Anti-Fascist Economics with Isabella Weber

And now let's get to this conversation with Isabella Weber.

Isabella, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Adam.

Great pleasure.

It's a really good week to be speaking to you.

You're in Germany right now.

What part of Germany are you in actually specifically at the moment?

Right now I'm in Berlin and I feel whenever it's a good time to speak to me, something horrible happened, either a bad election or inflation.

So I'm sad that it's a good time.

Well, tell me, you know, you have a new book out, Anti-Fascist Economics, and we are seeing the, you know, the victory of a fascist party in Germany.

What is your reaction to it and how do you analyze it?

Yeah, so the book Anti-Fascist Economics was really born in the night that Trump was reelected.

And I did this post saying, can we finally have a serious conversation about anti-fascist economics, which was a spontaneous reaction, but was also kind of a reflection on policy work that I've been doing for years.

We had come to realize that economists think of the economy as this big thing out there that is ruled by laws that are akin to the laws of gravity and that nothing can be done about, which then also means that there's no responsibility for democracy.

Safeguarding democracy is not a question for economists.

And I think what we have been seeing in recent years is that the economy really does matter for the stability of democracies.

And that's one of the things that we can see again in this election.

I mean, it's always, of course, more complex than one dimension, but the economy is a very important dimension in trying to understand what's going on here.

So the state, Saxony and Halt, were the AFD, a far-right party with very clear neo-Nazi elements that has been designated as right-wing extremists by the Internal Constitutional Protection Service, gained 44.5% of the vote.

It's also the state with the lowest average income population.

for the whole country.

It's a state where GDP has been shrinking, where unemployment is high, where the future has been canceled more than once.

It's in East Germany.

So the way that the so-called reunification happened was really a form of shock therapy, where people's jobs were canceled, where the industries that did exist in East Germany were canceled and privatized in ways that basically smashed them.

So, you know, in the 90s, we have this period of people really just like losing hope for any future.