Part of that interview—which I didn’t have space for then—was about the rise of oligarchy in the United States. It seems like a good moment to come back to it:

What we’ve seen in a host of other countries is that where you get an oligarchy in control, you also have a more autocratic leadership. You start to see the chipping away of the rule of law. You start to see the squeezing of the economy, as there’s deregulation in favor of particular interests and then a much more reduced space for other people to enter into the economy.

The American oligarchy

(Source: Deviant Art. CC BY 3.0)

The interviewer, Maura Reynolds, seems slightly surprised to hear Hill suggest in the interview that Elon Musk is an oligarch, and asks:

Does that mean you see oligarchy as something that’s emerging in the United States?

It’s a useful question, because it gives Hill a chance to lay out an argument that says that the United States has been on this path for a while. She suggests that between the financial crisis and the pandemic, smaller or weaker businesses went under or were bought out, resulting in greater business consolidation.[1]

(It’s worth pausing here to say that critics of monopolies, such as Cory Doctorow and Matt Taibbi, would also argue that weak or even compliant oversight and regulation waved all of this through, at least until Lina Khan arrived at the Federal Trade Commission.)

Economic power

The billionaire owners, she notes, tend to dominate their sectors, and although this is seen as a feature of the tech sector in particular, we have also seen consolidation in sectors like food as well. Monopolies are about economic power, and although the ‘greedflation’ argument that Hill nods to is contested, there is evidence that monopolies are not good for innovation or competition.

Reynolds pushes Hill on this a bit:

People admire the business skills of Musk and Trump. Where’s the danger in having people like that holding powerful positions in government?

Fused together

And since this is an argument about oligarchy, Hill makes the obvious point that in an oligarchic system political power and profits become linked together.[2]

You get a shrinking of the economic system, and also the political system, when everything is centered around a very small class of very powerful business people and political people who are essentially fused together. The rest of us are incidental to that class of people.

There’s a bit more to all of this, and I’m going to skate over it here because I want to move on to some theory, but she also discusses the ways in which we’re seeing patterns that emerged in Russia and other oligarchies play out in the USA.

The courts get stacked in favour of the powerful; newspapers get taken over by the oligarchs and become vehicles for political influence; and that means that the media is vulnerable because those oligarchs also have contracts with the government. As we saw in the United States in the run-up to the election, even before Trump won.

From neoliberalism to plutocracy

Over the holiday period, the British economist Simon Wren-Lewis wrote a long post on his Mainly Macro blog discussing the way in which neoliberalism had morphed into plutocracy.[3]

Neoliberalism comes with different definitions, and Wren-Lewis’s capsule definition is this:

a collection of ideas that helps existing capital in general (e.g. reducing union power), or at least some parts of capital without harming others (privatisation).

It probably needs to be expanded slightly since these ideas are also being enforced through state agency of different kinds.

He’s interested in the post in why “why neoliberalism encourages plutocracy, and how the political right that championed neoliberalism has become plutocratic.” The way he approaches this in the piece is by examining a number of dynamics at play in this process.

Three dynamics

Dynamic 1 is about the increasing unpopularity of neoliberalism and therefore the weaponisation of culture wars as a political strategy. Neoliberalism became unpopular because voters didn’t like the endless reductions to public services. Culture wars are a ‘look over there’ strategy designed to appeal to socially conservative voters.

But culture wars clashed with business interests—notably in the area of immigration, which led to new forms of right-wing politics, seen everywhere in the rise of hard-right populism.

Dynamic 2 is about a growing dependence on wealth and the media. Perhaps paradoxically, when the right splits, the wealthy, and media owners, who are often the same people, have more chance to play different groups off each other to get the policy outcomes they want.

Dynamic 3 is the drift of centre and centre-left parties away from neoliberalism, albeit too slowly for their own good. Unlike the shift in Dynamic 1, this is for economic reasons, to do with the failure of neoliberal economics to deliver good economic outcomes, as well as political reasons (their voters also hate endless reductions in public services).

Wren-Lewis suggests that:

In this new landscape, the central political fight is between right wing socially conservative populists serving the interests of a select plutocracy, and more traditional centre or centre/left parties generally triangulating on culture wars but pursuing an economic policy that is a blend between neoliberalism and more traditional social democracy.

Fractions of capital

All the same he is puzzled as to why centre/left parties don’t make more of the plutocracy that sits behind populist parties.

At an economic level, as we’re seeing in the United States, this makes policy unpredictable—deregulation and tax cuts, certainly, but not in ways that enable the kind of stable environment that most business prefers.

One of the costs of this, though, is that it turns politics into a competition for the support of different fractions of capital, as we see with the Democrats in the United States and the stuttering obsession of the British Labour party with ‘growth’, whatever that is supposed to mean, and of not offending business interests. The public interest somehow gets lost in this competition, and this means that their political base becomes increasingly fragile—and vulnerable to the populist right.

Reactionary tech bros

This question of where different sections of capital place their bets is the subject of an article by John Ganz at Unpopular Front which takes a more or less Marxist view of the emergence of Silicon Valley’s more reactionary billionaires as Trump’s financial vanguard. This is, as he says, the key difference between Trump 2016 and Trump 2024. His piece has, I think, quite a lot of explanatory power, so I’m going to give it some air here:

[H]ere’s what I believe happened: In the process of accumulating enormous wealth, the tech-oligarchs created the conditions for their loss of social power and, when they realized this, they got a big dose of class consciousness and turned furiously reactionary.

Capitalism always creates its own contradictions. It’s a long piece, and quite dense in places, and I’m not going to be able to do more than sketch it out briefly here, but in this case, he argues that the contradiction worked like this.

New social relations

As in the nineteenth century, new technology created new social relations. In Ganz’s account, the internet accelerated the growth of progressive ideas among people whose work had been made more precarious by the same digital technologies:

the great demonstrations of early Trumpism, #MeToo, “wokeness,” the new wave of labor activism, the shifting nature of gender relations, and, ultimately, the big one, the George Floyd protests were all different articulations of the progressive counter-thrust.

And the labour force of the big technology companies were more radical than their owners were.

‘The Great Awokening’

We don’t don’t need to take Ganz’s word for it. As he points out, the tech billionaire Marc Andreesen told Ross Douhat exactly the same story on a podcast recently:

[T]he kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.” And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined.

You can feel his pain. But when people say things on the record to sympathetic interviewers, they are as likely to be telling the truth as lying. 

Change in worldview

The result of this was a change in the worldview of Silicon Valley. Their business models have changed as well—away from consumer-oriented social and digital media to industrial and military technology.[4]

This isn’t just politics. If you’re a fan of Carlota Perez’s techo-financial long waves model, these companies are at the end of their 50-60 year wave, and it is getting harder for them to make money. Hence “enshittification”, a word of the year in 2023.

And so, their espoused politics have shifted through 180 degrees, as Ganz describes (emphasis in the original):

To save themselves, the tech-oligarchs must attack the very notion of universality as such—hence their abandonment of liberal universalism for racism, nationalism, masculine domination, etc., because they represent a conspiracy, a shrinking, exclusive interest against a larger one. They are attacking first and foremost the State and the Bureaucracy, the civil servants: everything that Hegel identified in The Philosophy of Right with the universal, general interest of the whole society.

(Guerrilla Girls, ‘President Trump Announces New Commemorative Months!’, 2016. Photo: Hrag Vartanian. Via Hyperallergic.)

Mask slipped

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are the obvious exemplars here. Their politics have always been a long way to the right—despite Musk’s fortune being founded on large public subsidies. But it is also striking how quickly the mask slipped elsewhere. Zuckerberg goes on Joe Rogan’s show and blahs about ‘masculine energy’, while some poor Google spokeswoman has to dissemble on why Black History Month, Women’s History Month and Pride Month are being removed from its calendar, and still look at herself in the mirror in the morning. As Ganz observes:

Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city.These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them. [Emphasis in original).

The question about counter-revolutions such as this is: will they stick? This was probably the last chance the hard right in the United States has to stage such a counter-revolution—the circumstances of Trump’s Teflon candidacy and his second Presidency are unlikely to be repeated. But Ganz thinks they have struck too soon. Maybe the spectacle of automated everything through AGI is more than just a fable.

Needing people

Because right now, the forces of technology production still need people to help accumulate their wealth, as we see from the cheap back office labour that props up large language models and their regular insistence that their staff need to be physically in the office five days a week.

One of the things that all of this reveals is that the dystopian world in which AIs have taken our jobs and left us all destitute is not so much a scenario which needs endless public policy discussion. Instead it is the return of the repressed. It’s the story that our tech billionaires wish for, but still have to pretend that they don’t.

—

[1] The legal groundwork was laid in 2010: “We’ve got an American system that because of Citizens United — which I think is one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in our lifetimes — has become a political system that’s driven by money.”

[2] Robert Reich has spelled out how this has worked for Musk since Trump became president. Musk is $270 billion richer (this is not a typo) than he was before the election because dozens of Federal investigations into wrongdoing at his companies have been closed down. 

Or this, from Heather Cox Richardson’s now essential daily blog on 12th February: “As both the New York Times and the Washington Postreported today, the big winner from all the cuts to the government has been Musk himself, who has eliminated the agencies that were scrutinizing his businesses.” The $250 million he paid to finance Trump and other GOP candidates during the election suddenly looks like chump change.

[3] Wren-Lewis has a footnote on the distinction between plutocracy and oligarchy: “I prefer plutocracy to oligarchy because it stresses the key point that political leaders are either very wealthy themselves, or answer to those who are.” If you’re on the receiving end of either of these the distinction may seem less important.

[4] Incidentally, one of the things about consumer-facing businesses is that they need to some extent to reflect the people who are their users and customers—they don’t wander too far from the mainstream.

—

A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.

The triggering of Article 50 marks the end of the political stand-off that has been the dominant feature of British politics since the Brexit referendum last June: a stand-off between our elected representatives on the one hand and “the will of the people,” as expressed in the referendum vote, on the other. Between the end of June and the end of March, any party with something to lose has had to go along with a show of respecting the referendum result, whatever they thought of it. Scotland too, although this has a different tint there. (The obvious exception is Tim Farron’s Liberal Democrats, but in 2016-17 they have nothing left to lose.)

So politics can start up again now, with differences on the terms of Brexit, and we saw this as early as last Sunday, when Labour’s Keir Starmer popped up on the Andrew Marr show to make a robust defence of “soft Brexit”, and on Wednesday when by all accounts Andrew Neil gave May the toughest interview of her Prime Ministerial career.

It’s also the last point at which May has any control of her Premiership, and there must be a question about how many of her senior civil servants have pointed this out to her and her ministers over the last few months.

Negotiating

This is because the Brexit negotiations will stretch British governance capacity to its limits. If you doubt the balance of the negotiating expertise, it’s worth reading the two Brexit documents produced by the EU and Britain. One of them is a coherent, thought-through, credible and fairly tough negotiating position, with clear red lines. The other one looks as if it was cobbled together by advisers in Number 10 at the last possible moment, despite having had months to think about what they have to say. There’s something of the same whiff about the Great Repeal Bill white paper: there’s less to it than meets the eye. (On the capacity issues for the British government, Buzzfeed had a useful list.)

Perhaps this is also the reason why ministers have started to row back from all that hard Brexit posturing: even David Davis has had to concede that the immigration numbers might not change much, because (who knew?) there are some sectors of the economy that would collapse without them. Indeed Matthew d’Ancona suggests that the trio of Brexit ministers are now more emollient on this point, for economic reasons, than the Prime Minister.

According to a senior government source, a wonderful irony is now manifesting itself around the cabinet table in the contributions of Liam Fox, David Davis and Boris Johnson: “There’s no doubt that Theresa wants to bring down immigration. But the three main Brexiteers are suddenly becoming more and more vocal about the need to keep the numbers sufficiently high for the needs of the economy. You hear Liam saying: ‘We mustn’t do anything that threatens prosperity.’ It’s becoming more and more clear to them what’s at stake.”

Black elephants

At the same time, the FT points out (in its essential daily Brexit briefing) that now Article 50 has been triggered the newspapers–not just the usual suspects–have moved on to the ballooning crisis in the UK public sector. If ever there was a “Black elephant,” or predictable surprise, it is this: that George Osborne’s monomaniacal obsession with debt reduction and therefore austerity would create and then leave behind a huge problem for his successor to sort out, or get dragged under by it, and this would have been true regardless of the referendum outcome. This particular elephant seems to be turning into a herd.

Today the FT and [Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/31/nhs-surgery-target-operations-cancelled-simon-stevens) report that the National Health Service has axed the 18-week target for operations. This is one of the NHS’s most important waiting time targets but scrapping it is essential if the service is to survive continued austerity. Meanwhile, [The Times reports](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/forces-face-shortfall-of-10bn-after-costs-soar-wqxts8hn2) that the armed forces face a £10bn shortfall amid escalating costs for new ships and aircraft. Service chiefs are scrambling to make savings elsewhere. The Daily Mail reports that cash-strapped local councils are fording middle class pensioners to pay higher care home fees in order to subsidise others with no savings. The Sun focuses on how Britain’s police forces are now able to solve just one-in-ten burglaries.

Maybe just worth spelling this out a little further: some of these papers are strong supporters of the Government and of Brexit, and some of these issues are ones that older and more conservative voters care about.

Economy

In the meantime, the proportion of British people who think that Brexit will be bad for the British economy has increased steadily since the referendum, as Simon Wren-Lewis points out, while the views on the vote are pretty stable.

Wren-Lewis’ explanation for this is, broadly, about the British sense of fair play: we’ve had the vote, and now we need to get on with it. I think there’s a different explanation. People gauge social facts and social hypotheses differently, which is one of the reasons that it’s often hard to get people to act on futures’ insights. The vote is a social fact, and the prospects for the economy are still a hypothesis. (BritainThinks’ Brexit research project also finds that, so far, “what unites ‘leavers’ is that the economic arguments, sacrosanct to so many politicians simply don’t matter.”

The BritainThinks research finds four groups of voters on Brexit, not just Leavers and Remainers. Leavers split into ‘die-hard’ enthusiasts and ‘cautious optimists’, while Remainers are ‘accepting pragmatists’ or ‘devastated pessimists’.

Cognitive dissonance

Significantly, so far, with the exception of the ‘devastated pessimists’, three of these groups remain optimistic about the outcome of Brexit. This includes optimism about the future of our public services:

One typical ‘leaver’ said “I am looking forward to it. This is a fantastic opportunity to rebuild the country: more police, better hospitals, more schools and more teachers”, while even a ‘remainer’ observed “This is a chance to explore a different avenue for Britain.”

It’s an open question as to how long cognitive dissonance will survive pessimistic news on the economy or continuing crises in the public sector, but it seems possible that at least two of these groups might change their views. And the demographics of the Brexit vote haven’t gone away.

Old age

As Anthony Barnett reminded us, Brexit is a project for the elderly English:

Within the generations, the differences remain as striking as they were in the vote itself: there is no majority for leaving the EU amongst those under 55. Those between 55 and 64 favour Brexit by a mere 52%. It is the over 65’s who swing the outcome as they break 59% for Leave…. Brexit is government of the old, by the old, for the old – and it will perish with the old.

In fact the profile of Brexit voters looks a lot like the profile of Conservative party supporters and voters, and Brexit is clearly a Conservative party project, whatever the “Lexit” arguments. But time is not on their side, and nor is the likely range of outcomes.

A combination of being outsmarted by EU negotiators, adverse economic news, and a looming public sector crisis, including on issues such as police and Armed Forces funding that are traditionally Conservative issues, could do quite quickly do for the Government’s current reputation for competence.

One view of the whole referendum fiasco was that it was a strategy to try to hold together a party that has been fractured on Europe since the 1950s, and which looks as if it is in long-term demographic decline. You can never predict how politics will turn out. But even given the current state of the Labour party, as it wrestles with the challenge of how to move beyond the crisis of social democracy, the Brexit negotiation process and the stored up problems from the Cameron/Osborne assault on public services seems likely to be a fundamental challenge to the health of the Conservatives.

The image at the top of the post is by Alisdare Hickson, via Flickr, and is published here under a Creative Commons licence.