‘I wanted to save the world!’: Grace Blakeley, TikTok’s answer to Tony Benn

Halfway through writing her new book Vulture Capitalism, Grace Blakeley had what her mum called a “midlife crisis”. “I realised that the stuff that I was doing, and the way that I was making sense of what I was doing, was having a really negative impact on me and my mental health,” she says. “Just everything … feeling constantly on edge, not really being able to engage with people in honest and open ways. There was a point at which I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this any more.’”

Twenty-nine may sound a bit young to qualify for burnout, but as a radical socialist economist who has spent the last several years fighting her corner on TV and social media, Blakeley has been at the centre of a brutally intense new era of political engagement. She took herself off to Central America for nine months to recover and detach from the public sphere.

She declines to fall back on what she calls the “easy” answer of the stress of being a woman on the internet, saying that ego, too, was a big part of it. “Anyone who puts themselves into the limelight as forcefully as I did, you’re looking for something and you will not find it in the places you think you will find it. You will find other things, and those other things will not necessarily be good.”

That crisis seems to capture something of the contradictions of the very online left to which she belongs. She says the effect of the digital age is “a thorny question”: “In a practical sense, it’s made it easier to organise protests and create networks that can translate into real life. But, and more so now with TikTok and gen Z, the way that it affects people’s subjectivity really feeds into a kind of individualism – this idea of individual human capital, your personal brand being the thing that defines you and your worth in a society.”

Blakeley was still in primary school when Naomi Klein made the case in No Logo that the left had missed a trick: during the first wave of political correctness, it argued about what to call things while, under its nose, globalisation materially reordered the world and huge corporations made poor people poorer. Blakeley isn’t quite prepared to concede that there’s a fresh split in the left between a strand concerned with representation and identity, and another with the old-fashioned material analysis of class, money and power relations, but she registers the tension. “I think we’ve got the terms of the debate wrong; my perspective is that both of these poles are important, material structures and identity.”

She does her best, indeed, to negotiate it, to bring concrete analysis to a world in thrall to vibes. She’s an academic economist who can tell the difference between Pareto optimality and Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage in a dense fog. She knows, and explains well, the complex interdependencies between corporations, financial institutions, governments and central banks. She’s a social media-savvy millennial woman bringing to the table a set of political ideas more associated with the 1970s (or even, and she doesn’t demur when I suggest it, the 1870s): a Tony Benn for the TikTok age.

I was at university learning about economics and politics [and] I was looking around like: this makes no sense. What’s going on?

Vulture Capitalism is a vigorous rejection of the liberal idea that if only some enlightened government were to tweak its policies correctly, democratic capitalism would bring prosperity to all. She believes that the problem is capitalism itself: that it is inherently anti-democratic, that it stifles rather than promotes liberty, and that far from being kept honest by “market forces”, it everywhere resists them.

The animating question of Vulture Capitalism, she writes early on, is: “What if we were to take [Friedrich] Hayek seriously?” It’s a provocative starting point for a thinker of the left: Hayek is the high priest of free-market economics. But Blakeley starts by at least cautiously accepting Hayek’s moral emphasis on individual freedom, and practical emphasis on the dangers of attempting to plan something as complex as an economy; then goes on to argue with some force and in granular detail that what she likes to call “actually-existing capitalism” shows none of the features Hayek claimed for it.

Blakeley believes that since the middle years of the 20th century, the standard view of political economy has been carved up roughly between a right and left (Hayekians, who think government should leave the economy the hell alone; and Keynesians, who argue the state has a role in “priming the pump” to get the economy moving with government spending) who restrict their differences to arguing about the degree of state intervention in a market economy. In fact, she thinks, we already have redistribution and we already have a planned economy, but the people who get to plan it, and the people to whom most of the dough is redistributed, are the ones with the money and the power. And ordinary people – think, say, Amazon workers peeing into bottles – have less and less freedom. One of the examples she offers is Boeing, which has been criticised for taking more interest in profit than anything else following two fatal crashes caused by flawed design. Vulture Capitalism was already in proof when news broke of another Boeing whoopsie; a cabin door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight over Portland and depressurised the cabin so rapidly one passenger had the shirt sucked clean off his back.

Blakeley argues that this (and many other case studies involving different companies like it) aren’t just failures of regulation or the result of overenthusiastic corporate corner-cutters. Boeing is deeply entangled with the US government both in terms of money and senior personnel, and its lobbying created the regulatory environment that has allowed unsafe planes to get into the air. It is politics as much as economics that determines how these titanic companies fare. In fact, the stuff that companies make can even be irrelevant to their prosperity: Ford, as she reports, thrived by turning itself into a financial services company with a side-hustle making motorcars.

The only way to understand where we’re at, she says, is to look not at imaginary lines between the state and private sectors but at who has the power; to see political economy in terms of class struggle between those who own the means of production and those who don’t. Labour and Capital, in other words. Old-school. She has the grace to giggle when I mention that, as a supporter of “Lexit”, she had an alliance of convenience with Nigel Farage, and then (“I’m making myself out to be this old-school, like, crusty 1970s communist, but … ”) quotes Tony Benn at me.

The criticism she makes of market-cornering multinationals, government bailouts, monopolistic tech giants, big business buying the regulations it wants isn’t far from that of Nobel prize-winning (centre-left) economist Joseph Stiglitz. Where they differ is that Stiglitz wants capitalism to work properly and Blakeley, thinking it is working properly, wants to be rid of it.

The defining thing that shaped her politics was “basically austerity”: “I was at university learning about economics and politics. I was being taught some very standard economics [and] I was looking around like: this makes no sense. What’s going on?” Did she know then what she wanted to do? “I wanted to just save the world!” she exclaims. “It’s so embarrassing to say now!”

The funny thing is, the path down which she set out in the hopes of changing the world was almost indistinguishable from that of David Cameron. She was privately educated, studied PPE at Oxford, bounced into a thinktank and – bizarrely – even did a short stint at KPMG. So how come one of them ended up shilling for the financier Lex Greensill and the other ended up writing a book in which Greensill is denounced from a Marxist perspective? What radicalised her? (I apologise for using the expression, but she says she takes it as a compliment.)

“I have ADHD,” she says, “I was a tearaway. I was expelled from a lot of those private schools.” For what? “Oh, y’know. Just standard teenage foibles … transgressions. I think I’m a radical by temperament: I don’t like being told what to do. That’s probably why I never really got on with having a proper job.”

Her maternal grandfather was a communist shop-steward in the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Her mother went from a “very bad comprehensive” to Cambridge University, “met my dad, they were all Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, travelled round the world teaching English. When they went to Nicaragua, they were going to help pick coffee beans for the revolution but they realised that they didn’t quite have the dexterity. They were told: ‘You’re useless, go and make revolution in your own country.’”

Starmer is resetting the internal structures of the Labour party so that something like Corbynism never happens again

What do they do now? Are they still English teachers? “No,” she says, “they’re consultants.” Like, management consultants? “My dad’s an executive coach.” That must make for some tricky Christmas conversations. “You know what? They’re politically on side. And I think they kind of love the fact that I do what I do. But, yeah, it’s interesting, because … it’s not perhaps in my material interests to have the kind of politics that I have, right?”

Isn’t it the case, I ask, that many of her ideological fellow travellers now seem to hate the Labour party even more than they hate the Tories? “Yes. And I understand that. Because there was this deep sense of hope that things would change. The hope – and the dashing of that hope – was really, really, profoundly difficult for a lot of people.”

How sympathetic is she to the putative Keir Starmer case that the Jeremy Corbyn platform was not electable; and the Labour party can’t do anything unless it’s in power, so it has to make these compromises? “I just don’t think that is what’s happened,” she says firmly. “Knowing the Labour party as I do, I know that what is going on with Starmer is not just about his personal convictions; it is about resetting and recalibrating the internal structures of the party to make sure that something like Corbynism never happens again, and to kind of push out a lot of people who were involved in that.”

For the centrist dads among us, that’s where her book’s hardest sell comes. How do you abolish global capitalism? “I see the dissolution of the divide between people who own stuff, and people who work for a living as essential to the construction of a socialist society,” she says, “and also to a fair society and a just society. But I don’t know what that will look like. Marx was also very vague about it. He said, ‘I’m not going to write cookbooks for the chefs of the future.’”

Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley will be published by Bloomsbury on 12 March. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.