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Episode 24 – Reclaiming Europe: A Story of Monetary Sovereignty with Thomas Fazi
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Steve is joined by Thomas Fazi, co-author of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World.
Fazi believes there’s an undeniable connection between the historic defeat of the left over the past thirty years and the dissolving of national sovereign power as we’ve transferred the tools of economic policy to supranational organizations which are outside the control of citizens.
The first part of the 20th century saw the gradual integration of the masses into the democratic processes of western political systems. This posed a great threat to capital, auguring the possibility of its power being curtailed.
Universal suffrage had been hard won in these nations, so the neoliberal solution was to hollow out the power of the ballot box. Formal political rights could be kept in place but by separating the mechanisms for democratic policy making from economic policy, they were able to render worthless traditional means of affecting change.
The Eurozone is the most extreme example, but other western democracies were similarly disemboweled through the shifting role of so-called independent central banks as well as bilateral and multilateral trade treaties which increasingly prohibit progressive government intervention in the economy.
Fazi maintains there is nothing free about the free market, which continues to need state intervention in the economy to forward the interests of capital, which could still make it vulnerable to mass democracy. He believes the left should acknowledge that our political, economic and social rights were all won within the context of the nation-state. And that is where power must be reclaimed.
www.plutobooks.com/9780745337326/r…ming-the-state/
Follow Thomas Fazi on Twitter @battleforeurope and Facebook www.facebook.com/thomasfazi
Macro N Cheese – Episode 24
Reclaiming Europe: A Story of Monetary Sovereignty with Thomas Fazi
July 13, 2019
Thomas Fazi [intro/music] (00:02):
We have countries such as ones of the Eurozone where people enjoy full political rights – that everyone has the right to vote – but that is completely pointless because whichever government the people vote for that government will find itself essentially deprived of all the basic tools of policy making.
Thomas Fazi [intro/music] (00:20):
Monetary unions between heterogeneous economies don’t promote convergence, they promote divergence. People, I would say, and we have a much better understanding of the workings of the system, than lots of the intellectuals who are pretty clueless.
Geoff Ginter ([intro/music] 01:26):
Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
Steve Grumbine (01:34):
Yes, this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. This week, we have a phenomenal guest. I’m very excited to bring on Thomas Fazi. Thomas is a writer and journalist. He was also the co-author of “Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World.” He co-authored that with our friend, Bill Mitchell.
He is also a former documentary filmmaker and an award winning one at that, which he co-directed Standing Army in 2010. With that I want to bring on my guest, Tom Fazi. Tom, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.
Thomas Fazi (02:12):
Hey guys, thanks for having me.
Steve Grumbine (02:15):
Absolutely. So this has been quite a journey here. I’ve been reading your work and most poignantly the book you co-authored with Bill Mitchell, “Reclaiming the State,” this is just an incredible book. It’s almost like a, dare I use the word, Bible for Progressives who really want to understand how to reclaim the state. It really breaks down neoliberalism and how it all came to be. Can you tell us a little bit about the book?
Thomas Fazi (02:44):
Right. So I’ve known Bill for quite some time now, and a few years back, he invited me over to Australia and he said, “Why don’t you come over? And we can do some work together.” We weren’t talking or thinking about writing a book at the time, just doing some research and writing up some stuff on, mostly on the Euro crisis, which both of us had written a lot about over the years.
And I’ve been wanting to do an experience abroad for some time. So I said, yeah. So I went down to Newcastle where Bill lives in Australia in New South Wales. And basically over many coffee sessions, of course you know, we got talking about a bunch of stuff and a topic we currently kept returning to was the sorry state of the left, especially in Europe, but not just in Europe and the reasons for historical defeat of the socialist left in Europe, and it’s almost the disappearance from the scene, not just the sort of third way, social democratic left, which, you know, won’t be missed if it — once it died — that disappeared once and for all, but the traditional labor and socialist left, which has also been hammered in, you know, elections year after year, especially in the past 10 years, especially since the crisis.
And so we got talking about that and just, yeah, one coffee at a time, we started sketching out this book and yeah, one issue we kept returning to was sovereignty, national sovereignty. The importance that historically that the notion of national sovereignty had had for the socialist left in sort of the postwar years, so 30 years following the second world war, where the left has really put the defense of national sovereignty at [indudible] forefront of its politics.
And how this beginning in the seventies had radically changed and how essentially over time, the left had essentially switched over to globalism, to anti-sovereignism and had essentially relinquished, all but relinquished, the battle for sovereignty, the defense of sovereignty. They have completely forgotten what it has known, and that is national sovereignty remains the most important locus for democratic, or for, what I would say, the only locusts, for democratic organizing and democratic action, and essentially allowed the globalists to take over, in fact, became globalist itself.
And over the years actively not passively, but actively supported the transfer of national prerogatives, national tools of especially economic policy making to the supernational and international organizations, the European Union, obviously being the most clear example of that – and how this had disastrous consequences in economic and social terms.
And of course in political terms as well because that meant that one bit at a time citizens were taken, were deprived of the necessary tools to essentially be able to influence economic policy. Once you transfer all the essential elements in economic policy outside of the realm of the nation state, and you shed those tools to international or even worse supranational organizations, which are outside of the control of citizens, which citizens have little or no means with which to influence, yes what we’ve witnessed has been slow, but steady, and over the years, increasingly dramatic erosion of democracy.
This has happened, I would say all over the West, including in the US and this has happened through various mechanisms. So the creation of formerly independent central banks, sort of formal separation between monetary policy and the treasury and government, even though we know that’s never a true independence, but it still proved to be powerful in political terms to disempower democratic policymaking.
It also includes for example, the signing of bilateral and multilateral trade treaties, which increasingly prohibit government intervention in the economy, especially internationally the progressive kind, the liberalization of capital flows. These are all things that slowly but surely have progressively eroded the ability of citizens to influence economic policy through the ballot box.
And of course, this was brought to its most extreme consequences, this logic in Europe, ironically Europe being the kind of cradle of democracy and of popular sovereignty, through the creation of the European Union and especially the Eurozone where what can be considered the essential plank of sovereignty of economic sovereignty, which has the ability to issue currency, the monopoly of the currency was relinquished to a supernational central bank, which is of course the European Central Bank.
And the consequence of that is that today there’s in the Eurozone especially have practically no means of influencing economic policy through elections. So what we’ve seen has been the achievement of what has been the longstanding goal of the neoliberal globalists, of the neoliberal globalists project, which was conceived, or I would say, perfected in the early 20th century in the twenties and thirties, especially by leading neoliberal theorists like Hayek and von Mises, people of this kind.
What they, I would say very intelligently understood was that the gradual integration of the masses and mass democracy into the political systems, into Western political systems posed the great threat to capital because for the first time capital saw the possibility of it being wiped out or at the very best seriously, or very least to see its powers seriously curtailed by means of democratic policymaking.
So they saw a real threat, I would say correctly, there’s a real threat for capitalism, at least for the kind of free market extreme neoliberal capitalism that they supported. And of course they realized that the solution couldn’t be to take away the voting rights, which had been hard won by people in West, through centuries of struggles.
They couldn’t impose dictatorships sort of all over the West as they did in a lot of developing countries or not them personally, but as the neoliberals have done throughout the 20th century in a number of developing countries, but they realized that wouldn’t fly very well in the West to taking away universal coverage, wasn’t a feasible solution.
And so what they envisioned was a way of keeping in place formal political rights, voting rights, but at the same time, essentially separating that the mechanisms of the democratic policymaking from macroeconomic policy essentially, and they conceived various ways of doing this. One way that they forced all was that of creating international supernational power, constitutional, legal arrangements that would severely limit the ability of individual states to decide that sort of economic policy they wanted to follow because they would be straight jacketed within these international, supernational, legal arrangements, while at the same time, of course, you know, allowing people to vote for whoever they wanted to; but of course that became less and less of a problem once you start to progressively reduce the scope of what individual governments can do.
And another way of course was to . . . instrument they foresaw was to essentially internationalize the state. And so transfer national tools of policy making, as I said, to international, supernational organizations that was, of course, bound to prove even more effective because it essentially meant that nation states would find themselves lacking basic tools to implement economic policy, especially of the kind of progressive redistributive kind, which they were very hostile to, of course.
And so, yes, this has been, I would say, a century long project which has essentially been pretty successful, I would say, and has been brought to completion. So today we have countries such as ones in the Eurozone where people enjoy full political rights that everyone has a right to vote, but that is completely pointless because whichever government the people vote for, that government will find itself essentially deprived of all the basic essential tools of policy making.
So this is a situation which we are now, it’s profoundly, I wouldn’t even say post-democratic, I mean, it’s a-democratic, there’s really nothing democratic about the Eurozone. And I would say, what has unfolded in Europe over the past 10 years proves that beyond a shadow of doubt. We saw what happened in Greece when the Greeks dared to vote going onto [inaudible] government, but we’ve seen similar forms of financial blackmail being implemented in Italy, both in 2011 and even more recently, including, you know, as I speak and elsewhere as well.
I think this really reminds us of what Wynne Godley warned about in 1992, when even the UK was debating whether to enter the UK, sorry, the Eurozone or not. And I think Wynne Godley in that instance wrote what I consider to be one of the best articles ever written about the euro, very short article that he published in the London Review of Books called “Maastricht and All That,” if I’m not mistaken and he essentially talks about many, many reasons why the UK should not join the Eurozone, but he focuses on one essential aspect.
And that is in his own words: “that a country that loses or gives up the power to issue one’s own currency essentially reduces itself to the status of a colony or region within a nation state.” Meaning that yes, it’ll, you know, it can make minor choices with regards to, I don’t know, education or whatever, or individual rights and so on. But when it comes to economic policy, it will find itself practically deprived of all the essential tools of policy making, much like a colony or region.
So, I think history has definitely proved him right on that point. And just one final point, I would like to add on this is that all this happened, it wasn’t a result of what we today call globalization or globalism or whatever; it wasn’t the result of kind of the inner workings of capitalism. There’s nothing inevitable about it.
And it certainly wasn’t something that was imposed upon national elites. In fact, it was something that was actively pursued by national elites. And I think the way to understand this is by internationalizing the state and even by dis-empowering national sovereignty, you’re not necessarily making the state itself weaker.
In fact, in many respects, the state, the executive branch of the state becomes even more powerful because it becomes even less accountable to the electorate, the citizens. So, yeah, who really lost out were the citizens. What really lost out was democracy, but this is a project that was implemented by the nation states themselves.
They realized that by appearing weaker, especially vis-a-vis their own electorate, they could in fact become stronger because they would be able to implement anti-social, neoliberal economic policies that would have otherwise been strongly resisted by the citizens if the individual governments had been responsible and accountable for those decisions by saying, “Look, this is not our choice.
This is something we have to do to appease the European Central Bank or the European Commission or the WTO,” or you name it. So by displacing the responsibility for these policies upon external institutions and factors, they were able to sort of implement and push through the neoliberal transition much more effectively than they would have been able to otherwise.
So I think this is an important point. Of course now, in a way, even national elites themselves, I think are slowly realizing the kind of Faustian pack that they signed by relinquishing sort of what are the essential planks of economic policy, because now even those elites themselves . . . Italy is a great case in point.
We saw what happened to the former government, which was led by the kind of neoliberal center left Democratic Party whose members were among the most enthusiastic supporters of European integration back in the nineties, even they found then realized that they essentially lacked the basic tools necessary to maintain consensus in a democracy.
And so we saw Democratic Party leaders scramble and beg the European Commission for some so-called fiscal flexibility, just so they could implement some mildly timidly expansionary policies to kind of win back the support of the electorate. Of course, as we now know, that was too little too late. And in fact they were completely hammered at the last elections, but I think this is what I’ve called the revenge of depoliticization in a way, which is now coming back to a haunt even those national elites that sponsored depoliticization in the first place.
Steve Grumbine (16:52):
So for people that are, you know, not necessarily familiar with all the intricacies of the Eurozone, the EU, the machinations of the Euro, the Troika, and all the other buzz words that we hear within the news and so forth. Some of the things that jump out are obviously the austerity forced on Greece, which you mentioned, and also the Brexit situation with the UK who did retain their monetary sovereignty with the pound Sterling.
I guess my question to you is can you explain the give and take? It appears to the outside that these states, these members states within the European Union, the Euro-using countries, are similar to state, or as you call it, colonies, but the states in the United States who have lacked monetary sovereignty, who are dependent on the federal government, what is the relationship, if you will, to the importer or exporter nations?
You look and you see Germany who is robust and a huge producer, and they seem to run the whole area with an iron fist. And then you go down to Greece who is basically a net importer without monetary sovereignty to offset that; nd they’re in a perpetual, you know, lose, lose – it appears like. Can you talk about the structure maybe a little bit, and those two key things in Brexit and Greece?
Thomas Fazi (18:30):
Right? That’s a lot of stuff there. Um . . .
Steve Grumbine (18:33):
Yes, it is.
Thomas Fazi (18:35):
Yeah. Well, I think being passive in the US helps us to understand why the European Union and Eurozone especially is so different from the US and from any other federation in the world, really. We’ve known since ever, I would say, or for a very long time, that essentially monetary unions between different heterogeneous economies don’t promote convergence, they promote divergence.
So we’ve known this for a very long time. This has led to a number of theories, including so-called Optimum Currency Area Theory by Robert Mundell and a number of other theories. And what they all agree upon is that monetary unions essentially promote diversions. So they tend to favor the strongest economies with the most developed economies and sort of more export-led economies; and they tend to hinder the weaker economies, the ones that historically have had a higher inflation rate and so on.
And the only way to compensate for the divergence created by monetary unions is to have essentially national forms of fiscal transfers to offset the negative consequences of monetary union. And so if you look at the US for example, you’ve got individual states that are doing a comparison with the Eurozone that are exporting states, and they’re also states that are perennially being selfless, meaning that they send more money to the federal government than they receive from the federal government.
And then you’ve got states that experience perennial trade deficit and perennially in deficit, vis-a-vis the federal state, meaning that they receive more money from the national government than they send back, and this compensates for the negative consequences of having a single currency. And this is the same, pretty much in all federations – Australia, UK and even most nation states, which were created from the aggregation of previous regions.
Italy, for example, what is now Italy, was a geographical space where there were dozens, in fact, hundreds of currencies, which were all eliminated, formed that one single currency once Italy was created. And so, yeah, so that’s really the only way – that’s how monetary unions work – by having forms of fiscal solidarity or fiscal transfers between state or regions and also between state and regions and the federal government.
This of course, is what has always been lacking in the Eurozone where nation states have been deprived. Their currencies have been deprived – the monetary policy – by being deprived of monetary policy, they were also effectively, defacto, the private boards for fiscal policy because it’s intimately connected, but at the same time, no forms of fiscal transfers at the federal level were created.
And so this goes very far in explaining the mess that the Eurozone is currently into and why some nations have hugely benefited from the Eurozone, especially the traditionally export oriented nations, such as Germany, and more in general, the larger sort of former Deutsche Mark block of central Northern Europe, they’ve benefited from essentially an artificially low exchange rate, which has allowed them to accrue trade surpluses that they never would have been able to accrue with their own currency because they would have seen their own currency appreciate as a result of their trade surpluses, which in turn would have caused a reduction in surplus.
And while at the same time, you’ve got the countries, especially the countries of the Mediterranean, which traditionally have been much more dependent on internal demand and much less export oriented, and which have traditionally been characterized by higher inflation rates than Germany, why they’ve lost out and why they’ve been characterized by essentially relatively high levels of unemployment, gradual de-industrialization, destruction of their industrial base and so on with nothing really to compensate for that at the federal level.
For a while, private capital compensated for it. So, you know, in a way, the accumulation of this growing divergences between countries what kind of masked by private capital, led to booms in a number of countries,
Intermission (23:09):
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Steve Grumbine (23:59):
So, as far as the news, we’ve seen so much about Brexit and it’s been convoluted because people that are of the exit persuasion have typically been lumped in as right wing nationalists and the economic underpinnings of the why behind that has been lost in sort of the social engineering kind of mindset.
But in reality, there is a perfectly valid macroeconomic side to this as well that maybe is a secondary or maybe a primary reason why Brexit makes so much sense. Can you lay out the understanding of what Brexit is and what the actual story behind that is?
Thomas Fazi (24:48):
Right. So I think Brexi should be framed within a wider trend that we are witnessing all over the West and especially in Europe, but not only in Europe; and that is a growing demand for what you could call re -politicization. So as a result of this 20, 30 year-long strategy of de-politicization of governments, essentially, I was, one in governance, I would say national elites, national oligarchies relinquishing, whether for real, or just in words, relinquishing powers to international and supernational organizations essentially to better control their populations.
As I said, has led to a deep, serious hollowing out of democracy, of popular sovereignty. And people are realizing that. People have realized what, or increasingly realizing that they’ve, or maybe they just have a gut feeling that they’ve lost control over their lives. That’s it basically. They’ve lost control, or they feel to have no control over the economy, over their country’s politics, more specifically over their the various flows that characterize neoliberal capitalism, and that’s flows of capital, flows of trade, and also flows of people, flows of labor.
And we can maybe come back to that after. And so what this has created is a growing demand for what was encapsulated very well in the Brexit slogan “get back control,” and that is a demand for greater control. Now that was derided, especially by people on the left, this notion of people wanting to get back control.
Ha ha what a ridiculous thing to say. And I think that’s . . . you mentioned the left’s attitude towards Brexit, which has mainly been very hostile, very antagonistic to not just the parties that have sponsored Brexit, but the notion of Brexit itself. And I think that has to do with what I mentioned earlier – the globalist turn of the left, or the cosmopolitan turn of the left, speeding up over the years over the decades.
Most people on the left have come to the conclusion that either nation states have no power, that they really have lost power as a result of sort of the intrinsic workings or intrinsic dynamics of capitalism; and that it’s ridiculous to try to get that back, to turn back the clock, so to say, which is a phrase they like to use very much and that national sovereignty is a thing of the past and the best we can hope for is international or super national forms of policy making, or decision-making such as the ones represented by European Union.
Now we know that’s not true. I mentioned earlier that states remain very firmly in control of the economy, but markets and private capital absolutely need states to intervene on a permanent, regular, heavy basis in the economy. So the notion that we’ve gone from the Keynesian era when governments intervene in the economy and regulated the economy and so on to an era where the West states have supposedly retreated away from the economy, left the economy to its own workings, left the free market to its own workings, or have been forced to do that by market forces themselves is completely false.
So states continue to intervene in the economy just as much as they did in the Keynesian era, big difference is that they don’t intervene to mediate between the interests of labor and capital. They intervene almost exclusively before the interests of capital. And we have many examples of that. There’s nothing free about the free market system.
Indeed, it’s not even a free market system at all. We have heavy intervention by the state in defensive capital, in support of capital in a variety of ways. So states still play a crucial role and not understanding this, the left has essentially bought into their mainstream globalist narrative, which is that states really have lost power.
And so in a way they’ve started believing that narrative and that has caused them to make a number of strategic blunders over the years and the left attitude to Brexit and to national sovereignty in general now in this crucial moment in history, is that heady demonstration of yet another great strategic blunder.
Cause I think this demand for, for greater control over our lives is a legitimate demand. And so yes, you mentioned that the UK doesn’t have the Euro and in fact retains much more economic autonomy than countries that have the Euro, but that doesn’t mean that national elites even in the UK, haven’t resorted to de-politilization to impose policies on their people.
And so I think it’s only natural that people respond to this feeling of being dis-empowered and of wanting greater democracy by claiming greater national sovereignty, greater sovereignty. I think people on an instinctive level realize that the nation state is the only level where their voices can be heard.
And it turns out they’re right. People, I would say in a way have a much better understanding of the workings of the system, then lofty intellectuals who are pretty clueless. In fact, most people understand the notion for example, of democratizing the European Union is a joke. You know, people on an instinctive level realize that they’re never going to be able to have their voices heard at the level of the European Union in the way that their voices are heard at the national level.
And so I think this goes a long way in explaining Brexit and also in explaining the left opposition to it. And I think just to return to the left, once more, to make things worse, most people on the left haven’t only come to the conclusion that states are powerless, when in fact they’re not, they’ve also accepted the idea that there’s something intrinsically reactionary about national sovereignty itself, that the concept of national sovereignty is in itself reactionary.
And instead we should abolish borders and aim for a greater integration between countries and greater . . . and ideally, I guess, they enforce some kind of world government where we can all live happily ever after – that kind of John Lennonish vision of politics. And, of course, this to me is just as absurd as the notion that states have lost all that power.
It’s at the national level that most of the economic and social and political accomplishments that the working class has been able to accomplish over the centuries have taken place. You know, it’s . . . we haven’t . . . our political economic social rights were all one within the context of the nation state.
So of course the nation state and nationalism have done a lot of damage throughout the 20th century, and even before that, but to identify the nation state just with nationalism, just with wars, just with Xenophobia or Ethno-identitarianism or however you want to call it, I think is missing out on a big part of the story.
And that’s the part of the story where we also managed to achieve pretty much everything that we have achieved at the nation state level. And so I think I would say globalism today as an ideology and especially kind of left wing globalism is one of the greatest obstacles that we face to change because in a way it’s the idea that the change can only happen at the global level or at the very least at the regional level, if you look at the European Union.
Now that’s essentially like saying that change is impossible. Change can only happen at the global level or the regional level, change can only happen once, and X number of countries agree on doing a good thing; A it means that we’re never gonna achieve that because historically that’s not how change has happened.
And B it also gives our elites a great excuse not to do anything about the things that need to be addressed whether it’s climate change or whether it’s addressing the economic problems that countries are facing and so on, because hey, they’ve got the people on the left the saying that, “We can’t do that at the national level.
We can only do that at the global level. So, you know, let’s just hope the one day we can get all countries to agree on what to do. Until then, we’re just going to keep doing what we’ve done until now.” So in fact, it’s a very reactionary ideology and that’s not surprising considering, as I said, globalism has historically the ideology of the capitalists of the elites that have always aimed at creating a government above governments that would prove impervious to democratic change.
So I think that’s kind of where we’re at with the left more in general. And one final point with regards to Brexit is I think that a lot of people look at what has happened over the past three years since the referendum, all the confusion, all the political scandals and essentially, the mess that Brexit has become.
And they come to the conclusion, “Oh, you see, that’s proof that there is no alternative. That’s proof that a country cannot leave the European Union. Look at the UK, they’re trying to leave. They want to leave, but they’re unable to because our economies are too connected and too intertwined for one country to hope to reclaim some degree or greater degree of economic sovereignty and autonomy.”
When in fact the only reason that Brexit has been such a mess is that the British government, the Tories, which sponsored Brexit referendum in the first place, sure that the referendum would lose, sure that ‘remain’ would win, sort of as a bone to throw to popular demands, shocked by the Brexit victory for the past three years have essentially been trying to fudge Brexit.
So all the complications that we’ve seen in the UK political scene over the past few years is to allow us to get the British government, trying to fudge Brexit or to achieve what in the UK they called BRINO, Brexit in name only. So yeah, everything Theresa May has worked for has been a way for the country to formally leave the European Union while keeping in place all the rules and all the economic arrangements that keep the UK economy to a large degree shackled to EU law.
And that just harks back to what I was saying earlier. And the reason is that the EU laws, whether we’re talking of anti-state hate laws, which means that laws that prohibit or seriously hinder government support for national industries or the constitutional realization of free capital flows at EU level, or the ban on all the prohibition of public monopolies in industries and services and so on, these are all rules or legal arrangements that work just fine for British capitalists.
And they also provide a kind of reassurance that if, or they should ever win the elections, his scope of maneuver will be severely limited by these rules and arrangements. And so I think this is really the Brexit story up til now, which has been further complicated by the inability of the UK labor party to propose an alternative progressive vision of Brexit, thereby also winning back the support of large part of the British working class that voted for Brexit.
Instead, the neoliberal elements of the party have progressively and increasingly pushed Corbyn to essentially, you know, take a fairly strong and Brexit stance to the point that now we’re also seeing calls from a number of labor party voters for a second referendum, with a hope of overhauling the result of the first referendum, which I think would be a tragic choice.
And so I think this also goes quite fine explaining the crisis of the labor party, which despite the complete F up of the Tories over Brexit seems unable to recharge them when it comes to hard numbers and to popular support, especially among the working class. So, yeah, so I think this is kind of what a Brexit story is at.
Steve Grumbine (38:19):
So Thomas, I really want to thank you for the time here. This has been a really, really eyeopening interview. I appreciate all the work you’ve done. Can you just finish off with kind of letting us know how we can follow you and your work?
Thomas Fazi (38:35):
Well, I publish most of my articles on social media. So you can find me on Facebook and Twitter. I do also have a website, Thomasfazi.net, but I’m not very good at keeping it updated. So I plan on doing that. So for the time being social media is the best way to keep up. And I also want to thank you guys for this interview, it’s been a real pleasure for me, too.
And I’m also happy to say that me and Bill have started working on a new book, which will kind of be a sequel to “Reclaiming the State,” and so we’ll be posting updates about that in the following weeks and months. We hope to have that out by next year. Fingers crossed.
Steve Grumbine (39:13):
That’s exciting. That’s great.
Thomas Fazi (39:16):
Yeah. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s been a number of very interesting developments since the book came out two years ago. Yeah. A lot to say.
Steve Grumbine (39:28):
Very good. So I want to thank you once again and hopefully we can have you back on again real soon.
Thomas Fazi (39:34):
I hope so. It’ll be a pleasure.
Steve Grumbine (39:36):
Absolutely. Have a great day, man. Thanks.
Thomas Fazi (39:39):
Yeah. You, too, guys.
Ending Credits (00:01:35.280)
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Steve is joined by Thomas Fazi, co-author of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World.
Fazi believes there’s an undeniable connection between the historic defeat of the left over the past thirty years and the dissolving of national sovereign power as we’ve transferred the tools of economic policy to supranational organizations which are outside the control of citizens.
The first part of the 20th century saw the gradual integration of the masses into the democratic processes of western political systems. This posed a great threat to capital, auguring the possibility of its power being curtailed.
Universal suffrage had been hard won in these nations, so the neoliberal solution was to hollow out the power of the ballot box. Formal political rights could be kept in place but by separating the mechanisms for democratic policy making from economic policy, they were able to render worthless traditional means of affecting change.
The Eurozone is the most extreme example, but other western democracies were similarly disemboweled through the shifting role of so-called independent central banks as well as bilateral and multilateral trade treaties which increasingly prohibit progressive government intervention in the economy.
Fazi maintains there is nothing free about the free market, which continues to need state intervention in the economy to forward the interests of capital, which could still make it vulnerable to mass democracy. He believes the left should acknowledge that our political, economic and social rights were all won within the context of the nation-state. And that is where power must be reclaimed.
www.plutobooks.com/9780745337326/r…ming-the-state/
Follow Thomas Fazi on Twitter @battleforeurope and Facebook www.facebook.com/thomasfazi
Macro N Cheese – Episode 24
Reclaiming Europe: A Story of Monetary Sovereignty with Thomas Fazi
July 13, 2019
Thomas Fazi [intro/music] (00:02):
We have countries such as ones of the Eurozone where people enjoy full political rights – that everyone has the right to vote – but that is completely pointless because whichever government the people vote for that government will find itself essentially deprived of all the basic tools of policy making.
Thomas Fazi [intro/music] (00:20):
Monetary unions between heterogeneous economies don’t promote convergence, they promote divergence. People, I would say, and we have a much better understanding of the workings of the system, than lots of the intellectuals who are pretty clueless.
Geoff Ginter ([intro/music] 01:26):
Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
Steve Grumbine (01:34):
Yes, this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. This week, we have a phenomenal guest. I’m very excited to bring on Thomas Fazi. Thomas is a writer and journalist. He was also the co-author of “Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World.” He co-authored that with our friend, Bill Mitchell.
He is also a former documentary filmmaker and an award winning one at that, which he co-directed Standing Army in 2010. With that I want to bring on my guest, Tom Fazi. Tom, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.
Thomas Fazi (02:12):
Hey guys, thanks for having me.
Steve Grumbine (02:15):
Absolutely. So this has been quite a journey here. I’ve been reading your work and most poignantly the book you co-authored with Bill Mitchell, “Reclaiming the State,” this is just an incredible book. It’s almost like a, dare I use the word, Bible for Progressives who really want to understand how to reclaim the state. It really breaks down neoliberalism and how it all came to be. Can you tell us a little bit about the book?
Thomas Fazi (02:44):
Right. So I’ve known Bill for quite some time now, and a few years back, he invited me over to Australia and he said, “Why don’t you come over? And we can do some work together.” We weren’t talking or thinking about writing a book at the time, just doing some research and writing up some stuff on, mostly on the Euro crisis, which both of us had written a lot about over the years.
And I’ve been wanting to do an experience abroad for some time. So I said, yeah. So I went down to Newcastle where Bill lives in Australia in New South Wales. And basically over many coffee sessions, of course you know, we got talking about a bunch of stuff and a topic we currently kept returning to was the sorry state of the left, especially in Europe, but not just in Europe and the reasons for historical defeat of the socialist left in Europe, and it’s almost the disappearance from the scene, not just the sort of third way, social democratic left, which, you know, won’t be missed if it — once it died — that disappeared once and for all, but the traditional labor and socialist left, which has also been hammered in, you know, elections year after year, especially in the past 10 years, especially since the crisis.
And so we got talking about that and just, yeah, one coffee at a time, we started sketching out this book and yeah, one issue we kept returning to was sovereignty, national sovereignty. The importance that historically that the notion of national sovereignty had had for the socialist left in sort of the postwar years, so 30 years following the second world war, where the left has really put the defense of national sovereignty at [indudible] forefront of its politics.
And how this beginning in the seventies had radically changed and how essentially over time, the left had essentially switched over to globalism, to anti-sovereignism and had essentially relinquished, all but relinquished, the battle for sovereignty, the defense of sovereignty. They have completely forgotten what it has known, and that is national sovereignty remains the most important locus for democratic, or for, what I would say, the only locusts, for democratic organizing and democratic action, and essentially allowed the globalists to take over, in fact, became globalist itself.
And over the years actively not passively, but actively supported the transfer of national prerogatives, national tools of especially economic policy making to the supernational and international organizations, the European Union, obviously being the most clear example of that – and how this had disastrous consequences in economic and social terms.
And of course in political terms as well because that meant that one bit at a time citizens were taken, were deprived of the necessary tools to essentially be able to influence economic policy. Once you transfer all the essential elements in economic policy outside of the realm of the nation state, and you shed those tools to international or even worse supranational organizations, which are outside of the control of citizens, which citizens have little or no means with which to influence, yes what we’ve witnessed has been slow, but steady, and over the years, increasingly dramatic erosion of democracy.
This has happened, I would say all over the West, including in the US and this has happened through various mechanisms. So the creation of formerly independent central banks, sort of formal separation between monetary policy and the treasury and government, even though we know that’s never a true independence, but it still proved to be powerful in political terms to disempower democratic policymaking.
It also includes for example, the signing of bilateral and multilateral trade treaties, which increasingly prohibit government intervention in the economy, especially internationally the progressive kind, the liberalization of capital flows. These are all things that slowly but surely have progressively eroded the ability of citizens to influence economic policy through the ballot box.
And of course, this was brought to its most extreme consequences, this logic in Europe, ironically Europe being the kind of cradle of democracy and of popular sovereignty, through the creation of the European Union and especially the Eurozone where what can be considered the essential plank of sovereignty of economic sovereignty, which has the ability to issue currency, the monopoly of the currency was relinquished to a supernational central bank, which is of course the European Central Bank.
And the consequence of that is that today there’s in the Eurozone especially have practically no means of influencing economic policy through elections. So what we’ve seen has been the achievement of what has been the longstanding goal of the neoliberal globalists, of the neoliberal globalists project, which was conceived, or I would say, perfected in the early 20th century in the twenties and thirties, especially by leading neoliberal theorists like Hayek and von Mises, people of this kind.
What they, I would say very intelligently understood was that the gradual integration of the masses and mass democracy into the political systems, into Western political systems posed the great threat to capital because for the first time capital saw the possibility of it being wiped out or at the very best seriously, or very least to see its powers seriously curtailed by means of democratic policymaking.
So they saw a real threat, I would say correctly, there’s a real threat for capitalism, at least for the kind of free market extreme neoliberal capitalism that they supported. And of course they realized that the solution couldn’t be to take away the voting rights, which had been hard won by people in West, through centuries of struggles.
They couldn’t impose dictatorships sort of all over the West as they did in a lot of developing countries or not them personally, but as the neoliberals have done throughout the 20th century in a number of developing countries, but they realized that wouldn’t fly very well in the West to taking away universal coverage, wasn’t a feasible solution.
And so what they envisioned was a way of keeping in place formal political rights, voting rights, but at the same time, essentially separating that the mechanisms of the democratic policymaking from macroeconomic policy essentially, and they conceived various ways of doing this. One way that they forced all was that of creating international supernational power, constitutional, legal arrangements that would severely limit the ability of individual states to decide that sort of economic policy they wanted to follow because they would be straight jacketed within these international, supernational, legal arrangements, while at the same time, of course, you know, allowing people to vote for whoever they wanted to; but of course that became less and less of a problem once you start to progressively reduce the scope of what individual governments can do.
And another way of course was to . . . instrument they foresaw was to essentially internationalize the state. And so transfer national tools of policy making, as I said, to international, supernational organizations that was, of course, bound to prove even more effective because it essentially meant that nation states would find themselves lacking basic tools to implement economic policy, especially of the kind of progressive redistributive kind, which they were very hostile to, of course.
And so, yes, this has been, I would say, a century long project which has essentially been pretty successful, I would say, and has been brought to completion. So today we have countries such as ones in the Eurozone where people enjoy full political rights that everyone has a right to vote, but that is completely pointless because whichever government the people vote for, that government will find itself essentially deprived of all the basic essential tools of policy making.
So this is a situation which we are now, it’s profoundly, I wouldn’t even say post-democratic, I mean, it’s a-democratic, there’s really nothing democratic about the Eurozone. And I would say, what has unfolded in Europe over the past 10 years proves that beyond a shadow of doubt. We saw what happened in Greece when the Greeks dared to vote going onto [inaudible] government, but we’ve seen similar forms of financial blackmail being implemented in Italy, both in 2011 and even more recently, including, you know, as I speak and elsewhere as well.
I think this really reminds us of what Wynne Godley warned about in 1992, when even the UK was debating whether to enter the UK, sorry, the Eurozone or not. And I think Wynne Godley in that instance wrote what I consider to be one of the best articles ever written about the euro, very short article that he published in the London Review of Books called “Maastricht and All That,” if I’m not mistaken and he essentially talks about many, many reasons why the UK should not join the Eurozone, but he focuses on one essential aspect.
And that is in his own words: “that a country that loses or gives up the power to issue one’s own currency essentially reduces itself to the status of a colony or region within a nation state.” Meaning that yes, it’ll, you know, it can make minor choices with regards to, I don’t know, education or whatever, or individual rights and so on. But when it comes to economic policy, it will find itself practically deprived of all the essential tools of policy making, much like a colony or region.
So, I think history has definitely proved him right on that point. And just one final point, I would like to add on this is that all this happened, it wasn’t a result of what we today call globalization or globalism or whatever; it wasn’t the result of kind of the inner workings of capitalism. There’s nothing inevitable about it.
And it certainly wasn’t something that was imposed upon national elites. In fact, it was something that was actively pursued by national elites. And I think the way to understand this is by internationalizing the state and even by dis-empowering national sovereignty, you’re not necessarily making the state itself weaker.
In fact, in many respects, the state, the executive branch of the state becomes even more powerful because it becomes even less accountable to the electorate, the citizens. So, yeah, who really lost out were the citizens. What really lost out was democracy, but this is a project that was implemented by the nation states themselves.
They realized that by appearing weaker, especially vis-a-vis their own electorate, they could in fact become stronger because they would be able to implement anti-social, neoliberal economic policies that would have otherwise been strongly resisted by the citizens if the individual governments had been responsible and accountable for those decisions by saying, “Look, this is not our choice.
This is something we have to do to appease the European Central Bank or the European Commission or the WTO,” or you name it. So by displacing the responsibility for these policies upon external institutions and factors, they were able to sort of implement and push through the neoliberal transition much more effectively than they would have been able to otherwise.
So I think this is an important point. Of course now, in a way, even national elites themselves, I think are slowly realizing the kind of Faustian pack that they signed by relinquishing sort of what are the essential planks of economic policy, because now even those elites themselves . . . Italy is a great case in point.
We saw what happened to the former government, which was led by the kind of neoliberal center left Democratic Party whose members were among the most enthusiastic supporters of European integration back in the nineties, even they found then realized that they essentially lacked the basic tools necessary to maintain consensus in a democracy.
And so we saw Democratic Party leaders scramble and beg the European Commission for some so-called fiscal flexibility, just so they could implement some mildly timidly expansionary policies to kind of win back the support of the electorate. Of course, as we now know, that was too little too late. And in fact they were completely hammered at the last elections, but I think this is what I’ve called the revenge of depoliticization in a way, which is now coming back to a haunt even those national elites that sponsored depoliticization in the first place.
Steve Grumbine (16:52):
So for people that are, you know, not necessarily familiar with all the intricacies of the Eurozone, the EU, the machinations of the Euro, the Troika, and all the other buzz words that we hear within the news and so forth. Some of the things that jump out are obviously the austerity forced on Greece, which you mentioned, and also the Brexit situation with the UK who did retain their monetary sovereignty with the pound Sterling.
I guess my question to you is can you explain the give and take? It appears to the outside that these states, these members states within the European Union, the Euro-using countries, are similar to state, or as you call it, colonies, but the states in the United States who have lacked monetary sovereignty, who are dependent on the federal government, what is the relationship, if you will, to the importer or exporter nations?
You look and you see Germany who is robust and a huge producer, and they seem to run the whole area with an iron fist. And then you go down to Greece who is basically a net importer without monetary sovereignty to offset that; nd they’re in a perpetual, you know, lose, lose – it appears like. Can you talk about the structure maybe a little bit, and those two key things in Brexit and Greece?
Thomas Fazi (18:30):
Right? That’s a lot of stuff there. Um . . .
Steve Grumbine (18:33):
Yes, it is.
Thomas Fazi (18:35):
Yeah. Well, I think being passive in the US helps us to understand why the European Union and Eurozone especially is so different from the US and from any other federation in the world, really. We’ve known since ever, I would say, or for a very long time, that essentially monetary unions between different heterogeneous economies don’t promote convergence, they promote divergence.
So we’ve known this for a very long time. This has led to a number of theories, including so-called Optimum Currency Area Theory by Robert Mundell and a number of other theories. And what they all agree upon is that monetary unions essentially promote diversions. So they tend to favor the strongest economies with the most developed economies and sort of more export-led economies; and they tend to hinder the weaker economies, the ones that historically have had a higher inflation rate and so on.
And the only way to compensate for the divergence created by monetary unions is to have essentially national forms of fiscal transfers to offset the negative consequences of monetary union. And so if you look at the US for example, you’ve got individual states that are doing a comparison with the Eurozone that are exporting states, and they’re also states that are perennially being selfless, meaning that they send more money to the federal government than they receive from the federal government.
And then you’ve got states that experience perennial trade deficit and perennially in deficit, vis-a-vis the federal state, meaning that they receive more money from the national government than they send back, and this compensates for the negative consequences of having a single currency. And this is the same, pretty much in all federations – Australia, UK and even most nation states, which were created from the aggregation of previous regions.
Italy, for example, what is now Italy, was a geographical space where there were dozens, in fact, hundreds of currencies, which were all eliminated, formed that one single currency once Italy was created. And so, yeah, so that’s really the only way – that’s how monetary unions work – by having forms of fiscal solidarity or fiscal transfers between state or regions and also between state and regions and the federal government.
This of course, is what has always been lacking in the Eurozone where nation states have been deprived. Their currencies have been deprived – the monetary policy – by being deprived of monetary policy, they were also effectively, defacto, the private boards for fiscal policy because it’s intimately connected, but at the same time, no forms of fiscal transfers at the federal level were created.
And so this goes very far in explaining the mess that the Eurozone is currently into and why some nations have hugely benefited from the Eurozone, especially the traditionally export oriented nations, such as Germany, and more in general, the larger sort of former Deutsche Mark block of central Northern Europe, they’ve benefited from essentially an artificially low exchange rate, which has allowed them to accrue trade surpluses that they never would have been able to accrue with their own currency because they would have seen their own currency appreciate as a result of their trade surpluses, which in turn would have caused a reduction in surplus.
And while at the same time, you’ve got the countries, especially the countries of the Mediterranean, which traditionally have been much more dependent on internal demand and much less export oriented, and which have traditionally been characterized by higher inflation rates than Germany, why they’ve lost out and why they’ve been characterized by essentially relatively high levels of unemployment, gradual de-industrialization, destruction of their industrial base and so on with nothing really to compensate for that at the federal level.
For a while, private capital compensated for it. So, you know, in a way, the accumulation of this growing divergences between countries what kind of masked by private capital, led to booms in a number of countries,
Intermission (23:09):
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Steve Grumbine (23:59):
So, as far as the news, we’ve seen so much about Brexit and it’s been convoluted because people that are of the exit persuasion have typically been lumped in as right wing nationalists and the economic underpinnings of the why behind that has been lost in sort of the social engineering kind of mindset.
But in reality, there is a perfectly valid macroeconomic side to this as well that maybe is a secondary or maybe a primary reason why Brexit makes so much sense. Can you lay out the understanding of what Brexit is and what the actual story behind that is?
Thomas Fazi (24:48):
Right. So I think Brexi should be framed within a wider trend that we are witnessing all over the West and especially in Europe, but not only in Europe; and that is a growing demand for what you could call re -politicization. So as a result of this 20, 30 year-long strategy of de-politicization of governments, essentially, I was, one in governance, I would say national elites, national oligarchies relinquishing, whether for real, or just in words, relinquishing powers to international and supernational organizations essentially to better control their populations.
As I said, has led to a deep, serious hollowing out of democracy, of popular sovereignty. And people are realizing that. People have realized what, or increasingly realizing that they’ve, or maybe they just have a gut feeling that they’ve lost control over their lives. That’s it basically. They’ve lost control, or they feel to have no control over the economy, over their country’s politics, more specifically over their the various flows that characterize neoliberal capitalism, and that’s flows of capital, flows of trade, and also flows of people, flows of labor.
And we can maybe come back to that after. And so what this has created is a growing demand for what was encapsulated very well in the Brexit slogan “get back control,” and that is a demand for greater control. Now that was derided, especially by people on the left, this notion of people wanting to get back control.
Ha ha what a ridiculous thing to say. And I think that’s . . . you mentioned the left’s attitude towards Brexit, which has mainly been very hostile, very antagonistic to not just the parties that have sponsored Brexit, but the notion of Brexit itself. And I think that has to do with what I mentioned earlier – the globalist turn of the left, or the cosmopolitan turn of the left, speeding up over the years over the decades.
Most people on the left have come to the conclusion that either nation states have no power, that they really have lost power as a result of sort of the intrinsic workings or intrinsic dynamics of capitalism; and that it’s ridiculous to try to get that back, to turn back the clock, so to say, which is a phrase they like to use very much and that national sovereignty is a thing of the past and the best we can hope for is international or super national forms of policy making, or decision-making such as the ones represented by European Union.
Now we know that’s not true. I mentioned earlier that states remain very firmly in control of the economy, but markets and private capital absolutely need states to intervene on a permanent, regular, heavy basis in the economy. So the notion that we’ve gone from the Keynesian era when governments intervene in the economy and regulated the economy and so on to an era where the West states have supposedly retreated away from the economy, left the economy to its own workings, left the free market to its own workings, or have been forced to do that by market forces themselves is completely false.
So states continue to intervene in the economy just as much as they did in the Keynesian era, big difference is that they don’t intervene to mediate between the interests of labor and capital. They intervene almost exclusively before the interests of capital. And we have many examples of that. There’s nothing free about the free market system.
Indeed, it’s not even a free market system at all. We have heavy intervention by the state in defensive capital, in support of capital in a variety of ways. So states still play a crucial role and not understanding this, the left has essentially bought into their mainstream globalist narrative, which is that states really have lost power.
And so in a way they’ve started believing that narrative and that has caused them to make a number of strategic blunders over the years and the left attitude to Brexit and to national sovereignty in general now in this crucial moment in history, is that heady demonstration of yet another great strategic blunder.
Cause I think this demand for, for greater control over our lives is a legitimate demand. And so yes, you mentioned that the UK doesn’t have the Euro and in fact retains much more economic autonomy than countries that have the Euro, but that doesn’t mean that national elites even in the UK, haven’t resorted to de-politilization to impose policies on their people.
And so I think it’s only natural that people respond to this feeling of being dis-empowered and of wanting greater democracy by claiming greater national sovereignty, greater sovereignty. I think people on an instinctive level realize that the nation state is the only level where their voices can be heard.
And it turns out they’re right. People, I would say in a way have a much better understanding of the workings of the system, then lofty intellectuals who are pretty clueless. In fact, most people understand the notion for example, of democratizing the European Union is a joke. You know, people on an instinctive level realize that they’re never going to be able to have their voices heard at the level of the European Union in the way that their voices are heard at the national level.
And so I think this goes a long way in explaining Brexit and also in explaining the left opposition to it. And I think just to return to the left, once more, to make things worse, most people on the left haven’t only come to the conclusion that states are powerless, when in fact they’re not, they’ve also accepted the idea that there’s something intrinsically reactionary about national sovereignty itself, that the concept of national sovereignty is in itself reactionary.
And instead we should abolish borders and aim for a greater integration between countries and greater . . . and ideally, I guess, they enforce some kind of world government where we can all live happily ever after – that kind of John Lennonish vision of politics. And, of course, this to me is just as absurd as the notion that states have lost all that power.
It’s at the national level that most of the economic and social and political accomplishments that the working class has been able to accomplish over the centuries have taken place. You know, it’s . . . we haven’t . . . our political economic social rights were all one within the context of the nation state.
So of course the nation state and nationalism have done a lot of damage throughout the 20th century, and even before that, but to identify the nation state just with nationalism, just with wars, just with Xenophobia or Ethno-identitarianism or however you want to call it, I think is missing out on a big part of the story.
And that’s the part of the story where we also managed to achieve pretty much everything that we have achieved at the nation state level. And so I think I would say globalism today as an ideology and especially kind of left wing globalism is one of the greatest obstacles that we face to change because in a way it’s the idea that the change can only happen at the global level or at the very least at the regional level, if you look at the European Union.
Now that’s essentially like saying that change is impossible. Change can only happen at the global level or the regional level, change can only happen once, and X number of countries agree on doing a good thing; A it means that we’re never gonna achieve that because historically that’s not how change has happened.
And B it also gives our elites a great excuse not to do anything about the things that need to be addressed whether it’s climate change or whether it’s addressing the economic problems that countries are facing and so on, because hey, they’ve got the people on the left the saying that, “We can’t do that at the national level.
We can only do that at the global level. So, you know, let’s just hope the one day we can get all countries to agree on what to do. Until then, we’re just going to keep doing what we’ve done until now.” So in fact, it’s a very reactionary ideology and that’s not surprising considering, as I said, globalism has historically the ideology of the capitalists of the elites that have always aimed at creating a government above governments that would prove impervious to democratic change.
So I think that’s kind of where we’re at with the left more in general. And one final point with regards to Brexit is I think that a lot of people look at what has happened over the past three years since the referendum, all the confusion, all the political scandals and essentially, the mess that Brexit has become.
And they come to the conclusion, “Oh, you see, that’s proof that there is no alternative. That’s proof that a country cannot leave the European Union. Look at the UK, they’re trying to leave. They want to leave, but they’re unable to because our economies are too connected and too intertwined for one country to hope to reclaim some degree or greater degree of economic sovereignty and autonomy.”
When in fact the only reason that Brexit has been such a mess is that the British government, the Tories, which sponsored Brexit referendum in the first place, sure that the referendum would lose, sure that ‘remain’ would win, sort of as a bone to throw to popular demands, shocked by the Brexit victory for the past three years have essentially been trying to fudge Brexit.
So all the complications that we’ve seen in the UK political scene over the past few years is to allow us to get the British government, trying to fudge Brexit or to achieve what in the UK they called BRINO, Brexit in name only. So yeah, everything Theresa May has worked for has been a way for the country to formally leave the European Union while keeping in place all the rules and all the economic arrangements that keep the UK economy to a large degree shackled to EU law.
And that just harks back to what I was saying earlier. And the reason is that the EU laws, whether we’re talking of anti-state hate laws, which means that laws that prohibit or seriously hinder government support for national industries or the constitutional realization of free capital flows at EU level, or the ban on all the prohibition of public monopolies in industries and services and so on, these are all rules or legal arrangements that work just fine for British capitalists.
And they also provide a kind of reassurance that if, or they should ever win the elections, his scope of maneuver will be severely limited by these rules and arrangements. And so I think this is really the Brexit story up til now, which has been further complicated by the inability of the UK labor party to propose an alternative progressive vision of Brexit, thereby also winning back the support of large part of the British working class that voted for Brexit.
Instead, the neoliberal elements of the party have progressively and increasingly pushed Corbyn to essentially, you know, take a fairly strong and Brexit stance to the point that now we’re also seeing calls from a number of labor party voters for a second referendum, with a hope of overhauling the result of the first referendum, which I think would be a tragic choice.
And so I think this also goes quite fine explaining the crisis of the labor party, which despite the complete F up of the Tories over Brexit seems unable to recharge them when it comes to hard numbers and to popular support, especially among the working class. So, yeah, so I think this is kind of what a Brexit story is at.
Steve Grumbine (38:19):
So Thomas, I really want to thank you for the time here. This has been a really, really eyeopening interview. I appreciate all the work you’ve done. Can you just finish off with kind of letting us know how we can follow you and your work?
Thomas Fazi (38:35):
Well, I publish most of my articles on social media. So you can find me on Facebook and Twitter. I do also have a website, Thomasfazi.net, but I’m not very good at keeping it updated. So I plan on doing that. So for the time being social media is the best way to keep up. And I also want to thank you guys for this interview, it’s been a real pleasure for me, too.
And I’m also happy to say that me and Bill have started working on a new book, which will kind of be a sequel to “Reclaiming the State,” and so we’ll be posting updates about that in the following weeks and months. We hope to have that out by next year. Fingers crossed.
Steve Grumbine (39:13):
That’s exciting. That’s great.
Thomas Fazi (39:16):
Yeah. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s been a number of very interesting developments since the book came out two years ago. Yeah. A lot to say.
Steve Grumbine (39:28):
Very good. So I want to thank you once again and hopefully we can have you back on again real soon.
Thomas Fazi (39:34):
I hope so. It’ll be a pleasure.
Steve Grumbine (39:36):
Absolutely. Have a great day, man. Thanks.
Thomas Fazi (39:39):
Yeah. You, too, guys.
Ending Credits (00:01:35.280)
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