Fightback against the
billionaires: the radicals taking on the global elite
When Rutger Bregman and Winnie Byanyima spoke
out about taxes at Davos they went viral. They talk with Winners Take All
author Anand Giridharadas about why change is coming
Rutger Bregman, Winnie Byanyima and Anand
Giridharadas
Thu 7 Feb 2019 14.05 GMT
Rutger: Winnie, why did the comments you
and I made about billionaires and taxes at Davos go viral? Why do things seem
to be changing right now?
Winnie: Why did we go viral? I think we
said things that people have wanted to hear, especially on a big stage where
powerful politicians and companies are represented. And they are rarely said.
People go there and speak in coded words and praise themselves and spin out the stats that suit
them, but for once we
spoke plainly about the challenges that people face.
Spin out: If you spin something
out, you make it last longer than it normally would. My wife's solicitor was anxious to spin things out for as long as
possible. The Government will try to spin out the conference into next autumn.
R: I saw some interesting stats today from Gallup that
suggest that since the end of
the 1990s, the vast majority of people in the US have wanted the rich to
pay more taxes. There are signs that there is a profound shift in the public
mood.
W: I don’t know whether the left has
been sleeping, but there has been a dominant narrative that has remained quite
unchallenged in the media. This narrative suggests that there is no connection
between the super-rich and abject poverty, that you can keep getting richer and
richer, and this has nothing to do with people getting poorer. And it wasn’t
always like that, people in the past have known that maximising at the top
means you are depriving somebody else further down. It’s empowering
for people to hear that truth being put on the table again.
Anand: The idea of the narrative is so
important. I think that what you both found yourselves in the middle of at
Davos, and what I found myself in on my book tour over the last few months, and
what politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have found themselves in the
middle of, is the growing challenge to a kind of bullshit narrative around
wealth and poverty, access and power; it’s completely wrong and fraudulent, and
it’s now crashing down. There is a second narrative about how the world is
getting better and better: people in India and China and elsewhere have been
coming out of poverty, and the world is the best it’s ever been. Never mind the
fact that we’re perhaps 50
years away from catastrophic climate change fuelled by greed. That narrative, too,
has had a free ride in the press and culture, including on the left, until now.
And then there
is a final narrative of companies and billionaires – as long as they are doing
good things, we don’t ask what else they do; as long as they are giving back,
we don’t ask how they made their money. It’s like a mafia deal: no questions
asked.
Greed (uncountable noun): Greed
is the desire to have more of something, such as food or money, than is
necessary or fair.
Greedy (adjective): She is greedy and selfish.
R: I agree. I think that for a very long time,
politicians on both the left
and the right have
believed that most wealth is created at the top. The brilliant
entrepreneurs, the visionaries, they are the job creators. The right says we
need to give them all the freedom in the world, wealth will trickle down and everything
will be all right. What Winnie pointed
out very well in Davos is that most real wealth is actually created at
the bottom, by the working and middle classes and at the top there is a huge
amount of wealth destruction and exploitation. Entrepreneurs might use the
language of entrepreneurialism and hard work, but if you really delve into their business
models, you’ll find that they’re not contributing to the common good. They are
destroying more than they create.
Trickle: When a liquid trickles,
or when you trickle it, it flows slowly in very small amounts.
Trickle down theory: The
trickle-down theory is the theory that benefits given to people at the top of a
system will eventually be passed on to people lower down the system. For
example, if the rich receive tax cuts, they will pass these benefits on to the
poor by creating jobs.
A: How did the billionaires pull this off? How is it that they
conquered the realm of ideas so successfully and what do you think we need to
do to win the battle of ideas in the coming years?
Pull off: If you pull off something
very difficult, you succeed in achieving it.
W: I was a student in the UK when
Margaret Thatcher set out to
crush the unions. There
was a new language at that time: the message was that if you are poor you are not working hard
enough. You had to be a winner and if you were not, it was your fault.
Ordinary working people were put on the defensive. But there are hardly any
people now who see themselves reaching the top. The top involves a tiny number
of such very rich people it’s unreal. So ordinary people are saying: “Wait a
moment, we are in the majority, down here, and our lives are not like that.”
Set out to
(phrasal verb): If you set out to do something, you start trying to do it. We set out to find the truth behind the
mystery.
R: There is a depressing finding by
researchers at the LSE: in a
survey of 23 western countries since the 1980s, it was discovered that,
as they became more unequal, their populations actually believed more strongly
that people at the top were there because they worked the hardest.
A: I think in many ways the forces of
plutocracy and of conservatism have been better than progressives at
understanding the importance of cultivating ideas. And a big part of ideas is language.
I want to give some examples of the conquest of language – words that everybody
uses, not just plutocrats, but that end up doing the plutocrats’ bidding. One is “win-win”. That phrase sounds great.
Who could be against win-win? But, in fact, win-win is a darkly powerful way of
suggesting that the only kind of progress worth having is the kind that lets the winners win –
in tandem, supposedly, with empowering others.
Bidding (phrase): If you
say that someone does another person's bidding, you disapprove of the fact that
they do exactly what the other person asks them to do, even when they do not
want to.[formal, disapproval] She is very
clever at getting people to do her bidding!
Worth having: If you
say that something is worth having, you mean that it is pleasant or useful, and
therefore a good thing to have. If this
was what his job required, then the job wasn't really worth having.
W: Yes, we were told that
globalisation was a win-win. It’s a situation where everyone is a winner and no
one is a loser. In
America no one even wants to say they are working class. They want
to be called middle class. People feel that the right thing is to identify with the
winners and that has masked many
problems.
A: A couple more examples. Take “thought leader”. When
you were both in Davos, you were surrounded by thought leaders, who are
actually people who don’t say what they truly think: they are the ones who say
nice things about the powerful and keep getting invited back. Why you two made such a splash is that you refused to be
thought leaders, you behaved
like thinkers, which is something those people don’t expect. Another instance
is “doing well by doing good”:
it sounds positive but it really is about putting the people who are trying to
make money in charge of changing a status quo they have no interest in changing.
And then there are terms such as “social impact” and “social venture capital”
and “impact investing”. They are ways of encouraging us not to use words like
“power” and “justice” and “dignity”. They are an attempt to make us not speak
about unions and taxes.
Behave: The way that you behave
is the way that you do and say things, and the things that you do and say.
Doing well by doing good: (idiomatic)
To achieve social acceptance or financial success as a result of behaving in a
benevolent or charitable manner. Sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin. The
concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) began to take hold about 25
years ago and has since gained a firm foothold. It emerged as a notion that
doing good things for society might earn a company some media and public
approval.
W: I have been attending climate change negotiations since
2007 or 2008, and am
always frustrated that you can not use the term “climate justice”. You
can talk about “climate change”, but you cannot say it is an injustice, even
though the people who are facing the worst consequences are poor people. And
they are not the ones who caused it. The negotiators prefer “climate action”,
and the idea that we all have to do it together, that kind of happy happy
language. We don’t place the responsibility where it lies.
R: I really like your point about the
importance of ideas, especially on the right. People often focus on Thatcher or
Ronald Reagan, but what we often forget is that this thing called neoliberalism actually
started in the 1950s. Figures such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich
Hayek gathered as part of the influential think tank the Mont Pelerin Society
and, back then, these were the real radicals; almost everyone else was a
socialist or a social democrat. So they said to themselves we have to start
developing ideas. We are the resistance now, we need to start building
institutions, develop a new narrative, and wait for a moment when the current
system crashes – or at least doesn’t work as well any more. This is exactly
what happened during the 1970s with the oil crisis, with inflation, with
strikes by workers in the west. More and more people began to think that the
economic system wasn’t working. And that’s when Thatcher and Reagan came on
stage with these supposedly new ideas that had in fact been developed over 30
years.
When, after the financial crash of 2008, it
became obvious that neoliberalism was founded on a huge amount of bullshit, the problem was
that there seemed to be no alternative. The left was against a lot of things:
austerity; homophobia; racism; the establishment. But you also need to know
what you are for. A few years ago I argued that we needed to have a Mont
Pelerin of progressives, to start developing ideas that might seem utterly utopian
now but could become a reality in the future. I didn’t expect back then to be
invited to Davos, of all places, to talk about basic income, nor that I would
go viral with a speech about taxes, taxes, taxes. It has been really
interesting how quickly things have changed.
Bullshit: If you say that
something is bullshit, you are saying that it is nonsense or completely untrue.
(ruqueries / chorradas) Etymology: "eloquent and insincere rhetoric,"
1915, American English slang; see bull (n.1) + shit (n.), probably because it
smells. But bull in the sense of "trivial or false statements"
(1914), which usually is associated with this, might be a continuation of Middle
English bull "false talk, fraud" (see bull (n.3)). Bull apparently
from Old French bole "deception, trick, scheming, intrigue," and
perhaps related to modern Icelandic bull "nonsense." Related with
Spanish “bulo”?
Again, in relation to the past, there is the
importance of the cold war, capitalism v communism. I’ve often thought social
democrats in a way depended on there being communism further to the left. Then, with the
defeat of that communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the “end of
history” was proclaimed, and politics was just going to become technocracy –
win-win. What has been happening now is that there is a new generation that’s
not traumatised by the cold war. I’ve
heard this in Davos as well: you talk about taxes and some of the billionaires
say, “Oh that sounds like Venezuela” – Michael Bloomberg recently said it. But
now there is a new generation that says: “Whatever.”
A: I’ve met more people on my book
tour in the last five months than I’ve ever met before in my life. And the big
thing I’ve found is that the conversation no longer revolves around capitalism
v gulags. When Bill Gates was asked in Davos about my book, he seemed to
insinuate that I was a communist, even though he had blurbed it a year before. I think most people
now understand that this “There is no alternative” talk is bullshit. An
understanding seems to be rising that it’s not about left v right or communism
v capitalism any more, but about humanism v plutocracy.
Blurb (countable noun [usually
singular]): The blurb about a new book, film, or exhibition is information
about it that is written in order to attract people's interest.
I think we need to really claim this mantle of humanism because it’s
not only for people on the left. It is for everyone who does not want to be gaslit by the pretensions of
the private-jet set. I really sense,
even with people on the right, that there is anger about monopolies, political corruption and crony capitalism. There is
anger about companies that talk a big game about belonging to communities, but
actually make their decisions based on factors that have nothing to do with
those communities. What we have yet to see is political leadership that is able
to speak to those not only belonging to the left but also to that 10 or 20% of
the folks on the right who are also against plutocracy, even if they may like markets. Such people
may like business and may like the idea of making
£100,000 with their own barber shop one day, but they don’t like Amazon being
the only retailer in the US, they don’t like Facebook controlling democracy and
abetting ethnic
violence.
Mantle: Anything that cloaks,
envelops, covers, or conceals
Gaslit: Lighted or as if lighted
by gaslight
Sense: If you sense something,
you become aware of it or you realize it, although it is not very obvious. She probably sensed that I wasn't telling
her the whole story.
Crony: Friend
Abetting: (verb) If one person
abets another, they help or encourage them to do something criminal or wrong.
Abet is often used in the legal expression 'aid and abet'. His wife was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for aiding and
abetting him.
R: One thing I’ve been doing is to use
a different kind of language, one that centres on basic income for everyone and
higher taxes on the rich. Often people on the left use the language of care, or
they say something is just immoral or this is unjust. And yes, there is a
certain part of the population that is receptive to this kind of language. But
there is another part of the population that doesn’t really like that language.
Also, impoverished people never like being talked down to.
One thing to do is to take back the win-win
language and use it for something else. For example, doing something about
poverty – there’s a lot of research that shows eradicating poverty is an
investment that pays for itself. You spend less on healthcare costs, you spend
less on crime, kids will do better in school, so that is a win-win policy.
Also, history shows the
most fundamental innovation has
come about through government spending. The iPhone is a perfect example:
every fundamental technology that has gone through the iPhone touchscreen, the
battery, the mobile technology – it has all been invented by researchers on the
government payroll.
In the 1980s and 90s it became fashionable to
think of the government as inherently wasteful. But new research has been
conducted by two Dutch economists, who asked 27,000 people in 37 countries: do
you think your job is actually valuable? It turns out a quarter think their job
doesn’t add anything of value. And four times as many people think that in the
private sector as in the public sector. The more valuable jobs, such as caring
for other people, police officers, fire fighters, you name it, are in the
public sector. It’s possible to take the whole narrative of wasteful jobs and
turn it around.
W: Yes, at Oxfam we call it a human
economy, and we try to paint a picture of what that could look like. We begin
with what is wrong now, showing that the super-rich don’t just spend on
priceless works of art, but also use that money to buy the public voice, buy
the media, buy impunity from justice, buy the policy process, to bribe congressmen and women. I call it bribing,
they call it lobbying. We show wealth at the top is being used to take away your voice, your
rights, the policies that would work for you. I find that this shocks people –
they start by thinking that the rich are just enjoying their money, snorting
cocaine. Then they actually realise they are using that money to disempower
ordinary people. For example, we can express the amount of money governments
lose from billionaires’ tax
dodging in terms of the number of nurses. Supposing we said:
“x-billionaire dodged some 50,000 nurses”. We use that kind of language – it’s
emotive, it has an impact on people.
Bribe: If one person bribes
another, they give them a bribe. A bribe is a sum of money or something
valuable that one person offers or gives to another in order to persuade him or
her to do something.
Tax dodge: a way of avoiding having
to pay the full amount of tax owed; it may be legal or illegal
A: In the US the right has been better
at using the kind of emotive language you describe. For example, the estate
tax, which in any version of it only affects a very small number of estates at
the top: it was brilliantly rebranded as the death tax. If you call it a death
tax you create the feeling among people that their very mortality is being interfered
with by the government. People who want more equality and more justice need to
get more imaginative with language.
R: Here’s an idea: I think we should
call it a laziness tax.
That’s basically what it is. You have a huge class of people who haven’t
actually done any real work themselves or contributed in any meaningful way to
societies. They were just born into certain families. I’ve also been trying to
reframe basic income as pro-work. It’s “venture capitalism for the people”, to use a Silicon
Valley phrase. Everyone wants the ability to make different choices, to move to
a different city, start a new company. I dislike the left v right axis, but you
often can’t get around it.
Lazy / leɪzi /: If someone is
lazy, they do not want to work or make any effort to do anything.
Venture: Risk
A: I was listening to an extraordinary
conversation Ocasio-Cortez had with the American writer Ta‑Nehisi Coates
in a church a couple of weeks ago for Martin Luther King Day. Ocasio-Cortez
made the point that elected officials like her are really followers rather than
leaders. She said: “Part of the job of elected public office is translating public will into the law of
the land. Who shapes, who directs and who moves that public will? Writers,
journalists, activists, artists.” And that is so true. It was the job of Upton
Sinclair to show what the slaughterhouses
were actually like, and what labouring conditions were actually like, and then
politicians made laws to improve things. It has been such a grim time for journalism, for
books and many of these other things, in part, because of plutocrats and the
monopolistic world they have built. But I come to this conversation so
optimistic about the power of ideas and books right now. I feel like what we
are witnessing is a profound cultural turning point in relation to these
issues, caused by activists, artists and writers who are changing what the
public wants by telling honest stories.
Public will: Will is
the determination to do something.
Slaughterhouses: A
slaughterhouse is a place where animals are killed for their meat.
Grim: A situation or piece of
information that is grim is unpleasant, depressing, and difficult to accept.
W: Stories are my biggest weapon.
Oxfam works in more than 90 countries around the world, and people respond to
stories very strongly.
R: I’m 30 years old. I’ve been writing for seven or
eight years now. And never
before have I had such a strong feeling that the zeitgeist is really shifting and now you can
talk about things that were simply not possible just a couple of years ago. It
seems like the window of what is politically possible is just opening up, or
that what they call the Overton window is shifting. Ideas, according to theory that originated
with political scientist Joseph Overton, are seen as somehow acceptable to
discuss at a certain creative time, and the real political challenge is to move
the window. The people behind such a shift are never politicians or mainstream
writers, they are the radicals – those who are often seen as naive or bizarre,
people who make you uncomfortable and angry. And they often pay a high price
for doing this hard work. There are many examples throughout history, whether
we are talking about the fight against slavery, or women fighting for the right
to vote, or the establishment of the welfare state. Ideas that were first
dismissed as ridiculous or too expensive or dangerous became the bedrock of
civilisation.
Zeitgeist: The zeitgeist of a
particular place during a particular period in history is the attitudes and
ideas that are generally common there at that time, especially the attitudes
and ideas shown in literature, philosophy, and politics.
W: I hope that’s true.
R: I think that hope is exactly the
right word, because I never really like the word optimism. Optimism gives you
the feeling that, “Oh everything will be all right, just sit down, enjoy the
ride – all the trains are good.” But hope is fundamentally different, another
world is possible but not inevitable.
W: Do you think the racists, the
misogynists, feel that they are being pushed back or do they feel they can
assert themselves and make their reality the norm?
A: My view from the US, and I bet it’s
true in Britain to a certain extent, is that you have two big things happening
to a lot of white working-class communities. On the one hand, they have been
victims of a great plutocratic theft,
like everybody else over the last generation. To the extent that they feel like
they can’t raise children who will have a better life than them, they can’t get
the kind of education that gives them a piece of the dream, they can’t have the
kind of healthcare that allows them to not think about healthcare all the time,
they feel that theft.
Theft: Theft is the crime of
stealing.
The problem is that those people also feel a
second theft, which is not actually a theft, which is the rise of women and
minorities, and immigrants and African Americans. In fact that’s not a theft at
all, it’s a wave of rising equality; it is justice. But I think we have to
accept that the psychological experience of this change may also be felt as a
theft. What Donald Trump did is to exploit the pain caused by the real theft,
and to divert blame for it on to the non-theft. He made it all about the
cultural ascendancy of others – they are the ones who stole the dream from you.
And instead of encouraging people to punch up at the powerful, he encouraged them to
punch out, at women and minorities and the Other. I think the political
challenge for us is to go to those communities and not to pander but to speak compellingly to both of those
experiences of feeling wary of
the future, and to identify the real reasons why it has happened.
Pander: If you pander to someone
or to their wishes, you do everything that they want, often to get some advantage
for yourself. (condescendir / condescender)
Compellingly: In a way that demands attention and interest
Wary of: If you are wary of something or someone, you
are cautious because you do not know much about them and you believe they may
be dangerous or cause problems. (desconfiar)
Now, before we go, I want to see if the three
of us can make a case for hope. All three of us have been pushing a certain
rock up a hill, and suddenly the slope seems to be becoming more hospitable.
What do you want to see happen?
R: If you ask people from around the
globe in what kind of country they would like to live, almost everyone says:
“Somewhere like Sweden.” Much less inequality, more rights for workers, higher
taxes on the rich, it doesn’t really matter whether you are asking people on
the left or right, it’s pretty much the same everywhere. So there is huge
potential. You only need to find a way to draw on that political energy. There
was one political advertisement by Bernie Sanders, in 2016, that I really like,
called Together. In it he says: “We should not allow them to define us.” The whole
purpose of the campaign was to bring people together – black, white, men,
women, that doesn’t matter. I think this is the very simple message that we
need to keep on communicating: don’t allow them to divide us.
W: We must go out and mobilise and
create new norms, and say, for instance, that it’s wrong for people not to have
help when they are sick, they should have free healthcare. That idea was alive
after the second world war. Everyone all over the world understood and agreed
that healthcare should be a right. What I’m hopeful about is there is such
anger at the few who are running away with wealth and power, these monopolies,
these big tech companies taking our information, not paying their taxes. So
much concentration of wealth and injustice by those few at the top. That is
going to help us to shift the norm back to what is good for society, a human
economy that works for all, a society that cares for all, including those who
may not be able to work and earn. We are now a movement building.
A: I do feel tremendously hopeful,
which is strange because my country has the most dangerous leader it has ever
had, and things are very fractured around the world. I was recently in Britain
in the House of Commons when they took that chaotic vote [on Brexit] a couple
weeks ago, so it may seem strange to be hopeful. But there are cycles in history, and I believe
we are at the natural end of a 40-year cycle, defined by the religion of money,
defined by the veneration of entrepreneurs and markets. And instead
of just saying, “That’s wrong”, I think it’s more empathetic to ourselves as a
society to say that the last 40 years has been an experiment, an era defined by
entrepreneurs as heroes, markets as gods – just as a century ago there was the
industrial revolution and the first gilded age, a time of great fortunes. I think we are living in the
death pangs of an era
that has done tremendous good, but has also done tremendous harm, that has
lifted a lot of people out of poverty, but also put the planet in mortal jeopardy. And I feel hope
that another era has to follow this era because that is how history works. As
well as the death pangs, there are birth pangs right now. I believe that after
the age of markets will come the age of reform and the age of solidarity.
Gilded Age: a
period of U.S. history in the 1870s noted for political corruption, financial
speculation, and the opulent lives of wealthy industrialists and financiers
Pang: Spasm
In jeopardy: If
someone or something is in jeopardy, they are in a dangerous situation where
they might fail, be lost, or be destroyed.
• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of
Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas is published by Allen Lane. Utopia for
Realists by Rutger Bregman is published by Bloomsbury. Winnie Byanyima is
executive director of Oxfam International.
A good reader complement would be "La trampa de la diversidad" from Daniel Bernabé (2018)
