‘Anti-fascist economics’ would lower cost of basic essentials, author says

What is “anti-fascist economics”?

Isabella Weber, a rising-star German economist, says it is something we need to pursue again.

She says fascism has made a comeback. Our economic and political systems have stopped making our lives better and people are furious about it.

She says illiberal forces are exploiting voters’ anger and, rather than addressing the material causes of their pain, are deliberately redirecting people’s rage towards migrants and other minorities, and promising that salvation can be found in nationalism, ethnic purity or patriarchy.

To combat the phenomenon, she argues, we have to make life’s essentials affordable again — housing, food, energy, water, health care, transport — so the foundations for a dignified life are available to everyone, no matter your household income or class.

“It’s funny that today we think of anti-fascist economics as provocative,” she told the ABC Business Daily podcast.

“I would argue that today we are [once again] in a deep crisis of democracy around the Western world. The extreme right is on the rise. Democracy is as unstable as it has been since the 40s.

“I think people are very clear. They’re saying they can’t take the status quo anymore,” she said.

An article, a pile-on and the aftermath

Dr Weber, an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, shot to prominence (or notoriety) in December 2021.

She published an op-ed in The Guardian arguing that, in the wake of the COVID lockdowns, it could be worth using temporary and strategic price controls on certain products to prevent large companies in systemically significant sectors from exploiting the chaos to make windfall profits (and sending higher prices through the system).

She said they were a standard tool of economic management in the 1940s. They had been used to prevent inflation spiking dangerously in the transitional years when warfare economies were shifting back from a supply-constrained world with pent-up consumer demand (and high household savings) to post-war peacetime economies when domestic supply had recovered.

She saw strong parallels between the two historical periods. But the fallout from her article was immediate.

“In a matter of hours, Weber, who was 33 years old, had transformed from an obscure but respected academic … into the most hated woman in economics — simply for proposing a ‘serious conversation about strategic price controls’,” Zach Carter wrote in The New Yorker.

Weber agrees that her article “touched a nerve deep inside the economics establishment”.

“The idea that targeted price controls as an emergency measure merit serious consideration was greeted as if I had recommended a pornography exhibition in the Vatican,” she writes in her book.

“[But] for months, in public earnings calls with their shareholders, corporate leaders had been gleefully celebrating the fact that the pandemic, spiking commodity prices, and supply chain dislocations provided a wonderful opportunity to jack up prices.

“As my co-authors and I later showed with research powered by large-language models analysing 138,962 earnings calls, corporate leaders tend to talk positively about generalised cost shocks, which impact workers and households negatively, because they are good for pricing and the bottom line.”

Price shocks in essentials make inequality worse

Jump forward to 2026, and Weber says the high inflation that so many countries are still experiencing is one big problem among many.

Loading…

She says it is adding to the pressure-cooker environment that millions of people have been living in for decades, where the costs of basic essentials such as housing, food, energy and health have been rising much faster than prices of non-essentials such as TVs, electronics and toys.

The graphic below shows what happened to the price of essentials and non-essentials in the United States between 2000 and 2022. When it was published a few years ago it went viral on the internet.

It illuminates a point Dr Weber is making about the drivers of inequality under neoliberal capitalism.

She says when people living in the richest countries in the world are still struggling to pay for basics it is unsurprising they are so angry.

In her book, she argues that modern scarcities in basic public services and housing are the outgrowth of decades of austerity and “market subordination at all costs” and that that scarcity has become “the breeding ground of hate”.

“Usually we only consider income dynamics like wage stagnation as the driver of inequality increases … [but] price increases in essentials can be of similar importance.”

Who controls the essentials in a democracy?

In the book, she explains that anti-fascist economics is not her idea. It used to be commonplace.

Karl Polanyi, the Austrian émigré scholar who theorised about fascism in the 1930s and 1940s (and from which he had to flee to London) was one economist who wrote about it in detail.

She told the ABC that “anti-fascist economics” would improve peoples’ lives, and rebuild their faith in democracy, by securing and delivering the necessities for people at affordable prices and with their affordability safeguarded.

Dr Weber says we have levels of corporate concentration today, including in essential sectors, where a handful of companies have control over the things that people and industry can not do without, and that is a problem that needs addressing.

“There’s the question of basic principle,” she says.

“In the 1940s [it] actually was one of the arguments that economists made that, you know, whoever controls the essentials has quite a considerable degree of control over [an] economy and society.

“And as such, in a democracy, we have to ask the question of how we organise the essentials.”

At its core it is about affordability, she says.

“Under neoliberalism, we have been telling people for decades that democracy is the greatest of all political systems, which of course it is, but at the same time, even when it comes to the most basic things you need for a dignified life, ‘There’s not much that the elected representatives can do for you.’

“Anti-fascist economics is about creating an economic policy playbook that addresses the essentials, makes them affordable with short-run measures, and then introduces more structuralist measures that change the ways in which we provision the essentials.”