Neoliberalism Kills
Reading Lowkey's "Ghosts of Grenfell"
In my graduate courses on Education Policy and Leadership at Portland State University, we analyze the impact of neoliberalism on public institutions through readings such as Luke Herrine’s recent Roosevelt Institute report (2025), which documents how state governments systematically defunded public universities while imposing market discipline. The same logic Herrine traces in higher education, in which “corporate domination of society supports state enforcement of the unregulated market, guts free public services, eliminates social subsidies, offers limitless concessions to transnational corporations” (p. 25), killed seventy-two people at Grenfell Tower on June 14, 2017, when flammable cladding installed to save money ignited a deadly fire.
British-Iraqi rapper Lowkey’s “Ghosts of Grenfell” names the system that killed them and analyzes how it operates, translating political economy into powerful vernacular without simplifying the analysis. What follows uses scholarship by Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur (2000) as a theoretical framework for understanding how Lowkey’s lyrics perform a class analysis that mainstream policy discourse systematically avoids.
The Budget Logic of Death
Lowkey opens with brutal clarity: “Saved pennies on the block, dropped 20 million on the opera.” This isn’t a grievance about unfair spending but a concrete example of how neoliberalism operates. The safety of residents is traded off against the prestige of elite cultural institutions. This juxtaposition reveals capitalism’s core operation: the reduction of human beings to their exchange value (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2000). Grenfell residents had low market value, so their safety became negotiable. The cladding decision wasn’t a bureaucratic mistake but a deliberate economic calculation within a system that treats working-class housing as an expense to minimize rather than a human right to guarantee.
This is neoliberalism: “corporate domination of society that supports state enforcement of the unregulated market, engages in the oppression of nonmarket forces and antimarket policies, guts free public services, eliminates social subsidies, offers limitless concessions to transnational corporations” (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2000, p. 25). The cheaper cladding wasn’t a deviation from the system—it was the system working as designed. Austerity doesn’t fail when people die in preventable fires. It succeeds at its actual purpose: transferring wealth upward while making such transfers appear inevitable.
Crucially, the state wasn’t absent at Grenfell. It was actively participating in the marketization of safety, enforcing the very policies that made the fire possible. From building regulations to procurement processes to council budgets, state power enabled and enforced the principle that working-class lives could be risked to save money.
The Architecture of Manufactured Crisis
When Lowkey names the “shock doctrine” and describes “disaster capitalists salivating,” he’s showing how neoliberalism creates the conditions that make disasters inevitable, then uses those disasters to justify more privatization and deregulation. The Grenfell fire created opportunities for consultants, property developers eyeing the land, and politicians performing concern while maintaining the policies that caused it.
This is why the official inquiry can document every decision that led to the fire without threatening the system that required those decisions. You can fire individual officials, implement new regulations, promise it will never happen again, all while preserving the economic rationale that makes the next Grenfell inevitable. Bureaucratic language (’mistakes were made,’ ‘lessons were learned’) obscures who decided: people with names and bank accounts determined working-class lives weren’t worth the cost of safe housing, and they’re still making those decisions.
Austerity at Home, War Abroad
Lowkey makes the connection between domestic austerity and imperial violence explicit: the same budget priorities that determine fire safety not worth funding also determine war worth funding. Money saved on social housing is diverted to military spending, corporate subsidies, and tax cuts for the wealthy. The system that requires permanent war abroad requires permanent dispossession at home. Both are profit centers that require treating certain human lives as expendable.
When he references workers “pulling people out of the rubble,” he’s making visible the labor that capitalism renders invisible. Someone had to build the tower, install the cladding, respond to the fire, treat the injured, bury the dead. All that labor is subject to the same imperative of cost minimization and profit maximization that led to the cladding being flammable. McLaren and Farahmandpur argue that “all forms of social oppression under capitalism are mutually interconnected” and tied to “private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus labor from workers by the capitalist class” (2000, p. 28). The social division of labor means some people design death traps while others die in them, and the system presents both as natural outcomes rather than organized violence.
The Boundaries of Permissible Critique
Lowkey challenges the corporate media’s structural constraints. Media owned by capital cannot identify capitalism as the problem. It can report that cheaper materials were used, call for accountability, demand justice. What it cannot do is explain that profit-maximizing imperatives make such deaths routine, that accountability within the system means punishing individuals while preserving the relations that required their actions.
The coverage of Grenfell demonstrates this: endless analysis of community resilience, survivor trauma, with their voices centered. Almost no analysis of the political economy that produced the fire. When Lowkey identifies “trauma tourists,” he’s capturing how spectacular coverage becomes extraction: “They want to see your tears on the screen, / But they don’t want to see the system that made you scream.” The media mines grief for content while obscuring systems. It performs outrage while maintaining the conditions that generate it.
This exemplifies what McLaren and Farahmandpur call postmodernism’s problematic “shift towards a postmodernism layered with a thin veneer of cultural Marxism, scaffolded by identity politics,” in which “the categories of cultural domination and oppression replace those of class exploitation and imperialism as capitalism’s reigning antagonisms” (2000, p. 27). Mainstream discourse can acknowledge harm without naming cause, promise reform without threatening power, and center voices without distributing resources. The spectacle of suffering replaces analysis of relations of production. You can have representation without redistribution, awareness without transformation, justice that leaves injustice intact.
The Historical Structure of Disposability
When Lowkey links Grenfell to slavery, colonialism, and imperial violence, he’s not making a rhetorical gesture but an analytical claim: the devaluation of certain lives is continuous, not exceptional. The thinking that justified extracting wealth from colonies while abandoning their populations now operates in North Kensington, extracting wealth from working-class neighborhoods while leaving them in death traps.
He references historical struggles (miners, chartists, movements for democracy) to show that Grenfell isn’t an aberration but a continuation. Ordinary people have always resisted their own disposability. The Grenfell survivors' organizing belongs to long traditions of working-class militancy. The dead aren’t just victims to mourn but comrades in an ongoing struggle, and honoring them means continuing their resistance.
This historical grounding provides what McLaren and Farahmandpur argue much contemporary progressive thought lacks: rather than “displacing critique to a field of serial negation without fully grasping its prefigurative or emancipatory potential,” Lowkey connects analysis to action, valorizing “the ‘structural endurance of histories’ over the ‘contingent moment’” (2000, p. 27). Not endless critique without alternative, not permanent awareness without transformation, but analysis that leads to organizing, solidarity with the dead that means organizing the living.
Revolutionary Analysis in Vernacular Form
Lowkey’s achievement is making class analysis available without simplifying it. He moves from specific horror to general pattern, from Grenfell to austerity to neoliberalism to imperialism, each connection revealing how the system operates at every scale. He shows how to think in terms of systems: connecting individual incidents to patterns, seeing how apparently unrelated oppressions share common roots in capitalist relations of production.
This is educational work in the deepest sense: giving people conceptual tools to understand their own exploitation and making those tools immediately accessible and actionable. He translates political economy into powerful vernacular, demonstrating theory’s power as a weapon for understanding and changing the world. McLaren and Farahmandpur call for “a basic armory of Marxian concepts to make sense of both old and new types of instabilities in the capitalist marketplace” (2000, p. 31), and Lowkey does precisely this. He reveals the political economy of texts by connecting cultural expressions to the practices that produce them, showing how budget decisions, building codes, and media coverage all flow from the same source: capitalism’s requirement that profit take precedence over human life.
The people who approved Grenfell’s cladding still collect their paychecks. They did what the system required: minimize costs, maximize returns, treat housing as an investment rather than a human right. Individual accountability can’t address systemic problems.
What the Ghosts Demand
The song ends not with resolution but with a reminder of permanent war and a system that treats mass death as an administrative outcome. The song doesn’t offer comfort or closure because Grenfell isn’t in the past tense. The conditions that produced it remain intact, generating new deaths while mainstream discourse pretends each one is an unprecedented tragedy rather than a predictable consequence.
The ghosts don’t need our awareness. Awareness didn’t save them, and it won’t save the next 72 people. They need our analysis, and rigorous analysis leads to organizing. As McLaren and Farahmandpur argue, the question is whether we are “fighting for the right to be included in the conversation rather than transforming the material conditions of oppression” (2000, p. 28). Not representation but redistribution, not voice but power, not justice within the system but transformation of the relations that make injustice systemic.
This isn’t an accident or aberration but standard practice. Understanding this requires abandoning the fantasy that capitalism can be reformed to place greater value on human life than on profit. The choice isn’t between better or worse management of the current system but between this system and the alternative we build through collective struggle.
The cladding was cheap because our lives are cheap under capitalism. Changing the cladding doesn’t change the calculation that our lives are expendable. Only abolishing the system that treats some human lives as acceptable losses in pursuit of profit can honor the dead and protect the living.
That’s what revolutionary art does: it refuses the comfort of partial critique, insists on naming the whole system, and connects understanding to the work of transformation. Lowkey gives us the analysis. The organizing is up to us.
References
McLaren, P., & Farahmandpur, R. (2000). Reconsidering Marx in post-Marxist times: A requiem for postmodernism? Educational Researcher, 29(3), 25-33.
Herrine, L. (2025). The neoliberalization of higher education: Changes in state funding and governance throughout the 20th century. Roosevelt Institute.