Vulture Capitalism: Grace Blakeley’s new book is smart on what has gone wrong since the 1980s

• The strength of Vulture Capitalism is in its powerful summary of developments over the past few decades.
• All these writers would presumably agree that the “neoliberal” policy approach adopted in the 1980s was a key inflection point towards today’s economic malaise.
• Widening income inequality, declining social mobility and reduced life expectancies are further examples of this policy failure.
• As examples she cites Amazon’s success at avoiding corporation tax, and Boeing’s change in management approach that prioritised profit maximisation over design safety.

The democratic deficit

• Further to the idea of disempowered workers, Blakeley argues that the lack of democratic accountability in key domestic and international economic institutions helps to drive vulture capitalism.
• They determine which businesses or individuals succeed, but ordinary people neither get told about these choices nor get any say in them.
• These enable investors to take legal action against governments using their democratic prerogatives to tax, regulate and prosecute corporations.
• Blakeley convincingly argues that this all adds up to a major democratic deficit in which “elite” classes operate without any accountability.

The way forward

• Businesses choosing profits over safety and governments bailing out bosses while letting people starve do not represent a perversion of capitalism.
• Several reach all the way back to the 1970s: trade unionists’ alternative plan to save ailing British firm Lucas Aerospace certainly demonstrated workers thinking strategically, but it was swatted aside by management.
• Similarly, the more widespread attempts at democratic planning in Chile under Salvador Allende were crushed by Richard Nixon.
• And if that worked effectively, there’s no reason why assemblies couldn’t be incorporated into, say, the negotiations around trade treaties.
• Addressing the democratic deficit won’t solve everything, but it would be an important step in the right direction.

Conor O'Kane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.