Most of these companies exist and are able to do the things they do because of their relations with the public sector. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that wonders how long it will take for the angry mobs to come for Jeff Bezos.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Grace Blakely.

Grace is the author of Stolen, How to Save the World from Financialization. She's also a staff writer at Tribune magazine,

and she's on the Labor Party's National Policy Forum in the United Kingdom. Today, we're

talking about how the tech monopolies are benefiting from the COVID-19 crisis and how we might push back against them

and take that power back for workers. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review

on Apple Podcasts. That really helps us out. You can also follow the podcast on Twitter, where it's

at Tech Won't Save Us. You can follow me, Paris Marks at at Paris Marks. And you can also follow

Grace Blakely as

at Grace Blakely. Enjoy the interview. Grace Blakely, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me.

It's great to speak with you. Obviously, you have written a ton about this really terrible economic

system that we're in. And more recently, you've written about how that

is a particular benefit to these tech monopolies that are increasingly dominating the economy.

So to get us started, I was hoping that you could explain kind of how this form of financialized

neoliberal capitalism came to be created and how that has particularly

benefited tech monopolies even before this COVID-19 crisis that we're now in.

Yeah. So in my book, I talk a little bit about the kind of emergence of this kind of economic

model that I referred to as finance-led growth. And I mainly focus on

the politics of that, and particularly looking at the changes that happened in the 1980s.

And that's one way of looking at how we got here. The other way of looking at it is to take

a more kind of orthodox Marxist perspective and look at the internal dynamics within the development of capitalism.

So obviously I think you have to look at both. You have to look at how capitalism develops

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