October 21, 2026
Ao redor do mundo, as democracias liberais não conseguiram lidar com a falta de acessibilidade financeira, o que levou à ascensão do extremismo de extrema-direita. O novo livro de Isabella Weber, Anti-Fascist Economics, apresenta uma alternativa. (Cortesia de Isabella Weber)
Entrevista realizada por
Bartolomeo Sala
A economista Isabella Weber é mais conhecida por seu trabalho sobre o que frequentemente se denomina “inflação dos vendedores” (seller’s inflation) — a capacidade de empresas com poder de mercado de elevar preços e ampliar lucros durante uma situação de emergência. Durante e após a pandemia de Covid-19, Weber foi uma das vozes mais contundentes a criticar aqueles que interpretavam a inflação exclusivamente como resultado de um excesso de demanda, o que lhe rendeu críticas por parte de economistas do establishment. Seis anos depois, seus argumentos foram, em grande medida, validados. Fica claro que, embora as restrições na oferta tenham provocado a disparada de certos preços, os choques de custos resultantes levaram a uma coordenação nas estratégias de precificação das empresas, disseminando a inflação por toda a economia.
Em seu novo livro, Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defense of Affordability, Dignity, and Democracy, ela aborda uma questão política igualmente urgente: o que é necessário para conter a onda crescente de extremismo de extrema-direita? Sua resposta consiste em uma proposta econômica alternativa — fundamentada em seus trabalhos anteriores — que coloca a acessibilidade a bens essenciais e a dignidade no centro.
Weber conversou com a Jacobin sobre como seria um sistema econômico que prioriza as necessidades materiais das pessoas comuns em detrimento dos lucros corporativos, e de que maneira esse sistema poderia contribuir para frear o avanço do que alguns têm chamado de fascismo.
No seu novo livro Anti-Fascist Economics, você constrói um argumento poderoso para uma nova “economia para as pessoas comuns” como o único antídoto para a ameaça de um ressurgente “fascismo do fim dos tempos”.
Você passa a parte central do livro mostrando como o Trump 2.0 foi, em última análise, uma consequência da alta inflação que disparou os preços dos bens essenciais e corroeu os padrões de vida das pessoas. No entanto, você abre o livro mostrando que a actual ameaça à democracia não é o resultado de uma crise mal gerida. Pelo contrário, é o ponto final inevitável de cinquenta anos de neoliberalismo e de um sistema que coloca os lucros acima de tudo.
Como é que o neoliberalismo – com a sua insistência dogmática naquilo que chama de “fundamentalismo do lucro” e a visão limitada da liberdade como submissão ao domínio impessoal do mercado – conduz quase necessariamente ao fascismo?
Isabela Weber
Apenas uma qualificação antes de começarmos. Eu não diria que o neoliberalismo leva necessariamente ao fascismo. Penso que o fascismo é um fenómeno histôrico muito complexo que tem múltiplos impulsionadores, e a economia é um deles. No entanto, penso que é útil ver que existe uma espécie de convergência entre as lógicas dos dois, o que não quer dizer que sejam iguais, mas que, no fundo, ambas são formas de darwinismo social.
Num mundo neoliberal, existe esta ideia de que o valor de todos tem de ser estabelecido no mercado, de que o mercado cria uma hierarquia meritocrática. Se você é rico e está no topo dessa hierarquia é porque tem fortes habilidades, é superior aos outros, conquistou mais. Por outro lado, se você é pobre ou depende de transferências sociais, isso é basicamente resultado de sua falta de habilidades. Agora, neste sentido, o neoliberalismo é uma forma de ver o mundo muito hierárquica e baseada na competição. Sob o fascismo, não temos uma hierarquia estabelecida através do mercado, mas sim uma hierarquia “natural”. Na verdade, toda a ideia do fascismo é que a decadência e o desespero do presente são o resultado de intervenções contra esta hierarquia natural, e a tarefa do fascismo é restaurar um passado mítico onde esta hierarquia natural possa novamente atuar.
Esta hierarquia natural no caso fascista considera explicitamente algumas populações dispensáveis. Vemos isto muito claramente com as alterações climáticas, onde se deixarmos as alterações climáticas acontecerem, algumas populações morrerão, ou com a crise energética, onde se deixarmos os preços da energia explodirem, então os meios de subsistência de algumas pessoas poderão ser destruídos. Da perspectiva neoliberal, este é um lamentável dano colateral. Infelizmente, o mercado produz resultados onde os meios de subsistência de algumas pessoas são destruídos. O que os fascistas fazem é abraçar esta lógica malthusiana que está incorporada no pensamento neoliberal. Eles vêem-no como um mecanismo de limpeza onde algumas destas populações excedentárias estão a ser eliminadas e, assim, é criado mais espaço para a raça suprema.
Então, o fascismo seria uma espécie de último recurso para o neoliberalismo?
Isabella Weber
Até aqui, falei do neoliberalismo como um sistema de pensamento. No entanto, o neoliberalismo na prática — enquanto regime de organização da nossa economia — provocou uma concentração de riqueza espetacular, especialmente uma concentração corporativa. Para citar um dado: em 1930, os 0,1% das empresas que detinham o maior volume de ativos possuíam 47% do total de ativos nos Estados Unidos. Em 2013, esse mesmo grupo de 0,1% detinha 88% dos ativos.
O fato de o neoliberalismo gerar essa concentração de poder — ocultando, ao mesmo tempo, esse processo e abrindo caminho para que fascistas o adotem — é apenas um lado da moeda. O outro lado, que permite que alguns se tornem extremamente ricos, é, naturalmente, a existência de muitas pessoas vivendo em condições de extrema precariedade, constantemente à mercê da próxima turbulência do mercado. Vale ressaltar que insegurança econômica não é o mesmo que pobreza; muitas vezes, são justamente aqueles que têm algo a perder que se mostram mais receptivos às promessas da extrema-direita. É a falta de alternativas — algo que, no neoliberalismo, faz parte do próprio programa — somada à sensação de impotência, que torna atraente a promessa fascista de restaurar a autoestima de indivíduos cujas vidas foram degradadas ao longo de décadas, propondo um retorno a um passado mítico de pureza racial.
O ponto em que essa incapacidade de levar a sério as necessidades materiais das pessoas comuns se manifestou com força total — revelando-se, no fim das contas, fatal — é a ideia de “vibecession” (uma recessão baseada na percepção ou no “clima”); isto é, a noção de que a economia dos EUA estava em pleno crescimento no pós-Covid e que as pessoas que sentiam o contrário estavam simplesmente enganadas.
Muitos dos argumentos que você apresentou há cinco anos — de que estávamos passando por uma crise de acessibilidade, impulsionada por empresas que usavam choques e gargalos como pretexto para elevar os preços — tornaram-se parte do debate predominante. Na época, contudo, a discussão sobre a inflação elevada dividia-se entre aqueles que defendiam a austeridade e os que sugeriam, simplesmente, esperar a tempestade passar. Essa abordagem mais branda acabou prevalecendo, mas pouco fez para combater os efeitos da disparada no custo de vida.
Onde houve um equívoco na análise do que você, na ocasião, chamou de “inflação induzida pelos vendedores”? O que poderia ter sido feito de maneira diferente? E por que a relutância de Joe Biden em adotar uma postura mais incisiva contra as grandes corporações — atacando seus lucros — acabou sendo, no fim das contas, a causa da derrocada dos Democratas?
Isabella Weber
Quanto a quem venceu o debate no que diz respeito à resposta em termos de políticas: é verdade que a "turma do 'esperar para ver'" prevaleceu no campo da política fiscal; contudo, acabamos tendo aumentos agressivos das taxas de juros — o que, por sua vez, era a recomendação da "turma da austeridade". O fato de a política fiscal ter permanecido vigorosa acabou compensando, em parte, a austeridade monetária. Enfim, peço desculpas por soar tanto como um professor...
Bartolomeo Sala
Bartolomeo Sala
E não é que essas crises sejam eventos isolados; pelo contrário, elas se tornarão cada vez mais frequentes.
Bartolomeo Sala
As you write in your chapter “Capital Won’t Save Democracy,” capitalists and fascists are natural allies today just as they were in the 1930s — not just because the latter line the pockets of the former when stripping the state for parts, but because fascists are the best bulwark for their monopolies. Indeed, the two share a common enemy, “democratic states . . . when they regulate business activities in the common interest, protect the environment, or uphold labor rights.” Can you tell us why the unholy alliance between Davos Men and strongmen like Donald Trump isn’t an anomaly but a natural development?
Isabella Weber
First of all, one of the things that really struck me about being in Davos in 2025 during the inauguration of Trump was that large parts of the business community appeared to me almost more like followers than leaders. Many of them didn’t donate to Trump, but the moment the power shifted, they went with Trump. They are profit fundamentalists and, as such, they will always go with power.
Now, to your question of what the democratic state does here, I actually found Javier Milei’s Davos speech very telling. He is the president of a country, of course, but he insists that all the problems that the West has are a result of feminist wokeness, which again goes back to this fascist idea that there are natural hierarchies and that if you are trying to intervene, you are messing up with the natural order. His diagnosis of the decline of the West is simply, “if only free enterprise had prevailed in its pure form, then we would not have had this aberration.” That’s I think how someone like Milei comes to embody the convergence between neoliberalism and fascism that we talked about in the beginning.
As to what’s actually happening in terms of who globalization is working for, the first China shock was really an outsourcing shock. China was one part of the story, but the other was multinational companies headquartered in the West that were perfectly happy to throw a significant share of the working class in Europe and the United States under the bus. The second China shock is a very different beast, which is why the name is somewhat misleading. This shock is one where the almost universal dominance of Western corporations is suddenly under threat, as Chinese companies approaching the technological frontier in key industries start to pose a serious challenge to a world hierarchy in the global division of labor that dates back to the nineteenth century.
What’s interesting is that the moment that exposure to markets, free capital flows, and open trade flows no longer is univocally to the benefit of Western-headquartered companies, the allegiances to these liberal ideals start flipping and instead an extreme anti-China “by any means necessary” stance ends up becoming mainstream. What I’m arguing is that this is important context that we need to acknowledge when we look at how globalization of the neoliberal type is being destroyed and is being replaced with tariff blitzes and geopolitical maneuvering that bring the whole toolbox of the might of states into the game of fortifying a certain global division of labor.
Bartolomeo Sala
If all that is possible is a zero-sum game between states and corporations, the best way to ride out the crisis is to invite it and hope to win, so at least in this zero-sum world you are the one calling the shots.
Isabella Weber
Exactly, it’s a zero-sum competition, which is now being fought with different means in a way, but it’s still a zero-sum competition.
Bartolomeo Sala
Could you talk a bit explicitly about how you understand antifascist economics?
Isabella Weber
An important inspiration is Karl Polanyi, who wanted to write a book, “Masterplan for the Common Man,” as an antifascist economics. For him, when there is a crisis that threatens the existential foundation of people’s lives, what he calls countermovements emerge. Fascism is a countermovement to fortify a profit fundamentalist order with state violence. What I am arguing is for a countermovement against today’s “end-times fascism” — to use Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s term — one that secures the material foundations of people’s livelihoods as the precondition for a dignified life as its overarching goal.
The starting point for this is, very concretely, essentials for meeting people’s needs and for production systems, because obviously, to fulfil those needs, we need to have certain production structures in place. That’s the core. Then there are affordability policies that keep all of this together — things like rent freezes, a basket of price-controlled goods, free public transportation, or public ownership of energy and affordable utilities — policies that bring immediate relief.
However, in order to sustain a price intervention, you need to change the structures of provisioning in these essential sectors. And that, ultimately, is a question of ownership. Given that we are in this global crisis of livelihoods, it’s not enough to bring down the price of gasoline and thereby render life more affordable to people who drive their cars, and meanwhile we burn through ever more oil and let the planet burn. We need to use those measures that stabilize prices to buy time for the structural change that can get us into a situation where our use of natural resources becomes compatible with the continued existence of human lives on planet Earth, which might sound a bit big, but I think that’s really what is at stake here.
Bartolomeo Sala
How can this economic outlook, that starts with people’s essential needs, work hand in hand with combating climate change and responding to anxieties about globalization?
Isabella Weber
Polanyi has this idea of land, labor, and money being essentials. I am basically broadening this category by saying that all the things that our life depends on are essentials, because for all of these things, it’s a lie that they can just work like the market for plastic toys or chewing gum. If the rent is too high, it’s not like you just reduce your demand. You need shelter and a place to live. And for a dignified life, you also need to be able to live where your friends are and where your family is. You cannot just be moved around like a fungible atom from one place to the next because rent went up. For food, it’s even more straightforward. You can’t say, the price of food went up, I’m not going to eat.
The question then becomes: How do you organize each of these sectors in ways to achieve short-run affordability and to change the structure of provisioning in service of, among other goals, climate stabilization? What I’m arguing for in the case of agriculture are buffer stock systems, ideally multilateral, where you have a public stockholding entity that buys when the prices collapse because there’s a bumper harvest and sells when there’s a supply shock that constrains supply and prices spike. Now, the effect of such an entity would not only be to stabilize prices but also to change the dynamic in a market where right now four global food commodity trading companies control 70 to 90 percent of global food commodity trading.
If you have such public stockholding systems, you basically build a massive procurement operation, because you start to buy grain and other durable commodities on a large scale. This allows you to set conditionalities: you only buy certain types of grain that are climate resilient; you buy types of grain that have been produced in a certain, environmentally friendly way. You then could combine it — indeed you should combine it — with a procurement and industrial policy for green fertilizers. By building out this public capacity, you also build out a lever that you can use to change the ways in which you organize food production in a sector — agriculture — that is one of the most difficult to decarbonize. By contrast, if you go in with carbon prices, in a context of already high inflation where food prices are up by more than 30 percent since 2019 like in the United States, you just make things worse.
The same principle applies to the housing crisis. If you implement rent freezes, then the next step is to create more public housing, which, in a city like Berlin, could include socialization of large-scale corporate landlords and real estate companies that already control significant shares of your housing supply. If you take this housing stock over and put it in public hands, you have a public option that has a significant impact on what is happening in the housing market as a whole. You need to build more, of course, but you can make sure it’s done in green ways. Same for energy. And then, when you take all three together and add other essentials like transportation, you really are getting into the territory where you are tackling significant shares of the resource use and emissions in your economy.
Bartolomeo Sala
É para isso que estamos aqui!
Isabella Weber
Bem, voltando ao tema da inflação, creio que precisamos compreender o que de fato ocorreu nesta crise. Primeiro, tivemos uma pandemia — a primeira pandemia global em um século. As pessoas estavam, ou confinadas em casa, ou trabalhando na linha de frente, expostas ao vírus.
Depois, a economia retomou suas atividades. Contudo, devido a todas as disrupções causadas pelos confinamentos, surgiram, de repente, inúmeros desabastecimentos. Essas escassezes serviram de pretexto para aumentos de preços; no entanto, a dinâmica variou conforme o setor. No caso da energia, houve um colapso na demanda durante os períodos de confinamento. As empresas petrolíferas, então, reduziram parte de sua capacidade produtiva. Quando a demanda voltou a crescer, elas não demonstraram pressa em restabelecer essa capacidade. Esse descompasso impulsionou os preços do petróleo, e a invasão da Ucrânia pela Rússia fez com que disparassem. A questão, portanto, é: como o restante do setor corporativo reage a um aumento nos preços da energia? Eles absorvem esse custo adicional ou o repassam ao consumidor, de modo a proteger — ou até ampliar — suas margens de lucro? O que observamos foi que o setor corporativo, como um todo, conseguiu registrar lucros recordes justamente em meio a essa crise.
Trata-se, aqui, de uma questão econômica. Como economista heterodoxa, tendo sempre a analisar as estruturas; minhas pesquisas demonstram como situações de emergência criam janelas de oportunidade para aumentos de preços. Contudo, é também uma questão de moralidade e da forma como organizamos nossa sociedade e nossa economia. O capitalismo é, por natureza, imoral; mas, em um cenário como este — no qual as pessoas lutavam pela própria sobrevivência e o mundo vivia sob o medo da ameaça do vírus —, a reação do setor corporativo de elevar os preços a ponto de gerar lucros recordes torna a imoralidade do capitalismo algo evidente. É por isso que houve tanta indignação popular diante do que eu e outros denominamos “inflação da ganância” (greedflation).
Há, ainda, a questão da realidade vivida. As pessoas continuam saindo para trabalhar todos os dias e percebem que os itens essenciais — de alimentos e energia a habitação e transporte — estão cada vez mais caros. Isso os força a fazer escolhas impossíveis: comprar outro carro usado — já que o anterior quebrou — ou pagar o aluguel. Isso gera uma enorme sensação de insegurança e ansiedade. Se a postura for apenas dizer “tudo bem, vamos esperar que isso passe”, trata-se de mais uma demonstração da incapacidade de o governo agir.
Essa é a contradição com a qual inicio o livro. Sob o neoliberalismo, os governos afirmam que a democracia é o melhor de todos os sistemas políticos; contudo, quando se trata das necessidades materiais básicas das pessoas, parece que, infelizmente, nada podem fazer. Isso já constitui uma contradição em tempos de normalidade, mas torna-se ainda mais grave em períodos de crise, pois a confiança das pessoas na democracia acaba sendo, então, fundamentalmente abalada.
E não é que essas crises sejam eventos isolados; pelo contrário, elas se tornarão cada vez mais frequentes.
Isabela Weber
Temos visto isso em pesquisas de opinião, repetidas vezes. À medida que a inflação avançava, um número crescente de pessoas passou a culpar as grandes empresas pelos preços elevados, defendendo que o governo deveria intervir e impor controles de preços. Como você bem diz, isso não é algo que ficou num passado distante, e esses choques não são aleatórios. Vivemos uma crise global de desintegração dos nossos ambientes naturais e da ordem geopolítica, o que torna inevitáveis novos e frequentes choques no futuro.
A economia antifascista vai muito além de controles de preços específicos para itens essenciais. Contudo, em um momento de crise como o atual, a questão da estabilização dos preços de produtos indispensáveis resume-se, no fundo, a saber se o governo intervirá para garantir às pessoas o acesso a condições de vida com custos acessíveis — mesmo que isso signifique contrariar os interesses de corporações poderosas ou daqueles que insistem que o mercado é o único árbitro, expondo, assim, a população a resultados profundamente imorais.
As you write in your chapter “Capital Won’t Save Democracy,” capitalists and fascists are natural allies today just as they were in the 1930s — not just because the latter line the pockets of the former when stripping the state for parts, but because fascists are the best bulwark for their monopolies. Indeed, the two share a common enemy, “democratic states . . . when they regulate business activities in the common interest, protect the environment, or uphold labor rights.” Can you tell us why the unholy alliance between Davos Men and strongmen like Donald Trump isn’t an anomaly but a natural development?
Isabella Weber
First of all, one of the things that really struck me about being in Davos in 2025 during the inauguration of Trump was that large parts of the business community appeared to me almost more like followers than leaders. Many of them didn’t donate to Trump, but the moment the power shifted, they went with Trump. They are profit fundamentalists and, as such, they will always go with power.
Now, to your question of what the democratic state does here, I actually found Javier Milei’s Davos speech very telling. He is the president of a country, of course, but he insists that all the problems that the West has are a result of feminist wokeness, which again goes back to this fascist idea that there are natural hierarchies and that if you are trying to intervene, you are messing up with the natural order. His diagnosis of the decline of the West is simply, “if only free enterprise had prevailed in its pure form, then we would not have had this aberration.” That’s I think how someone like Milei comes to embody the convergence between neoliberalism and fascism that we talked about in the beginning.
As to what’s actually happening in terms of who globalization is working for, the first China shock was really an outsourcing shock. China was one part of the story, but the other was multinational companies headquartered in the West that were perfectly happy to throw a significant share of the working class in Europe and the United States under the bus. The second China shock is a very different beast, which is why the name is somewhat misleading. This shock is one where the almost universal dominance of Western corporations is suddenly under threat, as Chinese companies approaching the technological frontier in key industries start to pose a serious challenge to a world hierarchy in the global division of labor that dates back to the nineteenth century.
What’s interesting is that the moment that exposure to markets, free capital flows, and open trade flows no longer is univocally to the benefit of Western-headquartered companies, the allegiances to these liberal ideals start flipping and instead an extreme anti-China “by any means necessary” stance ends up becoming mainstream. What I’m arguing is that this is important context that we need to acknowledge when we look at how globalization of the neoliberal type is being destroyed and is being replaced with tariff blitzes and geopolitical maneuvering that bring the whole toolbox of the might of states into the game of fortifying a certain global division of labor.
Bartolomeo Sala
If all that is possible is a zero-sum game between states and corporations, the best way to ride out the crisis is to invite it and hope to win, so at least in this zero-sum world you are the one calling the shots.
Isabella Weber
Exactly, it’s a zero-sum competition, which is now being fought with different means in a way, but it’s still a zero-sum competition.
Bartolomeo Sala
Could you talk a bit explicitly about how you understand antifascist economics?
Isabella Weber
An important inspiration is Karl Polanyi, who wanted to write a book, “Masterplan for the Common Man,” as an antifascist economics. For him, when there is a crisis that threatens the existential foundation of people’s lives, what he calls countermovements emerge. Fascism is a countermovement to fortify a profit fundamentalist order with state violence. What I am arguing is for a countermovement against today’s “end-times fascism” — to use Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s term — one that secures the material foundations of people’s livelihoods as the precondition for a dignified life as its overarching goal.
The starting point for this is, very concretely, essentials for meeting people’s needs and for production systems, because obviously, to fulfil those needs, we need to have certain production structures in place. That’s the core. Then there are affordability policies that keep all of this together — things like rent freezes, a basket of price-controlled goods, free public transportation, or public ownership of energy and affordable utilities — policies that bring immediate relief.
However, in order to sustain a price intervention, you need to change the structures of provisioning in these essential sectors. And that, ultimately, is a question of ownership. Given that we are in this global crisis of livelihoods, it’s not enough to bring down the price of gasoline and thereby render life more affordable to people who drive their cars, and meanwhile we burn through ever more oil and let the planet burn. We need to use those measures that stabilize prices to buy time for the structural change that can get us into a situation where our use of natural resources becomes compatible with the continued existence of human lives on planet Earth, which might sound a bit big, but I think that’s really what is at stake here.
Bartolomeo Sala
How can this economic outlook, that starts with people’s essential needs, work hand in hand with combating climate change and responding to anxieties about globalization?
Isabella Weber
Polanyi has this idea of land, labor, and money being essentials. I am basically broadening this category by saying that all the things that our life depends on are essentials, because for all of these things, it’s a lie that they can just work like the market for plastic toys or chewing gum. If the rent is too high, it’s not like you just reduce your demand. You need shelter and a place to live. And for a dignified life, you also need to be able to live where your friends are and where your family is. You cannot just be moved around like a fungible atom from one place to the next because rent went up. For food, it’s even more straightforward. You can’t say, the price of food went up, I’m not going to eat.
The question then becomes: How do you organize each of these sectors in ways to achieve short-run affordability and to change the structure of provisioning in service of, among other goals, climate stabilization? What I’m arguing for in the case of agriculture are buffer stock systems, ideally multilateral, where you have a public stockholding entity that buys when the prices collapse because there’s a bumper harvest and sells when there’s a supply shock that constrains supply and prices spike. Now, the effect of such an entity would not only be to stabilize prices but also to change the dynamic in a market where right now four global food commodity trading companies control 70 to 90 percent of global food commodity trading.
If you have such public stockholding systems, you basically build a massive procurement operation, because you start to buy grain and other durable commodities on a large scale. This allows you to set conditionalities: you only buy certain types of grain that are climate resilient; you buy types of grain that have been produced in a certain, environmentally friendly way. You then could combine it — indeed you should combine it — with a procurement and industrial policy for green fertilizers. By building out this public capacity, you also build out a lever that you can use to change the ways in which you organize food production in a sector — agriculture — that is one of the most difficult to decarbonize. By contrast, if you go in with carbon prices, in a context of already high inflation where food prices are up by more than 30 percent since 2019 like in the United States, you just make things worse.
The same principle applies to the housing crisis. If you implement rent freezes, then the next step is to create more public housing, which, in a city like Berlin, could include socialization of large-scale corporate landlords and real estate companies that already control significant shares of your housing supply. If you take this housing stock over and put it in public hands, you have a public option that has a significant impact on what is happening in the housing market as a whole. You need to build more, of course, but you can make sure it’s done in green ways. Same for energy. And then, when you take all three together and add other essentials like transportation, you really are getting into the territory where you are tackling significant shares of the resource use and emissions in your economy.
Bartolomeo Sala
Brilhante. Não chegamos a aprofundar o tema do comércio global e de como uma agenda desse tipo eliminaria o gatilho para a retomada da competição e do imperialismo, o que é uma pena. Não sei se você tem alguma consideração final a acrescentar?
Isabella Weber
So maybe to wrap up: the idea is to put a floor under people’s livelihoods by guaranteeing affordable livelihoods in such a way that, over time, you change the ways they are provisioned. But you also put a ceiling on extreme forms of wealth and corporate power. This means of course taxing the ultrarich, antitrust laws that are willing to break up large corporations, but also public options and ownership. Because when you create public opinions, you create public power that can act as a counterpoint.
Now, if you look at this from a macroeconomic perspective, then what I am proposing also is a regime for “inflation preparedness,” because when shocks hit, you would not let the prices of energy and food commodities shoot up and create these knock-on effects across the economy, and then react with interest rate hikes that not only throw people out of work and treat their livelihoods as collateral damage but also make the investments that are needed to change the structures of your economy more expensive and out of reach. Inflation preparedness, as I’ve described it, de-emphasizes the blunt tool of monetary austerity. This means that you are freeing up space for things like a full employment policy, where if you invest in these essential areas, you would also be creating useful and decent jobs. And by having this form of public job creation, you would actually also again create public competition to private employers by offering the kind of labor conditions that are necessary for a dignified life. The right to a good and meaningful job becomes a real possibility. So, in that sense, if you put all of this together, it actually becomes a coherent program, also macroeconomically speaking.
And then in terms of the international dimension, what I’m arguing is that affordability is also a peace question. We see this very clearly with the Iran war. Working toward peace is actually working toward sustained affordability. Now, in terms of the international trade, what I’m arguing is to move beyond the dichotomy between nationalist protectionism and free-trade liberalism, and to have forms of managed trade that are organized in the interest of commodity-producing nations in the Global South, which are extremely vulnerable to commodity price swings, but also in the interest of working people around the world.
So maybe to wrap up: the idea is to put a floor under people’s livelihoods by guaranteeing affordable livelihoods in such a way that, over time, you change the ways they are provisioned. But you also put a ceiling on extreme forms of wealth and corporate power. This means of course taxing the ultrarich, antitrust laws that are willing to break up large corporations, but also public options and ownership. Because when you create public opinions, you create public power that can act as a counterpoint.
Now, if you look at this from a macroeconomic perspective, then what I am proposing also is a regime for “inflation preparedness,” because when shocks hit, you would not let the prices of energy and food commodities shoot up and create these knock-on effects across the economy, and then react with interest rate hikes that not only throw people out of work and treat their livelihoods as collateral damage but also make the investments that are needed to change the structures of your economy more expensive and out of reach. Inflation preparedness, as I’ve described it, de-emphasizes the blunt tool of monetary austerity. This means that you are freeing up space for things like a full employment policy, where if you invest in these essential areas, you would also be creating useful and decent jobs. And by having this form of public job creation, you would actually also again create public competition to private employers by offering the kind of labor conditions that are necessary for a dignified life. The right to a good and meaningful job becomes a real possibility. So, in that sense, if you put all of this together, it actually becomes a coherent program, also macroeconomically speaking.
And then in terms of the international dimension, what I’m arguing is that affordability is also a peace question. We see this very clearly with the Iran war. Working toward peace is actually working toward sustained affordability. Now, in terms of the international trade, what I’m arguing is to move beyond the dichotomy between nationalist protectionism and free-trade liberalism, and to have forms of managed trade that are organized in the interest of commodity-producing nations in the Global South, which are extremely vulnerable to commodity price swings, but also in the interest of working people around the world.
Colaboradores
Isabella Weber é professora assistente de economia na Universidade de Massachusetts Amherst e autora de How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate.
Bartolomeo Sala é um jornalista e editor freelancer italiano radicado em Londres. Seus textos foram publicados em veículos como FT Magazine, Gagosian Quarterly, Frieze, The Dial, Vittles e The Brooklyn Rail. Ele é editor na Translator Mag.
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