This is Grace Blakeley speaking during a discussion on Affordability, Energy and Oligarchy- discussing the war nobody is stopping. This is taken from a partial transcript.
Grace Blakeley:
25.28 That is that is what I was going to say. We have won the ethical argument, we won it a very long time ago. There isn't this kind of international fight that we can fight through the UN or whatever. But I think that in focusing on those issues, we were focusing on the wrong things anyway. You know, not that it's not important to fight these ethical battles. It absolutely is. But if we're going to build a mass political movement that's capable of transforming society, winning power within the state, then we need to focus on bread and butter issues. We need to be able to translate the things that we're worried about into issues that resonate with people's everyday lives. Now, this has always been a challenge for the left when it comes to particularly things like imperialism. If you go back to the original theorists of imperialism, you have Lenin writing about how the working class and the rich world is effectively a labor aristocracy and benefits from exploitation abroad. But it matters how we talk about these things. If we go around saying the working class and the rich world are benefiting from the war in Iran, which I don't think they are, but let's say that we were to say that, that creates a group identity that is therefore is not amendable to our movement.
26.47 If we're able to refocus that conversation and start talking about how our elites just corrupt, adventures abroad are screwing over everyone else and making life harder for everyone else, then you have the basis for a much broader and deeper coalition. It's very easy to do this with this war because it is making life a lot worse for everyone else.
 Affordability
I think the way that we do that is by focusing on three major things - affordability, energy, and oligarchy. The first one is affordability. So I've written a lot about this um on my substack already, just what is going to happen to the international economy as a result of the disruption that we're seeing from the Iran war. Yes, oil prices have risen. You know, they've been going up and down; there's been a huge amount of volatility but overall they have risen on the back of a number of different countries shutting down their oil production, on the back of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But that's kind of just one kind of relatively minor part of this much broader issue. The second issue is of course shortages of liqufied natural gas because Qatar exports a lot of liquified natural gas and obviously shut down the plant that was doing that. But relatedly in the process of the production of LNG you also produce a number of other chemicals that are really important to production of lots of different things particularly fertilizer. So agriculture is being affected right at the time that farmers are supposed to be fertilizing their crops. There's a study that suggests that this is going to lead to rising food prices in the shops within about six weeks as a result of that impact on agriculture and on fertilizers. There's obviously a crisis in global logistics of the kind that we really haven't seen since the pandemic as a result of the closure of the Straight of Hormuz which is going to impact prices on the shops and is going to by the way make massive profits for the extraordinarily consolidated shipping industry which is effectively an oligopoly. That is just two parts of this much broader economic crisis. There's that affordability angle which we really need to focus on just translating like you are going to be seeing higher costs on the shelves and it's because Donald Trump decided to go to war and Keir Starmer was too pathetic to actually mount any proper resistance to that.
Energy
29.14 Then there's the energy argument. We keep seeing energy crises that result from the fact that there are a few, often tyrannical, regimes that basically control the world's oil supply of which the US is one by the way as a major fracker. The more we rely on these forms of energy that can be concentrated in a few hands - be those state oil companies like Aramco or be those massive oil multinationals like Exxon Mobile, as long as we rely on energy sources that can be concentrated like that, these crisis are going to keep happening. It's also again worth bearing in mind that we see a systematic relationship between dictatorship and autocracy and oil revenues because if you can rely on oil revenues, you don't need to tax your population as much; look at the Gulf States. That means that relationship between democracy and accountability becomes even more frayed. It's not just the countries that have oil that happen to be the ones that are most unstable. There's an inherent relationship there and renewable energy is more distributed, it's more decentralized. It's much less likely to come under these forms of strain.
Oligarchy
30.30 There's affordability energy and finally oligarchy. A few men, powerful men backed by big fossil fuel corporations and a few other people who are in positions of extraordinary power decided to take us all to war and there was no democratic accountability there, and we're all going to be suffering as a result. So I think if we can translate what's going on here into those three issues and then make our arguments on the back of that then we build a much bigger coalition.
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