always had this fear of the mob, that the working class is somehow dangerous.

In your own country, you had William Jennings Bryan, I think is, to correct me if I’m wrong.The American Populist Party had a lot of very very useful policies, but again, the establishment was terrified. So they’ve always held the working class, the populace, as an object of fear to be kept away from the levers of power. But in Europe, I think we’ve had a little more success in creating working class organizations, the original Labour party, and certainly after the war, 1945 had a huge Labour landslide victory. Most of the members of parliament were members of the actual blue collar, what you call in America, you like to call the blue collar working class. And we made huge changes after 1945. Nationalization of major industries, later steel and rail in the fifties and sixties. As soon as the working class get near the levers of power, things change.

And the establishments, now, this is not just the right wing establishment, but the left wing establishment have always tried to keep the working class at arm’s length, away from the levers of power, because their expectations are much higher. They want things to change, and they want tangible change. They don’t want high ideals and visions about a beautiful world of the future.

They need things to change quickly. They need to pay their dental bills, that they need to be able to pay their mortgages, they need jobs, they need tangible changes and little triumphs. And if the establishment can prevent these things happening, then of course people will eventually lose faith with the left and move back over towards whatever group is controlling the right wing of politics at the moment. It’son the geopolitical front, it’s neoconservatives and then the economic front, it’s neoliberals, isn’t it? And so they can disrupt the left constantly disrupted by becoming part of it and infiltrating it and turning it towards the center, neutralizing it, softening it, and making sure that it doesn’t ask too much and doesn’t have the ability to do too much.

[00:09:52] Steven Grumbine: Could you define the working class for me? Because I think that my understanding of it is if you work for a paycheck, you’re working class.

[00:10:02] Steve Hall: Yeah, that’s the economic concept. Certainly. If you’re wage dependent, you’re working class, you have shared interests. Problem is that those shared interests are only shared to a certain extent in a very broad, abstract sense, because, high paid cyber security technicians, for instance, in this country, on a 120 grand a year are very, very different to baristas on 15 grand a year, So there are huge wage differentials in what the Weberian sociologists call stratification, across class lines. So those stratifications tend to be quite divisive. So we’re wage dependent, but we don’t all get, we don’t all get the same wages. So our interests diverge slightly.

Culturally, the working class is very very diverse. It’s an amalgam of various cultures. In this country, we have regional cultures. We have Irish, Northern Irish, Southernn Irish cultures, Scottish, Welsh. We have Northern Midland cultures. But it’s odd because I think the differences are exaggerated. Stand in a pub in the center of England.

Birmingham is in the center of England. I won’t, imitate a Birmingham accent because you won’t understand the word I’m saying if I do. But, Birmingham in the center of England, I’d stand in a pub and talk to people from various parts of the country. I worked in the steelworks in the 70s as an example, and because it was a fairly high wage job, you’re patient and working people, you got people from all over the country.

It’s surprising how well we got on. And minor cultural differences aren’t really too important. There’s a lot of rivalry and all, but it was quite friendly. We used to laugh and joke about it. Because we realised that our interests, our economic interests were shared. Keeping our wages high, making sure our jobs were secure, making sure our schools were educating our children, that we had a health service.

Of course, we had a nationalized health service in 1945. We still have, but it’s under great pressure from people who wanted to underfund it, run it down in order to privatize it. But , our shared interests were fundamentally economic, but the cultural differences were exaggerated. So there’s really still in this country, and you can tell me about America because I don’t really know, but in this country there’s a potential dangerous unity amongst the working class. Still there, still possible for those who are dependent on wages to recognize their shared interests and to vote accordingly for politicians who will organize the economy in their interests rather than the interests of global Financial capitalists, investors,the global asset managers who are controlling the world’s economy and decide which regions rise and fall. And the under investment in this country since 1960, when the growth curve flattened, because we had a huge growth curve from 1945, almost despite the austerity, despite everyone being fed up in the 1950s with austerity, we were actually growing very rapidly. Our industries were growing.

Americans didn’t like that, of course. Don’t forget, Stephen, that the American right regards European countries as competitors, as dangerous competitors and regard Europe as a dangerous competitor, economically. They pretend to be friends to have a special relationship, whereas really it’s America special and we have the relationship as we all know.

So our interests don’t necessarily converge. But, the growth curve flattened in 1960, and the private investors started to systematically under invest in the UK. Tony Benn, the, great British Labour politician, tried to put that right in the 70s with the National Economic Board in 1975. And the Labour Party Manifesto in 1978, which promised to use North Sea oil revenue to refurbish and modernize British industry,

because they were fed up with the fact the Germans and French were moving ahead so quickly. oOur plant was antiquated. I worked in steelworks in 1975, diaphragm pump on the gas water recirculation plant, which had 1948 stamped on it, no investment in that steel since 1948.

[00:14:04] Steven Grumbine: Wow.

[00:14:05] Steve Hall: And, uh, we were under invested. but we’ve always had that potential. The potential to recognize those interests and to vote for politicians who will refurbish our industries, who will create jobs andsupport our interests. And of course the financiers are terrified of that because they want to be able to put their money where they want, economies with low wages, low material costs, low taxes.

And, they don’t really care about, the Rust Belt in America, do they? They don’t care about Flint, Michigan, and these places, these sort of derelict places that have been de industrialized. When yoUSee the pictures of the old Packard, factory and the Champion Spark Plug factory, where they were all once these hives of industry, whole communities, but they don’t care about that.

They want to put their money where they want. And they’re terrified that the working class might vote in the sort of politicians who will bring back Keynesian capital controls, use the power of the state’s currency to invest in the economy, and start to become autonomous. They wanted make sure that the working class don’t vote for those sort of politicians.

[00:15:11] Steven Grumbine: It’s funny when you reference the US, we have a very different history, obviously, you know. We’re, kind of a, colonial power. We have always been empire of sorts. The foundation of the colonization of America is a story of the Trail of Tears. It’s literally a story of genocide.

As we experience this right now for the people of Gaza, The US as aEuroextension,is really quite frankly a colonial outpost and now turned empire. And I think the challenge is different here because there’s a lot of homogeneityin each of the countries of Europe.

I mean, yes, there are immigrants. Yes, there are some differences. But the United States literally kidnapped blacks, Africans, and brought them here to build up the industry of this nation on the backs of slave labor. And after that ran its course, you had Reconstruction. And reconstruction period turned them into criminals no longer slaves.

And so they had vagrancy laws and all these other laws that were spent to keep them in jail or to keep them working basically for pennies on the dollar, they never received anything. So this country that I live in is filled with stories like that. And people often say, ‘Oh, that was 100 or 200 years ago’ I’m saying, ‘No, you don’t understand the Jim Crow laws and all the other things kept going going. So their struggle was far different than the average white factory plant workers struggle as a class member of the working class. And so in this country, when we try and talk about uniting the working class, we don’t have the shared struggle, the shared history, the share. We have a divided history, history of oppressors and rulers, and that has shifted significantly now. the lack of acknowledgement of those grievances has created splinters all over the place. And I say splinters as if we were ever one piece of granite. But we are not, we never have been. I think yoUSaid it quite eloquently, actually, that the US is a melting pot that never melted. And, here we are.

[00:17:36] Steve Hall: Yes, I’m stealing that from Gore Vidal he said that quite some time ago. And he was right, Stephen, you have a much tougher job over there. I don’t envy the job, because your divisions run so deep.

[00:17:48] Steven Grumbine: They do and they’re exaggerated daily.

[00:17:51] Steve Hall: Absolutely. And your culture is so ultra competitive. Because this, this works on the level of competitive individualism as well as competitive ethnic groups. Because your hyper individualist culture is, and the world’s never seen anything as individualistic as America.

[00:18:09] Steven Grumbine: it’s awful.

[00:18:09] Steve Hall: Well,it gives you a lot of freedom. It gives you an awful lot of individual freedom, the American dream, of course,

[00:18:17] Steven Grumbine: a lot of one.

[00:18:18] Steve Hall: which is, you know, a little bit of a fake. I don’t know if I’ve got time, but if I’ve got time, I’ll you’ve heard the WC Fields story about the American dream, I suppose, where, tell you later if I have time, it’s quite a funny story. That level of individualism has never been experienced in Europe.

In fact, a lot of people fled Europe because of their religious differences. They were Protestants. Now, Protestants relocated God from the heavens, from an external power, into the conscience of each individual. So Christian Protestant individualism was the founding culture of the United States of America.

And it is so hyper individualistic that really bringing anyone together in any way, shape or form, the racial oppression and racial hostility that still exists in the place is, I mean, you have such an incredibly difficult job. And also don’t forget that your nation is founded on a hatred of the state and taxation.

[00:19:24] Steven Grumbine: Which is crazy, right? Ultimately, the more that you think about

what we’re up against, cause the US’s number one export aside from military weaponry is neoliberalism. We outsource everything to the world, basically preaching that individualistic mindset that every problem you have is your own fault.

Every success you’ve ever had is your own fault. Every, if you win, it’s all you. If you lose, it’s all you and shame on you. The Ayn Rand scourge is real. We literally live

in a libertarian hellscape.

[00:20:03] Steve Hall: This was all orchestrated though, Steven. This was all orchestrated. Don’t give up on America. Don’t forget that despite the huge racial differences that the divisions between black and white workers after the Civil War were orchestrated, they were prevented from living in the same parts of the towns and the villages that were springing up, as America were industrialized, deliberately segregated.

And after the First World War, right up until the New Deal, that separation, continued, and the hyper individualism continued. But during that very, very formative period of 1929 to 1933, the Americans just realized how bad neoclassical capitalism is, didn’t they? More than anyone else. We’ve all seen the Grapes of Wrath, the wonderful Steinbeck novel. We’ve all read about The Dust Bowl, Depression. The Americans learned a hard lesson there. And that was a fundamental, watershed for change. In 1933, Roosevelt got in on a social democratic, I think we need to go further than social democracy because social democracy was too weak to um, prevent neoliberalism from usurping.

But it was the Americans who first voted in a social democrat. Wasn’t it? And in 1937, it’s a little known fact, I mean, I’m a sort of polymath really, but I ended up working in the criminology department. That’s an easy question to answer, because a job came up, and I took it. So I ended up working in the criminology department and I became a criminologist over the years.

One of the things that I’ d investigate were comparative homicide rates. The incredible thing between about mid 1935 and late 1937, which was Roosevelt’s second term, wasn’t it? And he really started to put his new deal policies into practice in a, in a big way. I mean, you even had state funded theatre companies, didn’t you?

These wonderful people like Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, people like that. We had the, um, oh, God, you remind me. What was the work program called? The administration program. Oh, bloody hell. Yeah, The W, what’s it? Sorry, I’m getting old, my brain.

[00:22:10] Steven Grumbine: WPA.

[00:22:11] Steve Hall: WPA. Yeah, this was all organized and worked very well.

And, it was getting America back to work. America, in 1933, the homicide rate was about 11 and a half per 100,000, that’s very high. By the end of 1937 Roosevelt cut the American homicide rate in half. And that a very little known fact. And I wrote an article about that, a while ago. Social democracy, it’s not democratic socialism, it’s not ideal, it’s not perfect, but it had a massive impact. And it worried the American ruling class more than communism. Because they knew communism wouldn’t work. Gosplan, for instance, the central command economy. I mean, how can you possibly, find out and work out what everyone in little villages and towns across Russia want for their breakfast?

It was a stupid idea. They have tales of, people queuing outside of shops in Vladivostok are waiting for bacon and sausages and a lorry load of midtown boot polish would turn up, because a bureaucrat in the office of Moscow made a mistake. Now if it stuck with the new economic policy, the market, who knows what would have happened to the Soviet Union, a controlled market might well have worked.

But the social democratic policies were starting to work, and they were a road to what I, my ideal is a democratic socialism. And I’ve always been a democratic socialist, a benight in a sense. America adopted Keynesian, demand management policies and capital controls before anyone in Europe did. So don’t give up on America, Steven. You were capable of doing it. In fact, you were the first to do it. And you had a huge success in the 1930s.

[00:23:56] Steven Grumbine: I think things have changed though in both technology, the surveillance state, the police state, the weapons ofwar and the propaganda machine thatmanufacturers consent has radically shifted.

You used to have one newspaper that everyone read back in the day. You know, you knew that there was a show at 5 PM that everybody sat in front of the radio or the television to listen to together, they heard the same things. Now we’re overloaded with just data. It’s not even information anymore. It’s just data just thrown at us.

[00:24:32] Steve Hall: Yes. Data overload. Yes. This is the Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the obscene ecstasy of communication, he calls it. Go on.

[00:24:40] Steven Grumbine: We’ve checked out, we’ve given up. I mean, a lot of people are so overwhelmed that they’re like little potato bugs and every bit of information that contradicts what they think just bounces right off their little shell. And the unfortunate part of that is, and I think this is an important thing that we need to discuss is that, we have no understanding of class in the US. We have no understanding of uniting beyond Democrat or Republican. We don’t have that kind of history in this country, unfortunately, to lean on. And even when you point to Keynes, Keynes did not see class the way that Marx saw class.

[00:25:24] Steve Hall: Oh, absolutely not.

[00:25:26] Steven Grumbine: and. The unfortunate fact is that when you look at class in America, which is, I believe the one way that we can fight back, most people to your point earlier would run for the Hills.

They would, they’d be like, Oh my God, class. Oh, they’re talking about that red scare stuff. And then they break out all the CIA talking points about Stalin or whoever. And, immediately their eyes glaze over and they become rabid. And with social media, which has been the way we communicate so completely shut down with algorithms and shut down with little games that they play to keep us in our own little bubbles.

We never build the kind of consensus that we could have built.

I’m curious your thoughts, you frequently point to that book, The Death of the Left. Help me understand. I don’t see that path forward. I want to see that path forward. I see it has to be based on class because we would never have the numbers we would need to be able to make a dent. But help me understand.

[00:26:33] Steve Hall: Well, nobody in the 1920s, a European sociologist called Werner Sombart visited America and wrote that America is the last place in the world that you’re going to have class consciousness or an organized class resistance. It is so atomized. It is so hyper competitive individualist that there’s no chance of that happening.

But after 1933, it did happen. So you can never write it off. Now, I’m not suggesting that you go through the misery of the 1929 to 1933 Dust Bowl again in order to wake yourselves up. that’s not going to happen anyway, is it? With welfare and quantitative easing and, and all of these, fiscal, well, they’re just palliatives, aren’t they, they’re not really policies.

They’re just palliatives. They’re um,ways of getting countries through, very brutal market corrections as the neoclassicals like to call it. So it may not happen to that extent, but there will be… Alain Badiou, the French philosopher, looks to what he calls the Event, capital E. Now, the Wall Street crash and the Dust Bowl was an Event, Steven. Capital E. But there are some other Events. Gaza is an Event. Let’s not get into that huge controversy this little discussion. But Gaza is an Event. Events happen. Things happen that wake people up. And, hopefully, should we hope for an Event?

Well, I don’t know. Perhaps we should fear an Event. Perhaps we should be rather circumspect about the possibility of an Event, because the Event might be horrific. Or it might simply be a wake up call. Was the great financial crash should have been an Event. But as yoUSaid, you know, this huge ideological machine, this sort of weird libertarian/neoliberal ideology machine that runs American culture went straight into action, telling people that austerity was necessary, that inflation is a big problem that we can’t keep on, we can’t spend any money. We can’t create jobs and all the rest of it. So that ideology machine is still there, but the great financial crash was almost an Event. It was almost an Event. Are we due another one? Steve Keen, another heterodox economist, who I have a lot of time for outside of MMT.

I’m not an MMTer as such. I have a lot of respect for MMT. I think it’s the first port of call for any one interested in heterodox economics because it’s a pristine description of how the fiat money system, how the monetary plumbing, works in a fiat money. It’s great. And it should be the first part of the call, but there are other heterodox economists with good ideas. And there might be another financial crash.

The whole thing could just come apart at any time, because of course, the way that neoliberal capitalism works it’s a credit system. And you have to lend money, you know, it’s the old Marxist notion, as soon as money stops circulating, it’s dead, isn’t it? it has, hasn’t it?

They must invest, they must constantly invest, and if they can’t invest, the whole thing crashes. They inflate assets like they did with housing. Throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, inflating their assets to try and create a market, a durable market. But it didn’t work. Then they set up the derivatives market with collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, basically selling each of the debt and insurance policies on top of the debt in order to keep on, they’ve got to keep on lending money.

And receiving compound interest, because that’s how the system works. And if they hit a block in that system, then an Event occurs. I think let’s call the GFC in 2008, a “nearly Event.” And there may be an Event, but they managed to QE, you know, helicoptered in a load of money.

QE is non inflationary of course, because it disappears into the bank’s reserve accounts at the central bank. It’s just basically to obviate a liquidity crisis. But what were looking at it’s a possible Event. We don’t know what’s going to happen because this system of lending out money. I don’t know if you’ve read Michael Hudson, another heterodox economist.

[00:30:44] Steven Grumbine: Oh, I’ve had him on here quite a few times, yes sir.

[00:30:47] Steve Hall: Yeah, he’s a great economist and he really knows his stuff. And he knows that really this, that the problem is that the debt crisis, that the old world, he’s written a lot about the jubilees and,the [inaudible], of course the way that debts were canceled property was returned in order to try to get, they get out of social hostilities and reboot economies.

The Rome, Greeks and the Romans were the first to cancel the debt, debt jubilees. But can we keep on creating what Steve Keen calls debt zombies? And if they’re compound, they’ve explored everywhere now, haven’t they, Steven? I mean, they’ve done China, they’ve done Indonesia, Mexico, lent their money out to low wage economies.

And now these economies are developing. They’ve created their own organization, the BRICS. They’re starting to talk about their own possible reserve currency in the future. They’re starting to trade in their own currencies. They’re challenging American dollar Hegemony and they’re starting to fight back.

So will the BRICS cause an Event? Will there be an Event? We don’t know. So don’t give up. Things will change and we have to have policies ready for the Event. If something does happen, we have to say, look, this is the second financial crisis. We’re not going to get out of this.

We can’t helicopter money our way out of this. We’re going to have to change the nature of our economy. We’re going to have to change the way our economy operates. And then we can start looking towards the heterodox economists who receive such a trashing, don’t they, on social media by the libertarians and neoliberals.

You can tell how worried they are by the amount of invective and ad hominem they throw at heterodox economists. But that’s just, that’s a sign of fear.

[00:32:28] Steven Grumbine: Yet look at the documentary finding the money, and I don’t know if you’ve had an opportunity to see it yet.

[00:32:35] Steve Hall: Not yet. No, no.

[00:32:36] Steven Grumbine: My chief complaint of the movie is that it doesn’t have Bill Mitchell in it. That’s my chief complaint. Okay.

[00:32:43] Steve Hall: Yes,

[00:32:44] Steven Grumbine: But beyond that though, the thing that I find fascinating is that we’re exposing just how little the establishment economists, these neoclassical slash new Keynesian, type economists know about any of this stuff. They have no concept of money creation. They have no concept of how banks actually function. It’s kind of like placing the emphasis of a pronunciation of a word on the wrong syllable, on the wrong consonant, on the wrong vowel, and, they don’t get it, and it’s funny, ha ha ha. But the problem here is this, what I see in that documentary, and what yoUSaid in particular, about these events and having policies ready. We’ve got policies all over the place. I mean, I know, I come from the MMT world as an activist.

I want to be clear that I don’t want anybody to confuse anything I say as if I’m saying I’m more than an activist, right? I am an activist, but that said, when I see this stuff, it requires agency. Okay. Now you have a couple of choices. If you can vote for people that are like yourself with the same class interest and they have a real legitimate opportunity to run for office and have a real opportunity to make a difference.

That’s a democracy, and that’s something that can happen. But we do not have that in the United States. We have corporate law, corporate control, and we have cash as speech. And corporations use that to great effect. Lobbying is legalized bribery, and we have no means as a working class to fight back through the channels that the ruling class has given us to operate within.

So that means we have to operate either A, as fake placebo beings within this system that we have no agency in, or B operate outside of that system to create the kind of,

dual power counter revolutionary force, if you will, or revolutionary force. Let’s

call it what it is. We are screwed if we don’t do that. I mean, and so,

[00:34:55] Steve Hall: It’s Dostoevsky. We’re Notes from Underground. We’re Notes from the Underground, but we have to keep our notebooks going. And we have to keep on thinking and we have to keep on Thinking about communicating. If there’s one criticism I can throw at the heterodox economists, but , it’s a criticism being thrown at all economics and economists, because economics, economics is difficult.

It requires technical knowledge. It ‘s like engineering, you, need to know how things work. And it’s not easy to get across to people. When I start sometimes talk about, uh, you know, MMT or post keynesianism, Um, we still have pubs over here in England.

You’d be glad to know. I want to talk about them, their eyes start glazing over Steve, you know, and they think, Oh no, he’s going to start talking about the currency issue and inflation and and things again. and now, you know, and I can tell that you know, they don’t really want to talk about it.

So I said, I started talking about, the football, which is not called soccer, by the way, it’s the football.

[00:35:58] Steven Grumbine: I Look,

I want to say something else too, that I think that is very, very important. I was on a

radio program, Sputnik Radio, interestingly enough

[00:36:15] Steve Hall: Yeah, I know of it

[00:36:17] Steven Grumbine: And I was talking to them, and I mentioned that one of the other things is, whenever we read the news, we read the news as if they’re talking to us. That they’re speaking to us as individuals. But when you read deeper and you dig deeper, you realize that they’re talking to their class interests, they’re not talking to the working class. When they say ‘it’s a great economy!’ Think about this, the newspaper said, ‘it’s a great economy, and so in order to maintain this great economy, we’ve got to suppress wages because upward rise of wages is causing blah, blah, blah.’ Well, who are you talking to? Who are you talking to? Is that to a worker? I don’t think so, because if a worker heard that, they’d be like, ‘well, you’re goddamn right I want my wages to go up!’

[00:37:01] Steve Hall: Well certainly, and capitalists like Henry Ford would have agreed with them, didn’t he? When he said famously, ‘there’s no point in paying these workers, wages too low to buy the cars they make.’ And this was at the heart of Keynesian effective demand. Look, we know that rising wages and what they call, disparagingly, ‘money printing,’ which is actually accountants, but it’s just simply crediting accounts on the positive side. There’s nothing to do with printing anymore. They do print a little bit. So we know the price rises cause inflation. We know that, but of course they will deny that to the death, because they reckon that if you have price controls, you lower price, that will create shortages, it probably won’t.

And what they do is, that they present economic models that have human decisions completely extracted from them, that they talk about natural laws. Now, any good economist, someone like- he is not particularly heterodox, but- Ha-Joon Chang, the Korean guy working at Cambridge at the moment, is a fantastic economist and knows how the systems work.

He would say that, ‘look, you’ve got in every natural law proposed by an economic model, you’ve got to insert a human decision. And by constructing these economic models with these ludicrously complex equations, which most of which are complete nonsense, by the way, it’s just utter rubbish. It’s like your doctors calling everything by a Latin name so that you won’t… multiple sclerosis, the disease that affects many muscles, you know what I mean? , Botanists do the same too, they’re calling plants complicated names in order to deter people, to make it an exclusive profession.

And they extract… even the basic laws of supply and demand have human decisions in them, they don’t have to rise. If you have a field full of 10 goats, I’m going to simplify things that economists will roll their eyes right now and then go, ‘Oh God, listen to him.’ No, but I’m going to oversimplify something ridiculous.

You have a field, if you have tiny land economy with a field of 10 goats in it, and the little tiny land government issues 10 groats, then one groat equals one goat. Now, what the neoliberals and the neoclassicals say is that if the tiny land government issues 20 groats, then you need two groats to buy a goat, therefore you’ve halved the value of your currency.

But, the decision is that the goat herder doesn’t have to charge two groats for the goat. It can leave them and then put the rest in their savings, or they build a school, hospital, or go on holiday with it. Even the basic law of supply and demand is not natural. These models simply give people guides to the action that everyone is expected to do.

They expect everyone to behave in the way that the model has allegedly analyzed. In fact, it’s an instruction. It’s an instruction to decision makers. That’s, this is what you’ve got to do. If there’s more money about, you’ve got to charge more.

[00:40:26] Steven Grumbine: That is so brilliant. What you just said, exactly right. I tell people, these are signals, market signals, ‘hey, we’re, spending money, we’re printing money… okay, guys, that’s the signal, let’s raise prices, okay, now we’re going to go ahead and raise interest rates.’

Because guess who wins? The rich. Guess who loses? The poor. Yes, Once again, we’ve got the interest income channel, flaming hot. People with money, making money hand over fist. The working class getting screwed more and more and more.

[00:40:59] Steve Hall: Absolutely, and let’s, follow that. You’re absolutely right, we end up being screwed. We end up with high mortgages of interest rates. They won’t raise taxes, because we are a culture based on the hatred of taxes. We think tax is theft of our rewards, is stealing our rewards.

They’re stealing our enjoyment. So there’s this constant moral, this tale. But let’s follow that, let’s look at the goat herd again. So the goat herd wants to raise prices. It’s not a natural law of supply and demand, it’s just a decision. But who’s behind the goat herd? Where did he get the money for the goats?

He got the money for the goats from the bank of Tiny Land, and the bank of Tiny Land has investments, savings and institutional funds from other lands in the same part of the world, that they’re clamoring for returns. So the goat herd makes that decision, thinking that the shareholders and the asset managers, Larry Fink and all of his pals, want more returns.

So I’ve got to charge more. And he will think that the goat feed guy in the field who sells him the goat feed, he’s going to charge more as well. So everyone assumes that they’re going to act as the model allegedly analyzes, but is actually dictating. It’s telling them how they should act. It’s almost like a set of commandments for action, for the determined action, and give the action a moral jacket, saying this is a good thing to do.

You’re being a good person and you’re doing exactly what’s expected, and therefore then they put a load of stupid equations in the rest of it, as if they’re all Einstein ‘E = MC squared.’ It’s all nonsense. And they tell you these equations will determine your action.

In fact, the action they’ve taught people to do, is what’s determining the equations.

[00:42:48] Steven Grumbine: This reminds me… I’m sure you’ve seen the movie Star Wars, and the very first one, they’re pulling up- I can’t remember is it on Tatooine?- They’re pulling up to the bar and the Empire is standing there, and Ben Kenobi is in the land speeder with Luke and he’s like, “These are not the droids you’re looking for.”

“These are not the droids we’re looking for.” And it’s like, this is exactly what’s happened. I feel like the puppeteer. And, but think about what you just said, and what we’re talking about. There are so many things that have been programmed into our psyche, that are at a deep level. A level so deep that I can sit there and tell yoUSomething, I can show yoUSomething, but until you have a change of heart, until you’ve had an event of your own, a personal event- ‘have you received the Lord and savior as blah, blah, blah’. Until you’ve had your come to Jesus moment- where you agree to change or you agree to see things differently or whatever it is that snaps you out of the trance- you are going to continue to follow the playbook, because that’s what you know. It’s so deeply ingrained, that to do anything other than that seems ludicrous.

[00:44:05] Steve Hall: That’s true. We’re basically describing a large scale religious cult. That’s what it is. There’s no doubt about it. It’s a belief system. And the belief system is very, very powerful. And it’s scientized. It’s given a load of equations to prove that this is the god’s natural order in the world.

And it’s also modern psychologists like Tony Damasio, who talk about the way the psyche and the body’s neurology is structured and molecular constitution is structured, means that these beliefs really penetrate right down to our nervous system. And they penetrate right down to give messages to the molecular basis of our bodies. If you look at a very simple creature, it only has really two or three commands. It’s either to stay where it is or move to somewhere where it can survive, or to stay where it is and improve that environment. Now, only the primates can improve their environment.

So, only primates have the three molecular commands. Other organisms have two molecular commands, to move or to stay. And the neurological level sends messages to the molecules, we stay or we move. So basically, what neoliberalism is telling the body at the molecular level is we stick with this, we stay with this.

This is the environment. This is how deep it has penetrated. Not just to our feelings and emotions, and our neurology, but to the body’s molecular level, is penetrated. We must stay with this. You know, this is Adam Smith. This is the creation of wealth. This will make us wealthy. It’ll make us free. It will be a judicious combination of freedom and prosperity. Will not get any better than this. It was Francis Fukuyama, one of your guys again Steven, I have to remind you. Francis Fukuyama. Yes, you’re trouble, you people, I’m telling you, yes. Francis Fukuyama, who declared the end of history, as European philosophers have declared since then, we don’t really believe it’s the end of history, but we are forced to act as if we do. You don’t have to believe this, but you have to act as if you do believe it.

[00:46:15] Steven Grumbine: Double plus good.

[00:46:17] Steve Hall: It’s as good as it gets. That was a movie as well, wasn’t it? As Good As It Gets. And we believe that, that communism was a disaster. The Soviet Union was a disaster because Gosplan was a disaster. They made huge strides, they were great at making big stuff, like bombs and space rockets and things like that, but they were terrible at getting boot polish and sausages to the right people at the right time. And you heard of Richard Nixon’s kitchen campaign, didn’t you?

[00:46:45] Steven Grumbine: Yeah, go ahead, tell the fans.

[00:46:48] Steve Hall: ’59, Well Khrushchev [I mean, anyone who’s been through Stalingrad deserves a bit of respect], Nikita Khrushchev was a Russian, and I think- I might be wrong, don’t quote me on this- but I think he was amongst one of the first groups to arrive, putting the flag on the Reichstag. Remember that famous photo, you know, the end of World War II, but he certainly in battle of Stalingrad, and he was sitting there and he invited over an American ambassador, who was at the time- I think it was the late ’50s- it was a certain person called Richard Nixon.

And so, Richard decided to take over his weapon, and Khrushchev heard about this and said, ‘What is this secret weapon?’ ‘What’s this secret weapon?’ ‘What’s he bringing over?’ ‘I hope it’s nothing dangerous.’ He said, ‘no, no, no, I’m just going to bring some consumer items.’

So he came over with the latest American kitchen units and they all invited the Russian housewives.

I’m sorry to be sexist, but that’s what they were in those days. Housewives that had a strict gender division of labor and, you know, women were concerned with domestic labor. That’s changed. Good thing. And they were all coming. Oh, look, look what I could do. This is fantastic.

You’ve got a double, they’ve got a quadruple hob burner. You’ve got a timer on your other. I’ve got a timer. I don’t have to stand there with my watch. That doesn’t work. Trying to work out the time for the. From a stroganoff, you know what I mean? And they were cooing over these wonderful consumer items.

and Khrushchev was just, um, really, am I allowed to say pissed off on this program? Yeah, he was, you know, we, I think you mightn’t say pissed, but we say pissed off. I mean, it was really, And, he would said famously, we will bury you. Nixon, of course, reported back and, he said, this is a cold war. These are going to send nukes there. But what he meant was we’ll out produce you.

[00:48:27] Steven Grumbine: Indeed.

[00:48:28] Steve Hall: We will build, we will make better kitchen units, we will put timers on our ovens, and we will do all this, and we will do it better. Unfortunately, Stephen, they didn’t, they couldn’t, because they didn’t have market signals to work off. They had abandoned the new economic policy, which Lenin was keen to go, but of course Stalin wanted to centralize everything, have total control over everything, So they didn’t have the ability to do that and consumer dissatisfaction more than anything else. I mean, they had exploding TV sets. Well, when they suddenly found out that people wanted stuff, they hastily set up a Bureau. Well, that’s the Bureau and we’ll setup a design Bureau and a production Bureau.

And so they started making, you know, and TVs became popular in the fifties. Yeah. Remember they all start to come out in the night. Well, no, sorry. I’m assuming there’s you’re an old geezer like me and probably not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, no. You’re still a handsome young man, but I’m a grizzled old geezer.

And I was, I remember my mother talking about when, you know, televisions, I think the first television came out the year I was born, 1955 the Russians heard about this and they hastily made these television sets, which were totally crap. And they started exploding in the room, you know, and the tubes were exploding because hadn’t been made properly. Consumer dissatisfaction brought down the Soviet Union more than anything else. But the Americans are consumer fixated. I mean, they’ll queue around the block for the latest iPhone.

Have you seen them? you know, this sort of stuff. they created the consumer subject. Thomas Frank’s wonderful book on the Conquest of Cool. In 1961, they changed the whole advertising scenario. All the advertising messages were changed from family man to rugged Marlborough man, producing stuff for these sort of individuals, these cool individuals who were striding out in the sort of a Ayn Rand fashion, like John Galt and making themselves and the country wealthy.

So consumerism took off in America and consumerism is a drug, you know, almost religion.

[00:50:28] Steven Grumbine: It is.

[00:50:29] Steve Hall: It is. And this country, consumers have had a tougher time. We tended to love you because you’d helped us. well, you were late, of course but yeah, you got there eventually, you helped us during the war against Nazis and against the Axis powers. And after that, we sort of fell in love with you, started importing all your music and all your Levi jeans and all the rest of it. we became highly American influenced. Especially during the counterculture, which looked so sexy and edgy and all the rest. It wasn’t, of course, it it was a substitute for politics. And we imported all this stuff, but we had, as you were saying at the beginning, we had firmer identities. We had much stronger traditional identities, uh, in work, in religion, in region, and in locale, in the community, you know, I would I would describe myself as a, as a steelworker from concert and a socialist.

That was my identity. Yeah. There wasn’t, didn’t need a load of consumer trappings to construct my identity. But those identities were missing in America. People didn’t really relate too strongly. They related more to the ethnic groups, Italian American and Irish American, Jewish American, et cetera. And consumerism didn’t really have too much to get rid of in order to start. So it’s easier to sell consumer symbolism to Americans as symbols of their identity. And this is how they got us into consumerism. We became what we bought and what we displayed and what we wore and what sort of car we drove, you know, what we drove in. And this, this is why America became so consumer fixated because there wasn’t that much to get rid of really. We had much stronger identities over here, but eventually consumerism triumphed. No, we don’t, our regional identities are now much weaker than they once were, which is, I think it’s a tragedy because we had such incredibly rich cultures, you know, I come from a place called Newcastle Upon Tyne, Tyneside, yeah? The home of Hank Marvin and Mark Knopfler and Sting and people like that. we had a tremendous musical heritage, but our folk tradition,we’ve written some of those beautiful folk songs you’ve ever heard, but we started to lose that. You start to lose that tradition because we were being, Atlanticized. American culture was taken over. You were much sexier, you know, what I used to say in the fifties, the problem with Americans is they’re overpaid, they’re over sexed, and they’re over here. that was what, that sort of, jokey sort of way of putting it. You must understand how powerful your culture was, how attractive and sexy it was, Of course, West Germany, apart from the fact that you used West Germany as an investment shock absorber, if your investments weren’t producing the returns anywhere else, they would certainly produce it in Germany and Japan because They almost had to reconstruct them from the ground up. and you started pumping money through the Marshall Aid Plan into West Germany. And you created a very sexy place, the West Germany. And the East Germans would be sort of peering over the Berlin Wall thinking ‘Oh, I wish our life was a sexy and wealthy and interesting. I wish you had all those consumer goods and Mercedes Benz and BMWs and all the rest of it. American consumerism is immensely, powerful, both in America and outside.

How do you see consumerism impacting the working classes? Is that the identity based on what I can afford? I can afford to buy this nice new car. You can’t. So I’m better than you.

Sure.

[00:53:56] Steven Grumbine: individual, I’m the winner. You’re the loser. You’re the zero sum thinking.

[00:54:00] Steve Hall: Absolutely. It creates competitive hierarchies within a working class culture.

[00:54:04] Steven Grumbine: And that is a divisive thing, obviously. let me take us into this last thing here, because, you. know, we’ve talked a lot about some good history and all, but what really brings me to today is, is that I look and I see heterodox economists whom I happen to have championed for 15, 10, 15 years, and a lot of what comes out sounds a little bourgeoisie kind of high brow, you know, polite society kind of things. And I’m just very anecdotally, I am sitting here with five teeththat desperately need a root canal, right? We don’t have any dental care. And in fact, as I told you before We started this, I didn’t sleep last night because of my teeth hurting so badly. So when I hear them talking about what a great economy it is and Biden sticking the landing and other things that I feel are quite offensive. Um, it doesn’t measure up. It’s kind of like I said, reading the paper and you see that they’re clearly not talking to me.

The quote unquote voter, if you actually believe we’re voting, which we aren’t. But if you believe that we are. They’re not talking to regular people. They’re talking to investorclasses. They’re talking to ownership classes. And if you look at regular Jane and Joe six pack, we’re told to lump it, basically. We’re told, Hey, you know, Biden’s doing great. Don’t forget, Trump, You know, he’s So horrible and I’m not voting for Trump, but I’m not voting for either of them. I, you know, I don’t see my class interests being represented by either person. And and I don’t see the economist even talking about things from a working class perspective either.

I see them talking about it from a capitalist class kind of environment. What are your thoughts on the messaging? Because when I bring this stuff up, socialists don’t want to hear anything about MMT. They don’t want to hear this heterodox stuff. They’re like, that is just more crapitalism. That’s more nonsense. And it just, it falls on deaf ears. What are your thoughts?

[00:56:13] Steve Hall: Well, socialism, and communism in a much firmer way, socialism is about work in control of the means of production. It’s as simple as that. And if workers have controlled the means of production, they can make sure the right stuff’s produced and, that it’s shared round equally, and, and people have a chance to participate and work in it. And if, uh, there’s an overproduction of labor, that means you have a shorter working week. one of our great old union leaders, Arthur Scargill, I suppose you’ve heard of the miners strikes in 84, 85. He suggested that we go down to a four day and then a three day working week because machines are making our cars now.

And, and we were promised a life of luxury, weren’t we? And, leisure in the 19th century. And we would the technology that’s basically made everyone’s life more stressful. The opposite is more people that, you know, can do more work. Each individual can do more work with the machine. So the means of production, it doesn’t see an MMT heterodox post Keynesianism really having, because it’s all demand driven.

Keynesianism was demand driven. Keynes didn’t really care who was producing anything. Whether it was the British government taking over steel and, coal and energy and rail, or whether it was private, it was a demand driven and most heterodox economists are also driven by aggregate demand, notional demand and effective demand.

Effective demand being the most important that, you know, people have money in their pockets and they can, um, afford to buy stuff, but who’s producing that stuff and who’s making profits from it, who’s controlling production, who’s controlling the direction of the economy, seems to be, um, a little bit, on, the periphery of, uh, but I think there are exceptions such as Bill Mitchell, uh, for instance, the MMT, who I think is more socialist inclined.

Um, I hope, you know, if he’s listening, he doesn’t mind me describing him as such. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:57:54] Steven Grumbine: No, he said in my most recent podcast.. Absolutely.

[00:57:55] Steve Hall: I know. I know, Bill. I mean, I don’t know. I did a little mini-tour with him in England a few years ago, when I was talking about the the, Rather. Oh, how can I put their methods of communication could be slightly improved to somewhat.

He would say that what’s most important is that we take over the means of the production of money. And if we have the means of production of money we can, decide where investment goes. neoclassicals will respond straight away. If you do that, you need capital controls. And capital exchange controls. In other words, you can’t let capital out of your country all the time. If you want to, invest it in your industry. And if you want to fend off the bond vigilantes and the forex vigilantes, you’ll try and devalue currency and bid up your interest rates.

You need some way of defending yourself against them. And that means capital controls, central banks, buying of bonds, buying long instead of selling short and all the rest of it. We know. all of this. I’ll go and go through the boring technical details because they bore me as well as everyone else, to be honest with you.

But, if we have control of the production of money and we have the control of investment, some MMT and heterodox don’t like to make distinction between spending and investment, and they’re right because it’s all spending, isn’t it really? But there’s a tradition of distinguishing between spending and investment.

Spending seems to be profligate. It’s what you, it’s a loss, whereas investment is a gain. Uh, for the future investment You’re creating something will be useful in the future. So there’s a very, very important ontological and ethical distinction between the two that the economists, cause they’re not very good philosophy and all the rest of they tend to, to miss all that, it’s, it’s important to make that distinction.

If we are controlling investment, we control money, control investment democratically through representative democracies, then we can start to rebuild economies in a fair way, in a way that creates jobs, in a way that has an union representation on jobs. And we in this country, believe it or not, are still talking about re nationalizing the railways. The Labour Party has given in because the fringe parties like the Workers Party, which I’m in by the way, I’m a member of the British Workers Party, um, that we have got a couple of candidates. We got George Galloway into, um,Parliament and they’re worried that the fringe parties are getting more votes. the independent councillors are up, the Labour Party and Conservatives are toast. And that, let’s just have a you know, let’s rub our hands and enjoy that moment, the Conservatives toast. The Labour Party’s doing okay, not as well as I thought, they’ll probably get it to power.

But we have a chance of power broking, getting in a few Members of Parliament and having some say in the close decisions. So they’re worried about that and there are some positive things happening, Steven, you know, we can keep on pushing.

I don’t think simply educating people in economics on Twitter is necessarily the way to do it. I don’t think we should stop doing that. I don’t think we should stop doing that I think we should keep on doing it because some people are interested and if it sparks interest go off and read.. Randy Wray’s books or Stephanie’s books or whoever

and they do you learn majority they are too busy it is all a bit too difficult some of them failed their math at school and, you know, it’s all a bit too tricky. It’s like trying to teach people, um, what would be the equivalent? It’s not as complex as astrophysics or quantum mechanics. Let’s not, you know, let’s not elevate it to that level, But it’s at least as complex as, uh, as, as engineering, motor engineering, you know, so it’s, it’s fairly complicated.

It’s, it’s not something that’s an easy sell. and I will say something quite controversial here. I don’t think the job guarantee is an easy sell. I agree that you know, [Pavlina] Tchernova, uh, uh, Tcherneva, sorry, um, uh, very good book about it. It, it does all what says on the tin, it will automatically stabilize wages, stabilize prices and effective demand, and all the rest of it give people a job.

It will be sort of spatial Keynesianism in the sense that it can help to, um, to, to regenerate some of the theories made derelict by de-industrialization.De-industrialization was the crime of the 20th century, the real, the real crime century. It can do all that, but it’s a very hard sell, especially in this country, because it seems like you’re sort of it’s calling people rejects who have been put on a government program, who can’t get a proper job. English workers are very proud people. Very, very, proud. We have huge pride. We made the world’s greatest ships with our inventions, we invented the steam engine for God’s sake, you know.

We have huge pride in our engineering tradition in our work, and we don’t want to be seen as sort of government workers in yellow jackets with, you know, with JG stamped on the back, you know, go around. Singing songs in old folks homes and serving soup in the streets, you know, that we want that people they want a proper job.

So my advice to MMT people is that’s a good idea, but it’s not a great sell. It’s not going to attract people in. Promising proper jobs, industry jobs, public services, direct labor forces.

To doing that sort of thing where people can get proper jobs, proper wages, job security. That’s the way forward. So our identities as workers are still there. We don’t stand outside shipyards gates in crowds of 2000 anymore. You can find the working class in cafes restaurants and all sorts of little places.

It’s all atomized. Britain is a service economy and America is quite happy to keep Britain as a service economy because that’s one competitor out of the way.

[01:03:28] Steven Grumbine: Indeed, I want to break in on that momentarily before we close out. I just want to say this, you know, I think that one of the biggest mistakes that not just activists make, but people that are just kind of stumbling onto the job guarantee is they try and make it more than it is. Okay. And, you know, I hear some trying to sell it as a green jobs program and we’ll have, you can have a green jobs program at more than a living wage at a professional wage at a gilded wage, whatever. But problem is they try to take what is considered to be the base, which is the job guarantee, which is the employer of last resort. We’re talking about providing work as opposed to like, for example, in the US if you’re released from prison, you’re not going to find a job, but yeah, a condition of your release is to have a job. So we have recidivism where people end up back in jail because of this.

So in America, in the US I should say, we need something like this to prevent this nonstop revolving door in and out of the prison system based on really, really pathetic ideas. But the reason why it’s there the way it is is because people are trying to sell it as career work and Warren Mosler, I don’t agree with his political angles on some things, but from a perspective of economics, he’s talking about the job guarantee as the transition job going from here to there.

[01:04:55] Steve Hall: Sure, sure. But if it’s a transition, why sell it? Why put it at the foreground let’s just, keep it in the background. What we should be doing is is trying to sell the ideas that we, as Bill Mitchell argues, if we take over the means of production of money and we can invest, we can create proper jobs before we need a job guarantee.

[01:05:12] Steven Grumbine: heck yes.

Agreed.

[01:05:14] Steve Hall: And that’s what we should be leading with. I mean, we shouldn’t be ditching the job guarantee, but to lead with it, if that is your jab in the ring, it’s not a very good jab. It’s not Larry Holmes jab, that one. I agree with you, we need to take the job guarantee down a peg or two and be a little bit quieter about it and talk about investment, talk about real jobs, talk about control, talk about onshoring of industry, you know, I don’t want to do that too much upset China, of course, But we need progressive, high productivity. We need to move into the fourth industrial revolution, and a green transition.

We know it’s going to happen. We know there are massive problems with lithium mining and the conditions that we know that, but that’s, that’s the same for everything. Same copper is the same. So we know we’re moving it. We’re moving ahead. We need to move America and Britain and Europe ahead. We need to help the developing world. We need good relationships with the BRICS economies, because the BRICS economies are going to become powerful whether we like it or not.

[01:06:09] Steven Grumbine: I am about cooperation, but I will just say from my vantage point, and this is, uh, kind of my final word before I ask you for your final word, you know, a lot of the policy space, it, it, it doesn’t take into consideration that I can’t just go to the voting booth and vote my way to what I want. And this is, I think it abrogates a lot of the responsibility of us to participate in and and rising up and saying, I won’t take this anymore and we’ve become complacent. And when we don’t get our way with that little sticker, we put on our forehead that said, I voted, we just go. Oh, well, and, and quite frankly, we have stopped doing the things, like we’ve stopped really organizing.

We’ve stopped coming together as a people and, and saying what we want, what we demand and making it so. And because of that lack of imagination and that lack of fortitude, all that stuff you had said about, we need these things. Well, we may need them, but we’re at the mercy of the capitalist class based on the way the system works to, to agree with us.

They’ve got to do it or it doesn’t happen because we don’t have that. And we have to accept that in this class war, we have to actually be prepared to fight. And I don’t see that fighting spirit. I see a weeping, uh, you know, a,knee bend to fake electoralism. and, and, you know, and basically just going along to get along.

Kind of like 1984 where it’s just like, Oh, well, I don’t want to rock the boat. So I’m just going to keep my head on and not commit a thought crime. I’m just going to keep walking forward. And I think we need to begin to think about having some thought crime, maybe, maybe think about breaking the mold, maybe, maybe doing something other than just going to the ballot box and thinking I’m going to change society by hitting this button.

[01:08:12] Steve Hall: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I totally agree with you. Um, um, the opposite of that, of course, is to grow from the grassroots. I have no faith in that either. I don’t think there are any grassroots. I think we’re living on scorched earth in terms of politics.

[01:08:26] Steven Grumbine: Amen.

[01:08:27] Steve Hall: You know, so let’s forget all about that. What we do have Um, are some very pissed off people, uh, in Europe, don’t forget they can be persuaded to go to the far right as well to put the, you know, the gilets jaunes, the Canadian truckers, uh, or this sort of demonized as, as, uh, examples of popular, uh, populist uprisings.

Let’s stop demonizing people and calling them populists as a pejorative that term, and let’s just think of them as working people. There are fringe parties We need unification of fringe parties. We need to be talking economics to the fringe parties, just persuading them that there are ways in which we can reboot our economies.

We need to be educating the fringe politicians. Got a lot of politicians don’t really have time to become economically literate. We, we need to be, we need to be preparing policies when we need to be accumulating knowledge, collating it and putting it into, um, and let me say this, you know, into comprehensible books and pamphlets so that people can understand it. That’s the main thing.

It just goes too highfalutin. And there’s too much preachiness and lecturing going on about, you know, in the heterodox economics. We need to talk to people simply so that they understand what’s happening. And be prepared for an event. Nobody can predict history. I think there are about a dozen economists who predicted the great financial crisis [GFC]. Nobody knows when the next one’s going to come. Nobody predicted Putin’s invasion. We can’t predict history. Events will happen. Things will happen. We, we don’t know what, but we have to be prepared with the right policies, with the right organized political parties.

This means as much unification as we can of, uh, you know, amongst the left,

you know, the old joke, you know, you don’t know a leftist party until it’s had its first split. We need to stop,

[01:10:24] Steven Grumbine: Ha, ha, ha.

[01:10:25] Steve Hall: you know, we, we need to stop bickering about cultural issues. And we need to try to get black people, Asian people, white people together to, to, to recognize their shared interests in the economy.

And we, can we combat competitive individualism right now? Can we persuade people to be socialist? Of course we can’t. But an event will happen, or a series of events will happen, where people will say to themselves, This is dead. This has, this has now died. This has collapsed. And we must, this has happened in history.

Look at the collapse of the Bronze Age, 1100 BC.Don’t get me talking about that because I’m writing a book about that at the moment. Don’t get me, I’m just having at least another two programs worth out of me. And if you think economics is incomprehensible, wait, til you hear all this stuff. But it has happened periodically in history.

History changes, things just collapse. I mean, Michael Hudson’s work on the collapse of [the ancient world] that, I don’t know if you’ve had him on talking about that, but it’d be great to get him in to talk about the collapse of the ancient world, into debt crisis, and all the rest of it. He’s written a book called The Collapse of Antiquity, which I’ve got a lot of time for.

So things will happen, Steve, and we have to be prepared. And we have to have as many people as we can prepared. We have to get them on side. I’m not sure talking about the economic models and job guarantees is the way to do that. We have to get them on side. We have to try and to promote as much understanding as we possibly can and get through the fringe, politicians, some fringe parties are starting to win elections in this country.

So people are realizing that the uniparty, as we call it over here, you know, you’ve called the Dems and Two cheeks of the same backside, as George Galloway calls them. Uh, the, the uniparty is, is, is, people are losing faith in it. Voting, the, voting in the council elections over here was about 29%.

People are fed up with it, and they’re getting fed up with the austerity, the pressure, the traffic jams, everything. They’re just getting, generally, more and more pissed off. And then an event comes, forces austerity on them, And, you know, then at that point, we have to be ready to get out on the streets and start persuading people that there’s another way.

[01:12:36] Steven Grumbine: I love it. All right. Well, listen, Steve, it was very nice to have you on. Actually. It’s been a long time. I, you know, we’re obviously in the same circles. It’s nice to finally get to talk to you. Tell folks where they can find more of your work.

[01:12:50] Steve Hall: I’m not working at the moment. I’m retired. Um, but, um, if you want to read some of this stuff and bore yourself to death, you know, buy one of our long, boring books. Um, The Death of the Left, I think, is the most recent where we outline all of this. And in the final chapter, um, chapter, I don’t know how many chapters are in the flipping book, uh, chapter 10, we outline the economic way forward, uh, that we can present to people when the time comes. So, you know, please read The Death of the Left. Don’t forget it’s the death of the left. Long live the left. You know, the way we see in this country, the King is dead. Long live the King.

This old left is the, it’s the new left. They are the new left of post structuralism and counterculture. It’s all dead. It’s finished. We have to start building the left again from the bottom, from people’s basic social needs, and they need to be, they need to live in a society together. So read the book.

That’s where you’ll find, um, the thoughts of Chairman Steve in, um, in, in graphic detail. And, um, I hope you, I hope you get something from it, but let’s not give up. Let’s just keep going.

[01:13:57] Steven Grumbine: Amen. All right, folks. My name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese with my guest, Steve Hall. We are out of here.