You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. This week I'm

talking to Laleigh Khalili, a professor of Gulf studies at Exeter University, whose most recent book is

sinews of war and trade, shipping and capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. Her most

recent piece for the LRB takes a steely look at the development finance industry, which is

caricatured by its right-wing opponents as woke capital, and is epitomized by the figure of

Arif Nakhvi, a private equity multi-millionaire and

ardent global free marketeer. The piece is a review of three books. The Key Man, How the Global

Elite was duped by a capitalist fairy tale by Simon Clark and Will Louch. Icarus, the life and death

of the Abrage Group by Brian Breivatii and Our Lives in Their Portfolios,

why asset managers own the world by Brett Christophers.

Hello, Lally, and thank you very much for joining me again.

Hello, Tom. Nice to see you.

So before we get into the particulars of Arif Nakhvi's case,

perhaps we could talk a bit about this idea of, in inverted commas,

woke capital. Is it a real thing, or is the idea of capital being put to work in the interest

of social justice and illusion, or even a contradiction in terms?

I would say it's a contradiction in terms depending on how you define social justice.

So I think it's important to start by saying that the title woke capital, I don't buy into the idea that somehow there is such a thing as woke capital and then there's unwoke or regular mainstream capital.

I think Quinn Slobodyan recently just put out an article somewhere

where he was talking about different sectors or different segments of capital that take

different positionalities towards the way in which capital is supposed to work in the rest of the

world. And he specifically uses the case, I think, of steel capital and And the fact of the steel business, the steel industry

...