Owen Jones: Hubris haunts the West

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1:25Hey Owen, it's Oli Dugmore from The New Statesman. Really looking forward to seeing you later. Good to catch up. Not least because I want to talk to you about your new book, The Fall of the West. I want to talk about geopolitics. I want to talk about socialism. I want to talk about boomerang theory and how it all applies and comes together in our modern moment. So yes, really looking forward to seeing you and speak soon. Hey, Ron. Super excited to see you too. We've got a lot to talk about by the sounds of things. Very light sort of topics, just about the very future existence of human civilisation.

2:03But I think we can manage that. Speak in a bit. If you've been following leftist politics in the UK for the last two decades, my guest today will be a very familiar voice. Owen Jones burst onto the scene in 2011 with his best-selling book, Chavs, the demonisation of the working class. Since then, his activism and journalism has followed the ebbs and flows of the left in UK politics, his own push and pull relationship with the Labour Party, which he ultimately left in 2024. Now, he wants to cast his analysis beyond Britain. He joins me in this episode to discuss his new book, The Fall of the West, how they really lost it.

2:41I'm Oli Dugmore, and you're listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

2:50for someone who's coming to not just perhaps this book but maybe your work and you cold from a start like set it out for us what's your world view what do you think and then we'll get into it and we'll talk about the book itself well i'm i guess a democratic socialist i guess i mean i i always resent putting democratic in front of it though because for me you can't have socialism without democracy. Socialism for me is the democratization of life. It's capitalism is, in my view, on a collision course with democracy because it hands huge unaccountable power and influence to wealthy elites by virtue of that wealth.

3:27And it leaves vast numbers of people, not least those who work for their own labor in a position of exploitation. It oppresses people. It causes huge resentments as people feel they're competing for scarce resources. And that leads to, drives racism and xenophobia and in turn far right movements that threaten even the limited democracy that we have. So for me, it's about the redistribution of wealth and power. It's about the real wealth creators, the workers having the wealth that they create rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few, particularly in a financialized economy. And it's about building a world which isn't based on domination, which isn't based on what has been since about 1800 in different forms, the West's hegemony, the West's domination of the world, which has been about extracting resources and conquering lands with the resulting deaths of tens of millions of people in order to enrich that tiny elite.

4:28And that, you know, I want to build a different world, which is based on justice and peace, where it isn't rigged in favour of a tiny elite who, I think, brought the world to the edge of catastrophe with question marks about the very future existence of our civilisation. Like you said earlier, light stuff for us to talk about over the next hour. So that's you. That's your worldview. That's, you know, that's socialism. And then the book itself, Someone Coming to It Cold, what's it about? so it's the fall of the west how they really lost it um which obviously has a kind of double meaning there really doesn't it i think um you know i think people do have that sense of the world's gone insane and turmoil and all the rest i think the problem is you know when i started writing it some of my friends were like all right liz truss um obviously when she after she was beaten by a lettuce she went on to write 10 years to save the west i think that was about two or three years ago now so the countdown is is on but you know she was really adding to a very large literature and and and kind of ecosystem of right-wing declinism yes that's the heart really of the modern right the the west is in decline i mean make america great again that slogan is based on the fact that america's in decline which trump talked about all the time and when he's campaigning and all the rest um and i i think my view was why the hell has this narrative been left to the right because the West is in decline, but they've been left to define what that is.

5:52And their view is it's migrants, it's Muslims, it's woke, it's the attack on the West's history, it's the march through the institutions, it's the deep state, it's all these sorts of things. And the West isn't in decline for those reasons. And actually, the people talking about the West decline the loudest are themselves both symptoms and accelerants. Donald Trump is a symptom of Western decline, but he's also definitely whacked on the accelerators on it. And for me, the West decline is about how, well, I guess the moment of triumph about 35 years ago, the Soviet Union implodes and Western elites go, well, hey, we won the jackpot.

6:33It's the end of history. There is no going back. We've won an absolute historical victory. And now we can do what the hell we like. Our economic model is completely and utterly unchallengeable. We are militarily invincible and we are morally superior. And there was a time before that, you know, in the 70s, neoconservatism rose because of a sense of American decline. They lost in Vietnam. There was a sense of Soviet military prowess. There was stagflation. And Vietnam left the West looking, for many, morally exposed because of the atrocities it was committing. So this was all washed away all of a sudden.

7:10And it was like, it wasn't just, you know, in the past when you get a kind of military victory of a sort, which can, they maybe argue can prevail for this period or whatever. It was the end of history as that summed up the zeitgeist of the time. And that led to catastrophe because, well, it was self-serving because they go, you know, if there's the economic model, which is sucking wealth upwards. It's, you know, about share buybacks and dividends rather than investment. It's financialized. Workers' wages are stagnating and all the rest long before the financial crash. But if you oppose all that, it's like, well, what are you going to do about it?

7:51It's the end of history. You know, you lost, loser, dinosaur. Militarily, the view was, again, what's anyone going to do about it? We can do exactly what we want. And morally, that kind of moral triumphalism underpinned all of that. It gave it a kind of moral justification. Anyone who opposed it was sort of morally bankrupt. And that led to catastrophe because it led to the financial collapse, which was a direct consequence of all of that self-serving triumphalism. And it led to the military humiliation of the West over and over and over again in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya and now in Iran.

8:31Four military catastrophes in the space of a quarter of a century or less than a quarter of a century. and the moral claims which have always been used to underpin western power you know back in the days of old-star colonialism it was we're bringing civilization to backwards peoples we're uplifting them we're bringing the railways and all the rest and and and you know religion and and more on ethics and all the rest of it and that was just largely destroyed by the likes of iraq and so on But it was completely shredded, of course, along with tens of thousands of Palestinians in Israel's Western facilitated genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

9:14And all of this has led as well partly to, well, it's led directly to the real crisis that is now enveloping Western democracy. We've very serious questions over the future of Western democracy, in which a far right demagogue obviously runs the world's flailing hegemon. and that is a boomerang. That is, it's partly the economic turmoil of a system which was rigged in favour of elites or no longer providing sustained rises in living standards, in improvements in public services, improvements in security, leading to huge resentment and anger, leading people to feel they're in a zero-sum game competing for resources.

9:59and it's it's led the destabilization of the world by these wars and to movements of people to europe which are then scapegoated for that economic turmoil and and the war on terror built up a whole apparatus and both rhetorically actually an apparatus of rhetoric but obviously a physical apparatus which is now being redirected as you can see in the united states not just now against Muslims being racialized as this enemy within and obviously being used abroad. But against not just migrants, but against dissidents, against the left, against even milquetoast liberals, the Democratic Party denounced by Stephen Miller, Trump's right hand man, as an extremist terrorist organization.

10:46You know, National Guard sent to US cities as though it's a surge in Afghanistan or Iraq. like ICE used in ways against protesters and against migrants who are framed as terrorists. So this moment of total triumphalism, the Western elite saying, look at what we have won. We have won the lottery 10 times over. No one will ever be able to challenge us ever again, directly led to the West's chaotic decline. And that's a really critical point. It's not just a decline, which would have happened anyway, a relative decline as China and the rest rise. But it's a chaotic decline. And that, I think, is what is disturbing about it, because I think some might go, well, hey, you fall to the rest.

11:34Probably someone like you is probably kind of happy about that. But the question is always what happens next and what form that decline takes. And at the moment, what we can see is barbarism being legitimized in very disturbing ways and authoritarianism. And at the very worst time is various new technologies can be used and deployed against people to prevent any coherent opposition to any of that. So many of the sort of themes of that answer, I really want to try and draw out and push you on a little bit over the course of this conversation. not least Western hubris and claims to moral authority, the extent to which we can say that ever actually existed in the first place is one I really want to talk about.

12:20I want to talk more about boomerang theory. I want to talk about China and the way that all of these things are sort of brought together in our present moment and what we're witnessing happening in Gaza and indeed more recently now in the West Bank as well. I want to start, if I can, with domestic politics because we're talking in a moment, obviously, well, I was going to say we have a relatively new Prime Minister. By recent standards, we're sort of possibly even halfway through his term. He's a veteran. Yeah, he is. Yeah, we've got an old hand in Downing Street. You know, we're talking around the time of the Labour Party conference, which, you know, until relatively recently, you would have been at both as a member and then as a journalist as well.

12:58I'll be there. Are you still going? Yeah, I mean, they revoked my pass last time, but only after I was on the train home. So I was like, all right. You've been making those videos. I mean, particularly I've always liked the ones from Tory Party Conference in particular, doorstopping politicians, talking to activists, etc. I mean, you've been doing it for a while. And I sort of, I was struck by that, because not least the fact that you've been able to do it at the Conservative Party conference, and it seemed like you weren't able to do it, or well, you had done it, but then you passed revoked at Labour.

13:27And it just, it felt like, it felt like a symbol of something bigger, right? Because I've, for a long time, I always associated you with the Labour Party. I know you're not a member anymore. It clearly was like, It had a symbolism attached to the journey that the party had been on under Corbyn, the direction under Starmer. And now, to a certain extent, I think a question that many people have a left-wing persuasion are kind of looking at the party and thinking, OK, we've got a new prime minister who is saying things like, I want to end 40 years of neoliberalism. We've made a series of wrong turns since the 80s that I want to roll back.

14:02But again, it is not the first time that a Labour leader has made rhetorical nods and tips to the left of the party and more broadly to the British left, only then to reverse course once they get into power. And so I suspect there are plenty of people who would like to hear your early read. And I appreciate it's still early days, as much as we might take the piss a little bit about the Prime Minister. But it is early days. what your first impressions of him are and how you kind of sit Burnham in number 10 alongside that most recent chapter in the Labour Party's history under Keir Starmer. What's interesting about, I think, Andy Burnham is the rhetoric has obviously drastically changed.

14:36Yeah. And I do think that what needs to be emphasised, which isn't emphasised enough, is that the reason he became prime minister is because the left flank of the Labour kind of coalition was defecting en masse. and I say that because you know when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister it was understood that was because of the threat of Nigel Farage and the Brexit party but the left aren't seen as legitimate political actors in this country so it's like one thing you never do is give any credit to the left in any shape or form they're not legitimate and when they appear in any shape or form it's some sort of weird aberration and the political universe needs to be restored to how it should actually be That's the kind of gist.

15:19But, you know, the truth is, you know, Labour lost the Gorton and Denton by-election to the Green Party by a big margin. And then in the local elections, Labour got absolutely battered. But when they lost about four times as much votes to the Green Party as they did to reform, that didn't often materialise in seats because of how the cookie crumbles. because, you know, some places that means reform come through because you're in smaller towns where you get a bit from Labour for reform and then more from the Tories and therefore they're the victors. But nonetheless, it was their left flank that was on mass defecting.

15:52And that was based on, you know, the only thing Starmerism had in the cupboard was we hate the left. We define ourselves against the left. We conned our way into power. That was their basic original sin, which was we'll dupe the Labour membership into voting for someone who will do the exact opposite of what he claims to stand for. You know, he stood as kind of Corbyn but competent. You know, that was his shtick. And then he launched the most aggressive assault on the left in the history of the Labour Party. You know, no one has purged and used the whip to arbitrarily suspend Labour MPs en masse for voting against the government as Keir Starmer.

16:34I think what Burnham's done, the way I would look at it, is Keir Starmer's government pretended to be more right wing than they actually were. And I'm not saying they were lefties, by the way. But they did. They emphasised the fiscal rules and they emphasised, I don't know, locking up grannies for holding placards against genocide and kicking pensioners and disabled people. Whereas Andy Burnham is pretending to be more left wing than the government actually is. And what he's doing is he's taking the social democratic, mild social democratic elements that already are there. For example, rail semi-nationalization, modest reforms to workers' rights, public investment in some areas.

17:23And he's bringing that to the fore and he's stitching it together with a vision and an analysis. That's basically what I would say he's done that's different. and you know i think that if you look at his analysis obviously i agree with it yeah of course and actually his analysis in terms of talking about 40 years of neoliberalism obviously i mean the way he's talking you know other than jeremy corbyn who obviously has to be erased from labor history um you you know labor league ed milliband would never you know when he started talking i remember the up war when ed milliband spoke about it was in 2012 he It spoke about some business people being predators versus, I can't remember what the other one was, predators versus like investors or something.

18:08And people are like, oh my God, this is outrageous. It's like he's turned into a Bolshevik. Redhead. Exactly. And it was just like the mildest kind of critique imaginable. So Ali Burnham's rest of it there shows a massive shift. And that shows they realise, oh, you can't actually just keep insulting a very significant constituency of people who are very politically disenchanted with a broken economic order and abroad don't like, for example, the mass slaughter of innocent children. The shift he's made on Israel in terms of, and Palestine, in terms of the sanctions and legal settlements. Originally, I got, you know, it's easy to get a bit kind of mardy about it in the sense of like, I think it's just a case of, you know, We've had a live stream genocide for three years in which the most unspeakable horrors have been committed.

19:05Over 20 ,000 children, Gaza white for the face of the earth, hospitals bombed, schools bombed, agriculture intentionally destroyed. People starved deliberately. You know, a UN independent commission which concluded correctly that children are being deliberately targeted by Israeli soldiers, was deliberately shot in the head which u.s based medics have testified over and over again he's served in gaza or um you know a brilliant oxford surgeon who i interviewed he was in gaza three times and the third time he was there had teenage boys coming in each day with being shot in different parts of the body what one day it was the head one day it was the neck one day it was the chest one day it was the testicles and he said they're clearly playing a game there the point i'm making is you kind of look at that and think wow kind of you know we really just have to be grateful for, you know, for the smallest possible gestures in that context.

19:58But, you know, someone who kind of snapped me out of that actually quite effectively was Daniel Levy. I don't know if you know him. He's a brilliant guy. He used to work. He was on the Israeli negotiating team. His politics has been on a journey. And he just made it clear. He said the danger if you just whinge about or get, you know, sulk about anything that's in this context, however horrific the context is, you'll demobilize people because people think, well, what's the point in protesting? What's the point in organizing? And what I would say about that particular shift under Burnham is there is a significance to it.

20:38It's not just the sanctions will, for example, mean targeting potentially Israeli banks and insurance companies and so on, anything that facilitates the construction of West Bank settlements, It's not just like, you know, olives or whatever that being produced there. But the point is, it's because people campaigned and organized. And I think that's what shifted. Because what Starmer did is define that government and Morgan McSweeney define themselves against those people. It's like the more those people squeal, the better. Good. We're doing the right thing. And that strategy brought the Labour Party to the edge of destruction.

21:11They brought it to the point of existential collapse. That's what they did. And Andy Burnham, you can see there, they realize you can't do that without destroying the Labour Party. And I think that shift is testament to organising and it needs to be built on. How do you think about that problem? How do you reconcile maybe not ever achieving power but being able to cling to a set of political ideas that perhaps maybe even preclude achieving political power? I've always had this theory of change of people organise from below and force the powerful to conceive. and you know I always certainly thought what was more likely for a long time was you'd get a Labour government and then pressure would be applied to them and that would drag them to more progressive positions and I think in the here and now you know an ideal scenario actually or an ideal realistic scenario would be for example a minority Labour government that's dependent on green MPs and potentially electoral reform, which then means people can vote according to their conscience, and then you can get more left-wing MPs elected in the first place.

22:17So, you know, yeah, and that government would then be forced to do more radical things because it would be dependent on those MPs. So that's one theory. I think the broader point, though, is I think, I mean, you know, in the 2010s, there was this first wave of a new left, and you saw that with Corbynism, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Bernie Sanders in the United States, and that they all, Mélenchon in France they all crashed to some in different ways against the shore but I think it was a time that when you know when the financial crash happened the left didn't exist really as a viable political force in the west at all and I think at the time you know it was easy for the fragments of the left to think hooray crisis of capitalism I mean obviously you shouldn't celebrate people's misery but as in people think well now the left will surely be reborn and that You know, in the 1930s, we got fascism.

23:12But the left was defined such as it was by stop the cuts, stop the war, stop privatization, rather than a coherent vision of society. And then I think what happened is you got then a surge on the left, but it didn't have, you know, it didn't have the people. Suddenly you got all these newly politicized people for the first time. It didn't have the kind of coherent vision and the kind of economic vision, all the rest of it. and it didn't have the political experience. And I think a lot of the 2010s was about learning from that. And I think you can see that in America with Memdani. I mean, obviously he's a formidable politician and everyone will say generational talent, but obviously he had to learn, he's a product of Bernie Sanders, that movement, sorry, in 2016 onwards, as is AOC.

23:58You know, they wouldn't exist without a movement which superficially, of course, was defeated. Well, it was defeated, But that wasn't the end of the story in 2016. And, you know, I think what the optimistic reading would be what that there is. You can see the United States of all places. Actually, the prospects for the American left are probably better than they've ever been in the history of the United States. There was Eugene Debs a century ago. But we're talking here about, you know, in terms of just this range of politicians who've emerged on the basis of a mass movement, which does actually have mass support, where you can see in public opinion, the most popular politicians, when the top five, and it's Mamdani, AOC, Bernie Sanders.

24:46so I you know I think there was a shift taking place and you would you rule out would you rule out someone like AAC becoming president you might think that's not definite you might think there's big question marks you might think there's you know big doubts about it but you absolutely would not rule that out you would not rule that out in 2028 you wouldn't say that's definitely not going to happen imagine saying eight years ago or say like 10 years ago I mean maybe we say 2014 because it's before everything went a bit crazy but 2014 if he said the by the end of next decade America will have a self-described there's a prospect of a self-described social you'd think completely insane so I think things have shifted we're going to take a quick break now we will be back after this

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27:24Okay, let's move to, let's talk briefly about climate, and we'll use that as a way to connect between the Labour Party and your book, because it's being reported that the Labour government's going to grant licences to drilling for both gas and oil and Rosebank and Jackdaw. I mean, just initially, before we start to talk about it, I'm assuming you would oppose that taking place. I was struck reading your book that climate only really seemed to sort of make its entrance towards the conclusion. I mean, talk to me about that. And I sort of sit that within the fact as well. You've been out and about.

27:56I've seen a lot with Green Party politicians recently. I was, tell me about your decision to kind of involve the environment or bring it into your analysis in the later stages of your writing, rather than perhaps making it more central to your argument. Well, actually, there was actually originally in the proposal, there was actually an entire chapter on climate. I think the reason, because it's a book about the decline of the West. And obviously, the climate emergency is an existential threat facing human civilization as a whole, which the West has disproportionately contributed to, which is obviously what I talked about in the conclusion about the, you know, how the elites who once were full of triumphalism are now preparing for the end of the world.

28:35and they're all trying to snap up bolt holes in New Zealand and bunkers in Germany in order to escape Armageddon. Yeah, and I guess the problem with a book like this is it can just end up being, here's all the problems facing humanity. Whereas what I was interested in is, why is the West in decline? What caused the West to go into decline? And I guess you can say the climate emergency is a reason why the West is in decline, but that's more a question of what the West has done has disproportionately done has led to has led humanity to the to the brink of catastrophe um but i think it's a valid critique i mean certainly when i was you know when i mean the problem was when i was writing it i mean it had it's a long book um but you know there's a lot of material there's so much i was you know i was going around the world you know uh you know to iraq and palestine and across europe and america um and i just felt that that yeah that i wove in climate there towards the end because I feel otherwise there's a story about why has the West militarily, economically and morally the elites brought it to a state of total crisis, then that's where the focus is.

29:49And if you tie what you've just said there about opposing that drilling and combine it with what we've said so far about the neoliberal settlement and Andy Burnham's stated intention of reversing the neoliberal settlement. I wonder how you think about the fact that... Could I not make the argument to you now? It's not one I would probably subscribe to, but I'll do it for the sake of us having a relatively interesting conversation, that a green transition is a transition, so there's got to be some use of fossil fuels. But perhaps more crucially, that if we want to talk about re-industrialisation and supporting local economies, that places like Scotland and the northeast of England are reliant on the North see the extraction of fossil fuels and that whilst we accept and by no means deny that doing this is going to have a negative consequence for the environment, that there are trade-offs involved and if we want to be serious about re-industrialising or at least not de-industrialising these places at such a rapid pace, that this might be a course of action that would support those local economies.

30:52Well, no, because I think it's tying communities to a dying order. It's tying communities to to an industry which is is obviously has contributed to the crisis now developing human civilization and but also is is one which is on the way out when we should be focusing on the industries of the future and that that shows why we need an industrial strategy that's why you know we had the state position from thatchers and onwards if you let the market decide or winners or losers um where for example you know you got well the absurdity with with with mining where you got the mining industry shut down and then we just imported coal instead um where those communities were utterly ravaged and there was nothing there to replace those those industries and you go to those communities as i've had you know i was born during the mining strike i was born in sheffield in in in 1984 and you know my dad was a a trotskyist activist and militant um as it was back then but he was so he was he was there you know there um he was he was heavily involved politically in the mining strike but you know those entire communities were utterly obliterated as were shipbuilding industries as were um as steel and and all the rest and the question is what how what how you focus on on building different industries which aren't reliant on what are a dying resource.

32:22So just what you're saying there about that new technology, it makes me think about Adam 2s and, you know, electrostates versus petrostates and certainly the Chinese economy and really their positioning now at the sort of technological frontier, certainly as pertains to like solar power, battery technology. Electric cars and all the rest of it. Yeah, exactly. And if we're going to – I guess there's a central strategic question, which I think Miliband, when he was energy secretary, was kind of clued into and thinking about is the degree of alignment. I think it's slightly different for middle powers like the UK, but perhaps we're sort of kidding ourselves there when we think about this.

33:05But the extent to which you align your economy with the Chinese one in order to facilitate that green transition. And obviously, the reason I'm saying that is because that does not come without political consequences and trade-offs, right? Because of China's own record of human rights, free independent media, things that, you know, democratic socialists care about. How do you think about that problem? Well, I mean, we're dealing here partly with the legacy of what happens if you just trash your own industrial sector and don't think about the long term. because what also goes with that is the kind of research and development and all the rest of it.

33:43And Germany for a long time avoided this, that they were not long-term strategists, because what they did is they did, you know, invest in industries which were harder to just export to China, for example. Although now that hasn't worked out for them because they're not actually, they didn't focus on the sort of far more advanced technology that China. You know, China used to be, you know, when I was a teenager, It was portrayed as kind of this is where the kind of kind of low quality, low grade junk is kind of created and that floods the world. And now actually what they've done is because they control their finance.

34:20So their financial sector is state owned. They own the commanding heights of the economy. And their private sector is not the private sector we have in this country. It's the demarcation between the state and the private sector is heavily blurred. but they can just redirect resources and strategy directly into those sectors. I mean, look, one of the examples I gave in the book was just how South Korea is, by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were portraying South Korea as this great sort of vindication of capitalism and all the rest of it. And obviously South Korea is capitalist, but it wasn't Thatcher-y or Reagan-y.

34:58Again, they controlled the banks. They nationalised the key sectors of their economy. And they mobilised the state with their literal five year plans, which is what they called them. They used the state in order to direct their resources and finance at the industries that they wanted to. And I just think that is more what we should be doing rather than, you know, having this, you know, we've left ourselves exposed because we've hollowed all of that out. and therefore it becomes seen as we have to choose between the United States and China because we've left ourselves so exposed and vulnerable.

35:38I mean, you can't ignore, obviously, you know, in the same way, you know, no one realistically is arguing you could just ignore the United States, however horrific Donald Trump is and all the rest of it. You can't do the same with China. It doesn't mean you should, you know, send them weapons to go and oppress people. but I just think it just distracts a lot from how we've failed to use the state to reverse our decline because what happened is the whole shtick of Thatcherism is get rid of the state or roll back the frontiers of the state in various ways and then there'll be a rebirth and actually every decade since well the decade since from the 80s onwards the growth was significantly lower than what came before it was less equity distributed And it all went into the direction of not making things, but into complex financial products, which then led us into a disastrous mess, which we've literally never recovered from.

36:34It's nearly two decades on. So I just think, you know, I think one of the things we can learn from China is not obviously the deeply authoritarian repressive system, but actually the reason the economic model has worked better than the West economic models from the 80s onwards isn't just the story of, you know, look, they liberalized and all the rest of it. Well, actually, they kept the state at the absolute center of everything they did. And if the West hadn't, if the West had adopted that approach, then we wouldn't have faced the economic decline that we have faced, which is very real. Let's talk about the book specifically.

37:10How exactly has the West fallen? Can we not make the argument that America is still, to a greater or lesser extent, the richest and most powerful country on Earth? Oh, it absolutely is. I mean, America is still a preeminent power. I mean, the fall of the West is the West is falling. It hasn't fallen. and the US will remain by virtue partly of its size for a start and its wealth. It will always be, unless something absolutely catastrophic happens to it, an extremely important power. But the point is that the West was hegemonic. The West had total dominance on the world stage. That was challenged from the Cold War onward, after the World War II onwards, because you got decolonization and because the Soviet Union existed, those anti-colonial movements had a kind of alternative center of power they could ally to.

38:06So the West power was declining in that period. You know, I wrote my master's thesis on neoconservatism as a product of American decline in the 70s. And that's what they spoke about at the time they were speaking about declines. So you can kind of go, well, we've heard this all before and look what happened. And you basically, I think the argument, I think, is just, I think it's just important to realise that you've got this sugar rush with the collapse of the Soviet Union, where that was the failure of the Soviet system, which was this undemocratic, bureaucratic system, which failed. It was very good at de-industrialising, sorry, industrialising it at a great human cost.

38:47But when it came to a complex economy, it's just not able to deal with that. But that was then used at the very moment where you got the rise of neoliberalism in the West, where Western elites to go, their failure is our success. This proves this form of capitalism we have is the form of capitalism, which is the only form of capitalism. So, I mean, the fall of the Soviet Union was used to just batter even the most mild social democratic alternatives, as if Stalinism and mild social democracy were just strains of the same failure. I mean, that's how it's portrayed. And from that, you know, you got militarily as well at the time, Saddam Hussein very handily from the West point of view, invaded Kuwait, which is obviously a tiny state.

39:39left his army exposed in the middle of a desert to be pummeled by a US-led international coalition of several countries. And so at the very moment, the Soviet Union collapsed. There was this sense of, well, look, here's the fireworks to prove the military triumph of the West. But what happened particularly, and this is, you know, I think by the end of the 90s, you always get the peak of that triumphalism because you've had now, you had a decade of military supremacy, which seemed to be proven, for example, by interventions of the Balkans. And Iraq seemed to be, you know, just permanently hobbled, just kept bombing it every occasionally.

40:19And the economy seemed to be superficially to be booming. And what happened with 9-11 in particular was that military triumphalism fused with the sense of, well, you know, we've got an opportunity now, basically, which is what the Project for a New American Century, that think tank which provided key personnel for George W. Bush, openly spoke about. They said if we get a Pearl Harbor moment, then we'd be able to do these various things. And because they felt militarily and economically invincible, they obviously invaded these countries with catastrophic consequences. They pursued economic policies which enriched the financial sector in a tiny few at the expense of the majority.

41:06And that led to disasters which actually fused with each other because the US spent trillions on these wars, which could have been invested in the American economy, weakened the American economy before the financial crash even happened. And it led to this huge kind of mix of this toxic mix of anger and rage, which Donald Trump then managed to successfully manipulate and threaten the very future of American democracy. But the far right we see on the rise in Germany elsewhere are doing the very same thing. So, you know, economically, militarily and morally, the fall of the West in the 21st century is absolutely astonishing from where it was at the beginning of the century.

41:49The beginning of the century, it was Pax Americana. It was total hegemony, is we can do what the hell we want. No one thinks American militarily do what we want now because it's been defeated strategically four times. I mean, once is unlucky, twice is a bit of a problem. Three times is, come on now, four times is absolutely catastrophic for an empire. You made the point right about the USSR kind of functioning as a counterweight to other governments or global populations to the West. And I appreciate this is a simplistic question and it wraps up so much with it. But I guess the challenge to you or to my mind is, are we really sort of countering and saying that the world was a better place with the USSR in it?

42:32Because it is not without its own problems. Obviously, we could talk about Hungarian uprising. We can talk about the Prague Spring. We can talk about the purges, the gulags, etc. How do you reconcile having a bipolar world with two hegemons in it, both of which have incredibly dirty, horrible components? Actually, could we make the case to say that the USSR is an empire of its own kind? Oh, yeah. Look, I'm not a tanky. It should be very clear, but I'm not a Stalinist. And the point I'm making about the fall of the Soviet Union is firstly how that was spun in order to justify an economic and military order, which has led to global catastrophe as well as the decline of the West.

43:19And, you know, the Soviet Union offered no alternative to a broken capitalist system. It was totalitarian for a start. You know, a book that made a big impact, I mean, you mentioned Hungary, was by a guy called Peter Fryer. he was the daily worker the organ of the communist parties um he was journalist for them and he went to hungary in 1956 believing before he went that this was this um you know that it was a it was a bourgeois revolution you know counter-revolution against socialism and the soviet's fraternal forces were there to restore um the rule of the workers and the peasants and then he went there And he went, oh.

44:01And he realised that wasn't actually what was going on at all. And he actually saw there, actually, you know, actually people, they weren't trying to restore, you know, many of those involved capitalism. They just wanted democracy. They wanted democracy and socialism. They didn't want to return the factories to the bosses and the land to the landowners. But he talked about what Stalinism was Marxism with a heart cut out, broken, ossified, devoid of humanity. And I always think of that because I've never aligned myself with that faction. And I think the point about the Soviet Union is what could have happened instead.

44:33Because that moment of triumphalism led to ruin in Russia, as well as then the consequences of that for the world. I've been dancing around it and dangling it to listeners throughout the course of the conversation. So let's do boomerang theory. What is it? How does it apply to the UK and US? Boom-wang theory. So Aimé Césaire was a Martinican politician and writer. And his analysis of European fascism was absolutely fascinating. Because his argument was that European colonialism was based obviously on tyranny and brutality. it meant subjugating entire peoples and creating an apparatus of terror and that you would torture people, you would slaughter people, you would create in order to justify the colonialism racial hierarchy by definition.

45:26You know, what's the justification for subordinating these people? Because they're inferior, of course. Which is, you know, really at the heart of the modern racism, the emergence of modern racism as people understand it. which then had a whole host of kind of pseudo-scientific and pseudo-anthropologists kind of involved in all of that, pseudo-scientists, pseudo-anthropologists, to justify what was called race science and biological racism. And he said that colonialism then boomeranged back onto Europe in the form of fascism because they built up this apparatus and also this ideology. And then it was then applied to Europe, those forms of tyranny and racism.

46:17In fact, there's quite an interesting kind of, well, not I say interesting, it's horrific, but because actually in a sense, European antisemitism ended up partly offering a kind of prototype actually for the sort of racialization of colonial subjects. because Jewish people in Europe obviously were othered for a very long time, long before biological racism existed as a concept. And then that boomeranged, you see, it was then used as a prototype in the colonial world, but then boomeranged back onto the Jews of Europe because the way, you know, the kind of colonial hierarchies were then applied to European peoples, including, of course, in the most heinous way, the Jewish people he suffered then within living memory, the industrialized extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.

47:09But obviously it was also applied to Slavs. You know, I mean, you know, Adolf Hitler was a great admirer of the British Empire and particularly the British rule of India. And when he, you know, when they invaded Eastern Europe and the then Soviet Union, his order was to treat the Slavs like the Europeans treated the indigenous Americans in North America. So that, I think, is a really intriguing explanation in part of what happened. And you can see this happening now because the so-called War on Terror, what it did is firstly racialized Muslims. It's really, I think, striking that shift in our life, well, some of our lifetimes.

47:52I was born in 1984 but in the 1980s because back in the 1980s the United States was arming and backing Islamist jihadis in Afghanistan which was the first international kind of congregation of the modern Islamist fundamentalist jihadist movement that was against the Soviet invasion and that money went to their arms and money went to the most extreme cases and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was the warlord he benefited the most. I interviewed his grandson, who's a really fascinating individual. And Gulben Hekmatyar was someone who, he was accused in the 70s of throwing acid in the faces of women. He got sent to prison, accused of murdering another, a Maori student.

48:42And he believed openly in creating an Islamist fundamentalist sort of state. And the CIA knew all this. I mean, they wrote openly about who these people were and who was benefiting. And they said that they were actually as anti-Western as they were anti-Soviet. They said that they would end up using their weapons to arm other fundamentalist movements and so on. And Hekmajá, he went during the 80s, and West Germany was funding him as well. He went to Germany, West Germany. And he's on stage. He's got, on one side, he's got the Soviet Union's flag crossed out. On the other side, he's got the American flag crossed.

49:25He says to, you know, a CIA handily said, America will never be safe with me alive. They're just sending him all these weapons, sending him all this money. And they carry on doing it, literally, until the Soviet Union collapses, up to and including him in Gul'dan Hekhmachar, even back Saddam Hussein during the invasion of Kuwait. I think the point there is, so you've got, in any case, you've got in the 80s, there was this and you know reagan was there was you didn't have islamophobia in the same way at all you can't have done because it was kind of we are you know we're standing with that oppressed muslim people against communists at the time and and some of the most passionate defenders that were right-wing republicans obviously who were there going well hey let's back the jihadis let's back the mujahideen um and obviously that then that that rebounds in the united states in quite a spectacular fashion um the the mujahideen take over afghanistan it collapse into hideous chaos um a bit bin lada was closer to the he was close to mudja hadin he goes back to afghanistan under a mudja hadin warlord the taliban take over he actually doesn't have the same relationship with the taliban and the taliban present themselves as restoring order and a lot of people are very grateful at the time because mudja hadin were just so awful and then you end up of course with 9-11 but the point is after that then muslims get racialized but it's it's interesting because george w bush is like islam is a religion of peace and all the rest of it.

50:44But the American state apparatus is used to racialise and treat Muslims as different. Muslim Americans before that were often a conservative Republican-leaning bloc. In 2000, about 80 % of Muslim Americans voted for George Demi Bush. But then they're portrayed as this enemy within and so on. And this whole apparatus is created to deal with that, including ICE, of course. And that happens across the West. Suddenly now Muslims are this enemy within. And then as the invasion of Iraq ends in catastrophe, a bloody mess with an insurgency, that and then you get the predictable radicalization that then follows, that is accelerated.

51:26And the Republican right in particular then embraces Islamophobia to a large degree. And of course, that culminates with Donald Trump with his most, his first big cut through moment when he says he's going to impose a ban on all Muslims entering the United States of America. but then you know i think what's interesting about the first term of donald trump is in some ways it was you know the pact he made with the traditional republican establishment was you can tweet your crazy stuff but we'll get a deregulation and a tax cuts and so on and and that's kind of what happened but it's in it's in this term trump 2.0 which is completely different because then you can see the boomerang you can just i mean his whole rhetoric is the war on terror You listen to it.

52:09It's just the war on terror over and over again. He talks about Antifa, who have been prescribed as terrorists, as a terrorist organization. It doesn't even exist. And, you know, they're going through prescribing, again, as terrorist organizations, various groups and movements and so on. And talking about, you know, going after the funders of terrorists. But he's talking about George Soros this time, rather than the funders of terrorism they're talking about previously. they're using ICE which is again a war and terror institution to round people up in the streets and obviously up to including killing both migrants and American citizens but the way dissent is portrayed and demonised and approached is it's the rhetoric and apparatus of the war and terror so you can see that and that's all over Western Europe because the way Muslims became betrayed as that enemy within that needs an authoritarian state to intervene, that it's infectious because it's spread further and further to mean including the left woke because they're the enablers as well of the migrants.

53:20It's a really disturbing process, which you can see happening in real time, how authoritarianism grows. I find what's so bizarre about it is you look back at history of when authoritarianism takes hold in a society, You kind of wonder what people think at the time, how could that possibly happen? But you see it happening here. You see the kind of authoritarian mentality. And you can see that with obviously Israel's genocide, because as an example, you know, we cannot say. Someone cannot say it's illegal to say I support Palestine action. Obviously, that gets sent to prison for 14 years. But you can see, you know, the way that anyone speaking out about Palestine has been, people have been sacked, deplatformed, arrested, brutally often, imprisoned, deported.

54:10That authoritarianism has only deepened. Well, let's talk about that now, because the other sort of modern component of your argument, right, is the massacre in Gaza. and you write that it's widely acknowledged that what's happening, that what Israel's doing is genocide. I'm conscious that the ICJ is yet to rule actually on the merits of the arguments. So why present it in that way? I mean, you've used the word a couple of times over the course of the conversation, which is not to say that I wouldn't or disagree with it, but talk me through your thinking. Well, I mean, the International Court of Justice, which is the world's highest court, can't adjudicate on that for years to come.

54:47That is a process which goes on for years. is it's often presented that claim as if the ICJ has yet to have established, based on the evidence, that genocide has been committed. It doesn't matter what the evidence is or how overwhelming it is. The ICJ would not arrive at that and will not arrive at that for several years. I've seen the timetable. I think, for example, you know, there's got to be various submissions. Submissions are still taking place in 2028, 2029. That's what we're talking about. It's a lengthy, protracted legal process. What I would say is the consensus of genocide scholars believe genocide has been committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.

55:25There's the International Association of Genocide Scholars, which voted at their conference 88 % or so. People talk about the turnout there. The turnout was standard and normal for, in fact, slightly higher than their usual votes. and obviously you know there's the claim that there are people who don't think it's genocide who won't be represented there compared to people who think it is genocide there's no basis to that but Israeli scholars of genocide you know professor Omar Bartov uh Brown University uh chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies a preeminent Israeli genocide scholar and and you You know, in fact, there's several Israeli scholars of genocide who have long concluded now, long since the genocide began, that genocide has been committed.

56:12Rasi Gal was one of the first associate professors of genocide in Holocaust studies. He said at the very beginning, this was a classic genocide based on the rhetoric of intent. And then, obviously, the UN Independent Commission, the NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and Meds-Anson Frontier. The point just about why it's genocide is, you know, Donald Trump said himself that a civilisation has ended in Gaza, was over in Gaza. I can't remember what he said. It was really striking he said that because he said it a year before he threatened to wipe out civilisation in Iran. which is a sign itself of contagion, because I think when he said that, he was thinking of Gaza, because he said something quite similar, but he's saying it had happened.

57:02If you say a civilisation has ended, you are accepting a genocide has taken place. That's what that means in practical terms. Gaza has been wiped from the face of the earth. Gaza as a society does not exist anymore. People have been reduced to living in tents who have survived for the last three years now, having been forcibly and violently displaced multiple times. Its infrastructure has been completely obliterated. It's the pillars of a society that keep it together have been destroyed. Schools, mosques, churches, libraries, universities, businesses, shops, everything is gone. I mean, the vast majority of Gaza is rubble.

57:43It's apocalyptic. tick. You know, well over 100 ,000 people have been violently killed, according to multiple studies, you know, even The Economist, which backed this despicable crime, you know, their upper limit, and this is based on their data from well over a year ago now, last May it went up to, was 110 ,000 people out of a pre-war, pre-genocide population, 2.2 million. Genocides aren't defined by how many people have been killed. I think it's really important to make that clear. Is Gaza, has Gaza been, as a society, being dismantled? Yes, of course it has, in the most violent, apocalyptic way possible.

58:22I mean, that's the closest approximation on Earth to the apocalypse. And I just think it's important to just, I think that, you know, the reason it's just important to just, I think, make that clear is I don't think people understand the scale of the crime that's been committed. in Gaza. I mean, you know, I was talking the other day, like thousands of entire extended families have been wiped from the civil register. I'm not talking about mums and dads and kids, grandparents, cousins, first cousins, all gone. Thousands of them. They don't exist anymore. That's not what happens in a war. And in a normal war, 35 % of people being killed are not children.

59:10even in Bosnia it was about what 6 % of people killed with children I mean it's the scale of this crime and I have to say I've always had a tortured relationship with the media industry in which I work in I just you know a line was crossed here in my view which is that my colleagues were either directly cheering on and legitimising what happened, or they were choosing to stay silent because they were scared of the consequences, which I understand because people suffer consequences if they speak out about this crime. Just the open treatment of Palestinians as not having the tiniest fraction of the worth of a Westerner or an Israeli or however you define it, there's not even any subtlety about it.

1:00:10At all. Because nobody would tolerate what has happened to Gaza being inflicted against people they considered like themselves. Nobody would. Everybody would regard that as an unspeakable abomination. And I just think the way the Western media, including my colleagues, have helped facilitate this crime, because at the end of the day, it's the West which committed genocide against the Palestinian people. Israel is a tiny state which is armed and backed and aided by the West and would not be able to do any of it without the West. I just, for me, I just, you know, I understand the context. I understand the industry in which I work in.

1:00:54unfortunately. But I just, for me, I'll never get over the shock of it in some ways. Never get over the shock of the dehumanisation and the total content for the basic humanity of Palestinians is just, for me, it's just astonishing. I've never, never, nothing will ever shock me more than that, I don't think. Oh, and we've been talking for a long time. I've only got one more question for you. In the book, Andrew Sullivan tells you that he was wrong. about the Iraq war. And I want to turn the question on you and, you know, reflecting on politics more broadly. What have you been wrong about? Oh, God, lots of things.

1:01:33I think, I mean, this is not the answer a lot of people would like, but in the mid 2010s, I've lost, I started to lose confidence, I think, in my views. And, you know, I campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn to be leader, and I voted for him both leadership elections, but I was like, this is a mess. Labour 24 points behind in the polls. And I wrote a very notorious column suggesting they should stand down in favour of another left candidate. It still gets brought up. There's people still quite angry about it, actually. And, you know, my politics were saved by Theresa May because she called that election, obviously.

1:02:09And, you know, I don't know what would have happened otherwise. So I think, I mean, people, some people just find that really irritating because you're only supposed to be wrong in one direction, which is being like not right wing enough rather than saying I'm not, you know. But as in, I definitely learned after that is just not to give an inch on in terms of being, you know, it doesn't mean, by the way, not doubting things and learning and all the rest of it. But I just felt in particularly then that I saw people on the Labour right more as people who were, you know, who you could kind of end up with a nice broad church in the Labour Party where everyone gets along.

1:02:48And then I was like, well, actually, these people don't want that. They just want to crush the left and they don't actually have an interest in building a different sort of society at all. And they'd rather destroy the Labour Party than that happened. So I think that, I think, was a bit of a turning point. So, you know, I think, yeah, when I lost, started to lose faith and become melty in the mid-2010s. You regret that? Yeah, of course I do. Yeah, I think, I mean, I felt at the time, you know what? It became like this, you know, in 2011, my first book, Charles of the Demonization, the working class.

1:03:22And I didn't expect, you know, I didn't expect that to do, you know, well. I know it's very well. And, you know, it was the moment people want to talk about class again. But, you know, and then I was this kind of the token lefty commentator, basically, for till 2015. And then when Ed Miliband, I can see that when he lost that election. And, you know, and then there was this, I remember there was this period of like, well, it's because, you know, he's too left wing. And yet people like Dan Hodges saying, you know, this is because they listen too much to Owen Jones. And people, I was like, give a fucking lesson to me.

1:03:57What are you talking about? But as in, you know, but I felt a lot of pressure back then. And I felt, you know, I felt a bit isolated in that sense. And I definitely lost, I lost a lot of faith, I think. Or started to just doubt, you know, where I was politically and all the rest of it. But I definitely got that. That was a very bad judgment call, I would say.

1:04:20And, I mean, you know, there's lots of things I've changed my mind on. I mean, I used to support first past the post. That was daft, I would say. Because I was like, we'll get a socialist Labour government with the majority. Yeah, there's things I've changed my mind on. But, yeah, I think I definitely, which will aggravate people because they don't, you know, you're supposed to say, I'm supposed to say something which says, well, actually, I've become more right wing in an area or something. but I think I doubt I think I think becoming melty was a big big big mistake in a time when a lot of people were like look that is a project which is getting the shit kicked out of it by the British media you've got one job Owen like you're the only like pretty much one of the only left economists like what are you doing idiot but I think that's a that was a major error so I'm not like I don't you know it was a very big area of judgment and the election showed what which then you know it was before she called it I remember I was panicking at the time I was like, she'll go on election, Labour will be destroyed, the left will be blamed forever, and the left will never return as a political force.

1:05:18That's what I thought. So I think that was a really bad area of judgment. Owen Jones, author of The Fall of the West. Thank you for your time. I've really enjoyed the conversation. It was a big honour. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. You've been listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman. That was Owen Jones. I'm Oli Dugmore. And we'll be back with another episode next week.

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