This morning, The Guardian published a brilliant interview with economist Isabella Weber on her new book, “Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defence of Affordability, Dignity and Democracy”. Reading it felt like watching someone lay the exact macroeconomic foundation beneath the very topics I explored in my reflections on Hannah Arendt (Thought #421) and my critique of the German talk show Markus Lanz (Thought #420).
Weber revives a famous comparison by John Maynard Keynes: economists need to stop acting like detached ideologues and start working like dentists. When a patient sits in the chair in excruciating pain, a dentist doesn’t lecture them on free-market self-healing—she treats the pain.
Today, that pain is acute across our society: while corporations reap massive windfall profits (greedflation) from crises and ecological destruction—with Weber’s research showing 50% of those excess profits flowing directly to the richest 1% of households—daily life is becoming unaffordable for the majority. Working as an interpreter at the local job center, I witness this structural humiliation firsthand every week. Sitting on the CDU-led German government’s fiscal reform commission in Berlin, Weber sounds the alarm from the inside:
“We aren’t getting anywhere. Meanwhile our government is implementing severe social security reforms against the will of voters.”
Weber points to the state election right next door to us in Saxony-Anhalt as a textbook example of where this neoliberal blindness leads: when established parties offer one of Germany’s poorest regions nothing but stagnation and cuts, while the far-right AfD campaigns on “Alles ist möglich” (“Everything is possible”), no one should be surprised when fascism rises from a cost-of-living crisis. While pundits in designer suits on Markus Lanz scoff at young protesters in Paris or Berlin, Weber names the root cause clearly: human dignity and democracy depend on keeping life’s essentials—housing, food, energy, water, mobility, and care—affordable for all.
What excites me most about Weber’s approach is her rejection of ivory-tower theory. Having studied 20th-century socialist theories in New York, she criticizes how much of it was utopian and detached from people’s lived reality—which mirrors my own critique of certain academic bubbles within today’s Common Good Economy movement.
Instead, Weber calls for pragmatic solutions along the entire value chain—specifically citing grain and our daily bread: four multinational corporations currently control 70% to 90% of the global grain trade and profit from price volatility. Breaking these monopolies requires regional buffers, collective purchasing power, and fair price caps on staple foods.
This is precisely where our grassroots task begins: while commissions in Berlin debate endlessly, we have to build this “anti-fascist economy” from the ground up. Wherever we bypass global speculation through short regional supply chains, strengthen solidarity-based business models, and ensure fair, non-exploitative work, we build tangible resilience in everyday life. We don’t have to wait for TV economists to drop their ideology. Every local cooperative, every open community center, and every neighborhood network that brings basic necessities back into the hands of the community actively starves authoritarianism of its fuel.
