Vulture Capitalism: How to Survive in an Age of Corporate Greed. By Grace Blakeley. (Bloomsbury Publishing) ISBN 9781526638069
The aim of this book is to demonstrate its idea that ‘Life under capitalism means living in a planned economy, while being told you are free’. As such, the author makes a strong case that capitalism is not defined by ‘free markets’ but by the existence of a class of owners and a class of workers.
As the author notes, most of this is not new thinking, and that she is drawing together well-known texts in academic circles and bringing them to a popular print market. Indeed, a concise bibliography, rather than scattering references in end notes, would have been useful.
Using many examples, such as Boeing, WeWork, Blackrock, she shows the mix of personal perfidy and structural power that characterises contemporary capitalism. She states ‘Large powerful firms are able, to a significant extent, to ignore the pressure exerted on them by the market and instead act to shape market conditions themselves’. As evidence, she shows the efforts these powerful firms go to control and influence political institutions to achieve these ends.
The nub of her case is that these corporations are practically monopolies. Monopoly does not mean the complete elimination of competition, but it does mean that price is not the only route to capitalists competing. She notes that monopolies appear not to have a totally free hand on pricing, and would rather cheapen the costs of labour they employ, rather than price-gouge the market.
This is a point she under-develops, and she could have noted that the class competition will always remain within capitalism: the capitalist class collectively exploiting the working class, and then fighting among themselves by various means (legal, financial, criminal) to get a cut of the profits raised. But this would have blunted her emphasis on monopoly capitalism.
She ends by looking at examples of ‘democratic planning’, finding real world examples of alternatives to the corporate capitalist planning. These range from Allende’s ‘Project Cybersyne’ in Chile, to Preston council, Jackson Missouri and Blaenau in Wales. Unfortunately for her argument, many of these examples rely on isolated powerful individuals, rather than mass movement; but her central point stands that there are real world examples of attempts within capitalism to engage in democratic planning that show how a different world could be organised.
She does acknowledge that, ‘More planning does not, then, equal less capitalism. The only way to get less capitalism is to constrain the power of capital,’ and that political action would be required to attain that (let alone abolish it).
The book is engaging and entertaining, and provides a useful contribution and perspective to building the case for common ownership. She is commendably clear, in her conclusion, that widespread consciousness of the need for change and our capacity to organise society for ourselves is needed in order to make the change.
Pik Smeet
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