The agenda for anti-fascist mobilisation

This, suggests IAN SINCLAIR, is how to restrain corporate power, rebuild state capacity, strengthen unions and make the essentials for living affordable

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“ECONOMIC insecurity, inflation and austerity are not merely technical economic policy failures,” Isabella Weber argues in her timely new book. “They create… the political conditions in which fascism has flourished.”

A German-born Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Weber argues the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States “was not an accident but the monstrous outgrowth of decades of stagnating living standards and frustrating working conditions” and “brutal marketisation policies.”

Why? “People who worry about food on their table, who are anxious about their savings, who see no future, are available for political mobilisation by movements that names their suffering.”

Thus, the book eviscerates the oligarchy-creating neoliberalism practiced and cheered on over the last 40 years by Democrats and Republicans in the US, the Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats in Britain, and the European Union.

Engagingly and accessibly written, many of the book’s arguments will be familiar to readers of writers like Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Aditya Chakrabortty and, of course, the Morning Star.

Indeed, Weber’s thesis is backed up by a 2025 public intervention from Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who pointed to decades of welfare cuts as giving rise to the far right across the world.

In contrast, “an anti-fascist economics is one that addresses the material concerns of the people above everything else.” This, Weber explains, will require restraining corporate power, rebuilding state capacity, strengthening unions and making the essentials for living affordable, with price controls if necessary. She is a proponent of Universal Basic Services, rather than a Universal Basic Income.

Stopping the rise of the far right will, in short, require governments “to break with market and ultimately capital subordination as the guiding logic of our economic governance.” To illustrate her argument she repeatedly returns to the 1930s, when soaring unemployment, hunger and economic instability afflicted much of the industrialised world. “Germany and America stood at a similar crossroads,” she argues. “One chose to protect the orthodox economic order and got Hitler. The other chose to subordinate that order to democratic politics and the New Deal.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the defeat of Nazi Germany led to an intense battle of ideas, with economists proposing differing policies which they believed would prevent a return of fascism, including Frederich Von Hayek’s Road To Serfdom, which would become a foundational text for Thatcherism.

However, the social democratic economic theories of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi won out, with much of the West introducing mixed economies with significant public ownership. “Neoliberalism has made us think this is the exception, but it wasn’t for decades,” Weber recently told The Guardian.

Bringing the book up to date, Weber highlights some hopeful examples of governments sketching an initial outline of anti-fascist economics in practice. This includes New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has cited Weber’s work as informing his election pledges to freeze rents, make buses free and introduce universal childcare. There has also been significant state intervention in the economy in Mexico, with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador negotiating a deal to fix the price of a basket of 24 essentials goods. Similarly, Spain under President Pedro Sanchez has put a price cap on soaring gas prices and rents.

Turning to Britain, The Guardian reported Weber has done consultancy with “UK ministers including Ed Miliband,” while Andy Burnham’s Labour conference speech “was Weberesque in its messaging.” However, there’s little evidence the government, obsessed with their self-imposed “fiscal rules,” is able, or willing, to break with the neoliberal economic orthodoxy.

As Brazil has recently shown, only the mobilisation of huge sections of the population, through tumultuous mass movements, including re-energised trade unions, will create the political conditions that will enable the introduction of a truly anti-fascist economics in the UK.

Weber’s book is a vital foundational text for this urgent task.

Books / 22 October 2026 What is ‘end-times fascism’? 22 October 2026 ALEX HALL explores a new categorisation of contemporary fascism and welcomes the proposition that left-wing solidarity across boundaries can resist it

Book Review / 2 September 2026 Mamdani’s landmark victory 2 September 2026 IAN SINCLAIR recommends a readable, if partisan, account of the astonishing campaign of New York's new mayor

Books / 23 December 2025 The return of anti-fascism 23 December 2025 PAUL BUHLE recommends an eminently useful book that examines the political opportunities for popular anti-fascist intervention

Politics / 3 December 2025 The angry tide of the Latin American far right 3 December 2025 Far-right forces are rising across Latin America and the Caribbean, armed with a common agenda of anti-communism, the culture war, and neoliberal economics, writes VIJAY PRASHAD