Inspired by the attitudes of Christian missionaries towards colonial subjects, capitalist reformers set up “civilising missions” across England’s cities. The founder of the Salvation Army, for example, explicitly compared what he called “Darkest England” with “Darkest Africa”, writing that “the foul and fetid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African swamp.”

Reformers within the bourgeoisie saw themselves as a moral vanguard, attempting to force the emerging capitalist order into alignment with their liberal and Christian values, and spreading their moral code to a savage working class. Their politics was cast in the language of sobriety, self-improvement, and individual responsibility.

The poor were not to be liberated but reformed; educated out of their brutishness and tranmsformed into good, Christian subjects. And participation in these reform movements would allow members of the ruling class to signal their moral rectitude to others.

The Working Class ‘Other’

The moral imperialism of the early capitalists was facilitated by the increasing separation of the capitalist class from labour. Workers were segregated from bosses in the factory, in the city, in politics, and throughout most social institutions. Capital could approach labour as a project to be controlled and reformed because, as Beckert puts it, “workers had suddenly become strangers” to capital.

The working class was not, of course, a stranger to itself. Workers saw that they were being exploited and oppressed by the potent alliance between capital and the state that has always characterised capitalist social relations. And they struggled against this exploitation and oppression because doing so was a question survival – for themselves and their communities.

Leaders of the working class found ways to articulate their struggle in moral terms, throwing into sharp relief the hypocrisy of the liberal, Christian ideology of the bourgeoisie. But where the morality of the ruling class was based on individualism and imperialism, that of workers was rooted in collective struggle – a struggle fought by a class, for a class, through dense networks of mutual solidarity. The trade union, the cooperative, the friendly society – these were not expressions of abstract moral principle but of lived interdependence. Workers organised not because they had arrived at the correct ethical position, but because they needed each other.

In this sense, the morality of working-class resistance was distinct from the individualistic and imperialistic morality of capital. The latter was a universalistic moral framework to be imposed on others, both as a means of control and to signal one’s own moral rectitude. The former emerged out of a struggle for survival, based on workers’ recognition of their interdependence, rooted in solidarity.

Ultimately, as Beckert notes, capital’s moralising mission failed. “The capital owner’s power on the shop floor”, Beckert writes, “did not translate to effective control of the inner lives and culture of workers.” But as capitalism developed, the ruling class figured out much more effective ways to use moral imperialism as a means of control.

The Neoliberal Soul

Over the course of the late twentieth century, the sharp lines between capital and labour that had structured political life were blurred by a political class seeking to undermine working class solidarity. Their project – neoliberalism – was one of the most successful political revolutions of our time. Its effects were not simply economic and political, but social and psychological.

When the neoliberals took power in the 1980s, trade unions were broken up and workers were encouraged to see themselves as ‘mini-capitalists’ whose interests were tied to those of business and financial elites. In the UK, the mass sell-off of council housing turned workers into homeowners, which meant their prosperity was tied to the health of property market – and therefore financial markets. Similar effects were produced by the privatisation of pensions and the ‘opening up’ of financial markets to retail investors.

These material shifts produced a corresponding transformation in consciousness. As networks of collective solidarity were dismantled – unions broken, mass political movements dispersed, community infrastructure destroyed – they were replaced by a new subjectivity rooted in individualism. Thatcher was explicit about her aims when she said, “the method is economics, the object is to change the soul.”

Where workers had once defined themselves in relation to their class, they were now encouraged to define themselves as autonomous economic units, competing with other economic units in free markets. And where they had once oriented themselves toward their neighbours through bonds of mutual obligation, they instead began to see those neighbours as competitors.

In this way, neoliberalism scattered and dispersed a once tightly organised working class. The “middle classes” were encouraged to see their interests as aligned with those of capital. And the new working classes were subject to increased rates of exploitation, precaritization, and outright repression to make it even harder for them to fight back.

The Democratization of Moral Imperialism

The rise of individualism – closely tied with neoliberalism – has also had a profound impact on the left. The first and most obvious consequence was the destruction of the collective institutions that once underpinned left politics – from labour unions, to social clubs, to mass political parties.

But individualism has also dramatically affected the way we relate to one another within the movements that remain. Moral imperialism – once the preserve of the bourgeois reformer – has become democratised. Just as asset ownership has spread unevenly across society, so too has this mode of relating to morality: as an individual assertion of values to be projected onto others, rather than a collective project based on solidarity.

Like the early capitalist reformers, we increasingly understand our political participation as a way of signalling our personal moral rectitude to others. We think of ourselves as consumers – not just of goods, but of political identities – expressing who we are through what we buy and the language we use. Politics becomes a performance of individual ethics, rather than a process of coalition building and consciousness raising.

There is something seductive about this mode of politics. Moral conviction is real, and it matters. The desire to live consistently with one’s values is not trivial. But liberal individualism turns this desire into a trap. When politics is understood primarily as an expression of individual morality, collective action becomes extraordinarily difficult – because a person’s moral development is idiosyncratic and deeply shaped by their individual life circumstances.

We arrive at our moral positions through different paths, shaped by our histories and our communities. So, where solidarity supported the formation of broad-based political coalitions, individualistic moral politics tends toward fragmentation. Different understandings of what it means to act rightly become barriers to organising, rather than the basis for it. Each faction tends its own ethical garden, suspicious of those whose moral vocabulary differs from its own.

From Solidarity to Individualism

The analogy with asset ownership is instructive. The worker who owns her home does not feel the need to join a union. Her material interests have been partially decoupled from those of her fellow workers and partially aligned with those of the property owning class. She may well vote for the party that promises to protect the value of her house, even as that same party pursues policies that erode the value of her labour. Her political choices are not irrational; they follow from her understanding of her material interests. But her understanding of her material interests is no longer shaped by class solidarity.

Something similar happens when we accept the liberal idea that morality is individual, and politics is a struggle between competing moral frameworks. The person who sees their politics primarily as an expression of their personal ethical framework does not feel the pull of broad-based coalitions. The compromises that solidarity requires – the willingness to work alongside people whose values are not identical to your own, toward shared goals that are not perfectly aligned with your own convictions – come to feel like a corruption rather than a necessity. Movements become balkanised into hermetically sealed units, each defending its own understanding of the good, and suspicious of all the others.

This balkanisation is not a failure of individual political actors. It is the predictable outcome of a social transformation that pushed us to trust each other less and focus more on ourselves instead; that replaced solidarity with individualism.

The Politics of Solidarity

None of this is to say that morality has no place in politics. It is indispensable. Many people are driven into politics out of a sense of injustice, and this moral conviction often helps them to keep fighting when they might otherwise give up.

But one’s personal morality is no substitute for shared solidarity. Solidarity is the recognition of our interdependence. It is the understanding that our fates are bound together; that the conditions of my life are shaped by the conditions of yours. Solidarity is what makes us realise that we have to work together to fight a system that is exploiting and oppressing us all - rather than trying to dissociate ourselves from the evils this system causes.

Recovering that capacity to build powerful political movements, in conditions shaped by decades of deliberate fragmentation, is the central challenge of our time. This challenge cannot be overcome by prioritising individual moral rectitude - or by forcing others to adopt our particular version of the good. It will require, as it always has, the unglamorous work of finding one another across our differences, recognising our common interests, and acting together in pursuit of them.

The company claimed that its London headquarters wasn’t responsible for decisions made by its Nigerian subsidiary. I have sat with the people impacted by these decisions, witnessed the toll it’s taken on their lives, and I know just how costly that argument has been.

Shell has now sold its Nigerian subsidiary for $2.5 billion. Shell’s own estimate of the cleanup costs in the Niger Delta, recently released from the company’s files, puts their damage at far more than that.

The files - now part of a litigation in the English High Court - include emails, memos and presentations shared amongst senior Shell staff between 2008 and 2013. They show that the same executives who claimed to have no responsibility for Nigerian operations were directly involved in decisions about a pipeline that carried up to 150,000 barrels of oil daily right through the heart of the Niger Delta.

The cover up

The files tell a damning story of repeated warnings about the condition of the oil infrastructure. A confidential initiative called Project Madrid documented the true scale of the problem around the pipeline corridor.

The report identified 100 illegal refineries and noted pollution affecting 9,000 hectares each of land and water. One internal presentation even asked executives if they were “comfortable to continue producing KNOWING that further environmental damage WILL occur.” Concerns were voiced, risks acknowledged, but production didn’t stop.

Executives labelled their most sensitive exchanges as “legally privileged”, which was intended to keep their communications out of any future court proceedings. When Shell’s own technical vice-president raised concerns about the pipeline, he was not only reprimanded for the substance of what he said, but for failing to mark his email with that same label.

The communities living near the pipeline were neither consulted nor warned about any of these concerns. A United Nations Environment Programme investigation later found one community had been drinking water contaminated with known carcinogens at levels 900 times higher than what’s considered safe. A Nigerian government commission recently called the cumulative impact an “environmental genocide.” Amnesty International pointed out that years after Shell promised to clean things up, none of the sites identified by UNEP had been fully remediated.

The people of Bille and Ogale are now seeking one billion dollars in compensation and clean-up costs through the English High Court. They have been forced to live with the dire consequences of decisions made in boardrooms far from their communities. Now, they are asking for someone to take responsibility for this mess.

Will the Polluter Pay?

Nigeria’s oil exports have brought massive wealth to companies and governments alike, while leaving communities to bear the environmental costs. The resources these firms have extracted have not translated into wealth for those living alongside extraction sites. This isn’t just a tale of corporate incompetence. Senior executives actively decided to keep polluting when they knew the harms it would cause, while denying any blame.

Shell told the BBC that the documents have been presented without “the critical context of the operating environment in the Niger Delta at the time” and that decisions were based on complex factors including large-scale oil theft and militancy. The company says it “strongly believes in the merits of its case and will vigorously defend the claims at trial.”

With Shell attempting to defend itself in court, communities looking for remediation are facing uncertainty over who will end up footing the bill for decades of environmental destruction - damage that these documents show Shell knew about long before it became a legal battle.

The communities of Bille and Ogale are asking the courts for justice. A trial has been set for next year in the English High Court to determine whether Shell is responsible for environmental and community damage. In the wider fossil fuel system, profits can flow outward while pollution stays behind. Whether this system is capable of change remains a much larger question.

Olanrewaju Suraju is Chair of Human & Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA Resource Centre), one of the organisations instrumental in securing the release of the Shell documents.

Each week, I read you all my Substack content from the previous week in one quick episode - so you can catch up while driving, walking the dog, or cleaning your house!

Sorry this week is a bit late - I’m recording this while travelling back to the UK from France!

Asking nicely for the end of capitalism

Piketty’s Global Justice Report proves a fairer world is technically achievable. What it can’t tell you is how to build the forces capable of fighting for it.

Aid cuts: behind the curtain

Cuts to humanitarian and development aid cost lives. But so do the financial flows from impoverished countries to wealthy ones – which outweigh aid many times over.

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It’s a fascinating read, which proves beyond doubt that the obstacles to achieving economic justice and sustainability are not technical. Instead, the obstacles are political - in the shape of economic and political elites who would never willingly give up an iota of their power. This power cannot be bargained with. It must be broken. The issue is that, right now, the global majority is far too disorganised to break anything – let alone capital itself.

Global injustice

The report starts by pointing out that the world’s billionaires currently own 6.4% of all global wealth, while the bottom half of humanity owns 2%. Our unequal economic model is destroying the planet and generating untold human misery – even in the rich world. The authors argue that a different world is possible: one in which “90% of the world’s population doubles their income but works half the hours we work today”.

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Donald Trump began his second term by closing USAID. Shortly afterwards Keir Starmer announced 40% cuts to the UK aid budget in favour of defence spending, reducing aid from 0.5% of gross national income (GNI) to 0.3%. Germany, France and other EU nations also made cuts, and in 2025 the UN warned that its humanitarian operations were only 19% funded.

But aid was in crisis before Trump’s shock move. Support from donor countries is falling; the proportion used within donor countries to support refugees, previously budgeted separately, is growing. While campaigns in the 2000s had pushed for UK aid to reach 0.7% of GNI, a target that was met from 2013, Covid costs triggered a reverse. MPs voted in 2021 to cut back to 0.5%, and aid fell from £15.1 billion to £11.4 billion between 2019 and 2021. Meanwhile, Farage has said that if Reform gains power he would cut aid by 90% in order to put ‘British citizens first.’

How the west underdevelops the world

The consequences of aid cuts, especially sudden ones, are devastating for communities that are receiving help or medical care. The Lancet predicted that by 2030 the US’s aid cuts alone could result in 14 million deaths - a third of them children under five. Aid organisations and donor agencies are in turmoil trying to work out what to do.

Yet aid is not the whole story. As Global South scholars have shown, and activists have named for decades, the really big money moves in the other direction. The title of Walter Rodney’s 1972 work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa says it all. The poorest countries continue to lose much more to the rich world than they receive in aid, because the rules of the world economy are rigged in favour of richer countries.

The World Bank and IMF have been pushing a neoliberal agenda for decades. They have made loans conditional on spending cuts; privatisation and deregulation; and forcing markets open for foreign companies. Between 2016 and 2021 IMF loan conditions included public spending cuts of nearly $10 billion across just 15 countries, which could have paid for three million nurses, teachers and other frontline workers. This is debt used as an ideological lever.

Then there are the interest repayments on debt, which in 2024 amounted to $415 billion from low- and middle-income countries - next to $180 billion total global aid flows. Massive public pressure from Make Poverty History in 2005 led to G7 countries cancelling $77 billion of debt for 18 countries. But by 2023, after multiple price shocks, developing-country debts had quadrupled to $11.4 trillion, equivalent to 99% of their export earnings.

Currently 3.4 billion people – 40% of the world’s population – live in countries that spend more on interest payments (to rich-country banks) than on health or education, with women disproportionately affected. Governments have no space to cope with surging fuel prices caused by the US’s war on Iran or climate disruption, let alone to create better futures for their populations.

Unequal exchange and illicit financial flows

Another way of looking at South-to-North flows is what some political economists call ‘unequal exchange’. Because global power imbalances and border controls suppress the costs of resources and labour in the Global South, low-income countries have to sell more labour or natural resources to maintain a balance of trade.

By one estimate, high-income countries ‘appropriated’ commodities, labour and land worth more than $10 trillion in Northern prices from Global South countries in 2015 – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the period 1990–2015, this appropriation outweighed total aid by a factor of 30 and provided a windfall for the Global North equivalent to more than a quarter of Northern GDP.

Then there’s tax avoidance, which harms rich countries too. Lower-income countries lose at least $46 billion a year in tax revenue to multinational corporations shifting their profits to tax havens, a process with spillover economic effects that multiply the loss by a factor of up to three. Other illicit financial flows include trade mis-invoicing by companies, outright tax evasion and corruption by elites – all of which deny tax revenue that could be spent on public services.

What these methods have in common is the use of tax havens – secrecy jurisdictions, as their opponents prefer to call them – which can hide company ownership. Many are connected to the UK, which oversees a ‘second empire‘ of secrecy jurisdictions to keep the money flowing towards London.

Overcoming our saviour complex

Since the end of formal empire, citizens in the Global North have been encouraged to view the relationship between rich and poor countries as a one-directional flow: of aid and charity. Give humanitarian support in crisis, and offer ‘development’ aid to help them become more like us.

In this story, which scholar Jason Hickel calls the ‘development story’, poverty is no one’s fault, and can be alleviated if we give enough. It is founded on the former coloniser nations’ saviour complex: a desire to be and do good, underpinned by unconscious superiority feelings and ignorance – or disavowal – of the structural inequalities that mark the global economy.

Both stories help to legitimise the international political, economic and financial order that creates poverty and maintains these neo-colonial flows of wealth. Aid cuts are troubling, but they have yet to dislodge these entrenched stories. It’s time they did.

has campaigned against tax havens and facilitation of corruption by the financial sector. Her new book How Not To Save The World offers antidotes to common pitfalls of change-making, including the saviour complex.

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Another Lost Decade for Workers

The rich world is heading for another lost decade of wage stagnation – unless workers figure out how to fight back.

The Artisanal Miners Powering our Green Future are being Dispossessed

Millions of informal workers endure unimaginable hardships to supply our critical minerals, yet they are blamed for the ‘dirty’ supply chains that exploit them.

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Grace

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The 2020s now looks set to be another lost decade of stagnant incomes. First, we had the post-pandemic cost of living crisis, exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before the Iran war, inflation looked set to ebb. But the chaos unleashed by Trump’s invasion is going to leave lasting scars on the global economy. And the people who suffer the most will be those least able to bear it.

The first lost decade

In the years following the financial crisis of 2008, the UK endured a decade of stagnation in real wages. With growth and productivity fairly flat, and bargaining power low, workers were not organised enough to demand higher wages. The same problem was evident across much of Europe – particularly southern Europe. The US fared somewhat better, but low-income households were still squeezed.

Ultra-low interest rates – combined with central bank asset purchases – provided something of a salve during this period of stagnation. Many people on relatively low incomes were still able to take out mortgages at low interest rates. Consumers could buy cars and many other consumer goods on credit. And companies backed by cheap borrowing were able to provide them with services on the cheap.

At the same time, easy money led to an increase in asset prices, which increased wealth inequality. The rich were getting richer every year while wages were stagnating. In the UK and Europe, government austerity programmes added insult to injury. And the political turmoil of the 2010s – from Brexit, to the resurgence of democratic socialism, to the rise of the far right – can largely be traced back to this combination of wage stagnation, austerity, and rising inequality.

Still, easy money masked most of these problems – particularly for middle-earning households. Many middle-earners were able to ride the wave of rising asset prices by taking out low interest loans to purchase housing and other assets. When the pandemic hit, central banks doubled down on the new monetary orthodoxy, further slashing rates, leading to cheaper credit and higher asset prices. All this limited the political fallout from stagnation.

The end of easy money

The return of inflation – and the end of low interest rates – revealed the underlying contradictions of a growth model built on low wages, low productivity, and rising inequality. The cost-of-living crisis – or, more accurately, the cost of greed crisis – simultaneously reduced real wages and put an end to the era of easy money. Both low- and middle-income households suffered sharp falls in their living standards as a result.

In the UK, real wages fell at the fastest rate in 20 years in 2022. In the United States, real wage growth fell through 2021 and 2022, and remained largely flat for years after. Across the eurozone, the pattern was the same: workers ran faster and still fell behind.

The households that were hardest hit were those that spend the highest share of their income on energy and food – the basics of material life. These households are, overwhelmingly, those at the bottom of the income distribution. At the same time, profits for the big oil companies, defence, supermarkets and many other sectors boomed. In other words, the last crisis resulted in a significant upward redistribution of wealth.

Central bankers made the problem worse by hiking interest rates to reduce demand, increasing unemployment. They did so with a view to eroding workers’ bargaining power, so they were unable to demand wage increase in line with inflation. As I argued at the time, central bankers made the decision to respond to the cost-of-living crisis by imposing the costs of adjustment on workers. They succeeded.

The end of the era of easy money imposed costs on middle-earning households too. Up to that point, middle earners had been able to ride the wave of rising asset values by taking out low-interest loans – despite their largely stagnant income. From 2021, that path was closed off.

But even if interest rates were now too high to support consumers’ ambitions to asset ownership, they were still too low to take the wind out of the sails of a booming stock market. The AI bubble ensured that the recovery from the pandemic was K-shaped, with huge companies and wealthy households benefitting from the boom, while everyone else was left behind.

The wages of war

Then, Trump decided to invade Iran.

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We are often told that the world needs a dramatic increase in the supply of critical minerals to power the green revolution. ‘Critical minerals’ - a broad term used to apply to a wide range of minerals - are important for everything from decarbonisation to the military-industrial complex. Mines make windmills and mines make weapons.

These minerals are extracted in harsh conditions by artisanal small-scale miners. Artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) relies on informal, high-risk, and back-breaking work to dig ore out of the ground. For 45 million people around the world, however, ASM is a key, albeit extremely complex, source of livelihood. ASM is the leading non-farm source of rural income in much of the world.

Artisanal small-scale miners barely earn enough to survive, and are excluded from the multi-billion dollar gains of the industrial mining industry. They are routinely evicted, displaced, and dispossessed by it, too. These inequalities are a feature throughout mineral supply chains, especially at sites of extraction and disposal.

Artisanal miners in the DRC descend up to 50 meters into hand-dug ‘kalolos’ (tunnels) to extract cobalt and copper for global supply. They face the threats of landslides, tunnel collapse, and toxic exposure at the very start of the supply chains modern society relies on.

Invaders or Innovators?

As in many other mining cases, the Congolese state, industrial mining, and big technology companies pathologize artisanal miners. They are labeled ‘invaders’ or ‘illegal diggers.’ There are certainly links between illegality, warfare, and artisanal mining. However, ‘illegality’ is not the same as ‘informality’ – a term used to describe practices that serve as essential livelihood sources but are not protected by the state.

Framing artisanal miners through the language of illegality and criminality serves a distinct purpose. It provides a justification for the violent expulsion of miners from the land they developed, often after having found the deposits themselves. They essentially act as unpaid geological ‘spotters’ for multinational industrial mining companies.

When artisanal miners sell their copper and cobalt ore in the DRC, they face price manipulation and outright theft. Miners told me and my research team that the testing equipment, known as the ‘Metorex,’ is systematically tampered with to under-represent the grade of their ore. Miners reported the same for scales, which are rigged to display lighter loads. Lower-grade ore and lighter bags mean smaller paychecks for the artisanal miners and more profit for the mineral supply chain middlemen.

The Myth of the Clean Supply Chain

When transparency comes up in policy discussions, artisanal miners are the victims of another type of framing. This time, as Sarah Katz-Lavigne first pointed out, they are framed as the ‘dirty’ problems of the supply chain. In response, industrial actors claim to seek ‘clean’ solutions – aka ‘remove’ them as a source of supply. This is an act of plausible deniability on the one hand, and of scapegoating vulnerable miners on the other.

Industrial mining companies know they depend on artisanal miners and that they severely impact adjacent communities. In the DRC, there is no way to fully cut off artisanal mining from industrial mining.

The industrial miners have created the conditions that make ASM the only plausible source of income for hundreds of thousands of people in the area. Industrial mining and technology companies profess to ‘clean’ up supply chains and feign ignorance of the harms associated with artisanal mining. However, for the most part, the responsibility for these harms does not lie with the artisanal miner.

Glencore, the Swiss mining giant, negotiated a $440 million discount with the Congolese state on a deal to approve the Kamoto Copper Company mine. In 2022, Glencore pleaded guilty to foreign bribery and price manipulation, ultimately paying $1.1 billion in fines.

A Chinese company, CMOC Group Limited, runs the Tenke Fungurume mine in southern DRC. The mine displaced 10,000 people and triggered a public health crisis as local communities had to deal with their own eviction alongside toxic sulfur dioxide emissions.

Congolese political and economic elites are embroiled in the exploitation of artisanal miners too, as they cut deals with the middlemen who fix prices, and misdirect funds meant to support the health and wellbeing of artisanal mining communities.

Criminalising Poverty

Industrial mining - and the major technology companies that rely on it - create the structural conditions that make artisanal mining the only rational option for people trying to survive. Artisanal miners are criminalized because of the poverty they face - and are then strategically deployed as a scapegoat for corruption, dispossession, and the displacement of local communities. In fact, this is a trend that has persisted since the 19^th century.

The future of mining and global supply chains cannot be dictated by the industrial mining companies and the technology corporations extracting unimaginable wealth from under the feet of some of the world’s most vulnerable people. We urgently need a reframing of artisanal mining centered on the rights and dignity of every miner, while linking their plight to the structural forces that deliberately seek to keep them in poverty.

Brandon Marc Finn (brafinn@umich.edu), an academic and writer documenting the human costs of global supply chains, focusing on informal labor at cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and electronic waste dumping and recycling in Ghana. Brandon’s recent research on artisanal mining in the DRC is freely available and published here and here.

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How do the Greens deal with Andy Burnham?

Burnham may be Labour’s best bet to beat Reform. That doesn’t mean the Greens should give him a free pass.

This week’s guest post is from Joe Todd, a writer and political strategist. He writes the New Party, Old Problems substack and co-hosts the Life of the Party podcast.

The Bond Market Bogeyman

What’s really driving the crisis in bond markets? And how should governments and central banks respond?

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Grace

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Why do government bond yields spike when inflation rises? Think of a bond as a promise issued by the government to repay a certain amount of money over a certain period of time. A 10-year bond, for example, is a promise to repay the principal over 10 years.

These bonds are auctioned off by the government, and the interest rate the government has to pay is sets at auction – heavily influenced by the “base rate” that is set by the central bank (more on that later). Essentially, the government tries to tempt investors to buy its bonds – and the higher the interest rate, the easier it is to convince investors to lend their money to the government.

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After many labour pains and much internal wrangling, Andy Burnham has built up enough support - and Starmer has lost enough authority - to be given another shot at Parliament. If he wins, it won’t be long before he challenges Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership.

British politics has been warped by Starmer’s historic unpopularity - and Labour’s inability to get rid of him - for many months. Streeting is too disliked to wield the knife; Mlliband and Rayner are too reticent in their own ambitions, and the country has been left stuck.

The Makerfield by-election may break the impasse. In a cluster of former pit villages and towns an hour north-west of Manchester, fewer than 80,000 voters could end up choosing the next Prime Minister. To the satisfaction of national political journalists, Makerfield is a pale shade of red wall: overwhelmingly white and older, with few graduates, high home and car ownership, Leave-ish, historically Labour, and now a top target for Reform.

Reform got more than 50% of the vote in Makerfield in the local elections, more than double Labour’s share, with the Greens trailing on 11%. But Andy Burnham was not on the ballot then, and he won a majority of votes in the borough in the 2024 Greater Manchester mayoral election. Polling and anecdote consistently confirm his personal popularity, especially in the North West. The bookmakers have him as the narrow favourite. Maybe the only thing we can say with confidence is: it will be close.

All of this leaves the Greens in a difficult place. Nobody thinks they have a realistic chance of winning a by-election in Makerfield: the demography is very different to Gorton and Denton - and almost every other Green target seat. But parties have plenty of reasons to run in seats they cannot yet win. It helps to gather data - useful in the upcoming mayoral election which the Greens could win - and builds the local party for future challenges.

Running in Makerfield would maintain the Greens’ position as a distinct project from Labour: an insurgent, independent ecosocialist party that will not simply roll over. Leverage means inflicting a cost on your opponents, and that will never happen if you don’t actually run.

That said, the dangers are obvious. Burnham’s everyman Mancunianism looks like Labour’s best bet for seeing off Reform in swathes of northern, small-town and coastal seats - places somebody will have to win if a Reform majority is to be stopped. Polanski has combatted Reform in the media, making an unwavering and principled case on wealth taxes and migration that has dragged the Overton window back leftwards. But Reform and the Greens are still mostly competing in different kinds of seats.

Herefordshire North and Waveney Valley are exceptions, rural seats that have faced Tory collapse; as is a highly fragmented edge-of-city seat like Barking and Dagenham. But the vast majority of Green targets are diverse, inner-city, graduate-heavy seats that Labour has held for decades. Winning those seats from Labour is important for building ecosocialist power, but it will not stop Reform.

Much comes down to the deeper strategic question: whether you prioritise stopping Reform, or building a Green party capable of replacing Labour from the left. Some activists quietly view a Reform government as a price worth paying if it destroys the Labour Party in the process, hoping that Farage would revert to his Thatcherite rather than authoritarian tendencies in office. I worry this is far too complacent, and I’d settle for the Burnham-led Labour government trying to do some form of social democracy, with a truly ecosocialist Green Party of 50 MPs piling on the pressure from the left.

Of course, much depends on “which Andy Burnham turns up”, as Zack Polanski has quipped. It looks unlikely to be the Blairite cabinet minister of the noughties. Burnham ran in the 2010 Labour leadership election on an “aspirational socialist” platform not dissimilar to his “business friendly socialism” of 2026. But the signals are mixed. He has ruled out proportional representation in this parliament and said he would stick with Reeves’ fiscal rules. At the same time, he has also committed to stronger public “control” of energy, housing, water and transport.

For now in Makerfield, the Greens should probably soft-pedal: select a candidate late, run a respectable campaign, and put clear public demands to Burnham. If he makes serious commitments, they could consider standing down. If he refuses, they should run to the end. Burnham hasn’t earned a free pass, but nor should we work hard for his defeat. Instead, it’s our chance to test what he’s actually offering. After that, as Zack says, it really does depend on which Andy Burnham turns up.

Joe Todd is a writer and political strategist. He writes the New Party, Old Problems substack and co-hosts the Life of the Party podcast.

This podcast is for all those busy people who struggle to keep on top of all the articles they want to read. Each week, I read you all my Substack content from the previous week in one quick episode - so you can catch up while driving, walking the dog, or cleaning your house!

The Cost of Living Revolt

Eighteen years of stagnation built the far right’s base. The cost of living crisis will put them in power.

Britain has its own ICE - and these airlines are helping it fly

Titan, TUI, Air France, Corendon and AlbaStar are profiting from Labour’s brutal deportation regime. We’ve grounded these flights before. We can do it again.

Take action to stop cruel and racist ‘one in, one out’ deportations.

Eight Weeks to Record Profits

Trump’s war on Iran isn’t bringing famine to America - it’s bringing hunger to global South, stagnation to the global North, and a huge windfall to big oil.

That’s it from me this week! I hope you’re enjoying the podcast - and please make sure to share it on socials if you are :)

Oh, and if you’d prefer to listen to the podcast on your usual streaming app, I can give you a free membership to Patreon. I upload the podcast there too and it automatically syncs with various streaming apps. Just DM me if you want access!

See you next week,

Grace

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That’s what the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises is telling us, anyway. According to the report, acute hunger has doubled over the past decade. Two famines – in Gaza and Sudan – were declared last year for the first time in the report’s ten-year history. In 2025 alone, 35.5 million children were acutely malnourished, nearly 10 million of them severely so.

These famines were, of course, man-made catastrophes driven by genocidal forces – the Israeli state in the first instance, and the UAE-backed RSF in the second. Actual famine is now rare outside of war. It is very hard to completely cut off a peoples’ access to food in a globalised economy, which make the scenes witnessed in Gaza and Sudan all the more horrifying.

But, while not experiencing famine, much of the rest of the world is still suffering with elevated food prices and acute hunger thanks to Trump’s war. Prolonged disruption to energy and fertiliser trade has begun to impact agriculture, pushing up food prices and squeezing import-dependent countries already in crisis. Even if the war ended tomorrow, six months of inflation are already baked in.

West Africa and the Sahel – particularly Nigeria, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso – were already under heavy pressure from conflict and inflation before this crisis. Nigeria alone is projected to see 4.1 million more people facing acute hunger in 2026. In East Africa, failed rains, drought, insecurity, high food prices and aid cuts are converging on Somalia and Kenya at once.

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Most people are familiar with the vicious racist violence carried out by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, and the mass deportations being pursued there by Donald Trump’s fascist regime. Some have even argued that a future far-right government would do the same here in Britain.

But the reality is that mass deportations and raids already exist in the UK. Since 2024, this Labour government has deported 60,000 people and conducted 17,400 raids on businesses for so-called ‘illegal working’.

These policies are a thinly veiled attempt to pander to the far right with headline-grabbing cruelty. The ‘one in, one out’ agreement between the UK and France is another example. This grim scheme treats people seeking safety here as numbers, like tokens to be exchanged. In fact, we at the JCWI argue that it amounts to state-sanctioned human trafficking.

Under this scheme, people arriving in the UK with the intention to seek asylum are arbitrarily selected for detention and deportation. This dehumanising deportation regime is being aided and abetted by several airline companies, which are flying or facilitating these deportations: Titan Airways, Corendon Airlines, Air France, AlbaStar and TUI.

The brutality behind the ‘one in, one out’ scheme

Due to the government’s insistence on removing people as quickly as possible – and the Home Office’s systemic racist adultification of young people – more than 70 children, from conflict zones around the world have had their age disputed by the Home Office. They are being held in detention in preparation for deportation under this policy.

The Home Office continues to use horrific violence to deport people. People in detention have said that “people were taken to planes by force” and that they were “removed against their will, under intimidation and physical pressure”. One person, a torture survivor, described being choked by a belt, another was rendered unconscious by the violence used against him. Another said he was “nearly killed”.

This cruel policy has no influence on people’s decision to move. People have always moved, and they always will. A group of people held in immigration detention were candid in speaking about their reasons for coming to the UK:

“We come from Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and other countries affected by war, political persecution, corruption, and serious human rights abuses. Each of us has a different personal story, but we share the same reason for fleeing: to stay alive.

We did not come to the UK for comfort or advantage. We came because remaining in our home countries meant death, imprisonment, torture, or lifelong fear.”

How we fight back

Britain, as a former colonial power and military aggressor involved in imperialist conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran, Palestine, is responsible for much of the historic and current instability that has forced people to move in the first place.

Our bloody history demands that we treat people seeking asylum in this country with dignity and respect, providing them with support and the opportunity to build a life in this country if they wish. Before we get there, we have to end this sick, violent and dehumanising scheme.

In order to stop this brutal policy, we are asking people to contact the airlines facilitating it to tell them to end their complicity. This public pressure has worked before, most recently against the Rwanda scheme. Public pressure on Titan Airways, one of the airlines involved in this scheme, forced the airline to state publicly that they would not take part in these flights.

Pressure has worked before, it can work again. Forcing the airlines to back down from their involvement would be a small first step towards preventing more mass deportations and raids.

Thankfully, as in the US, there are also many other forms of resistance here in Britain: anti-raids groups have been actively and successfully opposing the British equivalent of ICE, the Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement agency, for years all across the country: in Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Dalston, and Peckham, and elsewhere. (Join your local anti-raids group if you haven’t already).

We also have a strong history of groups resisting and blocking deportations, from the Stansted 15, to preventing deportations to Jamaica, to the Rwanda plan blocked on the tarmac and in the courts in 2022.

Each of us needs to continue this resistance. For now, take a small step and join thousands of others who are expressing their opposition to this racist deportation regime – and write to the airlines facilitating and profiting from it, using our easy online tool.

Take action to stop cruel and racist ‘one in, one out’ deportations.

Back in 2021, when inflation started to rise as governments lifted lockdown restrictions, renowned economist Isabella Weber was derided by many of her peers for suggesting that governments adopt price controls. In the wake of that inflationary crisis, incumbent governments were punished severely at the ballots. Weber had a pithy response: “unemployment hurts governments, inflation kills them.”

This observation remains true today. The primary cause of Keir Starmer’s utter humiliation in the recent UK local elections is the cost-of-living crisis: a crisis that has been devastating communities across the country for years, and which has been largely ignored by Westminster.

The recovery that wasn’t

The cost-of-living crisis began in 2021 with the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and was exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Demand increased suddenly due to the lifting of lockdown restrictions and supply contracted due to the constraints on production imposed by the energy crisis. Prices shot up as a result.

Before this point, inflation had been low for some time – primarily because the “recovery” from the financial crisis of 2008 had been so weak. With much of the west facing high debt, stagnant wages, and low productivity, the only engine of global demand was China. Monetary policy remained extremely loose as central banks tried to stimulate demand.

Loose monetary policy provided something of a salve to the low-wage equilibrium experienced by many advanced economies following the financial crisis. Households were able to access large mortgages at low interest rates – as well as borrowing to purchase consumer goods. The cost of living crisis put a sharp end to this period of easy money.

Starting in 2021, central banks began aggressively to increase interest rates for the first time since the financial crisis. The cost of borrowing shot up at the same time as food and energy prices began to rise. Wages did not keep up. The result was a sharp decline in the living standards of millions of households across the rich world.

Shock or system failure?

Policymakers treated this inflationary shock as a one off “black swan” event1 driven by forces outside of their control. And it is true that the proximate causes of this shock were the recovery from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But the deeper drivers were structural.

As I argued at the time, rising prices have become the new normal thanks to climate breakdown, geopolitical conflict, and the corporate capture of our economies. Households could still access cheap goods imports from places like China. But the basic essentials – food, housing, energy – are becoming more expensive every year. And our governments – captured by vested interests – have refused to act.

The last inflationary crisis was not a random, black swan event triggered by variables outside our control. It emerged from the interaction of multiple crises afflicting the capitalist world system. So it was not particularly surprising when, just a few years later, it happened again.

With Trump and Netanyahu’s senseless war in Iran, prices rose sharply as a new conflict cut off the world’s access to a critical source of fossil fuels. But this time, the consequences were, if anything, more severe. The world could just about make do with fewer Russian fossil fuels; it could not make do without fossil fuels from the Middle East.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent oil and gas prices soaring. This was not a response to an immediate shortage of fossil fuels – the world had built up substantial oil reserves in the wake of the last crisis. Instead, it was primarily driven by speculators betting on future supply constraints. Nevertheless, these price increases were immediately passed onto consumers at the pump.

At first, we were told the war would only last a few days. Then, a few weeks. But, by this point, the damage was already done. Not only had the world been cut off from a key source of fossil fuels; oil and gas infrastructure across the Middle East had also been damaged, constraining output for years to come. And a host of critical industries found themselves unable to access critical inputs to production derived from fossil fuels – from fertilisers, to plastics.

Greedflation

In countries like the UK, most consumers had not recovered from the last cost of living crisis when the new one hit. The previous crisis increased support for Reform; this one consolidated their role as the primary party of protest. But this time, it is Starmer’s head on the chopping block. As Weber pointed out all those years ago, unemployment hurts governments, inflation kills them.

Weber’s observation was not glib. She had spent months telling policymakers that they needed to introduce price controls in response to the rampant profiteering that was taking place on the back of the cost-of-living crisis. Her research found that companies operating in oligopolistic industries were using the crisis as an excuse to raise prices more than they needed to. Weber called this phenomenon “sellers’ inflation”. The press called it “greedflation”.

In response, Weber advocated price controls on essentials to ensure that the inflationary crisis did not lead to a massive transfer of wealth from households to the shareholders of powerful corporations. She was laughed out of the room by economists like Paul Krugman, who called Weber’s idea “stupid”.

Weber calmly pointed out that these policy tools had been used in the past – most notably during the First and Second World Wars. When price controls were ended abruptly after each war, inflation shot up, causing yet another boom-bust cycle. Krugman later apologised for his dismissive response to Weber’s proposal, but the damage was already done. Price controls were off the table.

At the same time, other campaigners were advocating a windfall tax to capture excess corporate profits made during the crisis, with the proceeds used to support vulnerable households. In the UK, facing significant public pressure, the government did introduce a windfall tax on the big oil companies. But not nearly enough was done to protect households from the impact of rising prices. Indicators of poverty, ill-health, and deprivation all started to flash red.

Starmer’s false mandate

It was on the back of the first crisis that Keir Starmer swept to power in 2024. At the time, Starmer believed that his victory was his own. He had successfully purged the Labour party of the left and, in doing so, made them electable again. His moderate, sensible policy agenda appealed to voters up and down the country tired of populism on both the left and the right. Or so the story went.

But Starmer’s victory was not his own. Most voters were not paying attention to his management of the Labour Party – nor to his meek policy agenda. They were paying attention to their bank statements, which showed an ever-increasing chasm between income and expenditure. They punished the Conservative Party with near annihilation. And Starmer reaped the rewards, achieving a substantial Parliamentary majority on the back of a meagre vote share. A few shrewd commentators noted that Jeremy Corbyn had won more votes in 2017 than Starmer did in 2024.

Starmer’s hubris prevented him from learning the right lessons from his election victory. He had not received a decisive mandate to revive Blair’s New Labour project. He had won big on the back of voters’ disillusionment with the Tories. His task was simple: make stuff affordable again. He failed. Now, he has been punished at the ballot box.

Starmer and his acolytes will not learn any of the right lessons from this election loss. They will see Reform’s gains as a reason to adopt more reactionary rhetoric on migration. But, as political scientists have shown, you cannot beat the far right at its own game.

While Starmer uses this loss as a reason to attack migrants, the economic situation in the UK will continue to deteriorate. Life for most people will continue to get worse. And, safe in the halls of Westminster, our political class will largely fail to notice this decline.

Without action, Reform will continue to reap the rewards of the enshittification of life in the UK. The left cannot beat them using top-down electoral politics alone. Most people are sick of politicians telling them they will make life affordable again and failing to deliver. If we want to protect people from inflation, we don’t just need a policy agenda – we need to build power in workplaces and communities.

We need strong unions that can protect workers from cuts to real wages. We need tenants’ unions that can protect people from predatory landlords. And we need community organising to deliver the kind of mutual aid that has always protected workers from crises caused by capital. A strong left-populist electoral strategy can build on these elements – but it cannot replace them. People are too sick of politicians’ lies to trust in elections.

The vote for Reform is a response to this pervasive mistrust. It is a cynical vote against the establishment – one that denies the possibility of real, positive change, and instead seeks to punish those in charge for their failures. The issue is that a vote for Reform will not punish the elites who have caused these crises. It will embolden them.

This podcast is for all those busy people who struggle to keep on top of all the articles they want to read. Each week, I read you all my Substack content from the previous week in one quick episode - so you can catch up while driving, walking the dog, or cleaning your house!

Forget the Invisible Hand. Big Tech Is Building Empires.

Mainstream economics says capitalism is built on competition. But today, competition has given way to empire building - and the rest of us are paying the price.

Work Sucks, I Know

Long hours, stagnant wages, and no voice at the table - Britain’s biggest companies are failing the people who keep them running.

This week’s guest post is from Paddy Goffey, head of research and policy at the High Pay Centre, an organisation dedicated to fairer pay structures, stronger worker voice and a more responsible business model. Follow the High Pay Centre, and support their valuable work here.

Think oil prices are coming down? Think again

The disruption caused by this war is going to continue long after the fighting ends – and the oil companies are going to keep making billions.

Linked pieces: Big Tech’s earnings get ever bigger, and ever less useful

That’s it from me this week! I hope you’re enjoying the podcast - and please make sure to share it on socials if you are :)

Oh, and if you’d prefer to listen to the podcast on your usual streaming app, I can give you a free membership to Patreon. I upload the podcast there too and it automatically syncs with various streaming apps. Just DM me if you want access!

See you next week,

Grace

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The growing risk of a ‘non-linear spike’ in oil prices

This war has already gone on for far longer than financial markets were anticipating – and it doesn’t look like we’re going to see a secure peace deal for some time yet. But even if Trump did manage to make a deal tomorrow, things would not go back to normal for oil markets – nor the global economy as a whole.

Consumers have already seen a significant shock at the pumps, with petrol and diesel rising sharply. But, as I wrote last week, that’s largely because of what’s been going on in oil futures markets. In the west, we haven’t yet reached the point of acute shortages because we’ve been drawing down on oil reserves that have been built up over the last few years. Everyone has been assuming that the conflict would end by the time these stockpiles were exhausted – but that view looks increasingly optimistic.

At the start of the war, there were about 8.4bn barrels of oil sitting in tankers, pipelines, depots, and strategic reserves. But only about 800m of these barrels can actually be used – of these, 280m have already been used since the war began. The rest is locked up in pipeline fills, minimum tank levels, and the operational floors required to keep the system running. And we’re already starting to reach these floors.

To understand why it’s not so easy to access all the oil we have in storage, you need to think of the world’s oil reserves like layers of an onion. You can peel them off one by one, but the process gets harder the more layers you remove.

First, the world drew down oil stored in tanker cargoes and storage vessels. When the Strait of Hormuz was closed, there were plenty of tankers that had recently left the Strait on their way to their final destinations – so the closure didn’t immediately hit the circulation of oil. This layer is now pretty much completely tapped.

Second, we drew on commercial inventories – reserves held by private corporations. These reserves are held in refinery tanks, oil terminal depots, and commercial storage facilities. These stocks are getting low.

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The average person will spend over 80,000 hours working over the course of their lives. That works out at around a decade of non-stop work.

But work doesn’t just take up a lot of our time – it has a huge impact on our health and wellbeing. The average British worker will spend over 13,000 hours commuting, take more than 3 months off sick, and involve themselves in more than 800 workplace arguments.

Work should provide us with the means to enjoy a comfortable standard of living, and allow us to feel fulfilled, healthy and happy. But recent data found that just 11% of UK workers feel engaged in their jobs. This dissatisfaction plays a significant role in the wider social and economic challenges we face – from falling living standards, to rising loneliness, and worsening mental health.

The large companies that dominate the modern working environment appear reluctant to acknowledge and confront the costs of work. Data published last week by the High Pay Centre reveals that few large firms make meaningful attempts to engage with their employees or seek to understand their needs and interests. For example, no FTSE 100 company has yet appointed a worker director to its board; and only 12% of firms meaningfully consult staff on executive pay. Just 55% of the largest firms in the country commit to paying their employees a living wage.

Too many companies demand their employees work long hours for low wages, while failing to give them a say in the way the organization works. Should it really come as such a shock that so many workers feel disengaged?

The CSR Mirage

When firms fail to consult and engage their employees, internal inequality rises. The High Pay Centre has found that average CEO pay is up 33% since 2023 to £6.02 million; and a CEO’s typical pay package rose from 93 times that of their median employee to 100 times in the same period.

A company that truly took the time to understand their employees, what motivates them, and what makes them more productive, would not consider this growth in CEO pay an effective use of resources. There is little evidence that better-paid CEOs deliver better outcomes for workers, or the business as a whole.

Most firms like to claim that they treat their workers well – and that they’re responsible corporate citizens. Annual reports are rife with empty platitudes and weakly evidenced self-praise. Yet reality couldn’t be further from this fantasy: the average Brit will consider quitting their job sixteen times a year.

The harsh truth is that, for the typical employee, all the talk about CSR and ESG has made very little difference to their working lives. In fact, there is an argument that the rise of these discourses has mirrored a broader societal shift towards effectively marketed aesthetics and virtue-signaling over genuine change.

We are too willing to allow any business that claims to act in the best interests of workers and society to call itself a ‘good employer’. In fact, the evidence suggests that a company can enhance its reputation or boost its profits without providing any meaningful improvements for employees.

From Platitudes to Power

It is clear that, for the most part, companies are unlikely to alter their behaviour solely out of goodwill. This is where government must be aggressive in shifting companies away from a narrow focus on shareholder returns. Standards like living wage accreditation, reasonable pension provision and worker share ownership must be treated as non-negotiables – in the same way as returns to shareholders are now.

But delivering on these promises also requires rebuilding worker power. History has consistently demonstrated that, when firms conveniently forget that their prosperity rests on human labour, workers will find a way to remind them of that fact. Companies would be wise to recognise this when considering whether to increase CEO pay while forcing workers to accept real terms pay cuts.

An assertive union movement remains an indispensable tool in creating a fairer world. Rebalancing the power of capital and labour in this way will take time, as well as careful policy development and political organizing. But for as long as we continue to live in a system predicated on power imbalances and weak accountability, work will continue to fail to meet the needs of those who perform it.

Follow the High Pay Centre, and support their valuable work here.

If you take Econ 101, you’ll be taught a model of the economy that hinges on free market competition. According to its proponents, competition is what makes capitalism the most efficient and productive economic system imaginable. It drives innovation, holds down prices, and ensures that scarce resources are put to their most productive use.

Capitalism’s defenders have always placed competition at the heart of their analysis. Adam Smith used the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ to describe the regulating effects of competition in a free market economy. David Ricardo built on Smith’s framework to analyse how competition equalised the rate of profit between different sectors and places – ultimately bringing the world economy into balance. Joseph Schumpeter argued that the “perennial gale of creative destruction” was what ensured that capitalist economies remained dynamic and innovative over the long run.

But in the absence of competition, none of these arguments for capitalism hold. Without competitive pressure, the invisible hand cannot balance supply and demand; profit cannot flow to more dynamic sectors or regions; and less innovative companies cannot be felled by the winds of creative destruction.

If firms aren’t scared of losing market share to their competitors, they won’t feel the need to innovate, or keep prices low, or keep costs down. The firm can keep trundling along because its customers have nowhere else to go. As a result, innovation slows, prices rise, and inefficiencies accumulate.

In short, without competition, capitalism’s proponents can no longer claim that it is a uniquely efficient, productive, or innovative social system. The arguments for its existence evaporate.

Capitalist planning

Marxist theorists have always seen through the argument that competition is the lifeblood of capitalism. Marx himself observed a tendency within capitalist economies towards centralisation, whereby a few powerful firms come to dominate critical industries.

These monopolies consolidate their power by building close relationships with both financial institutions and the state. They are then able to project this power abroad, allowing them to extract resources and labour from poorer parts of the world. In other words, monopoly goes hand in hand with financialisation, state capture, and imperialism.

The end result is a world system dominated by a few huge monopolies headquartered in the rich world, supported by imperialist states and powerful financial institutions. As I argue in Vulture Capitalism, cooperation between these powerful actors facilitates a kind of oligarchic capitalist planning – the polar opposite of free market competition.

Competition doesn’t disappear under capitalist planning. Workers and smaller firms, are still subjected to ruthless competitive pressure. But the most powerful actors are able to insulate themselves from this competitive pressure – and focus instead on building corporate empires.

At the commanding heights of a capitalist economy – in the sectors upon which all other production depends – competition gives way to empire building. Large firms will work with each other, with states, and with financial institutions to protect themselves and their super-profits. And everyone else suffers as a result.

Just take Amazon. It didn’t turn a profit for the first decade of its existence – instead focusing on ploughing its revenue back into expansion. In other words, empire building. Eventually, it carved out such a dominant position in the market that it became one of the most powerful monopolies in the world.

As Amazon’s power grew, it became easier for the company to insulate itself from competition. At the same time, competition increased dramatically for less powerful actors dependent upon the company. Just think of the Amazon drivers forced to pee in bottles to make sure they didn’t miss their delivery targets; or the small businesses forced under by Amazon’s predatory pricing tactics.

Tech Empires

We’re seeing these dynamics very clearly in big tech today. Just check out this piece in the Financial Times, which looks at the earnings reports of the big tech companies.

Investors scrutinise these reports – which provide information on figures like profits, investment spending, and debt – to determine where to put their money. In a competitive market, they’d be trying to assess which companies were using their resources most efficiently, assuming that the bloated big spenders would be taken down by competitive pressure.

But today, investors don’t seem to be worried about how much these companies are spending, how much debt they have, or even how much profit they’re making. In fact, they’re willing to let the men running these companies plough unimaginable sums of money into purely speculative technologies, in the vague hope that one of them will strike gold.

As the FT puts it,

“The more AI matters to these companies, the less today’s financial results do… Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai are both chasing AI with superhuman intellect. Microsoft runs the cloud on which much of it will sit. Amazon is launching satellites into orbit.”

These are – sometimes literally – moonshots. Many will not pay off. Investors may find that companies have wasted billions pursuing innovations that either don’t work or aren’t as profitable as they were expecting. Investors know this, but they’re still throwing money at big tech. Why?

The state-like corporation

The simple answer is that the big tech companies aren’t normal corporations – they’re corporate empires. These companies don’t need to demonstrate that they’re using their resources efficiently to maximise their profits over the short-term. They just need to show that their territory is growing – and the boundaries of their empire are protected.

For big tech, this means controlling the technologies that will be indispensable to future production. The more they can push adoption of their AI tools among households, businesses, and governments, the stronger their empires become. It doesn’t matter if they’re burning through cash to achieve this growth in the short-term – all that matters is that, in the long-term, we all become dependent upon them.

This pursuit of imperial power is precisely why companies like OpenAI and Palantir are pushing so hard for government contracts – despite the allegedly libertarian leanings of their leaders. If they can force their technologies into the architecture of the capitalist state, they won’t just become monopolies, they’ll become an extension of the state itself – with all the political power that entails.

Eventually, the goal is precisely to become state-like entities, providing services the rest of the world cannot live without in exchange for levies on income. This vision could not be farther from the competitive, free market utopia outlined by capitalism’s cheerleaders. Because the real driving force of capital accumulation isn’t competition – it’s domination.