A Politics of Essentials

An excerpt from Isabella Weber’s new book Anti-Fascist Economics.

For decades, mainstream economics has diverted attention away from the problems it cannot solve—even a problem as fundamental as survival. In the 1950s, economists researching general equilibrium theory set out to demonstrate that decentralized market decisions, guided only by prices, would lead to a “Pareto optimal” outcome (named for the turn-of-the-century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto), in which “no redistribution of goods or productive resources can improve the position of one individual without making at least one other individual worse off.” But they ran into the so-­called survival problem: the same general equilibrium deemed socially optimal cannot guarantee that all people participating in the market can survive—­in technical terms, that they can afford a consumption bundle meeting minimum subsistence requirements. Yet this egregious inadequacy, identified long ago, did not stop the theory from taking hold as an orthodoxy.

An important lesson from the founder of equilibrium theory usually goes unmentioned: like Karl Polanyi, the nineteenth-­century economist Léon Walras believed that land—­the source of the most essential of essentials—­had to be in public hands for markets to work. Basically, this suggests that you need a form of socialism as the foundation for a functioning market economy, as markets presuppose a prior guarantee of subsistence that they cannot themselves provide. Polanyi thought that not just land, but also labor and money itself would need to be decommodified. Can this somewhat abstract principle be formulated into an economics that can directly inform policy strategy? 

Anti-fascist economics begins from this foundation: that it is essential to identify and protect the necessities that matter for human life. Doing so requires interventions at multiple points in the economy. The core of an economy that allows for the dignity of all consists of the essentials themselves: food, water, energy, housing, transportation, communication, care. Surrounding that core are the production and distribution structures that sustain the provisioning of those essentials. Around that are the macroeconomic conditions—stability, distribution, employment—that determine whether people can actually afford what they need. Further out still, the ecological foundations on which all provisioning of goods ultimately depends. And at the outermost layer, the international order that shapes the prices and availability of essentials across borders. Each layer conditions the next. But the purpose of the whole is determined by the core—the material needs of common people. That is what every layer must ultimately be made to serve.

Securing essentials

Essentials are those goods whose absence or unaffordability has far-reaching implications for one’s bodily integrity or ability to participate in society. I am not suggesting that we should stop at those basics in reorienting the economy to serve the needs of common people, but that these most basic needs are a good starting point. These needs are truly universal, part of the shared human experience. But they are also contextual and historical. The way we want to be fed, dressed, housed, and connected with others has changed drastically over time and varies across space. A dignified life therefore depends on participation according to variable social standards. 

However essentials are defined, economic security requires that they be reliably provisioned at stable and affordable prices. Safeguarding affordability depends not only on prices at the point of consumption, but on the underlying production structures and infrastructure that circulate goods. Though most people do not think about the cost of logistics, for example, when they think about affordability, the cost of storage and transportation of goods can push up the cost of living. To bring those two layers—essentials that directly satisfy human needs and essential structures for their production and circulation—together, my collaborators and I have devised a new modeling approach to identify what we call “systemically significant sectors.” These are sectors that present points of vulnerability for affordability. If we are living in a world of emergencies, in which more shocks are likely to come, which kinds of shocks are likely to have the greatest impacts on household living costs? 

Our analysis drew on the Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief’s method of input-output analysis, which quantifies the mutual interrelationships among the various sectors of a complex economic system. For example, the fossil fuel sector produces energy as an output, which is used as an input in the production of steel. Steel in turn is used in the fossil fuel sector and the car sector as input. Cars are also used in the steel and fossil fuel sectors. Though not all sectors are as tightly linked as these ones, all are at least indirectly linked, making one large web. This means that if the price in one sector goes up, the costs in all sectors that use this sector’s output as input increase. And if firms pass on those costs, those sectors’ prices also go up. This starts a new feedback loop from input to output prices. When we add up all these price increases that resulted from one initial price shock, we get an inflation impact. 

Within the web of input-output relations, some sectors are in a more central position than others. The energy sector is an input in virtually everything. Hence, price increases in that sector matter much more than in other sectors. Our research looks for the points that matter most for inflation and ultimately affordability and economic resilience, and in analyzing the US, Germany, China, and Mexico, we found that by far the most important sectors for households are housing, food, utilities, and fossil fuel products. Most people spend large shares of their income on housing, which is why it matters so much for affordability. Food, utilities, and energy are all crucial and have relatively volatile prices. As a result, oil and gas extraction, farming, banking, and logistics all contribute indirectly to consumer inflation. But within this group, fossil fuels are the most significant by a long shot. The inflation impact of petroleum and coal products is consistently the largest—about twice as large as that of the next most important sector across all our simulations. Therefore, the indirect impacts on inflation of price spikes in the various fossil fuel sectors are in the magnitude of the full inflation impact of other essential sectors. 

The first policy imperative of an anti-fascist economics is to ensure reliable provisioning of essentials at stable prices. The cost-of-living crisis under neoliberal policies has demonstrated that profit fundamentalism is not delivering on this goal. Recent years have shown that profits can thrive on volatility. Thus, when shocks hit essentials, price controls should be swiftly implemented to prevent price spikes from rippling across the whole economy. Of course, such controls have to be applied at a scale in which states have sufficient power over markets to defend them. Importers, for example, need to bundle sufficient buying power in buyers’ clubs to defend price ceilings in international markets. If states impose a price control unilaterally, they risk going without imports. Price stabilization policies can take different forms beyond price caps, such as price-gouging legislation and automatic taxes on windfall profits in emergencies. Strict regulation of speculation and financialization in systemically significant sectors and antitrust legislation are also critical. 

Price policies for essentials can bring short-term relief, but without measures that ensure stable supply along the value chain they are not sustainable. They can for some time contain price spikes when shortages occur or are expected, but they cannot overcome the shortages themselves. This is why affordability policies have to go beyond addressing prices. They have to devise strategies to ensure stable and sufficient supply and contain the reach of animal spirits in financial markets. As such, industrial policy is a key part of affordability policy. Depending on the nature of the sector, this can involve buffer stocks and public options, public investment and investment mobilization, or regulation to prevent speculative hoarding and require strategic redundancies. In housing, for example, rent freezes can bring immediate relief but have to be backed up with policies that ensure more affordable housing is built, empty apartments are matched with tenants, and build-out of public transport and services can divert housing demand to previously less desirable areas. For each sector, this requires policy coordination and planning that reflects the physical, social, and economic specificities of provisioning. Public ownership can be integrated into this framework so long as it is premised on deep accountability. 

Macroeconomic stability and employment

While price shocks in a small number of sectors have an outsized capacity to destabilize the economy and our lives, their impact is not distributed equally on all households. Households that are just getting by spend the majority of their income on essentials. Wealthier households, by contrast, spend most of their money on unessential goods. When the prices of essentials go up, those with lower incomes are therefore hit harder. The impact of the 2022 inflation episode on US households demonstrates this point. The petroleum price shock hit the poorest tenth of the population more than 50 percent harder than the wealthiest tenth. For food and beverages the gap is even larger—over 125 percent. The combined effect of the price shocks in all systemically significant sectors was equivalent to nearly a full year of the average annual increase in income inequality during the neoliberal period, compressed into just a few months. Price shocks in essentials are therefore always simultaneously inequality shocks.

The redistribution from the bottom to the top in the wake of price shocks in essentials is not simply a result of different consumption patterns between high- and low-income households. An even more important channel is profits. The flip side of price spikes is profit spikes, which almost exclusively benefit the wealthy. In the case of fossil fuel profits, we show that 50 percent of 2022 record profits went to the top 1 percent, and just 1 percent to the bottom 50 percent of households in the United States. Claims on these profits compensated for the largest part of the inflation burden for the richest, while the poorest had to carry a higher burden with virtually no compensation.

The conventional macroeconomic policy response makes things worse. Central banks react to inflation by raising interest rates, cooling the economy and suppressing wage growth in an attempt to bring prices down. But when inflation originates in supply shocks to a handful of essential sectors, interest rate hikes are not only regressive but also ineffective. They cannot fix a disrupted harvest or a geopolitical energy shock like the ones that followed from the Russian attack on Ukraine and the US–Israeli attack on Iran. And since people can’t do without consuming essential goods and services, reducing their income won’t do much to reduce demand in the sectors experiencing high prices either. What interest rate hikes can—and do—do is raise debt-servicing costs for lower-income households and the debt burden on developing countries, suppress job creation at the bottom of the labor market, and increase the cost of the very investments needed to build resilience against future shocks and transition out of fossil fuel capitalism. If monetary austerity is paired with fiscal austerity, it only compounds the damage.

When price stabilization in response to shocks does not rely on fiscal and monetary tightening, full employment can be the primary goal of governments’ macro and central banks’ policy. And a jobs guarantee used to build out the public provisioning of essentials becomes a real possibility. A growing role for public investments can also break private businesses’ power over the state of confidence, which the Polish economist Michał Kalecki identified as a major obstacle for a full employment policy. Public investment in turn can stabilize economy-wide demand and hence employment. Moreover, consumption demand becomes more stable when people’s incomes are not eaten up periodically by price spikes in essentials that force them to spend less on everything else. Taken together, this means that instead of relying on beggar-thy-neighbor policies, demand can be generated internally, helping to contain global imbalances.

Affordability and economic security do not depend on prices alone. Conditions of work and labor are indispensable to long term macroeconomic stability. Strengthening unions and worker organizing, workers’ rights, and labor standards, as well as limiting working hours and guaranteeing a decent minimum wage are all obvious ingredients of an anti-fascist economics. Instead of building bureaucracies to sanction the unemployed, governments should build up state capacity to address the crises and create meaningful jobs. If employment, wages, and prices of essentials are stable at decent levels, economic uncertainty is much reduced. But this is about more than addressing economic uncertainty. This is about building countervailing powers in defense of democracy and reclaiming the state. The German sociologist Klaus Dörre has interviewed hundreds of workers and is studying why they have turned to the AfD. One of his key findings is a lack of the dignity in work that was once afforded by unions and collective organization of the majority of workers.  An anti-­fascist economics must integrate the idea of dignity or risk losing out to a far right that promises to restore dignity through white supremacy, patriarchy, or nationalism.

Unlike proposals for a universal basic income, programs of guaranteed work could restore the dignity of working life and recognize the enormous contribution of unpaid care work for our economies. Old tools like public employment creation, or what we might want to call universal basic employment, could help compensate care work and close income gaps between immigrant and non-immigrant workers as well as white workers and workers of color. Narrowing these gaps is critical to defend against the divisive rhetoric of the right, which positions poorly-paid workers as competition for the somewhat more well-off members of the working class. 

Moreover, in the age of AI, where whole segments of the labor market might be made redundant, universal basic employment will be of potentially unprecedented relevance. Large-scale public investments in care from cradle to grave would create jobs in a collapsing service sector, while fostering an environment where young people feel like they can have families without risking poverty, economic insecurity, or career setbacks; where middle-aged people do not have to fear retiring in isolation and precarity; and where old people are not left alone. In an age when human creativity and connection is being automated, public investments in community and the arts will become crucial not just for job creation but to sustain humanity.

Making work dignified is also a question of power inside the enterprise itself. For most working people, the workplace is the least democratic institution in their daily lives. They arrive, follow instructions, and leave. Their experience, knowledge, and judgment are systematically excluded from the decisions that govern their working conditions, their job security, and the direction of the enterprise they sustain with their labor. The institutional answer to this democratic deficit is enterprise democracy. Its key elements are worker participation in corporate governance regarding the conditions of production, the direction of investment, and the distribution of profits.

Ecological foundations

The sectors that are systemically significant for inflation and inequality are, to a striking degree, also the most carbon intensive. Energy, agriculture and food, housing, chemicals, transport, and logistics are the sectors whose price volatility does the most damage to economic stability and household budgets, and the sectors whose decarbonization is most urgent for a green transformation. This overlap is not coincidental. It reflects the fact that our current provisioning of essentials is built on a fossil fuel foundation.

Our present economies, then, are both ecologically unsustainable and structurally volatile. Oil production cannot be smoothly ramped up or down when demand changes or alternative sources of supply dry up, as the Iran War crisis painfully illustrates. Oil supplies are geographically concentrated, which has long made them the subject of geopolitical conflicts and war. These factors all contribute to the enormous volatility of fossil fuel prices. The far right’s program exploits the structural links between fossil fuel capitalism, economic instability, and insecurity. They promise the return to a mythical golden age of stability, but in fact, keeping essentials tethered to fossil fuels keeps people exposed to the price volatility of oil and gas. An anti-fascist economics cannot be agnostic about the ecological foundations on which all human life depends.

For affordability and economic security to be sustainable, they must be built on preserving the ecological foundations that sustain our lives. This means that the stabilization and the decarbonization strategies we need to pursue are not in tension. Building resilient, affordable, low-carbon food and energy systems does not require choosing between economic security and climate action. Climate shocks that hit essentials are affordability shocks. Greenhouse gas emissions are not all that matters here: the ecological foundations of human needs also include fertile soils, clean water, functioning ecosystems, and biodiversity that underpins food security and human health.

Carbon pricing, long treated as a silver bullet in policy circles, is a market fundamentalist non-solution for decarbonizing. Firms can easily pass on carbon cost shocks to consumers, unleashing sellers’ inflation while leaving the production structures unchanged. Since essentials are both carbon intensive and not easily substituted by consumers, carbon pricing is also unlikely to fix the emissions problem through the demand side. The right lever to focus on for bringing about a green transformation is profitability. As long as fossil fuels are more profitable and yield more stable revenues than renewables, and as long as oil and gas profits are allowed to explode with every new emergency, private markets will not abandon them.

Relatedly, while the essentials framework insists on a floor—guaranteed access to the basics of a dignified life for all—its corollary is a ceiling on the resource claims of extreme individual wealth. The consumption of the top 1 percent globally accounts for 15 percent of global emissions compared to only 10 percent for the bottom 50 percent of the world population. The billionaires are, in their daily lives, global warming’s most extravagant contributors. In 2019, the richest 1 percent were responsible for more emissions than the poorest two-thirds of humanity combined. We need regulation and strict limits on high-carbon luxury consumption rather than relying mainly on price incentives that are bound to fail. This is a more effective strategy for lowering emissions where they are concentrated. It is also a way to address resource inequality and to channel people’s anger where it belongs: against the new oligarchy rather than migrants or minorities. 

Peace and trade

The chain from war to price spike, sellers’ inflation, austerity, and political crisis is a tangible sequence that has played out across many countries. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the US–Israeli war on Iran have each knocked over the same set of dominoes, impacting the cost of wheat, natural gas, fertilizers, and other systemically significant goods. Common people in countries with no stake in the conflict found their budgets devastated by wars they had no part in starting. Global economic interconnectedness, once praised as a path toward multilateral stabilization, has become a weapon of instability. 

The fragile character of our global economy was not inevitable—from the  “century of the common man” proposed in 1942 by Henry Wallace, FDR’s secretary of agriculture and later vice president, to the Program of Action for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) called for in 1974 by a coalition of newly independent countries in the global South—repeated efforts were made at genuine multilateralism. But in the late 1970s, the Volcker Shock caused a deep recession that broke labor’s power in the North and pushed the South into a catastrophic debt crisis that undermined its ability to coordinate commodity policy.

What replaced the NIEO was an order that entrenched the advantages of Western corporations at the expense of workers and the global South. Commodity dependence was a key feature of this system. In the colonial period, European powers structured the territories they controlled to export raw materials and import manufactured goods in return, suppressing local processing and industrial capacity, and binding local economies to metropolitan demand in ways that outlasted formal independence. It is still the defining structural feature of the vast majority of countries around the world, and means that the economies most people live in depend on the export of just a handful of commodities and the import of everything else—in many cases including food staples. These countries are always at the whim of the next price swing; their exchange rates, inflation, employment, and growth move with commodity markets they cannot control. Stabilizing commodity prices is a precondition for diversifying out of that dependence: stable export revenues allow governments to plan budgets and sustain investment in nascent industries.

The suppression of public intervention went further than commodity markets. International trade and investment law hard-­coded restrictions on the tools that every successful industrializing country has used: tariffs to protect fledgling industries, public procurement to build domestic capacity, technology transfer requirements for foreign investors, intellectual property rules that allow technological diffusion rather than locking it up in perpetual monopoly rents. Profit-­driven corporations and financial capital, frequently rooted in the Global North but operating in alliance with Global South elites willing to trade away their countries’ development prospects for personal enrichment, wielded their outsized economic power to limit the policy autonomy of developing countries.

At the same time, the neoliberal trade order was failing working people in the Global North. The gains from globalization were real but distributed with spectacular inequality. American and European corporations benefited enormously from cheap labor elsewhere while workers at home lost out. Whole communities were thrown out of work as manufacturing relocated. Urban landscapes became wastelands of deindustrialization. The collapse of stable, well-­paid manufacturing employment destroyed communities and the wage base on which affordability depends. When good jobs disappear and are replaced by precarious low-­ wage work, even stable prices for essentials become unaffordable. That is why the cost-­of-­living crisis was already deep before the arrival of inflation.

But now, within the span of just a few years, the world has moved from an almost religious adherence to free trade to protectionism, nationalism, and trade wars. These approaches are very different and yet similar. Both protectionism and free trade are based on competition as the exclusive organizing principle, in one case by market design and in the other case with directly coercive means. A third way on trade is urgently needed: one that takes the affordability of essentials as its organizing principle, captures the genuine gains from international economic cooperation while distributing them equitably, pairs a global system of labor rights with restored policy space for industrial policy, stabilizes commodity prices through cooperative international institutions so that commodity-dependent countries can escape the boom-and-bust cycles and balance-of-payments crises that have kept them locked at the bottom of the global division of labor, and that ensures the gains from a more productive global economy flow to working people everywhere rather than to the corporations and elites who have monopolized them for decades.

An anti-fascist economics cannot stop at a nation’s borders. The prices and provisioning that determine whether ordinary people can eat, heat their homes, and live with dignity are set in global markets shaped by colonial history, concentrated corporate power, and geopolitical conflict. Stabilization requires international cooperation. The intellectual and institutional tradition for that cooperation already exists, waiting to be retrieved and updated for our own time.

A gradualist policy strategy for foundational change

The four dimensions explored in this framework—inequality, macroeconomic stability and employment, the ecological foundations of life, and the international order—are not separate problems requiring separate solutions. They are the same problem viewed from different angles. Price shocks in a handful of systemically significant sectors simultaneously deepen inequality, destabilize the macroeconomy, lead to ecological concerns being overruled in favor of seemingly more pressing questions, andfuel conflicts that send those prices spiraling further. The chain runs in the other direction too: an international order built around corporate privilege and military interventionism rather than common people’s needs generates the commodity price volatility that hits the poorest hardest, pushes governments into austerity, and undermines the investments needed to build a different kind of economy. The housing crisis, inflation crisis, climate crisis, and geopolitical crisis all culminate in a crisis of how we provision the things people and production systems depend on.

This means that the solutions, too, converge. Stabilizing the prices of essentials, greening their production, ensuring that the gains from international trade are shared equitably, and guaranteeing that every person has access to what they need to live with dignity are facets of the same project. And that project is anti-fascist: It removes the economic anxiety and sense of overwhelming crisis that fascists exploit, and it demonstrates—concretely, in people’s daily lives—that democratic governments can act in their interest. The essentials framework is a gradualist approach that allows for diversity and experimentation. Once you enter the sectoral domain, you leave the world of silver bullets and begin considering how to solve specific problems. Of course, governments need to account for the larger dynamics at play, but they have to understand them in their concrete, sectoral manifestations. And they do not have to do it all at once.

Being gradualist does not mean being slow or only aiming for superficial change. It means focusing on fights that matter and that can be won, to create momentum and build a power base for deeper change. The policy strategy I propose centers around basket price agreements, buffer stocks, profit taxes, and a multilateral buyer’s club to concentrate demand. Price agreements for basic food items buy time and deliver visible results, while the more structural work of building buffer stock systems and greening the food system proceeds. These first steps can generate momentum—delivering proof of concept and consolidating political will.

A basket approach that prioritizes a set of basic goods within larger product categories is not new. In West Germany, a broad version of it covering a range of important consumption goods was implemented as the so-­called Everyone’s Program (Jedermann Programm) after the war, when democracy had yet to take root. It entailed agreements between the state and major companies in relevant markets to provide basic products at a fixed, affordable price. The goods had to be clearly labeled as being part of the Everyone’s Program. With every purchase people were reminded that in the dire post-war years, the new republic looked out for their material needs.

Enforcement of such a basket program need not rely on bureaucratic monitoring alone. The market itself might reinforce it by channeling demand to those stores who offer attractive baskets at the guaranteed low prices. Grocery stores can be encouraged to compete over the best offer. Moreover, shoppers have the strongest possible incentive to report violations because they feel noncompliance immediately in their wallets. Extreme grocery market concentration, which has harmed consumers, makes the basket program feasible. The government only needs to negotiate an agreement with a handful of companies to cover most of the market. This sort of basket agreement can be complemented with farm-to-table programs that make sure local produce finds its way to local kitchens at affordable prices. To build more durable public options, I could imagine a model similar to Costco but with no ownership fees, since no profits have to be paid for a public enterprise. To be sustainable, it has to be backed up with policies that operate at the deeper layer of production and circulation structures.

A buffer stock system can dampen shocks in commodity markets before they ripple along food value chains. A fertilizer buffer stock prevents input price spikes and supply shortfalls from becoming a food crisis. But it can also be an instrument for transformation: using the leverage of public procurement to incentivize the transition from fossil fuel–based fertilizers toward green alternatives. When the state purchases and sells fertilizer at scale, it can create markets for these alternatives and ensure provisioning at stable prices, making them especially attractive in times of fossil fuel price spikes like the ones we have witnessed in the wake of the wars on Ukraine and Iran. This way the near-term need to stabilize food prices becomes the entry point for the structural shift away from the fossil fuel foundation of food production.

In the same spirit, grain buffer stocks can be effective tools to promote green agriculture and adapt to climate change. In guaranteeing prices and markets to farmers, buffer stock authorities can decide which types of agricultural products to support with favorable purchase contracts. So, for example, buffer stocks can prioritize purchases of climate-resilient crops or crops that use less water. If needed, the minimum prices at which public authorities buy sustainably produced crops could take into account higher production costs, effectively constituting a green subsidy but one with a market stabilizing effect. For globally traded commodities like wheat and rice, prices are set on global commodity exchanges, which could only be stabilized by an international buffer stock that has a sufficient size in relation to the market. To be less vulnerable to global price swings, global South countries could pool their purchases, buy on world markets when prices are low to build up regional stock, and release them when global prices explode.

Stabilizing and transforming the energy sector is another mammoth task of our time in order to safeguard the livelihoods of common people around the world. The energy transition depends on limiting the profitability of fossil fuels while ensuring the affordability of electricity powered goods and services. Instead of making fossil fuel prices expensive, we should make power prices cheap and count on public provisioning as much as possible to avoid reinstating profits as the exclusive organizing principle.

To limit the profitability of fossil fuels, a permanent excess profits tax is a good tool. It can ensure that profits in the fossil fuel sector never exceed a certain threshold. To limit price spikes in fossil fuels, which trigger inflation across the economy, governments can use two tools: first, an emergency price ceiling prevents wholesale prices from shooting beyond a certain level. Prices in a major crisis are not rational but the reflection of animal spirits on financialized markets. Such a price ceiling is possible if you are producing enough oil and gas in your country and can enforce a domestic sales quota. For importers, only multilateral coordination can create enough buyers’ power to make sure that the price ceiling does not deter imports. Second, public reserves have to be built out to support the ceiling with additional supplies, and prevent fossil fuel prices from falling too low, as happened during the COVID-19 shutdowns. An important complement would be a multilateral buyers’ club that would channel demand from importers to defend such a ceiling. 

Renewables are currently not sufficiently profitable to be built out by private investors at the scale and pace necessary to address the climate crisis. So solar panels, wind parks, grid infrastructure, and battery storage need to be built in an all-government effort. If we instead spend the money to exclusively subsidize private producers to build solar power, we are reproducing the old problem of corporate capture of essentials. A green transition under those circumstances would also likely not occur fast enough. Private providers should of course be encouraged to join the build-out, and making permitting easier is certainly a good idea, but the scale of the challenge means that government leadership and coordination are indispensable. The government taking the lead in building the new infrastructures of power generation does not mean shutting out private producers of the equipment and technology required. But again, government procurement can be an important lever to shape new industries in the public interest.

From the perspective of economic sovereignty, it is important to recognize that renewables are very different from fossil fuels. They are a stock of capital goods—all the stuff that needs to be installed to have sun, wind, and water produce electricity—not a constant flow of inputs, as with oil that needs to come out of a well and then be shipped to users around the world.  For that reason they have high upfront costs—which makes them particularly vulnerable to interest rate hikes—and low running costs. In that sense, renewables are more like public roads and lend themselves to being public infrastructure. 

Public provisioning means that no profits have to be paid out, which, along with the falling cost of renewable technologies, can help keep electricity prices low. Low and steady power prices are important to incentivize households and businesses to electrify. Companies are cost cutters that have the resources to invest. They will react by upgrading their production systems to take advantage of the low power price. While households can be constrained in adjusting their consumption, it is possible to empower people to upgrade by, for example, giving tenants the right to demand that their landlords install heat pumps and reclaim their costs in subsidies. Public transport has to be electrified, built out to be a viable option for all, and made reliably cheaper than driving by car. While this transformation is implemented, car companies should be required to offer at least one basic low-cost e-vehicle, in the same spirit as the grocery basket. In healthcare, permanent public options are imperative for a dignified life. Prices of pharmaceuticals should be capped: “elastic” demand for drugs comes at the cost of a healthier life or even of life itself. Emergent essentials like AI should be removed from the control of private companies before they are integrated throughout our production structures. AI leverages all knowledge of humanity. It belongs to humanity and has to be controlled by the public.

An economy for the common people requires a floor under the living conditions of all. Affordable essentials, living wages, and a full employment economy mean that fewer people become dependent on social benefits, but a strong safety net is there to ensure dignity for all. But it also requires a ceiling to limit extreme wealth, extreme profits, and corporate power—and the individual overuse of our collective resources. But containing corporate power sector by sector, essential by essential, is not enough on its own to safeguard democracy. Antitrust policy has an important role to play in confronting corporate power head-on, as the lesson of historic fascism once held. Constraining corporate power also means enforcing a genuine global minimum corporate tax that ends the race to the bottom allowing multinational corporations to book profits wherever taxes are lowest. And it means taxing extreme wealth directly: the billionaire fortunes accumulated through decades of market power, financial engineering, political capture, and rent-extracting platforms represent a claim on social resources that democratic societies have every right to reclaim.

What I have presented are not blueprints but starting points. The logic is: stabilize now, transform structurally, and in due course build the institutional capacity for what comes next. What matters is that democratic governments show that the economy can be made to work for common people in the here and now and in ensuring a livable future. An economy of essentials organized for the common people is not a utopia but shaped, step by step, in a process of rehabilitating the public’s ability to act in the name of affordability, dignity, and democracy.

From the book ANTI-FASCIST ECONOMICS: In Defense of Affordability, Dignity, and Democracy by Isabella Weber. Copyright © 2026 by Isabella Weber. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.