Life After Oligarchy — Common Weal

Open Menu<br>Close Menu

Life After Oligarchy

DemocracyIndependenceIndustryInformationMoneyResourcesSecurityWellbeingWorld

25 Jun

Written By Robin McAlpine

Oligarchs are now our greatest threat and they are out of control. The only hope for the good society is to build a world beyond their reach.

If you read regularly, you won't have missed my growing fears that the oligarchs are going to kill us all. Throughout history, they always do, they're baking endemic risk into our economic system, yet because one nation can't reform them, our best course of action is to walk away, to build a different system.<br>Last week, I started to map out what that might look like. What follows is hardly a comprehensive vision of a post-oligarchical world, but this is the outline of my thinking. Some of it might sound familiar, some sounds unorthodox. But these ideas aren't weird at all in the face of where we are.<br>Because what is really strange is what we allow. This is a democracy, and the rich promised that if we let them get richer and richer, they'd share it with us (via that great economic hoax 'trickle down'). Well, they didn't share it with us at all; they just took more and more. And then we let them use their money to persuade us that it was really because of immigrants. Now that is weird.<br>Mamdani's public grocery stores are not, so let's start there in my trip around the post-oligarchy. The big argument for monopoly capitalism was defined by Robert Bork in the 1970s, who argues that preventing monopoly is perverse because it is efficient, and that's what the economy is meant to do, maximise efficiency.<br>Great – so the ultimate efficiency would be nationalisation, because that's the ultimate monopoly. So let's take that to its logical extension – what is there in the economy that doesn't greatly benefit from competition? Distribution and intermediation. That is what US capitalism now specialises in – not making the product but acting as the gatekeeper to the product.<br>Amazon stands between manufacturers and you, extracting from both. Uber stands between drivers and you, extracting from both. AirBnB stands between property owners and guests, extracting from both. Supermarkets are much the same. None of this is really productive; all it does is reallocate wealth to those who already have it and make production economically unsustainable.<br>So let's move to a different system. Let's take distribution into collective ownership. Ban private couriers and integrate it all into a consistent (and properly paid) delivery system based on saving the Royal Mail. This would be massively more efficient.<br>Then accept that the means of accessing products are 'infrastructure'. Like a road just takes you somewhere, a supermarket just lets you buy something. Let the producers compete in a fair market on price and quality. Any producer can put their food on the shelves, nationally or locally. People can buy what they want. The supermarket itself would just take a ten per cent 'facilitation' fee or whatever.<br>Now we have a rapidly expanding economy of high-quality and innovative food producers. So help them out by implementing an externalities tax. The rich get away with what they get away with because while they're counting their profits, we are left with the bill for the mess they leave behind. Ultra Processed Foods kill and cost the NHS a fortune.<br>Just like environmental harm. Just like social harm. So let's make the producer pay. Let's add a tax to products to capture this real cost. So now our better quality domestically produced food is more competitive, and we have a thriving economy.<br>Then just tell Amazon they have to unionise and, when they leave, take their premises. Now we have a distribution hub for other goods. Again, let sellers sell. That might mean the actual producers, but it could also mean Scottish sourcing businesses or businesses setting up to commission Chinese manufacturers to make core products. After all, that's what Amazon does now.<br>So we can have goods and services in a genuinely competitive market, facilitated by treating distribution as infrastructure and using it to drive quality for customers and economic viability for producers.<br>Now let's deal with the risk of global markets. As I argued last week, buffering saved us from a massive oil supply shock this year. There are aspects of food where competition makes sense, like 'who makes the best jam'. Then some aspects don't – staples. The cost of staples in the supermarkets are pretty steady across different companies, because these are basically global commodity prices.<br>So set up a national company to buy and stockpile staples. Have a large buffer to which you add more when prices are low and from which you sell directly when they're high. Lentils, beans, pulses, legumes, coffee, olive oil, tea, rice, grains, pasta, noodles, nuts, dried fruits, cereals – these can be stored long term. We could create a system where you guarantee...