We're in a situation in which the violence of the economy has
reached a very, very obscene peak.
We have actually 12 people in the world owning more than the
bottom 4 billion people. We've built it.
We need to see how the systemic forces trap us and shape us.
But we're the architect, so there is space for alternatives
if we build them. How do you actually think change
would happen? Are you revolutionary?
Hello, and welcome to Ways to Change the World.
I'm Krishna Gurimurthy, and this is the podcast where we talk to
extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and the
events that have helped shape them.
My guest this week is an economist who wants us to
rethink the idea that capitalism is simply the natural order of
things. Clara Matai is an author and
professor of economics whose work explores how economic ideas
become tools of power, shaping policy while masking the
political decisions beneath. Her new book, Escape from
Capitalism, argues that many of the problems that we see as
inevitable poverty, unemployment, inflation, are
built into the system and shored up by models and theories
designed to convince us that there is no alternative.
Welcome to the podcast. It's such a pleasure.
I mean, how can you escape capitalism?
I mean, we, we, we are all brought up to believe or to
think that it is just the way of the world.
It is human nature to want to accumulate things and wealth and
to have the freedom to choose what you want and what your
destiny is. So the first point is to escape
the mental trap that naturalizes the system.
That makes us think exactly what you just said, which is that we
have a spontaneous tendency towards this capitalist economy.
What I show in the book is that capitalism is far from
spontaneous. It requires constant violent
enforcement of those policies of austerity to preserve the system
in place. So what the state needs to do is
to protect the market by keeping the majority of subordinated to
the to the market itself and maintaining us in a situation by
which we have no alternative but to go work for wage and usually
a very low wage and very precarious conditions so.
What is capitalism in your terms?
Capitalism is a system based on 2 pillars. 1 is wage labor.
Exactly the idea that the majority on the planet has no
option but to go sell. It's their capacity to work in
return for a wage and produce much more value than what they
actually get in their paycheck and have very little say on how
things are produced and why. And on the other hand, private
investment. So the idea that it's actually
very few that we have basically a society delegated the the
command over what is produced and why.
So private investment and wage labour are the 2 pillars and of
course the roof is production for profit.
The fact that nothing we have around us would be ever produced
if it weren't for the fact that there's expectations to get more
money from what you started off with.
I mean, are you so, so to what extent are you different from
the anti capitalist protesters who've been around forever, who
are a tiny minority, you know, but you're, you're, you're
you're sort of respectable and at a university and, and, and,
and not hiding your face. So I think right now we're in a
situation in which the violence of the economy has reached a
very, very obscene peak. We know right now that we have
actually 12 people in the world owning more than the bottom 4
billion people. We have soaring poverty,
equality that is extreme, inequality that is extreme.
We know the climate catastrophe, constant wars and and militarism
and genocide. People are suffering.
So actually the point is to say that if we want our basic needs
met, if we want people to even get fed, we have 2 billion
people who are suffering from food insecurity.
If we want these basic needs to be met for everybody, you're an
anti capitalist because the system is not meant to provide
for the need. It's meant to provide for
profit. And So what I'm trying to do
here is shift the logic again, propose a different lens through
which we can say we can't blame crony capitalism.
We can't blame, you know, excessive greed.
We can't blame the idea that the system is not working as it
should. And This is why we have all the
inequality and the suffering. It's the opposite.
The system is actually working as it's always been structured
to work. And This is why we have such
high accumulation at the top while the majority suffers.
And we know that the reality is that even in Britain, the reason
why we have so much wealth in the the West again very divided.
In the UK one out of three children are in poverty and
since 20/20/14 we have had billionaires grow sixfold.
OK, so while billionaires keep growing, children keep getting
poorer. And what we see is this, even if
in the UK the wealth is distributed very unequally, the
reality is that the West is basing its capacity to develop
on this structural underdevelopment of the global
South. And this is very important still
today, when supposedly colonialism is over, we have $65
billion or more every year that flows from the global South,
especially Africa, to Europe and the United States of.
Debt. Because of debt, because of
extraction of resources, because of the fact that capital we go,
we invest and we take everything out also in terms of profit.
So it's the dependency how development is there because
there is the creation of underdevelopment.
We wouldn't. This is the thing.
We're not on an equal path in which we're all growing
progressively and getting better and better.
What you see is actually the fact that those countries that
have developed have developed because the rest was going down
and was underdeveloped. It was structurally destroyed.
And this is what austerity policies are all about.
And austerity is a basic feature of capitalism.
And this is, I guess, what distinguishes my work from other
critical political economy, is to say that austerity is not
irrational. It's irrational for us for the
logic of need, but it's very, very rational for the logic of
profit. Why?
Because it keeps us in a subordinate condition.
It keeps us needing to go work for whatever job to pay our
bills and to pay for healthcare and education.
So if you cut social services as the capitalist state does, while
financing private investors, de risking, you know, militarizing
the surveillance economy, the protection of the borders, this
is what capitalism needs because it protects the two pillars,
right? You keep wage labour and private
investment in check. So, so you're saying that when
people say austerity is a necessity, in a way they're
right because it is a necessity of the system?
Yes, and this is the point. It is a necessity, but it's not
a natural necessity. So this is the big point is that
it's not a technical fix. You know, austerity is not just
a tool that economists and with their neutral models adopt to
save us all. It's the opposite.
It's the point that economic models, as I show in the book,
are deeply classist in the sense that they depict the problems as
being due to workers misbehaving.
This is how inflation is understood.
Why is there inflation? All because the cost of Labor
are too high or because people are consuming too much.
This is literally what the model say.
So if the culprits are the workers, the solution needs to
be increasing interest rates so that you create actually harsher
unemployment levels and unemployment.
Guess what is actually important for the system?
We would not have capitalism without a good dosage of
unemployment. Why?
Because if the workers did achieve bargaining power, they
wouldn't accept this conditions that allow for profit to keep
accumulating. So this is really important is
to realize that austerity is not neutral, it's political, but
it's also necessary for this economic system.
But I think the empowering element of the conversation is
that capitalism is not spontaneous and has been around
for very little time. Only 0.1% of the time Homo
sapiens has been on the planet have we been under industrial
capitalism. And in this little time, we've
managed to destroy, as we know, our ecology and many people
around. Us Did you mean just post the
industrial revolution? Basically yes.
But but even before that, wasn't it essentially a capitalist?
System, yes, definitely it was, you know, capitalism was born in
the UK, so the cradle of capitalism is right here where I
stand today through the enclosure system.
And this is very important. This is a story that economics
never tells you because economics as a discipline is
deeply ahistorical, purposefully to make you think that this is a
natural spontaneous order. The reality is that if you look
at history, our economic system was born through violence.
And what was this violence? It was the the exclusion of
people from the land. The land was the basic means of
subsistence in which people could reproduce themselves
autonomously from respect to the market.
Once you eliminate the self-sufficiency, then people
become market dependence and dependent.
And that's in a way necessarily have to accept going to work for
whatever situation they can find.
What wasn't that a product of natural human nature to acquire
and to exercise power over others.
I don't think so. If you look at all the
indigenous cultures in many places in the world, you know,
I'm in Oklahoma right now. This was the reservation land
after the indigenous people had been kicked out.
They had the trails of tears. Many, many died, and they
reached this reservation land and then all the oil was stolen
from the indigenous people. But the indigenous people, the
Cherokee for example, was based on circular horizontal
organization through councils and actually woman had a very,
very big role there and it was about caring for the Commons,
caring for nature rather than extracting.
So, you know, indigenous values tell you that actually humanity
is not has no essence for self-interest.
This is the adaptation under capitalism, but we can be
different according to what social relations we construct.
In Tulsa, the forum for real economic emancipation.
I now found it very interesting experiment to try to bring back
these different social relation that need to start locally
because it's at the local level that we can associate through
assemblies in which you show how collectively we can think to be
together in a different way and pressure our local and national
institutions to do not austerity, but decision making
over the budget and much else. Well, where?
Where does democracy come in? You know, because, because you
know, the defenders of the system will say these are
choices that people have made deliberately through their
democratic rights. Well, I would say that these
choices have been made by a tiny elite since the very beginning
and they are choices that by definition require the lack of
economic agency of the majority. So what you see is that
democracy, liberal democracy is really only a superficial
facade. And This is why in my work,
historical work, I also show how in moments in which people
challenge this capital order, liberals and fascists are great
allies. And this has been my work on the
post First World War period, as you see that Benito Mussolino,
sorry, Benito Mussolini was adored by the Bank of England
and by Buntagu Norman because he was the right man at a critical
moment to keep workers in check and to avoid post capitalist
experiments. So this is the whole point is
that you see that liberal democracy presupposes economic
coercion and when people rise up against economic coercion,
liberals and fascists are best friends to implement austerity.
So so. These are choices that people
are making within a framework of coercion.
Absolutely in in your. In your framing, I mean why
then, when we have seen alternative economic models in
the 20th century, have they all gravitated towards capitalism?
This is. Why in Russia, why in China, why
in parts of India? Do they all end up like us?
Yes. Well, I don't think it's because
we have the magnetic attraction or a fair system.
It's mostly because we impose our capital order globally,
right? If if 11 reads just the post
Second World War, the golden age period, the United States, we're
actively imposing capitalism everywhere else in the globe,
right? Through militarism, through
coups, We have the CIA involved in really taking over during the
Cold War to protect capitalism. So, you know, there's nothing
spontaneous about this. It's about really a struggle, a
political struggle. And the political struggle
happens geopolitically, but also within each country.
And this is very important is that, you know, luckily with
Trump, we've we're seeing what capitalism actually looks like.
And he's revealing the face of the brutality of the United
States. In Tulsa, where I live, people
can't afford anything. People don't have teeth.
People can't afford to actually have a roof over their head.
Many of the people who we organized through the Forum for
Really Economic Emancipation are unhoused, and they barter food
stamps as the only way to actually, like, make a living.
It's a situation in which the money exists, but it's really
caught in the hands of very, very, very few philanthropists
that by the way then benefit from lending money to the titty,
lending money to the governments and then get all the interest
back. So and.
And yet some of the poorest people in America are Trump
supporters. So how?
How have they achieved this hegemony over over people that
have nothing to gain from it? This is why I think my book can
be relevant for people. It's because it's about the
narrative. Again, the way we break free is
first mentally. And what you need to see is that
Trump is thriving on a narrative that has been constructed by
mainstream economists for a long, long time, which tell you
there's nothing unjust about this economy.
If you are at the bottom, it's because you deserve it.
And this is constructed through also mathematics and telling you
that those who are at the top are there because they save,
they behave more rationally, and they are benefiting everyone
else by employing everyone else. And so they should be lucky.
So this methodological individualism, this idea that if
you're poor, it's your fault is spread everywhere.
And people have internalized it so deeply that the only
explanation they have for the fact that they're living not a
human life at the end of the day, because it's dehumanizing,
what you see in the United States today, you blame it on
those who are even weaker than you because those are the ones
who you fear the most because you don't see who's actually
benefiting. You don't see those.
You know, 19 people in the United States, which is the
0.00001% of the population, have increased their wealth in the
past two years by almost $2 trillion.
Only 19 people. This is what we're talking about
when we talk about this extreme red.
And these people are not taxed because capital gains are not
taxed. This is part of the austerity
policies I was mentioning. But isn't it the case as well
that when you have very little and when you have great economic
insecurity, you are desperate to hold on to whatever you have?
So. So talking to people about
breaking the system means that they will lose everything is
what they fear in the short term.
I think right now, first of all, many people have very little to
lose at this point in the United States really.
I mean 77% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck.
Half of the homeless population that keeps skyrocketing in the
USA, 108 a 118,000 more homeless people.
And this is just the official statistics.
In just one year, these people, you know, work, half of the
homeless population actually has a job.
So, you know, working is not enough to secure your survival.
So this is what I'm seeing with the Forum for Real Economic
Emancipation, is that people want to come together with
alternative models, with solidarity based economies, with
mutual aid, with the idea that let's breach market dependence,
Let's take back our relation with nature, with land, with
resources. We need to create this
alternative infrastructure that can actually serve the logic of
need that the governments, both at the local and at the federal
level and also in Europe, can no longer support because our
governments are there to maintain the capital order in
place. And the fact that Europe is
militarizing like crazy while people are losing their social
services is not by chance. It's not to be, you know,
attributed to the bad person empowered that moment.
This is the tendency of the system that we, though, have the
power to fight against because the system is US.
And this is the empowering message of the book is to say
we've built it. We need to see how the systemic
forces trap us and shape us. But we're the architect, so
there is space for alternatives if we build them, are we?
Also trapped by our education system and the way economics is
framed and taught. Completely.
So I'm a professor of economics and I've for years tried to
introduce alternative frameworks in the economics discipline.
They do exist. They're at the margins.
So anyone who teaches, sorry, who studies economics rarely
gets exposed to alternative frameworks.
And in my book, I tried to expose the classical political
economy framework. So it's built on not just my
ideas. This work is built on a
tradition that is very strong. It dates to Adam Smith himself,
the founding father of modern economics.
Well, people talked. About Marx, aren't they?
And that's the only alternative way of looking at the world.
Yes. Well, I think absolutely.
The important point is that, you know, Marx has been demonized in
all ways, but at the end of the day, he was one of the most
important economists ever existed.
Because again, he does not, he did not accept the narrow idea
by which things happen because of individual choices.
Things happen because of systemic forces that had been
built by us. And what Marx says that is very
important and liberating is that capital as wealth as money is
nothing but the surface expression of capital as a
social relation of the fact that we we relate to one another in
production processes that are very anti democratic.
I mean what I mean. Is you say people are not taught
any alternatives ever, I'm saying they are taught about
Marxism. Are you saying, are you saying
the way Marxism is taught? Okay, so.
This is important a I think very few people are actually talked
about Marxism. Definitely if you take an econ
class you will not hear that his name or even the word
capitalism. As a matter of fact, you only
hear about markets and individual choices and
maximization. So when you do hear the word
Marx, it's usually attributed to some crazy deterministic way of
seeing the world, which doesn't make any sense because again,
the critique of political economy that Marx brings about
is exactly to say you economists take for granted capitalism.
I as a scholar, a historical minded scholar, will tell you
that capitalism is a specific socio economic system that
requires specific social relations and we can change it
because it's us who have built it.
So are you? A neo Marxist.
I've definitely been inspired by Marxian political economy and I
think this is really important for economic students to go back
to. The original texts does that.
Make it almost impossible for you, given everything you said
to gain traction, no. I think the opposite.
I think right now, historically, we're in a moment in which
people are fed up by the liberal narrative that can't explain the
current crisis of humanity we're living in.
And so Marx. The Marxian tradition is a
tradition that actually speaks to people who consider
themselves on the right or considers themselves, you know,
Trumpist or whatever, because it goes to the real root of the
problems. So in the end, if you want to
get fed, you are an anti capitalist and you will see that
only like a critical really a critical lens, not a superficial
lens, a critical lens that I tried to develop in this book
will be the source for emancipation of your mind and of
your actions. And so I think we are in a
historical moment which people are thirsty for radical
explanations that can push us beyond.
And until we try it, we can't, you know, predict.
But right now, what we know is that the current situation is
getting worse and worse as we speak.
What? What I mean is if you are taking
a lot from Marx, does that make you for huge numbers of people,
Public Enemy number one? You know, if you think about how
America responded to communism after the Second World War in
this sort of almost hysterical way, but but but much deeper in
terms of foreign policy and all the rest of it, that is still
deeply ingrained in American psyche.
Yes, and and, and in Europe to some degree as well for
different reasons. But you know, the fall of the
Berlin Wall and all of that. But I think that speaks to the
reason why Marx and analysis is so powerful, because it was so
scary that it need to be purged from academia.
You know, it was it was a political project like academics
were. You know, you can read the the
Powell report. It's all about a project of
purging academia from critical knowledge.
And this is the whole point is that part of it is this
demonization of Marx. But you know, the most
emancipatory tradition, you see the Frankfurt School, Antonio
Gramsci, Rosa Luxembourg, people who were for the liberation of
humankind. So what I do is to say, let's
drop old categories. Let's think about ways
reclaiming words like freedom is a word that should be reclaimed
in the radical tradition. You know, we're not for the
state. The idea that Marx is a status
is absurd. You know, Marx was seeing the
the capitalist state as a problem and as an oppressive
machine. And this is the whole point
actually. Marx was vindicating the idea of
freedom and agency and subjectivity and collective
welfare. And this is the problem is that
if we still are trapped in categories that made sense
during the Cold War, we will never look forward.
So I want to reclaim the word freedom, the word economic
democracy, because these are words that I think can connect
people much more. And how do you?
Actually think change would happen?
Are you revolutionary? We.
Are testing alternatives on the ground.
You know, academics love to like preach about general ideas and
never get involved. I think they're culprits,
they're responsible, they're part of the problem.
Even these supposed lefty scholars, they're part of the
problem if they don't engage in academia, even on the left, is
so elitist and so separate from people's problems and people's
ways of thinking that, again, they are responsible.
So what we're trying to do in Tulsa, again, Tulsa is I think 1
chapter of what I hope we'll continue building as a pilot
project that can be reproduced with its own characteristics.
Everywhere else is the idea that knowledge is of the people for
the people coming and stemming from people's participation.
And that's why we do public education.
That is really the first step. And then we organize through an
assembly that is a way for people to try out something
different. Just getting involved.
I mean, I mean, you don't just mean protest movement, do you?
I mean, you know, should they be involved in local government, in
collective so. To give to give you an example,
we just had a big event with 400 people, which is a lot for Tulsa
with the mayor sitting there to respond to a conversation about
participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting is a
reality that has been completely excluded from the way we run our
economy because it's dangerous for the status quo.
But it's something that was invented in Brazil, actually, we
should really look at in the 80s.
It's the idea that people can take on responsibilities in
ideating how their money should be spent and voting on it in a
way that actually is much more inclusive.
This is happening in some parts of the world, but this could be,
for example, an instrument to get people to realize that they
can have much more agency. You know, that's the value
workers produce. It's overly taxed because it's
workers that pay taxes, not investors.
OK. And that money that has been
taxed, it's used not for people and their social services, but
again to foment wars in the South of the globe.
So the whole system is completely irrational that we
need to completely subvert it. Marx would tell us we live in an
upside down world and he was right, we do live in an upside
down world. So what I'm saying is that we
need to propose these alternatives.
Putting pressure on the local governments is 1 possibility.
So as an institution, as the free, we are now launching a
campaign for participatory budgeting, which is all about
taxing the wealth in, in, in, in town through actually income
taxation of the very rich and at the same time demanding that
this money is not allocated according to the priorities of
the usual suspects, but according to the logic of need.
And this is something that can happen.
It's realistic, it fits even within the constitutional
framework and the current laws. It's just about political will.
So. So.
So at the moment you think democracy is the vehicle to
deliver change, even though you think democracy is corrupted and
underpinning, you know, economics as we know it of, of
capitalism. So what I would?
Tell you is that I think we need to be more specific of what we
mean by democracy. There's liberal democracy, which
is again, this oligarchic farce by which very few make
decisions. And then we as consumers get to
come vote once in a while and we feel like we're so empowered,
but actually we count nothing. And on the other hand,
participatory democracy, which is based on people actually
having a say on the material conditions that we are building.
So what does this look like? It looks like, you know,
different ways. The time I was reading that I
studied are the factory councils of someone like Antonio Gramsci,
which is about workers actually deciding on how to produce and,
and why now it's about neighborhood councils that exist
in Latin America. They're very strong, for
example, in Tulsa. The idea is that through this
assembly we can start are breaching market dependence, for
example, again organizing groups of people that go back to the
concept of food sovereignty. How do we achieve food
sovereignty in Oklahoma one out of four children suffers hunger
and the only way to get this to stop is if we gain back access
to food and we fight against food deserts and this is one of
the possible ways in which we can have participatory democracy
in action. So a political.
Party is not necessarily the vehicle to deliver this.
I don't think you. Necessarily need a political
party, especially what parties look like today, especially in a
country like the United States. So, but if you're a scholar of
sort of Gramsci, I mean, how do you how do you achieve that
persuasion of enough people? That's very.
Important. So Gramsci has deeply influenced
my ideas, because Gramsci is the person who came up with the idea
of hegemony, right? It's the idea that capitalism is
strong because what capitalism is able to rule the capitalist
elite rules not only by coercion but also by consensus, right?
And this is what hegemony is about.
It's about convincing those who are suffering, but actually the
system is doing their interest. And this is the way you get
people to comply, to like passively accept.
So what we need here is something that goes two ways.
You need a public education that is more critical and historical.
And this is kind of what I tried to do in my book to like, you
know, again, it's not just me, a lot of people are doing it, but
I'm trying to make it accessible in a way that I think a lot of
scholars have lacked interest in doing.
At the same time, public education has to go with
participation and institution building.
This is what Gramsci was doing. He was saying the only knowledge
that actually is interesting knowledge comes from
participation and construction of counter hegemonic spaces.
How do you get? The middle class, the people
with some money to buy into this when they only stand to lose.
I don't think they stand to lose.
That's the whole point is to realize that the alliances are
much broader. The middle class is really a
construction that, by the way, now is completely disappearing
because that so-called middle class, you know what matters,
Struggling. Middle class?
Yeah, of course, but there is also a middle class with with
resources. Absolutely.
But the point is that class is not defined by your bank bank
account. It's defined by your social
positioning within the social relations of production.
So the question to ask is where does the majority of your income
come from? Does it come from labour or does
with a paycheck? Or does it come from investment
and capital gains and rent? This is your class positioning.
Then you can be a worker that is better off than other workers.
But the point is that as the system stands, the system is
disintegrating all those social resources that are allowing
those happy workers to still maintain a like a better life.
And these people are being tracked down.
We know the middle class in the United States basically doesn't
exist anymore. And it's a paradox because the
American dream was based on the idea that everyone, if they
worked hard enough, they could achieve a car, a refrigerator
and, you know, television. But this is again, and reducing
us to consumers. We can be much more humane if
even people like me, you know, I'm a professor of economics.
I'm not starving in the street. I do pretty well, but I'm still
will gain into humanity if I participate in a collective that
is not just my family and my neighbor, but actually people at
large that come together through assemblies and try to actually
take decisions together. This is how we transform our
humanity into something much more fulfilling.
What? What are you?
Asking people to do about their private property, I mean
particularly middle class in America and Britain means
slightly different things I think.
But you know, certainly in Britain you have a middle class
that is home owning, property owning, that is their economic
security, that's. Great.
Are you saying? They've got to give no.
But this is another myth about Marxism.
Marxism never said that we should get rid of you know of,
but that is their. Capital gain, that's where they
make their wealth, isn't it? Land and property, absolutely.
But the point is that the majority of their income, I
assure you, comes from wages. So again, it, you know, it's not
a binary workers capitalist, but it's, it is important to keep
track of like the the most important situation.
So the idea here is that everyone should be able to have
a roof over their head and afford a roof over their head,
right? And so we need to make sure that
this is a reality for everybody. And we know that this economic
system is actually buying out these people to make us all into
renters that then again, have to spend spend a lot of time to
find out, to try to find a job to able to make that rent.
So the point is that if you're lucky enough to own a house,
that is what you should imagine everyone else being able to
achieve. And by the way, right now,
owning a house is a is a real pain.
If you're a property owner, you know that it's a very
individualistic mindset. There's a plenty of alternative
ideas of collective ownership that are much more empowering
because you don't need to like, worry about, you know, something
breaking or paying the property tax.
It would be a much more massive space in which everyone could
think about the housing as a political project.
And you and you. Clearly think this is a moment
for your ideas because of the extremes that capitalism,
particularly in the West, is throwing up.
Yes, yes. And I do think that the cause of
the liberation of Palestine, I talk about Palestine in the book
by looking at the economic dimension of the subordination
of the Palestinian territories towards Israel and the West and
and showing how that is just a microcosm of the subordination
of the whole global S where the majority of the population lives
of the world, right? Seven out of the 8 billion
actually live in the Global South.
And so how these are moments in which you see that people
standing up for crude injustices, people can wake up
and say we need something different.
And I really do think that connecting the struggles and
seeing that it they're all one struggle.
It's a struggle for humanity over profit is a very important.
But again. You know, if you go to the
global S development is all based around mimicking, yes?
The. The Western capitalism of the
global N completely. And that's the real problem.
And that's why underdevelopment keeps growing.
And this is the whole point is that economists have this myth.
And it's really interesting because it was this economist
called Walter Rosto who came up with this non communist
manifesto about how to develop countries in the global South.
And the myth is that it's we're all the same, you know, the
United States, Britain and Africa, we're all countries are
the same. They could potentially to all be
on the same development path. It's just about where you are.
They're just behind us, but the path is the same.
The trajectory is universal. This is a lie.
If you ask scholars, critical scholars on dependency theory,
it's the opposite. It's actually the trajectory of
some countries going up are based on other countries going
down. So there will never be a
universal trajectory. And this is really important is
for these countries in the global S to realize that if they
listen to the IMF of the World Bank and open up their markets
and implement more austerity, privatize, deregulate labor, do
the whole recipe that supposedly is going to help them be more
efficient. They are losing as they're doing
that. And that that's why the trouble
is the. Elites running those countries
gain. Exactly.
So the debt increases in these countries.
The elites are gaining, both internationally and locally, but
the workers are losing. So, so, so I'm still wondering
how how the workers unite you know, in in your in your world
without a revolution. Aren't you a revolutionary
ultimately? Well.
I think revolution is again a word that we've associate with
such negative connotation, right?
Blood disaster, again, it shows you how indoctrinated we are
because revolution just means social transformation and
change. And if there's blood, it's
usually because their reaction to revolution, right?
There's actually a reaction coming to those at the top who
don't want any social transformation.
So revolution is really actually a positive word because it just
means change. It means change.
And as humans, we deserve change to fulfill our our full human
prosperity. So if you.
Could just change the world now with one fell swoop.
What would you do? I would.
Prioritize the two most important issues right now that
are the physical violence and the killing of people, not just
in Palestine, in Sudan and many other places, and food as a
primary resource. And I would try to organize
these two priorities as society's priorities.
And this is very important because this is potentially
revolutionary and subversive. This is the thing.
If you want people to get fed, you are revolutionary because
the logical profit will never bring you there.
So we need to say as a society, we are intelligent agents.
We can change things. Let's set ourselves basic
priorities. Everyone will agree that people
deserve to have a plate in front of them once a day.
At least. Everyone will agree that
children should not be slaughtered by our drones.
So this is the basic thing. How do we collectively operate
to achieve these goals without being dependent on the logic of
profit? Because currently the idea is
that if we depend on profit, then as a by product, people
will get fed. And this is completely
irrational. Again, it's upside down.
Let's see how collectively we can have two priorities that are
very basic and people on the right, on the left or whatever
will say it's the, it's just so basic.
It has to like we can't agree. And let's figure out how to do
that. And I what I would say is that
we will need to do this by focusing on use value on the
materiality on food itself rather than on value as
abstraction as money. And if we can do this, things
will start to change. And I think we need to start
locally. I think The thing is that we
can't, you know, it's very scary to think in a global context
because we feel so disempowered because we feel so little.
The idea is not we start local, but we think global, because if
we have different chapters of these alternative institutions
that are actually devoted to achieving these needs, then
things can change. And I think This is why you can
collaborate with local institutions and with
governments, but you need to pressure them to do things
differently because on their own they'll never do it because
they're listening to the technocrats that have these
economic models that tell them that the problem of the people
rather than the system. Clara Matai, thank you very much
indeed. Thank you SO.
Much for having me, Hope you enjoyed.
That you can watch all of these interviews on the Channel 4 News
YouTube channel. Until next time, bye bye.