Sacrificial Lambs No More

 According to the head of the British Army, General Sir ‘Roly’ Walker, we must all be prepared to make sacrifices for the good of our country.

Urging a “frank conversation” about preparing for war, Walker (salary at least 220,000 pa) said last month that “citizens have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritise defence and security”.

Then, one of his predecessors, Lord ‘Lordy’ Dannatt, piped up, “His Majesty’s Government would need to consider conscription, starting with 18-24 year-olds”.

I suppose we should be gratified they are still talking about consent. But the thing about consent is that to mean anything it has to be freely given – if it isn’t, it’s simply compliance. And while there is any element of choice left in this matter, why should we ‘consent’ to anything?

Because, for many people the last two decades have been one long sacrifice for which, to employ a well-known phrase, consent was decidedly manufactured.

Around 2010, I remember the opposition Conservatives lifting a phrase from Barack Obama – “We’re all in it Together” – to indicate that “shared sacrifices” were necessary for the greater good. Once they were in power, this noble sentiment took the form of regular doses of state money creation (known by the neutral sounding term Quantitative Easing*) which saved the insolvent banking sector and made rich people even richer, accompanied by eye watering austerity, a public sector pay-freeze and a 345% increase in benefit sanctions on the poorest people in society.

The incredible thing is, 16 years later, the script is exactly the same. Because of inflation, the latest budget involves “real-terms cuts” in departmental spending. And, despite promising to bring “compassion” and a culture change, the Starmer ‘Labour’ government raised benefit sanctions to a record level (a record on top of the previous record achieved by the Conservatives), entrenching, according to Amnesty UK, “a system that is becoming even more punitive than the one it promised to replace”.

Between 2010 and 2020, the sacrifices were to save ‘the economy’ (coincidentally making rich people even richer – billionaire wealth increased by 310%). Now the sacrifices are necessary to save the country from a non-existent Russian threat (coincidentally making rich people who have shares in arms companies even richer).

At least during the Cold War, when military spending was high and society was militarised to a high degree (historian David Edgerton has said after World War Two in Britain the ambition was not only to “build a New Jerusalem” but also a New Sparta), there was some kind of social contract.

Now there is just exploitation, precarious jobs, subsistence self-employment, rents that consume 60% of your income, and ever-rising council tax and heating bills – the last having risen by 79% since 2021, augmented by ‘market trading’, otherwise known as speculation in gas and electricity prices.

British Gas and its successor company Centrica, have made profits of more than £56 billion since the publicly-owned firm was privatised by Margaret Thatcher in 1986, while more than 7,400 people die each winter because their homes are too cold.

But they expect sacrifices.

The same hubris – that you can keep pushing and pushing and there will be no resistance – is currently experiencing something of a rude awakening across Europe. In 2025, a French general said that the country should “accept the loss of our children” in a confrontation with Russia. The children are now giving their verdict and centrist-banker-austerian president Macron may not survive the shock.

An MP from La France Insoumise (LFI), the left-wing party in France which backs the protests, told an audience in Birmingham last month that “the enemy is at home”. This truth, which applies just as much to Russia, alludes to a famous statement made by the German anti-war socialist Karl Liebknecht in middle of the First World War: “Every people’s main enemy is in their own country.” It was quite a costly sentiment to express.  After being imprisoned, and then sent to the Western Front, Liebknecht was murdered.

To prepare for the necessary sacrifices, appeals to patriotism are being ramped up. That is why there are even more war films (specifically World War Two films) on TV than there normally are. But as the patriotic revolutionary George Orwell once noted, patriotism is completely different from conservatism. In the 1940 essay My Country Right or Left, Orwell remembering realising on the eve of the Second World War that, despite previously opposing British involvement, he could never sabotage the war effort while “England was in a serious jam”.

But now it’s not England that is in a “serious jam” but its rulers. And we should not lift a finger to help them get out of it.

*Quantitative Easing (QE) was not limited to Britain. In 2022, Andrew Huszar, the man in charge of America’s $1.25 trillion QE programme, recalled that “Over the last 12 years, we’re talking about unprecedented amounts of money being printed and funnelled into the markets, banks being showered with trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars, ultimately benefiting the most privileged in our societies. So you now have billionaires launching rockets into space … You have certain elements of society that are soaring and other parts of our society that are being left, unfortunately, ever further behind.”

Coincidentally, military spending in the US – which goes directly to weapons firms like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon – has doubled since 2019, reaching $3 trillion.

What Does it Mean to be Human? (1st part)

 

It may be my imagination or peculiar reading habits but there seems to be a kindling of interest in how the world appears to non-humans. The technical term for this is umwelt. Originally coined by the 20^th century German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, it means how the world is experienced by animals can be very different to how it is experienced by humans.

Dogs, for example, have a much more powerful sense of smell than we do. So, if you have a dog and take it for a walk, even round the block, it will be a far more absorbing experience for the dog than it is for you – given the huge variety of smells that the dog will encounter (and despite the fact that it will frequently be dragged away by its human owner from lingering over them for more than a few seconds).

A seagull’s world

In his recent book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, the philosopher Martin Hägglund relates how he was sitting on a mountain in Northern Sweden, watching a seagull gliding in the wind and started to think about how the landscape appeared for the seagull.

But this leads him into an unusual, and quite unfashionable, train of thought. Rather than eulogising about the seagull’s incredible flying skills or sense of navigation, he starts to ponder how humans (like him) differ in fundamental ways from animals (like the seagull).

They are both, humans and seagulls, living beings and must do things to sustain their lives (finding food and sleeping for example). But while the seagull has what Hägglund terms natural freedom – it engages in “purposive” activities like avoiding predators and finding fish to eat – humans have spiritual freedom. They can also decide whether the ends they follow are the right ones.

“Even when we are socialized into an identity as though it were a natural necessity” says Hägglund, “there remains the possibility of transforming, contesting, or critically overturning our understanding of who we are.”

Many animals, he says, show evidence of mourning, deliberation, suffering, joy or conflict. They can also change their behaviour “but the principles in light of which they act remain the same for as a long as the species exist”.

With humans it’s different. The understanding of what it means to be human “varies dramatically across history and across the world at any given moment of history”.

Why such a view is unfashionable (and also controversial) is that there is a thin line between thinking that humans are different to all other known species of life and thinking they are superior to them. Historically, humans have seen themselves as the ‘Lords of Creation’. The contemporary incarnation of this attitude has been termed anthropodenialism, a stubborn refusal to see the similarities between animals and humans.

But, to Hägglund, also not seeing the profound differences between them is an “act of bad faith”.

The traits of spiritual freedom, he says, “are higher forms of the traits of natural freedom”. But to avoid supernaturalism, an account must be given of how spiritual freedom evolved from natural freedom (and in turn emerged from non-living matter).

Our family and other animals

Though unmentioned by Hägglund, someone, of a kindred philosophical background, has given just such an account. This is the American social ecologist Murray Bookchin (the mutual intellectual tradition is Hegelianism though, to be accurate, Bookchin, while profoundly influenced by Hegel’s logic, stridently denied being an ‘Hegelian’).

Bookchin’s equivalent of Hägglund’s natural and spiritual freedom is first and second nature (a distinction which originally comes from the Roman orator Cicero). First nature is a strictly biological, animalistic realm. Humans are clearly animals – we are mammals and primates. We exhibit biological traits and behaviours. Our dexterous fingers mark us out as primates for example – all primates have hands. First nature is the same as Hägglund’s natural freedom.

But, says Bookchin, humans also have a second nature which is not shared by any other species. This is the realm of conscious choice about how to live, a domain – unlike natural evolution – that can be subject to rapid change. In contrast to developmentally static animal “aggregations” humans form, or have formed, a wide variety of societies. These include tribes, bands, slave states, republics, democracies, market societies, dictatorships and centrally planned economies. “Each of which”, writes Bookchin, “has richly articulated structures, intersubjective relationships, and cultures, and which can be changed by popular actions, coups, and upheavals of one kind or another.”*

This is the counterpart of Hägglund’s spiritual freedom. While Bookchin talks about the ‘macro’ level – the diversity of human institutions and political structures – and Hägglund stresses the ‘micro’ – different personal proclivities and choices – they are essentially talking about the same thing.

Humans as the result of evolution

But one of the important features of Bookchin’s work, from Hägglund’s point of view, is that he meticulously details how second nature (spiritual freedom) has slowly graded from, rather than suddenly erupting out of, first nature (natural freedom).

The emergence of humanity, he argues, is part of a strong biological trend spanning vast aeons of time that gave rise to a species within first nature that then “transcended its mere animality and produced a second, distinctly social nature”.

In this sense, we – human beings – are revealed to be, not some strange freak of organic evolution, but an intimate, indeed logical, part of it. Natural selection shaped the human ancestral line just as surely as it shaped that of wolves, tigers or bears.

But it shaped it in a way that eventually allowed for choice, both personal and social, to emerge, whose parameters are not dictated by biological imperatives or instincts.

The ability to reason and cooperate is an integral part of this freedom. Bookchin traces the ‘human line’ – from early hominids three million years ago, to Homo Erectus 1.5 million years ago to our own species, homo sapiens, who are 300,000 years old – to argue that traits such as the ability to communicate, guardianship, care and cooperation were essential to its survival and thus the fact that we exist now.

“Humans are immensely vulnerable animals” he argues and thus our ancestors had to rely on something other than physical strength or speed to remain alive amidst other animals seeing them as prey.

But it wasn’t until around 90,000 years ago – a mere blink of the eye in evolutionary terms – that, in Bookchin’s words, the human species crossed “the line between its animal ancestry and its human future”. This period saw the emergence of rudimentary art (cave paintings), bows and arrows, spears, weaving, clothing and complex shelters (given that our species is 300,000 years old it does beg the question of what was happening, if anything, in the intervening period).

If there is such a thing as ‘natural’ human nature it probably can be located here. Human beings are so constituted by nature to reason and innovate, rather than merely passively dwell in nature as other animals do. They also live together in what Bookchin calls “quasi-biological institutions” around family, kinship, age and gender.

Second nature takes over

But plainly things did not stop there, and neither therefore did ‘human nature’. Henceforth – and certainly after the end of the Ice Age 20,000 years ago – Bookchin’s second nature took over resulting in an array of different institutions, societies and political formations held together by ideologies (thinking a certain way to live is the ‘correct’ way) rather than blind biological instincts. Now, in Hägglund’s terms, humans are spiritually free rather than merely naturally free. They can – potentially – decide whether the way they live – either personally or socially – is right or wrong and, if the latter, should be changed.

In an earlier work, The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin gives some examples of how second nature made itself felt in antiquity (3,000 to 6,000 years ago):

We know that about the same time the ancient Egyptian peasantry rose against the entrenched class system of the Old Kingdom or possibly the nobility of the Middle Kingdom, a similar uprising occurred in the Sumerian city of Lagash. Judging from Athenian references, Sparta’s serf-like helots revolted with disconcerting frequency. So troubling was this history of underclass unrest that even the fairly benign Athenian polis lived in uncertainty about its own slave population. Rome, particularly, toward the end of the republican era, was apparently destabilized by a series of slave and gladiatorial revolts, among which Spartakus’s historic rebellion (73 b.c.) was apparently the most far-reaching and dramatic. This army of slaves and gladiators, later joined by impoverished free people, engaged in a series of major looting expeditions that swept over the Campania and southern Italy until it was crushed by Crassus and Pompey.

Clearly, we are talking about phenomena that are qualitatively different from animal behaviour. Zebras do not rebel against the organisation of their herds and nor, for that matter, do chimpanzees (humanity’s closest primate relative) – who do sometimes revolt against alpha male ‘rulers’ – ever question the nature of the chimp collectivity.

But the sheer variety of human second nature (in the above examples, Spartacus’s slave army [who rebelled against a republic] can be contrasted with the Egyptian peasantry who were neither slaves nor serfs [and rose up against a monarchy], Athens was a direct democracy, although slave-owning and intensely patriarchal, helots in Sparta were state-owned serfs, and many of the peasants in Lagash, one of the earliest civilisations, were technically free citizens) does invite a question. Is there a ‘right’ way to live?

With detours into Hägglund’s concept of “democratic socialism”, Bookchin’s idea of non-hierarchical participatory democracy and whether reason and logic can be deployed to evaluate the superiority of one social dispensation (in terms of meeting human needs and abilities) to another, this will be the subject of the second part.

*Most of the quotes come from the ‘Becoming Human’ chapter of Bookchin’s 1995 book Re-enchanting Humanity (and therefore I suppose could be classed his mature view – he started writing in the 1960s)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roosevelt, Fascism, Woke Capitalism and 'Coups Against Democracy' (part two)

 To utterly mangle a famous Bob Dylan lyric, “history doesn’t rhyme, it swears”.

In April 1938, in a speech to the American Congress, Franklin Roosevelt said that “unhappy events abroad” (meaning Europe) had imparted two “simple truths”.

The first was that democratic government was threatened by the “growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than [the] democratic state itself”. That, in essence, was Fascism, he said.

The second was that the “liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not …. produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living”.

“Both lessons,” said Roosevelt, “hit home”.

The Hubris of Wealth

Sadly, 88 years on, they are hitting home again. Though our situation is probably more perilous in that the American president is the “essence” of the problem, rather than the one stating its existence.

A general myopia regarding the situation also makes combating it far more difficult. Many understand Roosevelt’s second “truth” – that falling or stagnating living standards provide fertile ground for far right and Fascist parties. Anything from high rents, to failing public services, to a callous ‘welfare’ system are blamed on immigrants or lazy freeloaders, or both.

But the first “truth” – interestingly Roosevelt placed it first so as to emphasise it – is less appreciated. But, as part one I hope demonstrated, “the concentration of private power without equal in history” is now actually worse than it was in the 1930s. And its producing similar effects.

So while Fascism is incubated by social conditions that affect the mass of people and unsolved and misunderstood economic afflictions, it also has a corollary at the top of society.

As Roosvelt noted at a time when Nazism thought it would last a thousand years, economic concentration and the growth of corporate power leads to a hubris among rich capitalists that they can discard democracy and institute a government seamlessly suited to their profit-maximising needs. This allies with the Fascist impulse at the bottom of society to produce a low-tax, deregulatory political project that, on its reverse side, constantly seeks scapegoats to blame for problems that are never addressed.

First on the Fascist ‘To Do’ List

We can see this in the actions of classical Fascism – the political environment that Roosevelt was confronting. The absolute first priority of the Hitler regime in Germany, as befitting its bankrolling by wealthy industrialists, was to repress the Left and puts its activists in concentration camps like Dachau. This started with the Communists in February 1933, and then within weeks extended to the Social Democrats and the trade unions. Only after this had been done, did the Nazis turn their attention to Jews, initially through a boycott of Jewish businesses. “There were relatively few Jews among these early prisoners of the Third Reich,” writes historian Arno Mayer in Why did the Heavens not Darken? “and all of them were arrested for being left-wing politicians, lawyers, or literati.”

The original Fascist regime, Mussolini’s in Italy, ceded a lot of power to a coterie of mainly non-Fascist economic advisers. As shown by Clara Mattai in The Capital Order, they instituted a system of brutal austerity and privatisation, which seamlessly dovetailed with Il Duce’s physical smashing of the workers’ movement, and coincidentally caused a massive, though far from unwelcome, slump in living standards.

Roosevelt, in keeping with someone who didn’t consider himself a socialist, thought the intrinsic problem with Fascism was that it rested on a particular type of capitalism. This was the cartel system – groups of companies that become so powerful they can fix prices, distort markets and take over governments so their interests are tended to.

And it is true that, contrary to the contemporary Right’s absurd portrayal of it as socialistic, Nazism had a private profit-making impulse at its core. As Hannah Arendt relates in Eichmann in Jerusalem (p 40), IG Farben, Krupp and Siemens all had plants in the vicinity of Auschwitz and made a pot of money by ‘employing’ its inmates as slave labour.

Nazism and Cartels

As the Rooseveltian moment reached its zenith – i.e. before the Cold War took root and the US started installing and supporting right-wing military dictatorships across the world – the cartel system was blamed for Nazism. The chairman of the US Senate’s Subcommittee on War Mobilization stated that the cartel system was “in great measure” responsible for the Hitler regime. Roosevelt himself wanted the German cartels eradicated and a “Decartelization” team was dispatched to post-war Germany to do just that (with the exception of IG Farben unsuccessfully).

But as shown by the fact that the German cartels existed prior to Nazism, and in fact were instrumental in helping Hitler into power, cartelisation is always an inherent possibility with capitalism. This is especially the case when – as they have been since the Great Depression –economic downturns are nipped in the bud by government intervention and a widespread destruction of capital is not permitted to happen.

In 2012, two American Marxian economists, in a book called The Endless Crisis said that economic concentration, though frequently denied, was greater than it had ever been in the past. They cited another economist who found 22 “barriers to entry” used by firms to exclude rivals, prima facie evidence of a cartel system. And given what has happened in the interim, including a spate of mergers and acquisitions in the wake of Covid, economic concentration has almost certainly become more extreme.

In such circumstances, the temptation to wield the power of market influence and wealth can become irresistible.

Last year, the anti-monopoly group the Balanced Economy Project and the NGO Global Justice Now, urged an investigation of three pharmaceutical giants who had paused investments worth £1.5 billion as prelude to negotiations with the government over drug purchases by the NHS. This, they said, “showed signs of cartel-like behaviour”.

As it turned out, the Competition and Markets Authority, permeated with the Starmer (read now Burnham) government’s growth mantra and horror of seeming to impair business ‘confidence’ refused to investigate. The subsequent talks, carried out under the shadow of threats to withdraw investments, saw the NHS promise to double spending on new drugs at a cost of £64 billion.

Billionaires and the Far Right

It is not hard to see an echo of the German cartels’ role in the rise of Nazism, and participation in its horrors, with billionaire sponsorship of the far-right today. Elon Musk pays Tommy Robinson’s legal costs, calls for the British government to be overthrown and supports Restore Britain. Palantir founder Peter Thiel thinks freedom and democracy are incompatible, while backing Donald Trump and the far-right. Trump’s immigrant detention centres are built and operated by private corporations.

Conveniently, those supported by these techno-billionaires (or trillionaires in the case of Musk) promise to tear down regulations banish abominations like a wealth tax. According to Facebook whistleblower, Sarah Wyn-Williams, offering electoral campaign tools to the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland and the Front National in France was seen as a way of “getting close to these political parties and helping them into government” so as to “stop government from regulating Facebook”.

Famed economist Daron Acemoglu (co-author of the noted book Why Nations Fail) has even suggested that what he calls “the capitalist state” may be prompted, by growing automation and an ever-rising stock of capital, to launch a “coup against democracy” and institute “repression”. He hypothesizes that for quite rational reasons – the desire to maximise profit – “democratic decision-making will become less and less attractive to capitalists”.

The Questionable Allure of Fascism

But a counter-question can be posed. For most corporations – as opposed to some idiosyncratic ultra-wealthy individuals thrown up by this age of mammoth inequality – is backing Fascism is really necessary or even desirable? As alluded to above, Clara Mattei in The Capital Order showed that in the 1920s, both Britain and Italy imposed brutal austerity – in the form of spending cuts, high interest rates and repression of trade unions. But while the latter became Fascist and abolished elections, the former didn’t. In fact, Britain instituted its recession-inducing austerity policies in the same decade that it experienced universal suffrage for the first time.

The Anti-Trump Corporation

It’s also true that for some corporations, elements of the modern Fascist script stick in the craw, primarily because they alienate senior staff members. Disney, for example, perhaps the archetypical American corporation, publicly criticised a Florida law which restricted teaching about sexuality and gender identity in schools, a kind of American version of Thatcher’s Section 28. This was even at the cost of a two-year long legal battle with the Trumpite state governor.

But though it personified corporate opposition, Disney was far from alone. Altogether 337 corporations, including famous names like Apple, Pepsi, Pfizer, Facebook, Mastercard, Citibank and Amazon  signed a statement bemoaning similar state bills across the country that “single out LGBTQ+” people and “have a negative effect on our employees, our customers, our competitiveness, and state and national economies.”

Some American corporations have also retained their DEI policies in the face of threats from the Trump administration. Clearly the ogre of the woke corporation, invoked by the MAGA movement a few years ago, still exists under the surface. It’s a phenomenon that simply didn’t exist the last time Fascism bestrode the world. The late David Graeber brilliantly diagnosed a “culture of resentment” that hones in on a corporate Left elite of HR managers and administrators who police language and acceptable behaviour. “The mainstream Left largely controls the production of humans,” he wrote, “The mainstream Right largely controls the production of things”.

Despite Trump and Elon Musk and crypto-billionaire funded Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, this division within the corporate world is very real. But although sections of the corporate elite may passionately hate contemporary Fascism, they are no more predisposed to “democratic decision-making” than the Right. They may be dissenters in the culture war but in the economic war they are resolutely on-message.  In fact, though universal suffrage is an unadorned fact, few powerful people actually like it. As seen by their reaction to losing control of the UK Labour party a decade ago, centrists loathe democracy too.

Be that as it may, in the absence of a serious working-class left-wing revolt, an alliance between the corporate Left and the corporate Right, though they both detest Marxism and view democracy with visceral distaste, seems unlikely.

The surreally limited vision of ‘democracy’ of Margaret Thatcher’s mentor Friedrich Hayek – representatives serving 15-year terms with electors only able to vote for them once in their lifetimes – may be appealing to right-wing libertarians like Peter Thiel but the schisms run too deep for it to become a charter for corporate freedom.

Acemoglu’s “capitalist state” launching a “coup against democracy” presupposes a unity of purpose that was only achieved sporadically in the 1920s and ’30s and would be even harder to cement today. In any case, the dangerous beast of democracy has been suitably tamed in the last few decades by methods such as austerity, debt and the judgement of financial markets. If all else fails, Machiavellian techniques can be employed to see off insurgencies like those of Corbyn or Saunders.

The Shifting Battlefield

Though this last may facilitate the rise of the far right by channelling grievances in that direction, that too has a function for the corporate elite even if these parties do not attain power. The pressure of right-wing opponents promising a bonfire of regulations and more austerity results in establishment parties, even ostensibly ‘left-wing’ ones, committing themselves to similar, though maybe not quite as extreme, policies. Labour Chancellor John Healey, for example, wants further deregulation of the finance sector, accompanied by “fiscal discipline” (read austerity), while the Tories and Reform scream ‘not enough’. Thus, the battle lines are drawn, while the battlefield itself moves inexorably to the Right.

In 1931, American philosopher John Dewey called politics “the shadow cast on society by big business”. Four decades later the Deweyite Noam Chomsky said that corporations were, “in political terms fascist.” Organisationally, there is “tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level”. The corporation cannot help but shape democracy in its image. At root the problem is corporate power. While it exists, democracy will always be mutilated. It just depends how badly it is mauled.

The Consequences of Slow Growth, part one

 Echoes of the global financial crisis of 2007-9 are in the air. Both the US Nasdaq and the tech-heavy South Korean stock market have fallen heavily recently, prompted by threats by the US Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Back in February 2007, stocks in the US and Asia also nose-dived, presaging ‘Debtonation Day’ in August of that year.

And the proximate cause of the credit crunch, which many very knowledgeable people assured us could never happen, was an incremental rise in interest rates.

But whether an almighty bubble is about to burst, as it has threatened to many times before, there is one thing we in the West can be sure of. We are living in a society defined by slow economic growth, which qualitatively distinguishes it from economies in most of the second half of the 20^th century.

Statistics can lie but not here because they are so stark. In the decade to 2025, UK GDP grew by just 14%, an annual growth rate of just over 1 per cent. In the decade to 1965, growth was 37%, and economic growth per capita (growth adjusted for population growth) in the last 10 years has actually been negative.

The European Union has seen average growth of 1.3% over the last 19 years and 1.1% in the Eurozone.  This is a decline from nearly 5% in the 1960s, 2.1% from 1973-83, and 1.6% in the 1990s.

The US, the world’s largest economy, has performed slightly better but the trends are still unmistakable. In the 1950s and ‘60s, the growth rate was above 4% before decreasing to around 3% in the 1970s and ‘80s. Over the last ten years, the average has been below 2%.

These are not figures relative to other economies. Other parts of the world, like China, have clearly been catching up over the last few decades. But the West’s growth decline is palpable without comparisons to other countries.

Nor, as an aside, is this what was meant to happen. Thatcher and Reagan’s ‘free market’ economic medicine was sold on the basis on reviving the economy, ushering in an era of prosperity. But as these supply-side prescriptions have bedded down into conventional wisdom, they have had precisely the opposite effect.

 And slow growth has definite consequences. One of these is that ‘democratic’ government (to the extent that our government can ever really be called democratic’) gets absorbed by private economic power. Back in the 1930s, US President Franklin Roosevelt called this “the essence of Fascism”.

I was reading recently a book about “deaths of despair” in the US. These are deaths by suicide, drug overdose, or alcoholism, which the authors contend have shot up among white people without a degree since the turn of the century. There are many possible reasons, which I can’t go into here, but one factor is slowing economic growth.

“What may seem like small differences in growth rates have effects over long periods of time”, the authors, Anne Case and Angus Deaton (not that one), say.

One of these effects is increasingly bitter fights over distribution. “With lower growth, there is more pressure to shut out less successful groups”, they write.  This “poisons politics”.

Such a poisoning can be seen in British politics in the demonisation of immigrants and refugees. Or in the intense concentration on attacking the very limited, and very conditional, benefits of sick and disabled people; an issue which simply didn’t exist prior to the 1990s, in an era marked by higher economic growth. The ‘problem’ of excessive benefits paid to vulnerable people has become an obsession of British politics in the age of austerity.

Case and Deaton also say that with slower growth, the “positive-sum game of innovation” gets usurped by “Rent-seeking”. This turns into a “vicious circle that impoverishes everyone”.

Rent-seeking does not just mean seeking housing rents from tenants, but the appropriation by powerful corporations of the existing income of government and society, rather than attempting to create new sources of wealth.

Based on these insights, the basic features of slow growth society, in Britain and elsewhere, can be identified.

In a slow growth society, living standards decline or stagnate

Wage rates in the US have been stagnating for half a century. In Britain, the process has been more telescoped but no less pronounced. According to the Resolution Foundation, if wages had continued to grow as they had been before the 2008 financial crisis, they would be 37% higher than they actually are.

This has taken place in the context of a decline in real GDP – GDP that takes account of a rise in population. “It is extremely difficult for living standards to rise in such circumstances” says socialist economist Michael Burke. Likewise, Case and Deaton say that in an economy growing at 2.5%, living standards double in 28 years but at 1.5% it takes 47 years.

Of course, in a strongly growing economy, there is no guarantee that income will be shared out. While global GDP has increased by 65% since 1990, for example, the number of people living on less than $5 a day has increased by 370 million.

But in a stagnant economy, there is even less chance of living standards increasing. Why should this be so? Partly this is because living standards are dependent on labour productivity which is in turn dependent on business investment. And both of these metrics have been falling over the last few decades. As Case and Deaton say, “investment is a prerequisite for growth, it embodies the latest knowledge and techniques and it raises productivity.”

In the absence of investment, business tends to concentrate on low-cost labour, possibly overseas, or cheap AI transformations. Neither of which raise living standards.

There is easy money to be made – for some people

But in these circumstances, capital is irresistibly attracted to something else – rent-seeking. This involves making money, not from consumer spending on new products, but from government revenues or unavoidable spending by consumers (on housing or heating costs, for example). Something that is already there and merely has to be tapped or exploited. The deal negotiated by pharmaceutical companies with the Starmer government to double NHS spending on new drugs over the next decade – the cost of which has been variously placed at £64 billion or £44.7 billion, causing hundreds of thousands of excess deaths – is a prime example of rent-seeking.

The “VIP Lane” created by ‘Boris’ Johnson’s Conservative government, to enable firms with political connections to the Tories to get PPE contracts under Covid, is another.

More generally, Britain’s ‘privatised’ utilities – in truth not genuinely privatised but contracted out – are a haven of rent-seeking. They provide both a monopoly ensured by the government and a captive market of consumers who have no choice but to buy the ‘product’ being sold. Unsurprisingly, charges have increased way beyond the rate of inflation.

But rent-seeking can occur in purely private sector settings. When a private equity consortium buys a company, in the process loading it down with debt, and then prepares it for re-sale by asset stripping it and increasing the charges to customers, that is rent-seeking. It is destructive to the viability of the firms that are acquired, but the ‘investors’ acquire massive profits.

These processes come to dominate entire economies. The Tories’ PPE scandal has been described as “the rule of contemporary British capitalism, rather than the exception”, while a recent report by UCL professor Mariana Mazzucato has characterised the European economy as a “capitalism of rent”, where income is captured not by producing anything but by achieving market power, and owning assets and charging for access to them.

It is no accident that this degradation has occurred in an era of slow GDP growth, where the levying of rent becomes a far more lucrative and risk-free strategy than actually creating anything.

In a slow growth economy, everything costs more – for a reason

As the Mazzucato report asserts, the crux of corporate strategies is the achievement of market power, which enables income to flow from charging people or other companies to access what you possess. This brings into focus another aspect of slow growth economies – an increase in price mark-ups.

A price mark-up is overcharging for products. According to orthodox economic theory, the price of goods is determined by the cost of the labour and raw materials it takes to produce them, plus a ‘normal’ rate of profit (as we are talking about a profit-based system).

But under a regime of price mark-ups, this normal level of profit becomes ever more elastic. According to one recent book on the cost-of-living crisis, the largest UK firms have massively raised their mark-ups over the last two decades, from 58% in 2002 to 82% in 2020.

This ability to profiteer, and impose what is essentially a private tax on consumers, is intimately related to size and market power. Research by the anti-monopoly group The Balanced Economy Project, reveals that for the world’s top 20 companies, in the five years to 2022, the average mark-up rose to around 50%. For the bottom half of firms (around 34,000 companies were studied), however, the average mark-up was just 25%.

And for some sectors of the economy – pharma or Big Tech for example – mark-ups can be huge, many hundreds of per cent.

The economist Isabella Weber coined the term “sellers’ inflation”, to account for the inflation that took hold after Covid-19 that, she said, was based on “the ability of firms with market power to hike prices”. In truth this process was happening before the Covid epidemic, but as inflation was so low few noticed.

A decade ago, the Economist magazine found that corporations in the US were raking in “exceptional profits” of $300 billion a year, equivalent to a third of taxed operating profits. Some sectors of the US economy were seeing price rises of double the rate of inflation. This, at a time when inflation was negligible (indeed there was a pervasive fear of deflation). Of course, GDP growth was tiny as well, lower than it had been since before World War Two.

What is interesting is that these price mark-ups were occurring in the most concentrated parts of the American economy. In the same article, the Economist analysed 900 sectors of the US economy and found that 2/3rds had become more concentrated between 1997 and 2012.

Not only do high mark-ups contribute high profits and high market value, they are enabled by it. When it comes to charging much more for your products than it takes to produce them, the bigger you are the better.

Which leads to another insight.

Bigness is a curse

In the late 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt called attention to a “concentration of private power without equal in history”.

0.1% of corporations in America, he told the US Congress in 1938, owned 52% of the assets of all of them. Now that figure has risen to 90%.

Roosevelt said something else in his speech, delivered in the midst of the Great Depression. That the history of modern times “proves that in times of depression concentration of business speeds up. Bigger business then has a larger opportunity to grow still bigger at the expense of smaller competitors who are weakened by financial adversity.”

We are undoubtedly now faced with, and have been for some time, conditions of “financial adversity”.

A slow growth economy means generalized financial adversity — not just among people struggling to make ends meet but among small businesses who are dependent on consumer spending or may be the suppliers of corporate behemoths like Amazon.

One group, though, palpably not suffering from financial adversity are large corporations. Corporate profits are at all-time highs, eclipsing previous all-time highs achieved a few months before.

And the large are getting larger. According to Goldman Sachs, “despite uncertainty in the global economy” mergers and acquisitions – which by definition involve the creation of ever larger economic and financial entities – could hit $3.8 trillion in 2026, surpassing the previous peak in the Covid-year of 2021.

Received wisdom has it that the threat of Fascism is nurtured by conditions of inequality, poverty, anxiety, and a lack of social mobility. Conditions that will call out for scapegoats to be found which temporarily soothe the anxiety.

But if we listen to Roosevelt who was speaking when Nazism was approaching its zenith, that isn’t the whole story. Fascism also has an economic corollary, what he called “a cluster of private collectivisms” … “masking itself as a system of free enterprise” that seeks to control democratic government.

Fascism doesn’t just base itself on the exploitation of popular discontent among its mass base. It also has an elite element, which finds nourishment, as it did in the 1930s, in the conditions of a slow growth society.

What Roosevelt termed the “essence of Fascism” is what I want to consider in the second half of this article.

Memoirs of a 'decent' man

Sir Kier Starmer resigned the way he assumed power in the first place. By revealing a relationship with truth so estranged it would make Josef Stalin blush.

“Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt,” Starmer told the country outside Downing Street.

It is necessary to deal with each of these claims in turn by virtue of the fact that unless challenged, recent history becomes ossified into a straitjacket of received wisdom that fatally conditions what can be thought possible in the future.

Politically Bankrupt

In 2019, Labour under Corbyn, as Starmer and his acolytes never tired of saying, achieved the party’s worst showing since 1935, winning just 202 seats. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives  won 365 seats, their best performance since Thatcher’s victory coronation of 1987.

Apart from memory-holing the election just two years before in which Labour had somehow secured the largest increase in its vote since 1945, this warped interpretation conveniently ignores how 2019 was uniquely about one issue, Brexit. And Corbyn’s Labour, faced with a core support overwhelming backing Remain and 2/3rds of the actual constituencies it was defending having voted Leave, was trying to pull off the most delicate of balancing acts.

Its 2017 result partly stemmed from a promise to respect the result of the referendum. But this stance was made all but impossible by then shadow Brexit spokesman – Sir Kier Starmer himself – deliberately violating the agreed party policy and telling the 2018 Labour conference that he wanted a second referendum “and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option”. This led to the perception that Labour was a part of a ‘Remain alliance’ and doomed it in the eyes of many voters in ‘Red Wall’ constituencies, and elsewhere.

Starmer also torpedoed cross-party negotiations with the May government in 2018 over getting a Brexit deal through the Commons, even ruling out his own party policy on a customs union. Thus, he ensured that the hardest of all Brexit deals would be the one to succeed.

But as soon as he became Labour leader in 2020, the ‘King of Remainia’ went through a strange metamorphosis and declared that “Britain’s future is outside the EU” and all arguments about the issue belonged to the past. Clearly his previous stance was very principled, though, and not all an amoral strategy to displace Corbyn at all costs.

Notwithstanding Starmer’s antics, the 2019 election would still have been closer had not Nigel Farage’s ‘Brexit Party’ (actually a company, not a political party) chosen not to stand in 317 Conservative-held seats. This had the result of artificially inflating the Conservative vote share and probably their number of seats.

Curiously, the Conservatives, who must have received – according to Starmer’s interpretation – such a resounding mandate in 2019 (in contrast to Corbyn’s Labour), have since shrunk to a rump of 121 seats. Why they have plunged into such an ‘existential crisis’ in such a short space of time is something of a mystery, unless of course the issue of Brexit artificially hid their real popularity just as it artificially magnified Labour’s divisions.

Financially bankrupt

This is especially ridiculous. Labour in 2019 were flush with cash, on the back of surging membership numbers which peaked at 600,000. Starmer’s unique talent was to reverse this process by telling hundreds of thousands of people to leave (“the door is open”), or simply expelling them.

He then partially plugged this gap by suddenly becoming immensely appealing to very rich people (many of whom formerly donated to the Tories) and corporations. For example, Labour’s 2024 election campaign was bankrolled by a huge £4 million donation from hedge fund Quadrature Capital, the largest single donation the party had ever received. But because of when it was received – in the week after Sunak called the election but before the “pre-poll reporting period” – Labour didn’t have to publicly declare it during the campaign. And our fearless media didn’t bother to enlighten anyone.

Morally Bankrupt

Now we come to the crux of Sir Kier’s appeal to posterity. He was a ‘decent’ man, fighting against the odds to rescue the party he loved from the cesspit of antisemitism into which it had fallen under Jeremy Corbyn.

The truth is rather different. Starmer, as the public face of the right-wing ‘Labour Together’ faction, cynically used antisemitism allegations to purge thousands of left-wingers from the party whose only crime was to criticise Israel, a country which would go on to refute these criticisms by committing a genocide in Gaza.

Of course, Sir Kier was on hand to support what was happening, lay on surveillance flights over Gaza, and increase arms sales at the height of the killing.

The Starmer purge extended to Corbyn, forced out of the party for observing, correctly – even mildly – that the extent of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated” by political opponents and the media.

Under Starmer the totalitarian mentality so gathered pace that even suggesting that Labour wasn’t riddled to the core with antisemites was an offence punishable with expulsion. Victims of this witch hunt included a Jewish professor, hauled up charges of simply repeating a pun by another Jewish member of the Labour party (Jo Bird’s ‘Jew process’) and an elderly Jewish woman accused of, among other things, “demonising Israel by inaccurately [sic] describing it as an apartheid state”.

There is a definite ‘pattern of behaviour’ here. In fact, as leader, Starmer expelled more Jews from the Labour party than all previous Labour leaders combined. As Andrew Feinstein (Starmer’s opponent in Holborn & St Pancras in 2024) pointed out, that is like expelling people of colour to combat racism.

In truth, the one decent thing that Sir Kier Starmer did was resign. Everything else was appalling.

Starmer’s handmaidens

But it would be wrong to see Starmer’s momentary ascendancy as being solely down to the man himself, once generously described as “a piece of hotel art made man”. Nor was his brief reign merely the responsibility of his sponsors in the shadowy Labour Together group, likened in their amorality to the denizens of Richard Nixon’s White House.

There had to be other powerful forces behind the strange phenomenon of Sir Kier Starmer and there were – the British media and important parts of the British state.

At every stage of his political career, the media had Starmer’s back, because, in essence, he had a job to – to destroy Corbynism at its roots. For example, every national media organisation (barring the Morning Star) enthusiastically backed Starmer’s decision to suspend Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour party for his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report.

The EHRC report was itself a sham, though. It deliberately refused to hear evidence contradicting its interpretation, erroneously described those guilty of ‘antisemitism’ as being ‘agents’ of the party, and accused the Corbyn leadership of acting unlawfully by riding roughshod over ‘established procedures’ to intervene in individual cases, when the party’s rule book explicitly allowed it to.

When the circumstances cried out for investigative journalism, all you got was consecration. And a herd of braying donkeys.

Conversely, when Starmer did subsequently furiously intervene in antisemitism cases to expel the (left-wing) perpetrators forthwith – something the EHRC (wrongly) said the Labour leadership was not allowed to do – there was complete media silence.

And when Starmer jerked Labour massively to the Right, after being elected as Labour leader by promising to continue with Corbyn’s policies, the media response was largely to commend him for practising clever politics.

Sometimes the cognitive dissonance was breathtaking. One of Starmer’s pledges  to members when he was campaigning to be elected Labour leader was to “end the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime”. In reality when he got into government, not only did he fail to do this, he actually made it worse, increasing sanctions to their highest ever level in January 2026. According to an Amnesty spokesperson, “I’ve worked to highlight human rights violations for more than two decades and witnessed many awful situations. But never have I encountered such raw and widespread distress from people sharing their experiences in the UK.”

But, to the British media, this world, which affects millions of people, simply doesn’t exist.

And the media omertà about Starmer spread its tattered net far wider. The successful campaign by Starmer backers Labour Together to hamstring left-wing media organisations like The Canary after 2017 by getting advertisers to withdraw on the laughable basis of not supporting ‘fake news’ happened, at the time, completely in the shadows. Anti-Corbyn Labour bureaucrats’ scheme to funnel money to right-wing MPs in 2017 at the expense of the official campaign barely registered. And Starmer’s predilection for money and freebies from high-net-worth individuals and corporations to fill the financial void left by members deserting in droves was, almost without exception, left to the alternative media, who had a far smaller reach, to expose.

The 40-watt searchlights of the mainstream media continued their feeble glare after 2024. Starmer Labour’s 2025 deal with pharmaceutical corporations, which will double the amount the NHS pays for drugs, trampled all over the independence of NICE, the body that decides whether drugs are cost-effective and should be paid for by the NHS. But the deal was presented in entirely vanilla terms by the media, thus concealing what it was really about.

Our strange form of democracy – really oligarchy accompanied by ratification by universal suffrage – has left us in a paradoxical situation. Powerful and wealthy vested interests decide who can, and cannot, have political power (not Corbyn for example) but voters then cast their judgement on them. The result has been seven Prime Ministers in the last decade.

The fact that no-one of influence can see the problem is why they inflicted Sir Kier on us and expected it to work.