Transcription
I have an inner fascist. Every single one of us has a dark side. The left needs somebody who actually says things that can connect with people. This is a tragedy of good people trying to do good things and then in the end end up devouring each other. Our opinions are being influenced not by opinion makers but by machines that train us to train them to train us to train them how to know us and to influence us directly.
Uh, Janice Farrafakus, Ephesto, how nice to see you.
Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure.
Well, this is a turning point for you in the literary style. Whatever else you've written before, um, I might call it academic. I might call it, you know, psych psychological or or but this in this is a new a new style.
So, it I'd like to think that this is not a boring book that takes one particular left-wing perspective. It tries to bring out the complexity of modernity.
Yes. Well, here's something else it brings out because this is in your words. It encouraged you to confront the inner male chauvinist.
Indeed.
Did you have a male chauvinist in you, Janice?
We all do.
Well, let's talk about you.
We all do. Of course. Absolutely. I have an inner fascist. I have um a brute. We all do. We have every single one of us has a dark side and it's a constant struggle. The beauty of life is to struggle against the darker forces within us because I don't know about you. I'm not going to presume about you but I remember as boys we were socialized through misogyny. You know boys getting together ganging up on the girls.
And on each other but get boys gang up on boys. That's the.
Indeed. But yeah it's this kind of.
That's a fascist in us.
Punchy.
Right. Uh so our socialization process and I believe that this is unfortunately uh being reinforced these days uh in.
Strong man politics.
Yeah and with the algorithms and what I call cloud capital and social media and big tech amplifying what I experienced without algorithms.
Uh and therefore the subtitle that I wanted to give my book was five women who taught me how to resist fascism authoritarianism and the male soist within.
There was a period when I think of you as a brochialist. Have you heard that phrase? It's a mangle of the word socialist with bro. And it doesn't make any sense except it rhymes.
And you were seen as a sort of.
I've been accused of many things. Not of that.
Leather jacketwearing, motorbike riding, Angela Merkel stander upper brochist.
Well, look, I I love motorcycles and I'm not going to apologize for that. And it's got nothing to do with being a bro. My wife is a motorcyclist and she's not a bro, believe you me.
Let me ask you to see it from this way. Yes.
Our chancellor who is like you assailed by advice, she's called Rachel from accounts. You were never called Janice from accounts. Do you sympathize with Rachel Reeves?
Not much. Not much because Rachel Reeves uh shot herself in the foot before she was elected, before she became chancellor.
But that's policy. It's personal to say she's Rachel from accounts. You could condemn that.
I I can condemn that easily. I can condemn any attempt to uh pigeon hole people and effectively to to you know to put a label on their forehead whether they they are people I agree with or not but.
On matters. Yeah.
And not so much politics but um economics and you know she's a chancellor. She needs to be judged according to her impact on uh the macroeconomy of this country. Do you having having accepted the you know a pound shop version of George Osbbor's austerity before she even became chancellor at a time when the last thing this country needed was austerity. She really set herself up for failure.
Is she wrong to be concerned about the power of the bond markets?
No. Of course we should all be terrified of the bond market. It's very scary Andy.
Bern especially if you are a finance minister, a chancellor, right? You should, you know, be very wary of the bond market where she's completely wrong.
Let's not be in hot to the bond markets. Andy Bernham said that. So she's.
I think that's what Andy man meant if I may interpret him, which I have no right to do. But allow me to say what I think her great great mistake is. It is to think that you can pacify the bond market through austerity, through cutting, that you are, you know, proving yourself to be fiscally responsible when you're cutting. Now, George Osborne uh his experience should have taught her that when you're cutting, especially in a period of stagnation of very low productive investment, all you're doing is you're resembling a stupid cat chasing its own tail because you cut even if you manage to reduce your expenditure, the state's expenditures, that diminishes, shrinks the growth rate and therefore the tax. So you end up in the end having to cut even more and you you get get caught up in that stupendous downward spiral like Jo Osborne was.
Do you have advice for her?
Look, I don't want to sound presumptuous, but of course I would do things very very differently. H and my main advice would be don't look at the budget before you have a plan on how to reinvigorate the economy. Uh to think that you can simply say growth growth growth while practicing fiscal austerity and that growth will come through some kind of uh magic. That's that that's just delusional. Uh the problem that Britain has had now for 30 years is that there's been no serious productive investment. There's been liquidation of public assets starting from that with uh the sale of council houses, British gas, British airways and so on. All that money including uh North Sea oil was wasted. It was thrown into the cauldron of creating fake demand increasing the trade deficit of this country and so on. And then at some point you just run out of the family silver to sell and you had asset prices that were sky-high and very low levels of productivity. So you were caught up, this country was caught up in a low level of equilibrium. So you've got to answer the questions, how are you going to reverse that equilibrium and then the budget will follow. The problem with Rachel Reeves with these bin counters is that they start counting beans without having a plan of how to bring about serious productive investment.
Um I want to ask you as well another question which will annoy you.
No questions at all.
Well, you were getting decent answers. You don't like you don't like well all decent questions but Slavoy Jezek appeared on this proen program the Slovenian thinker and said the left needs its own trump because Trump has broken the orthodoxies of what governments can do. He's taken tariffs which not really liked by the markets and thrown them around hither and thither. Do you agree that the left needs its own Trump?
Look, Savo is a great friend of mine personally speaking. Right. So.
That's why I said he said it. There's nothing that he can say that annoys me.
Because he's just said it. Especially when I disagree with him because this is how friends should disagree. But let me answer your question. Look, allow me to interpret. I know him pretty well. What he meant and I agree with him on this is that the left needs somebody who actually says things that can connect with people and which are not simply a regurgitation of that which center left politicians believe that is going to keep them respectable within the establishment. That's what Savoy means. And I think he's right on that. You know, we of the left when we fail to connect with people, we must stop blaming the establishment. The establishment is going to try to bring us down. We have a duty to go beyond that and to connect with people. And that's where I will agree with Isl here. They tried to launch your party and they can't. They're always arguing. They don't know what to say over here. they don't say over there. The left is condemned to argue. Whereas in the right, you're getting strong men who are giving a message to the public or in the case of France, a strong woman who they then say can't stand.
It's pretty tragic, isn't it? But at the same time, it is understandable because, you know, people who want to change the world in a good way. Uh they have lots of ideas and they, you know, if you think about the Christians from the very beginning of Christianity, they fell out with one another. They had heresies. They had, you know, splinters. They they were killing each other. Uh this is a tragedy of good people trying to good to do good things and then in the end up devouring each other like.
Well, I mean, I can't really go back.
So, we have to be very critical of ourselves as leftists.
Let me not go back 2,000 years. Let me ask you in the UK for instance, Zach Palansky.
Yeah.
Do you back Zack?
I think that Zach Palansky is a breath of fresh air.
Because he wants to be an eco-populist, which is kind of in the territory I'm asking. I hate the word populism.
Well, you you can't. It's his word. I.
I think we should be very careful with with the words. We need to be popular. We need to be popular, but not populist because for me, a populist is somebody who offers everything to everyone, promises all sorts of things, s of sorts of people, things that cannot be fulfilled. Promises that cannot be fulfilled. And that is toxic. So, I'm against the populism. I think he's right that we need to be popular. And I think that Zar Pollinski has really improved the Greens. He's given them a substance that they didn't have. Uh but I don't think the Greens are enough. I think that your party and here I'm speaking as uh a bosom body of Jeremy Corbyn. Uh I'm not a bosom body of Zara Sultana but I know her and I like her very much.
So you would like to see in Britain and indeed in the European countries plural a realignment of the left.
I think it's essential. I think it's not just me who needs it. I think that society needs it because uh this world of ours whether it's the United Kingdom or Germany or France or my country or the United States for that matter we're drifting in a direction uh that is taking us collectively to a form of sophisticated misanthropy and um you know the rise of racism the rise of the manosphere as a species we are facing an existential threat following you know this this v this a revival of a kind of uh the midwar period.
Yes, it's nation states. It's strong men. It's the crowds on the street. It's a violent a climate of violence. You're thinking to yourself, the proof is there that the algorithms which are controlled by some of the world's richest men. They take the human nature to make you angrier, to make you more.
Entirely.
Violent. Uh we have a new form of capital. Machines used to be just means of production like you know steam engines, industrial robots, machines that help us produce other stuff. But now with these algorithms, with these algorithmic capital goods, we have uh produced means not of production but of behavioral modification. So for the first time our opinions are being influenced not by opinion makers you know preachers, politicians and uh writers and so on but by machines that train us to train them to train us to train them how to know us and to influence us directly. And the oldest of those machines, people like Zuckerberg and Bezos and Elon Musk and so on, they have this exorbitant power that that machinery gives them uh to extract rents from us. And therefore that machinery uh which is self-programming now with AI what it does it doesn't it's not political it's not moral it's not immoral it's just a machine but it is optimized in order to maximize the time your eyeballs my eyeballs spend glued to a screen because that's how cloud rents amass in the pockets of those people and the the machines work out of their own accord automatically that the way in which to maximize their rents for their owners is to get us to be angry. So they poison our soul.
Because they poison the conversation and they poison our democracy.
We are more engaged as angry people than as happy online. This is proved, isn't it?
That's right. And and especially when it comes to the world of politics and and power.
So do you think that now we're seeing a version of our free will under attack?
Well, our free will was always uh precariously balanced. Okay. It was it was always an aspiration that we had free will. Well, we used to say as capitalists, we used to say the Marxists want us to collectivize and the capitalists want us to exercise free will. That's how we all grew up studying the early.
Well, their own free will, not the free will of the workers, right? Who.
Well, but that's a good Marxist. But let let let let me make the point you know let's assume that we are both on the same page and that we value and I do value uh the idea of the liberal individual the person that who is autonomous.
Who is forget the entrepreneurial creative I would say the person who creates his or her own desires beliefs substance you know the free person the liberal individual right well that is in serious retreat.
Let's turn to some policy questions Um, let's look at the role of the British prime minister in trying to be a bridge between this United States and this current European Union plus the UK plus Ukraine. Do you think it's a good role for the British Prime Minister? It's historic to try and bridge do you think it's an understandable role for Karma to try to fill?
It is utterly understandable. I don't think he's doing it well. He got 10 15% less than the tariffs on the EU.
Well, he didn't get it because he is a good negotiator. He got it.
Because Ursula is a bad one.
No, he got it because Donald Trump and his team in particular uh hate the European Union so much and they are such staunch Brexiteers that they wanted to make sure that Brexit is cast in iron. Trump was in and he was saying that even before he was elected that he was going to introduce differential tariffs to make sure that Britain gets a better deal than the the European Union to make sure that you know the remainers and the rejoiners in the United Kingdom never get a leg up. So it I think that in the end this special relationship is uh simply a figment of the British imagination. Since we began talking about women, I can I end with a very trivial question, which is that once long ago I listened as a boy to a song about a Greek woman who had a thirst for knowledge and she studied at St. Martins's College. Can you tell us who that woman, that Greek woman is?
I can tell you that I'm married to a woman who studied uh sculpture at St. Martins College and I can tell you that u uh I don't think I will be able to go home tonight if I say more.
We want you to come back from your home successfully another time. Thank you for talking to us.
Thank you.
Thank you.