Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defense of Affordability, Dignity, and Democracy - Couverture rigide

Weber, Isabella

Couverture rigide

ISBN 13 : 9798217154432

Editeur : Random House, 2026

Synopsis

As inequality, inflation, and overwhelming corporate power threaten democracy, a rising-star economist asks what it would mean to create an anti-fascist economics that guarantees dignity for all.

On the night of President Trump's second presidential victory, economist Isabella Weber tweeted: "Can we now finally have a serious conversation about an anti-fascist economics?" In her view, Democrats had missed the seriousness of the affordability crisis in the wake of pandemic-era inflation. By refusing to step in to protect their constituencies against price explosions in essentials and corporate profiteering, they left room amidst the global crisis for the resurgence of the politics of resentment that Trump and the right reveled in. 

Her question, though, was a bold one with implications that reached far beyond one election. In a neoliberal world, we tell people at the same time: Democracy is the highest form of political organization. And: When it comes to the economy, to the material foundation of our life, the best the representatives of the people can do is to subordinate their constituencies to the corporate pursuit of profits. This basic contradiction between the rule of the people and the rule of the market makes neoliberal democracy vulnerable to the threat of fascism, she argues. Economists have too often acted as prophets of market subordination and ended up waxing the slippery slope to fascism. Isabella Weber warns that if we are serious about saving democracy and preventing the further rise of fascists, we need an economics that serves democracy and centers people’s needs and dignity rather than seeing their fulfillment as a welcome side effect in the pursuit of other goals.

In Anti-Fascist Economics, Weber proposes just such a way out. She envisions an economics that centers on essentials for livelihoods and production, that strives to make life on our planet livable for all, that confronts rather than conceals corporate power, and that charts the way towards international cooperation rather than getting stuck in the dichotomy of free trade and trade wars. To halt the further rise of fascism, we need a tangible alternative to the dystopian status quo, she insists, one that takes affordability seriously as a foundation of democracy. In this paradigm-shifting book, Weber recalls a history of mid-twentieth-century economists for whom “never again” was the North star and reinvents their thinking for our day.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Isabella Weber is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University, and a Fellow of the OSF Ideas Workshop. She works on policy responses to inflation and has advised policymakers in the US, Germany, Europe and Latin America. Her prize-winning first book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate, has been translated into five languages and was a Financial Times best book of the year. She has written for the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs; has been named a Time100 Next; and has a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge.

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Chapter 1

The Fascist Transformation and Its Alternative

My friends, the world is changing. It’s not a question of whether that change will come. It’s a question of who will change it. —­Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City

In the run-­up to the fascism of the 1930s, the “political and the economic system of the planet disintegrated conjointly,” Karl Polanyi observed in The Great Transformation. We are once more witnessing such a disintegration. Institutions that appeared practically unchangeable a few years ago are crumbling. Trade wars are ending free trade globalization. The rule of the dollar is under threat. China’s rise means that for the first time since the British Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, a country that was on the losing end of imperialism has overtaken the United States and Europe in several key technologies. The global security architecture is being redrawn. A new rearmament race is in sight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the doomsday clock at eighty-­five seconds to midnight and warns “the world is perilously close to the precipice.” The United States is leading an onslaught on international organizations. Aggressive nationalism is back. Basic standards of humanitarianism and international law are buried along with tens of thousands of corpses in Gaza under the leadership of Israel’s far-­right government and with the full backing of the United States and the complicity of most European nations. The American president is on an open mission of territorial expansion. U.S. democracy is in a full-­blown constitutional crisis, and with it goes the ideal of Western liberal democracy.

Meanwhile, the human habitat is under threat from the disintegration of our natural environments in ways that would probably have been unimaginable in the 1940s. The world has just emerged from the worst pandemic in a century, and epidemiologists are warning the next one could already be around the corner. Studies showing we are approaching climate tipping points arrive in an unrelenting stream, each more alarming than the last, and we may have already reached tipping points where the damage is irreversible. The ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic are eroding. Mountain glaciers are melting away. Amazon rainforests are dying. Coral reefs, once wonders of color and diversity, are going white and dull. Agricultural yields from tomatoes and olives to grain, cocoa, and coffee are under threat as it rains at the wrong time and there is a drought when water is needed, as excess heat and untimely frosts kill crops. Climate change is displacing millions of people who lose their homes and communities as life becomes untenable.

A crisis of livelihoods is in full swing. Hunger is on the rise globally. The stubborn resistance against recognizing and valuing care work has triggered a reproduction crisis. Increasing numbers of white working-class people are dying deaths of despair in the U.S.—­suicides and drug and alcohol overdoses.

In the same year that Friedrich von Hayek published the neoliberal manifesto The Road to Serfdom (see chapter 3), the Hungarian-­born economic historian and social theorist Karl Polanyi—­then teaching at Bennington College after fleeing the rise of fascism in Central Europe—published a counter manifesto of sorts: The Great Transformation. Polanyi’s central argument was that the attempt to build a self-­regulating market economy inevitably destroys the social fabric and natural foundations on which human life depends, provoking a defensive countermovement, of which fascism was the most brutal expression.

Averting fascism required a progressive countermovement: freeing labor, land, and money from market imperatives and realizing real democracy and freedom by confronting economic power structures rather than brushing them aside. Polanyi’s warning and vision could not be more relevant to the crises of our own day. Polanyi has long been celebrated as the patron saint of the critics of neoliberalism and The Great Transformation the bible of many. Yet, Polanyi’s analysis of the rise of fascism, his anti-­fascist agenda, and his vision for a democratic future received much less attention than his takedown of libertarian economists. In fact, Polanyi originally intended to title the book The Fascist Transformation.

The “Fascist Virus”

Polanyi’s life was shaped by the forces he set out to analyze. Born in Vienna in 1886 and raised in Budapest, he fled back to Vienna in 1919, critical of the short-­lived Soviet Republic yet declared a persona non grata by the right-­wing reaction that crushed it. Vienna remained a red island—­a remarkable experiment in municipal socialism—­while the federal government grew increasingly hostile to the workers’ movement.

Polanyi engaged in fierce intellectual battles with libertarians like Ludwig von Mises who chose to kowtow to monopoly capital and form alliances with fascists. Mises served as economic adviser to the Austro-fascist government of Engelbert Dollfuss. Five years after Mussolini seized power, Mises wrote that fascism had “saved European civilization” and that “the merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.” Mises later refashioned himself, warning of a slippery slope into fascism, alleging that the control of just one price, such as that of milk, is enough to start the slide into total planning. But in a critical moment in Austrian history, Mises was directly involved in waxing such a slippery slope, not with price controls but with libertarian economics.

When Dollfuss suspended the Austrian parliament in 1933, Polanyi and his family fled to London. In lectures for the Workers’ Educational Association, he grappled with the question of how nineteenth-­century liberalism could have given rise to fascism. While the 1920s had seen attempts to restore the prewar liberal order, the 1930s brought revolutionary rupture. This was the great transformation Polanyi set out to explain in exile. His insights can serve as a compass in our fight today against the return of the fascist threat.

Polanyi argues in the 1934 essay “The Essence of Fascism,” under the shadow of the Great Depression, that the ultimate purpose of fascism was to rescue capitalism when an existential crisis renders its alternatives too attractive. Fascism was nothing radically new in the 1930s, in Polanyi’s view, but simply the most virulent outbreak of an older “antidemocratic virus.” At the core of this virus is the gospel of economists that interventions against the law of the market would always backfire. Governments must be prepared to harm their constituents in the name of the rule of the market in this logic—­an inherently anti-­democratic stance. Today, this attitude is anything but outdated. Germans are known for saying out loud what others only quietly imply. One of the country’s most influential policy economists, a paid board member of a large corporation and winner of the Hayek Medal who is on a crusade against market interventions, stated in an interview: The problem of the centrist government was that it was geared toward “not harming the people.” But such willingness to impose pain is precisely what is needed, in her view.

In “The Fascist Virus,” Polanyi traces the origins of the anti-­democratic stance of market fundamentalists to the classical economists of the nineteenth century, like David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. They argued that “interference with the market was an unnatural act that would work its own defeat.” Any attempt to improve the life of the poor must backfire, in this logic. “Economists were agreed that the whip of hunger was needed to make the wage system workable,” writes Polanyi. In this view, “poverty of the masses was a law of nature” and the “laws of the market economy prohibit any intervention in economic life on the part of the working people.” What Kalecki describes as “political aspects” (see chapter 2) become nature.

Malthus’s target in his time was the so-­called perfectibilists, who argued that the fruits of the technological revolution unfolding should be equally distributed to end poverty, disease, and social conflicts. Everyone could enjoy a modest, comfortable standard of living, they insisted, and argued for the public provisioning of social infrastructure, sanitation, housing, and transportation. Who reaps the gains from technological progress is as topical a question in our age of AI as it was in the nineteenth century. The perfectibilists might be seen as akin to those arguing today that the gains from AI should be democratically owned and broadly shared rather than captured by a handful of tech billionaires. This could make possible a four-­day workweek and universal basic services—­the free public provisioning of essentials. We have faced the opposite trend: technological progress accelerating inequality. In recent decades, productivity gains have far outpaced the growth of real wages in OECD countries. In other words, workers are producing more and more goods and services per hour, but their share of the fruits of their labor is falling and that of profits is rising.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798217154432
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 400
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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