How Our Entire Economy Turned Into A Casino For The Wealthy

"Hegemony Now" authors Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams discuss how financialization took over our economy and turned it into a casino for the uber-rich.

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A little remedial to just start the first question with the title of the book but hegemony in the context of what you're talking about. What does that mean? Well, so hegemony is a term that comes from the writings of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. I mean it's weird to have some other meanings in other contexts. but in the tradition of radical political Theory really it translates to an Italian word which is more usually translated as leadership. So basically that's what it means. and if what it refers to is the ability of relatively small groups in society to exercise a kind of leadership over the rest of the society. So the way we like to explain this is to say that hegemony is basically the capacity to determine the general direction of travel for a society or a group or indeed for the whole planet. So that's basically what we mean by it. all right and fair enough. And so Alex as you guys write this and so much of what we talk about on this program much of this hegemony begins or at least those who are in a position of having hegemony over the direction of society starts in the 70s. As we enter into an era of financialization and also almost simultaneously the development of new technology that enhances the ability for financialization then also becomes certain Platforms in and of themselves. Give us a little bit of that history. Yeah I mean that's not really a nice way of introducing it. I mean a lot of the time no neither of those things is really mentioned when you think about the 1970s certainly a lot of academics and kind of leftist commentators would rather talk about neoliberalism, right? So they'd be talking about maybe Thatcher Reagan maybe about the Montpeleran Society and Friedrich Von Hayek and Friedman and all of that. and certainly, all of that is very important. the slightly less remarked upon component of their ability to implement neoliberalism you know first of all in the kind of anglophone world and then later on across Europe and then the rest of the world a lot of what enabled them to do that was exactly the fact that you know financialization could occur that you know technology allowed things like you know disaggregation of production systems. So you know you could crush your working class within America or the UK because much of your production was going to be happening in Southeast Asia. And All of this involves the emergence of a kind of computerization later the internet and the liberalization of finance. And all of these things kind of happen together and are kind of they're all involved in this kind of process. And very much today when we look around you know who is it who's managed to get what they want? you know who's whose which groups in society have managed to kind of achieve their aims best of all and it wasn't the kind of Thatcher/Reagan conservatives. Because you know they'd look at sort of much of modern society and be pretty aghast at the king of the lack of social conservatism. And instead, the people who've really got what they want are the people who work in you know big finance and big tech.