The death of the high street: Surveillance capitalism and community wealth building

High streets in towns across the country have been, for over a decade, dying a painful death. It’s a familiar sight. Boarded up shops and an emptiness showing local economies and cultural hubs that once were. This has been particularly noticeable since the 2008 financial crash, compounded even further by a decade of damaging austerity, sucking out money and weakening aggregate demand in the economy. In the decade following the financial crash, Borders closed, GAME shut half its stores, Comet closed and JJB Sports disappeared. British Home Stores went into administration, along with Woolworths, Maplin, Toys R Us and Debenhams. Coronavirus has accelerated the high street’s demise with Edinburgh Woolen Mill going into administration, along with Harveys Furniture, the UK’s second-largest furniture retailer, TM Lewin, Monsoon and many others. The rise of working from home has not been enough to arrest this trend. In early September, a study estimated 125,000 UK retail jobs were lost already this year. Experts warn of up to 300,000 retail jobs being axed as a result of Coronavirus significantly accelerating trends that were already underway. A place’s sense of self worth declines when all around are closed shops and the most likely prospect of sustainable work is a delivery depot, where workers endure precarious work, bad conditions and low pay.  

The numbers of retail job losses this year are staggering when added on to those from the past couple years. 2018 saw 150,000 jobs lost, with another 143,000 lost in 2019. What replaces these shops is a familiar and depressing sight for many towns across the UK: a betting shop, fast food outlets, and pound shops. These are all the result of political decisions and choices, not the inevitable consequences of an immutable higher force. 

This results in a profound sense of loss, with high streets formerly providing a bustling hub of exchange beyond purely economic, but also social and cultural. Especially in smaller towns which are more rural and isolating, the high street’s demise is a devastating experience – jobs are lost to never be replaced, places where friends once met disappear, optimism fades. A grinding abject sense replaces it. 

The Tories needless and devastating austerity has pushed millions into poverty, extracting money out of the economy, with significant reductions to Universal Credit. It has also starved councils of central government funding, where core funding to London councils has been reduced by 63% in real terms, with northern cities affected the worst, where seven out of 10 cities with the largest cuts are in the North East, North West or Yorkshire. The results have been devastating, regional inequality in the UK is the worst in northern Europe, and one of the worst in the developed world. The UK has 9 out of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe. As well as devastating citizens and communities, food bank Britain sees ‘systematic’ and ‘tragic’ poverty according to the UN’s special rapporteur, the effect this has had on the high street is also profoundly devastating. Beyond individuals having less to spend, ideological cuts have made councils more reliant on business rates. This provides council with a problem: they are incentivized to have higher business rates due to inadequate funding, but the result is if they ramp up rates, more empty shop fronts will likely appear. While small and medium businesses potentially become subject to higher business rates, the exact opposite is happening to the behemoth that is largely responsible for the high street’s demise. 

Amazon – aggressively avoiding tax

The chief beneficiary of the high street’s decline is Amazon. Its exorbitant wealth has ballooned since the pandemic, with revenues in the third quarter of this year showing a 37% increase in earnings, with company revenues at $96.15bn, compared with the net income of $2.1bn in last year’s third quarter. These figures are astronomical and run directly anathema to the amount of tax it pays: just £220m in taxes in the UK last year, despite sales revenues here of £10.9bn.  This year, it is paying just 3% more tax last year despite its profits rising by more than a third.  A study in 2019 by Fair Tax Mark puts Amazon, run by the world’s richest person, Jeff Bezos, as the worst offender for ‘aggressively avoiding’ tax over the past decade. It outlined how Amazon’s effective tax rate over the decade was 12.5%, when its headline tax rate in the US had been 35% for most of the decade.

The UK’s new digital service tax will not affect Amazon, yet small traders who sell products on its site will face increased charges. This would be easier to stomach if Amazon did not make 74% of its workers avoid using the toilet, sometimes urinating in bottles, out of fear of missing target numbers. This follows, as Kalecki wrote, capitalists want discipline in factories, which the threat of the sack achieves.  Amazon also uses new software to track trade unions, undermining one of the most fundamental rights any worker has. It is unsurprising, then, that 55% of Amazon employees have suffered depression since working there, and over 80% said they would not apply for a job at Amazon again. This continues the privatization of stress that Mark Fisher powerfully wrote against, where those subject to deteriorating conditions, which are deemed ‘natural’, look inward to their brain chemistry, or personal history for sources of stress.  So it is that workers are subject to the disciplining and dehumanizing effects of neoliberalism, mirroring what is seen for those out of work and subject to the brutal punishment that is Universal Credit. 

Beyond the toxicity and harm Amazon inflicts upon its workers, its effects on the high street are similarly troubling. It has taken 25 years for Amazon to assume its monopolistic position where its size, predatory trading, ability to dodge tax and use of data work to put retailers out of business. In another 25 years, if current trends are not reversed, individuals will not be able to shop at many, if any, other retailers. This comes as Amazon plans on launching at least 30 physical stores across the UK, where an app is used to enter the store, with customers not required to pay for purchases at checkout tills, giving a different meaning to fast-food culture. If it sounds like a data grabbing dystopia, that is because it is.  

Platform and Surveillance capitalism 

Amazon, unlike local retailers, operates in a different economic stratosphere with a wholly different economic model not open to smaller firms: platform capitalism. As Nick Srnicek persuasively argues, platform capitalism has grown, with the rise of companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Uber. These companies provide the hardware and software for other actors to operate on. These big tech giants are platforms that are predicated upon a voracious appetite for data, disregarding privacy and workers’ rights, as they constantly expand.  Connecting all these tech behemoths is the centrality of data, which is the basic resource driving them, and providing them with an advantage over competitors. Platforms are designed to extract and use that data. They have the benefit of providing infrastructure and intermediation between different groups, monitoring and extracting all interactions, providing their economic and political power. 

These platforms, Amazon included, have a trend towards monopolization. A vital feature is their reliance on network effects, where the more users using a platform, the more valuable the platform becomes for everyone. Just as individuals become interested in buying from Amazon when there are enough products available, once users arrive, retailers double down and populate the platform further still.  Both sides feed one another, with Amazon taking a margin on every item sold. Further, Amazon created greater network effects with ratings and reviews, along with a feature showing other products that customers tend to buy.  Conversely, shoes bought at a local store cannot tap into such network effects, yet the shoe store is subject to higher tax rates too.

As Shoshana Zuboff writes, platforms’ eternal need for more data means they are driven to push up against the limits of the private realm. When this drive is combined with more computer monitoring and automation; the desire to personalize and customize services offered to users of digital platforms; and the continual experiments on its users and consumers, we end up with what Zuboff terms ‘surveillance capitalism’. The possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more accurately is a trend that cannot be resisted across the big tech monopolies. The justification against is that doing so would result in a loss of a competitive advantage. Technological advances have contributed to flagrant invasions of privacy, as demonstrated by Amazon’s Alexa, a voice assistant that always listens to conversations, where Amazon “is able to anticipate and monetize all the moments of all people during all the days”.  We, ultimately, are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s surplus. 

Surveillance capitalism operates as a cause for, and consequence of, the high street’s death, the predatory vampire like way it feasts not only on the blood of retailers, but it also “feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience”. Individuals become subjugated to imperatives that are not theirs with autonomy undermined. 

Friedrich Hayek, leading intellectual architect of neoliberalism, argued in The Road to Serfdom, that abandoning freedom leads to a loss of freedom and the creation of an oppressive society, and the serfdom of the individual. It was, so the theory goes, up to the market to liberate us all. And yet, it is instead the deregulated free market that has resulted in the oppressive conditions of Amazon warehouses, which are anything but liberated, with workers urinating in bottles out of fear of the sack. Compounding this, our everyday lives being scraped and sold to fund Amazon’s monetization off our everyday behaviour and subjugation is only liberty for Jeff Bezos, but our collective serfdom.

As Alan Bradshaw writes, the normalization of subscription services like Amazon, extracting consumer spend via direct debits rather than point-of-persuasion, helps move ever closer to a world of automated shopping. Big data’s use of algorithms edges society towards social control, where the advantages for business are prioritized without any considerations for exploitation.  The illusion of technological inevitability coupled with the natural collapse of the high street is appealing yet misleading. There is power in revivifying the public sphere. 

Community wealth building

An effective tax regime is the first step to changing this trend, helping to raise substantial revenue from Amazon and other tech giants. Once the virus is contained, reconstruction offers an opportunity to depart from the neoliberal orthodoxy that is killing the high street and what is needed is a revivified public sphere, exemplified by community wealth building, or ‘the Preston Model’. The model works to embed capital in the local community and relies on combining the economic weight of ‘anchor institutions’, like schools, hospitals, universities etc. These institutions procure contracts with local businesses, which attach certain conditions, for instance, a catering contract in a hospital open only to worker-owned enterprises based within 10 miles. This ensures capital, rather than being extracted by large corporations and leaked outside of a local economy, stays within a local economy, boosting local employment and future investment.  These contracts are only entered with unionized businesses, cooperatives and companies that operate in the local area and paying a living wage, ensuring there is no race to the bottom, avoiding the horrors apparent in Amazon’s warehouses.

The results of this model are profound. Research from the National Organisation for Local Economies found that anchor institutions spending in the Preston economy increased from £38m to £11m in just three years, improving all economic measures, including GDP and productivity. This has led to Preston recently being named Britain’s most improved city in the UK, as well as the best place to live and work in the Northwest. 

This model enables worker-owned businesses to grow but without access to credit the possibility of expansion is limited. That is why a network of regional investment banks is essential to the success of community wealth building. Regional investment banks would be crucial to the growth of this sector, which is presently inhibited by commercial banks’ tendency to steer clear of such investments. Local authority pension funds could also be encouraged to redirect investment from global markets to local schemes for further means of financial support. 

Reviving the high street, beyond the Preston Model, must include reforms to public transport. A high street cannot flourish without being easily accessible. Due to austerity cutting local bus routes by 32% and the rise of ticket prices, huge swathes of the UK are unable to access public transport. It is essential that public travel links are reinstated, and expanded, extending initiatives like the freedom pass, which enables over 60s to travel for free. Renationalizing the railways and ditching the approach that prioritizes shareholder profits above all else would also assist with lowering fares. 

Finally, establishing rent caps to reign in unscrupulous landlords, appropriating derelict or unused properties into community trusts, and reforming business rates must be a part of a broader project to revive the high street. These are all commonsensical, and also democratic, allowing local communities to decide what will replace certain retail outlets when they do disappear. This could be a cafe, a hairdresser, a care or centre for learning. Society’s needs, not those of the market, must shape change. Germany's economy is often heralded as one that is dynamic, innovative and impressive, yet its use of both regional investment banks and rent caps is all too often forgotten or conveniently ignored.

The Preston Model, coupled with these reforms, would not stop platform and surveillance capitalism, but would at least attempt to break away from the deleterious trend of Amazon, a data grabbing tech giant invading privacy, undermining worker rights and killing local high streets. It aims to drive standards up, for those of local economies and its workers. It could also trigger a greater push for localism across other economies too. And it is popular, with 55% preferring to buy local brands to help support local and small producers. 

Regaining control

The high street's precipitous decline is being caused by an economic model working to benefit surveillance capitalist platforms like Amazon. Its effects are devastating, haunting high streets, instilling a sense of loss and despair, and potentially replacing some jobs with precarious work. It also works to undermine our liberties, well-being, privacy and autonomy by, harvesting every detail about us possible through our personal data, with the aim of making profits. The commodification of this personal data serves to enrich Amazon's stranglehold of different markets and our collective selves. The coronavirus crisis has accelerated the trend of a declining high street, leading to even more local shops closing across high streets nationwide, due to social distancing and lockdowns mandating the closure of non-essential shops. However, this pause offers a chance to push for changes to an economic model that is failing. Whilst it is impossible to wholly insulate local markets from globalization, communities must take control. It is time to encourage local development, where jobs are sustainable and made locally, rather than lost. Better working conditions, stronger local economies and a healthier collective space for communities are all commonsensical demands. 

It seems implausible that the Conservatives would truly grasp the problem - as they have done nothing over a decade in office but assist this trend and they cannot even get Amazon to become subject to a digital services tax - yet alone propose the solutions required to allow people to actually take back control. It is therefore vital that Labour make the case as forcefully as possible. If they do not, they will allow the Tories to set the terms of debate around regional inequality and localism, which will shift from economics to cultural issues, likely blaming immigrants, immigration whilst failing to address the economic causes of the problem. The lack of opportunity and abject sense of bleakness against London and finance capital was a key component of the vote for Brexit, and it is pivotal the left focus on trying to solve that, rather than placating a sentiment hostile to immigration. The longer Starmer’s Labour stays silent on policies such as reviving the high street, the easier it will be for the Tories to ramp up the culture war to distract from their litany of failings. To not act, or to delegate it to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market is to choose a high street of gambling shops, pawnbrokers, and precarious work degrading the environment. We all deserve so much more than that.  

It's the end of Trump, but Trumpism lives on: why Democrats must prioritize material concerns

The dust has yet to settle. The votes are still being counted. Trump is still bemoaning a phantasmic electoral fraud. But it is now set: a deeply divided country has a new president in Joe Biden. Given the circumstances, over a quarter of a million Americans dead, in large part due to the president’s atrocious handling of Coronavirus, eight million driven into deep poverty and protests sparked by the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of police violence, the closeness of this result is, on the face of it, shocking. With the Democrats' hopes of winning the Senate fading after Republican victories in Maine, Iowa and South Carolina, President Biden will likely be severely hamstrung. This will make his ability to pass substantial reform close to impossible. Higher taxes on the richest will not be passed. A Green New Deal becomes harder to imagine. Biden’s expanded health care plans look implausible. Donald Trump will be departing from the White House, but Trumpism is far from over. 

New Democrats and a warped identity politics over material concerns 

Trump is a symptom rather than a cause of America’s decline. The institutional forces that led to Trump’s election and almost reelection are still present. It is a state of affairs that, in large part, began when the Democrats started pursuing a warped conception of identity politics and the courting of the managerial professional class over the interests of material concerns for working people more broadly. A 1971 memo called ‘Changing Sources of Power’ sought to eliminate working-class politics from the Democrats, replacing it with the interests of a growing generation of middle class voters. The memo highlighted how it would oppose a class-based New Deal politics, one that helped FDR win four elections, instead looking to a politics of ‘the psyche’ or ‘the soul’. The 1972 presidential election duly saw a landslide win for Richard Nixon over George McGovern. The two Democratic presidents who won re-elections since then were both disappointments, failing to arrest America’s economic decline, as its middle class continued to shrink. 

The Democrats’ embrace of a warped identity politics fails to take anti-racism seriously, and marks a retreat from solidarity to identity, and emphasising individual recognition to a collective struggle against an oppressive social structure, as Asad Haider has persuasively argued. Identities are formed in contemporary political arrangements that are produced and exercised in a range of social practices, as Foucault noted: the division of labour in the factory, the organization of a classroom, and the disciplinary procedures of prisons. Collectives of individuals are subordinated to a dominating power. But identity alone is an abstraction, failing to inform about the specific social relations that have constituted it. Without reference to material considerations it can often fade into vacuous platitudes. It is exemplified by a gestural symbolic politics that is embodied when a politician like Hillary Clinton, who spoke of Black Americans as ‘super predators’ tried to adopt the language of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘white privilege’ when running in 2016 despite being closely associated with policies that have harmed black communities.  

Instead, the universality of class links different oppressed identities into a shared narrative that is grounded in lived experience and material needs, and common struggles that different oppressed groups face. Eschewing that results in only symbolic nods to approving of different identities, but fails to address the exploitation and mistreatment different identities share in common. The LGBT community, minorities, and many millions of other Americans have shared interests: they are, largely, oppressed and marginalized by a system that reinforces a patriarchal capitalist structure that is both racist and sexist. Failing to speak out about the causes of oppression and only providing lip service is insufficient and merely PR. 

This cultural elitism, of prioritizing white-collar workers over blue-collar workers, has done all it could since the early 70s to eschew the legacy of FDRs New Deal. As Thomas Frank persuasively argues, the Democrats have repeatedly failed for decades to advance traditionally liberal goals. They have failed to expand opportunity, failed to fight for social justice, and failed to ensure workers get a fair deal. Instead, the free market consensus grew so much, with Bill Clinton signing a NAFTA trade deal losing jobs and incomes for workers and shipping manufacturing jobs abroad. He repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, fusing investment and commercial banking, unleashing risky investments and lending, which helped play a role in the 2008 financial crash.  

At the precise time bankers saw their shackles removed, Clinton passed the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, heralding long prison stretches for drug users, disproportionately targeting, demonizing and incarcerating black Americans. The Act resulted in a massive expansion of the prison system. It incentivized states to adopt truth-in-sentencing laws, which require prisoners serve at least 85% of their sentence. Clinton was also responsible for the atrocious federal three strikes law, giving life sentences to repeat offenders. The result was more people, disproportionately black and brown, in prison for longer periods of time, tearing families apart, helping the prison industrial complex boom as a result, with the amount of Americans in prison almost doubling from 1993 where there were 949,000 inmates to over 1.5 million in 1995. Rather than expanding opportunity, this reduces it, with the stigma of offenders released often preventing assimilation into society. Slavery ended but the dehumanization that many people of colour suffer has not. 

Whilst Obama ran on a ticket of hope and change, his presidency was also marred by disappointments. He failed to close down Guantano Bay, failed to initiate proper reform for the crooks on Wall Street, and failed to stop inequality spiralling. He also saw a rapidly shrinking middle class shrink further still, with the average wealth of the bottom 99% dropping by $4,500 between 2007 and 2016. Whilst over that same period, the average wealth of the top 1 percent rose by $4.9 million. Even his signature reform, the Affordable Care Act, did not go far enough, failing to create a public healthcare system. Obama’s foreign policy also helped destabilize other regions with a significant ramping up of drone strikes, increasing the risk of terrorist attacks in the US as a response. Obama’s presidency even oversaw 9.3 million Americans losing their homes following the financial crash. And it was under Obama’s presidency that the Black Lives Matter movement was formed, following the shooting of black Americans, mostly at the hands of overzealous police officers, as police violence continued to rise.

Despite Clinton and Obama serving as two term presidents, the decline of America’s middle class accelerated as the free market was prioritized over workers and their interests: Wall Street got bailouts; wages remained stagnant and America’s middle class shrunk. Neither president reversed rising inequality, stagnant real wages, or the offshoring of jobs abroad. As the free market grew, so did class and race divides. The prison industrial complex and a racist criminal justice system worked to disenfranchise, discriminate and demonize people of colour and at a disproportionate rate.

Both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, nevertheless, ran on platforms that heralded a return to a fabled status quo: one that has not been working for millions of Americans for decades. Although Biden was slightly better at sounding more anti-elitist, emphasizing his Scranton roots against Trump’s privileged upbringing, and did not need to deal with misogyny, something that dented Clinton’s chances. Trump, conversely, was able to tap into an anti-establishment resentment, identifying that globalization and neoliberalism have left ordinary Americans with a worse lot. The inability of Democractic candidates to understand or failure to speak about the legitimate economic grievances of working people is why a candidate like Trump can run and win. Trump, despite being a billionaire, and not caring about redistribution in the slightest, realized he would have to pretend to listen to these concerns, and did so. Like an opportunistic populist, he was able to point to an out of touch political elite who have failed to improve livelihoods for many millions of working people.  

Just as the New Democrats aimed for a politics of ‘the soul’ rather than speaking of material conditions, Joe Biden’s campaign line was termed ‘a battle for the soul of the nation’ and also avoided progressive policies. With both parties embracing deregulated finance capital and an increasingly authoritarian and racist criminal justice system, undermining workers and living standards, rhetoric about the country’s ‘soul’ misses the point. Life is stark for tens of millions of Americans and no amount of referencing America’s ‘soul’ changes that. When deploying such meaningless platitudes, it is unsurprising that Trump, who at least spoke in part of bringing jobs back and reviving the coal and steal industries, was extremely close to recapturing Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – the rust belt, symbolic of America’s manufacturing and labour decline – once again. Trump was only 20,000 votes short in Wisconsin, .8% vote short in Pennsylvania and got 48% of the vote in Michigan. 

It is clear that the lesson of 2016, which included a failure to offer a positive case for voting Democrat by appealing to a broad coalition that prioritized raising living standards for tens of millions and speaking the language of material considerations was not learnt in 2020. The Democrats failed to introspect after a humiliating loss in 2016; the chances of introspection now they have edged past Trump appear even smaller.

Low-income workers and people of colour constitute a significant voting bloc of the Democrats, and those the Democrats should be fighting for and turning from non-voters into Democrat voters, yet the New Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism is what they got in return. With neither Republicans or Democrats identifying issues around America’s declining middle class or the losers of globalization, the space grew for a populist opportunist, who could lay blame, justifiably, at the hands of free trade and globalization but also to set the agenda and unjustifiably blame immigrants and Muslims for America’s demise too. 

Proactive reactionaries and reactive progressives 

Mark Fisher wrote that since the 70s, a tendency has been in play "for reactionary political forces to be pro-active and for progressives to be reactive". It is clear that 2020 was no different. Trump seemed like the person who would get things done: blaming China for the rise of the coronavirus helps escalate his irrational trade war and make it look to ordinary Americans that he is indeed getting something done and putting America first. Similarly, Trump boasted of America being ‘energy independent for the first time’ due to the massive expansion of fracking and oil production. And Trump, contrary to scientific warnings, was pushing to reopen the economy as fast as possible. All of these claims are either false or dangerous. In the first instance, the notion that China is at fault for a global virus is spurious at best, notwithstanding their opaqueness at the start of pandemic. And it also fails to reckon with why China, and countries close to it, have handled their responses to the virus infinitely better than America has. Additionally, Trump has failed to re-shore manufacturing jobs as the trade war with China has hurt America’s economy.  Moreover, fracking is ruinous for human health and the environment and oil extraction is unsustainable and damaging for the planet. And finally, reopening the economy without a plan for ensuring safety when coronavirus cases are over 100,000 a day is dancing with the devil. With a media failing to inform voters on these nuances, such details often get drowned out in the noise. And with hyper-partisan media like Fox News working round the clock to spin all of these as successes for Trump, a large section of the country view Trump as a man of action fighting for their interests. 

Biden, conversely, failed to seize the narrative or agenda. His sole selling point was not being Trump, merely claiming he would handle the pandemic better but failing to offer a compelling alternative narrative of America’s decline and why he could turn it around. It is a damning indictment that in the middle of a pandemic, healthcare reform failed to be an election defining issue. The richest country ever has 26,000 Americans dying a year waiting for healthcare, as millions delay getting medical help because of skyrocketing costs. Exorbitant prices for drugs and medical treatment results in the US spending much more on health care, at 17% of GDP, more than any other large advanced economy. Biden also refused to advance any progressive response vision to crises such as climate change, racial justice and economic crisis.  

Trump’s proactive style also extended to the nature of his electoral campaigning. Trump held big rallies, against scientific advice, often with many unmasked attendees, electrifying his base. The Republicans also had a more effective ground game to get out the vote, whereas the Democrats scaled back on both of these. Biden had a muted campaign, often conducted indoors, unable to meet large amounts of people, and perhaps understandably unwilling to engage in door knocking during the pandemic. The notable exceptions to these being seen in Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Stacey Abrams helped lead teams to increase turnout among Black Americans who are most susceptible to voter suppression. 

Helping to cement Trump as a mythological champion fighting for Americans in the eyes of many of his supporters, his contraction of coronavirus actually worked to his advantage. Rather than demonstrate, as most liberals asserted, that his inability to take a deadly virus seriously meant he was not fit to govern, putting himself and Americans all at risk, he instead tried to show how the virus is beatable, and that it ‘taught him a lot’. Describing his treatment, as "the real school not the books school" exemplifies why Trump appeals to his supporters. Rather than established science, lived experience matters more and the politics of belief becomes prioritized. Empiricism, science and climate change get tarnished as being the domain of the elites - emotions and feelings are prioritized over facts. This politics of belief is dangerous, as the consensus around Trump supporting anti-vaxxers causing infectious diseases becomes clearer. It is part of the reason why, in spite of over a quarter of a million deaths, many Americans felt that Trump was not at fault for this, and even if he was, such considerations become trumped by the economy, as exit polls demonstrate, with the economy seen as the most important electoral issue. It is unsurprising given how enmeshed the implausible American Dream is within US history, politics and culture. As Trump rebounded from the virus, so too then would America.

Nevertheless, Trump’s propositional pretend economic populism are rehashed failed Reaganomics. The assumption that tax cuts lead to greater growth and revenue is fallacious and has been debunked.  Tax cuts for the rich and corporations, coupled with social spending cuts and union busting meant the majority of the public was not able to drive growth through spending on much else other than sustenance and shelter. As real wages froze, the rise of credit ballooned which ultimately led to the casino lending exemplified by the subprime mortgage crisis that helped cause the global financial crisis. In the 40 years since its inception, Reaganomics and tax cuts for the rich have been devastating. As workers have less money, growth rates slow, leading to wealth accumulating more quickly from profits rather than labour, with most wealth going to the top 10% and 1%, increasing a desire for extreme politics due to a failing status quo where essential needs like healthcare become a privilege rather than a right.  

Tax cuts for the rich have caused a ludicrous situation where billionaires pay less than the working class for the first time, with the richest 400 families in US paying an average tax of 23% while the bottom half of households paid a rate of 24.2%. And the top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (30.4% of all household wealth in the US), while the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined (or 1.9% of all wealth). The cutting of taxes for the richest works to transfer wealth and power upwards, making America more unequal, increasing desperation and legitimate resentment. 

The Democrats’ failure to attack trickle up economics exemplified their passive approach. This is inevitable when the Democrats prioritize an imaginary ‘Biden Republican’ voter and go to war with the grass roots of their party, freezing out expertise and campaign teams of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.   

Demographic destiny will not deliver a Democratic majority by itself. And it is precisely the sort of lazy complacency that led to Trump’s rise in the first place. In spite of Trump’s racism, he made gains with minority voters, which are increasing as a share of the US population. The Democrats must learn to make a positive case for why voting Democrat is in interests of different groups of minorities by appealing to as broad a base of voters as possible and having policies that would improve their material conditions. The status quo is broken; heralding a return to it will not entice the undecided.

Trumpism looms large

The Trump era may be over, but all the reasons for his existence live on as strong as ever. America is even more unequal than it was in 2016. The anger from racial injustice and a broken criminal justice system is stronger than before, as exemplified by the waves of protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd demonstrate, coupled with a feeling that the Democrats are unwilling or unable to deliver adequate solutions. The manufacturing jobs that Trump promised to reshore failed to materialize. Compounding this is a Republican controlled Senate. Biden’s campaign of saying little except that he was not Trump failed to inspire or help Democrats in down ballot Senate races. Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate, is a specialist in killing Democratic plans. And with the Democrats likely to be without a Senate majority, he will block any legislative reform. For six out of Obama’s eight years in office, McConnell blocked almost every White House initiative. The likelihood now is that McConnell would be even more obstructive. And even if the Democrats win Senate seats in Georgia and gain a majority, it will not be enough to stop Republicans using filibusters to obstruct measures from being brought to a vote. Bipartisanship alone represents a continuation of big business above all else, fuelling inequality and racialized divisions. 

Trump added 10 million more votes in this election and recorded the second most votes in a US election ever. The Trumpist right are strengthened and bigger than ever. Adding fuel to this fire is a great depression, which will energize their opposition to even the most milquetoast reforms. If Trump was able to get elected when the economy (GDP, not living standards) was experiencing an upturn, think of how the reactionaries will use an economic depression to push for their extremism. It is progressives who backed a Green New Deal, who will be required to defend a president in Biden, who himself does not want to be in the same camp as those progressives against the interests of big business.  

It is positive that the nativist populist right is losing its most powerful figure. And it is a strongly encouraging sign that Biden will rejoin the 2015 Paris Agreement, deescalate tensions with China, likely rejoin the Iran Nuclear Deal and reverse sanctions on a poverty stricken Iran. Biden will also end the disgraceful Muslim-countries ban, and could reinstate funding for Palestinian refugees. It also matters that neo-Nazis will not feel emboldened with a Biden presidency. However, rejoining the Paris Agreement whilst necessary is insufficient without substantial climate change reform to decarbonize the economy, which is tough with a Republican controlled Senate that embodies Freud’s Death Drive, with self-destructive policies that expedite the extinction of the human race. Yet, there is more that Biden can and should do to address climate change, such as convening global leaders to proactively build international consensus, reversing Trump’s energy rollbacks, tying in climate change to a coronavirus relief package, signing executive orders to cut emissions, creating new financial regulations, prioritizing environmental justice, revising fossil fuel production rules and restoring wildlife areas.  

Biden’s more expansive climate plans are unlikely to pass the Senate, as enshrining a carbon neutrality date in to law will unlikely be possible through an executive order. Additionally, other significant issues such as reforming the electoral college system, strengthening voting rights, reforming Senate representation to be more representative of states with larger populations, universal public healthcare or appointing a supreme court justice, or justices, all look out of the question too. 

As Grasmci wrote, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. Just as Trump leaves, the reasons for his ascent endure, and cannot be resolved by his departure alone.

Conclusion: material concerns must be prioritized

Ultimately, America’s divisions run deeper than left and right, as they involve a bifurcation of reality. Waleed Shahid was right to note that 235,000 people dying has no effect on half the country when they live in an isolated universe shielded from national public opinion.  It is troubling that Trumpism grows, with 50% of Republican voters believing in the baseless QAnon theory. It is strengthened still when Marjorie Taylor Greene, the newly elected Republican House Representative for Georgia’s 14th district, also believes in this far right conspiracy theory. 

Baseless conspiracy theories fester when living standards decline and desperation leads to a pursuit of extreme answers. The need, therefore, has never been greater for the Democrats to appeal to working people’s material interests through social democratic reform. This, instead, would work to improve lives and livelihoods, restoring the belief that Democrats want what is best for workers. The appeal of nativist populists is eroded when they cannot speak to falling living standards or a political elite taking the public for granted. And even if the 50% of those who voted Trump are steadfast in believing baseless conspiracies, a significant chunk of the other half are certainly persuadable through economic materialism. Referring to them as a “deplorables”, will not win them over. If, as expected, the Senate is as obstructive as it looks likely to be, Biden must be courageous and legislate as radically as executive orders permit on climate change, economic reform and criminal justice reform. 

It is, in large part, black Americans in cities like Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia that helped propel Biden into the White House. And it is Black Americans, on the whole, who will benefit most from economic justice, criminal justice and environmental justice reform, though the benefits of such reforms would be felt much more widely. The fights for all three are intertwined. A coronavirus relief package must therefore address economic and environmental reform together. Biden must, with as much pressure from the left as possible, renege on his words that ‘nothing will fundamentally change’ under a presidency led by him.  Taking these voters for granted helped Trump to power, as they failed to turn out in sufficient numbers in 2016, due to 3.5 million being targeted by disenfranchising and suppression tactics.  

The pressure from the left in potentially primarying and dislodging Chuck Schumer, the Democrat leader of the Senate, is already reaping rhetorical gains. He is now, contrary to his inherent conservatism, sounding all the right notes: promising an FDR-like first 100 days in office for Biden, where the focus will be on climate change, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, an infrastructure bill employing people with prison records and student debt cancellation. These policies would go some way to improving economic, environmental and criminal justice. They would also lessen the appeal of baseless conspiracy theories and nativist populists like Trump. 

It is therefore the job of the left, Bernie Sanders, 'The Squad', Justice Democrats and the Democratic grassroots more broadly, to pressurize establishment Democrats to ensure as much of these words become actions through as many executive orders as possible. Without the left pushing Biden, the establishment counter-forces will propel him to be as close to Mitch McConnell’s conservatism as possible. It is time for progressives to set the agenda and narrative again. Failing to do so will increase the chances of a Republican win in 2024, with a politics more dangerous than anything we have seen before, as class, race and environmental injustices worsen still. The need for Democrats to get serious about materialism could not be more urgent.

Overwork in an age of unemployment: why we need a four-day working week

With the furlough scheme ending next March, The Institute for Employment Studies says that the UK is on the cusp of suffering “a prolonged labour market shock”. The unemployment rate had risen to 4.5%, the biggest increase in the jobless rate in more than a decade, as 1.5 million are out of work. This is misleading, statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions Claimant Count from September showed 2.7 million looking for work, a rate of unemployment of 7.3%. Unemployment forecasts predict a further rise still to 10% over the winter. With another national lockdown due to increasing cases of Coronavirus following the failure of the privatized Test and Trace and insufficient financial support to incentivize self-isolating, it is clear that millions will be out of work with a jobs crisis this country has not seen in over a generation. These statistics are only part of the story, however. The UK suffers from an epidemic of stress, overwork and poor-work life balance for those lucky enough to be in employment. Compounding these are the culture of unpaid overtime, where, according to the Trade Union Congress, UK workers put in more than £35 billion in unpaid overtime in 2019. It is clear that those in jobs are often overworked, while the numbers of those looking for work is rising precipitously. Overwork in an age of unemployment, a nonsensical position to be in. A solution is needed, one that allows for work to be shared across the economy as well as for new jobs to be created. A four-day working week does both. 

Since the 2008 banking crash, earnings for the vast majority have still failed to fully recover and employment has become increasingly more precarious for millions of workers due to the rapid growth in the use of precarious contracts, such as those on zero hours. This increased precarity heightens the stress of those subject to it. Unable to know and plan how much income will be received each week, a regular fear of falling into debt and a daunting and all too common experience for many young people subject to such. And such precarity extends beyond call centres, McDonalds, the Uberised economy, with their use extending into the public sector.  

A recent report by the think tank Autonomy suggests 500,000 jobs would be created from a four-day week. The report outlines how it would be possible for public sector workers to move to a 32-hour week with no loss of pay, thereby creating roughly 500,000 new full time equivalent jobs to make up for the shorter hours. Progressing this through to private sector roles seems the logical next step. 

A shorter working week helps stem runaway unemployment. An example being President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal measures (Fair Labour Standards act of 1938), reducing the working week to 40 hours maximum.  A more recent example of a four-day workweek is from Germany. In 2008, Germany rolled out the Kurzarbeit, or ‘short week’, a scheme to mitigate mass unemployment, subsidizing a reallocation of labour.

As well as a decade of stagnant wages, The UK economy has been suffering from a productivity crisis. The slowdown in productivity growth over the last decade is the worst since the start of the Industrial Revolution over 250 years ago. Growth in productivity, or economic output per hour of work, has failed to rise in Britain at anywhere near the rates recorded before the 2008 crash. Persisting with the same policy options that are failing to deliver greater productivity benefits makes little economic sense. Conversely, two thirds of UK businesses operating on a four-day week reported improvements in staff productivity according to recent research by Henley Business School. Microsoft reported a 40% boost in productivity when it allowed people to have Fridays off in a 2019 trial. Recent polling also demonstrates its popularity, with 75% of Brits backing a four-day working week. Having less time spent in pointless meetings can improve focus and a shorter working week could help improve the UK’s sluggish productivity growth.

As well as addressing falling productivity rates, a four-day week would help address the escalating mental health crisis. 

Stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 44% of all work-related ill health cases, with 54% of all working days lost due to ill health. Despite the rhetoric of reducing bureaucratic red tape, the rise of new technology and managerialism has increased the administrative stress on workers. This stress can be seen with the increasing use of instant messaging, emails and notifications. Workers are becoming increasingly contactable by their employers. No longer does one need to be in a fixed place to do to service based work, which is predominantly what neoliberalism has created in the UK. There is an expectation that one can respond to an email at practically any time of the day. With a laptop and wifi, one is able to work anywhere and at any time, permanently ‘tethered’, inviting stress and pressure. In an economic landscape with rising unemployment, the pressure whilst not always explicitly stated becomes internalized to ensure one is not ‘falling behind’. The work therefore never ends. The worker is expected to be available whenever. Franco Berardi notes the increased digital communications help produce a diffuse sense of panic, with individuals subject to an unmanageable data-blitz.  

Covid-19 has exacerbated work stress. For those who have transitioned to working remotely, this always-on culture of being available for meetings, calls and checking emails has now entered their homes. The separation of work and home lives is eroded, and the working day has become extended as a result. Often those working remotely will be doing so from the same room they sleep in, making the task of compartmentalizing even harder. By April, a third of all those who remained employed without being furloughed were working more hours than usual. Mental distress among workers is now 49% higher compared to 2017-19, with the impacts being disproportionately felt by women. With the devastating decade austerity has wreaked on many peoples mental health, it is clear that a rebalancing of work and life is urgently needed. 

Studies demonstrate the effectiveness of a four-day week helping to lower stress levels as well as improving work-life balance. A trial from the University of Auckland shows that the four-day week increased commitment and empowerment, with staff stress levels down from 45% to 38%, and work-life balance scores increasing from 54% to 78%. 

The mental distress that comes from unemployment is stark. Jobs and incomes being lost, with the fear of not being able to meet rents and bills is a frightening and nerve wracking experience. As grim as Britain can be normally, it is grimmer still with an empty stomach. The paltry Universal Credit, with a delay of at least six weeks, is linked with rent arrears, problem debt and food bank use. It is deliberately cruel and inadequate, actively trying to discipline claimants. Countless examples exist of sanctions being meted out to disabled people, with studies showing they are ineffective at getting people into work and reduce those affected to poverty, ill health or even survival crime. Sanctions have been shown to be ‘pointlessly cruel’ as well as ineffective. So the Tories, constantly consciously cruel, decided the middle of a pandemic, precisely when there is a paucity of jobs, was the right time to bring sanctions back after having previously dropped them. The sanctions process has been linked to increases in psychological stress. Universal Credit, meanwhile, submits claimants to Kafkaesque levels of dehumanization. Whilst Jobcentres are no longer open due to the pandemic, when they were, they did produce a distressing and unsettling effect on claimants. The open offices, the transparent doors, waiting for an appointment under the watchful eyes of Department for Work and Pemsions staff and G4S security guards helped create a sense of unease and discomfort. It is like Foucault’s Panopticon, with the Jobcentre’s openness allowing for surveillance, forcing claimants to submit to its authority, even if they are unsure who is watching them, constantly in fear, with their vulnerabilities all too visible. The message is simple: if you are not one of the lucky ones toiling away, the state is going to make an example of you. Far from a safety net, this is a punishment, and one that tries to break claimants. Therefore, a policy such as a four-day week that reduces the amount of claimants subject to this vindictive, callous and heartless ‘benefit’ can only be a good thing. 

Finally, the four-day working week would help decarbonize the economy. With only 11 years left to prevent irreversible damage from climate change, the imperative for action has never been greater.  A recent study found if hours worked are cut by a day our carbon footprint would decline by 36.6%.  Researchers at the University of Reading asked business leaders how a four-day week would affect their commuting habits, with workers estimating they would drive 55.7m fewer miles per week.  Further, another recent analysis of US states found a convincing positive relationship between the number of hours worked and their carbon emissions. The more hours worked, the bigger the carbon footprint. It is therefore clear that reducing a day’s work will assist with decarbonizing the economy. Beyond this, working less can help reduce the work-spend cycle. More leisure time is a positive end in itself, providing time to reconnect with oneself, loved ones, and passions, providing a sense of purpose and wholeness that is unrelated to toiling for financial gain. 

As Marx wrote, the realm of freedom begins only when work, or the realm of necessity, ceases. When pursuing this freedom also helps to address the impending environmental catastrophe the arguments in favour of persisting with the present failing approach seem even weaker.

Overwork in an era of mass unemployment must end. Workers being overworked and stressed out while others are underemployed is illogical and unjust. Ecological disaster, a mental health crisis and a productivity crisis make the need for a four-day week more urgent than ever. A recent cross party group urged Rishi Sunak to consider a four-day week “as a powerful tool to recover from this crisis”. This is something that needs to be continually pushed by Labour as we re-enter another national lockdown during winter, when mental health crises often become more severe. Far from the Trade Union Congress declaring this a realistic goal for ‘this century’,  it is a realistic goal for the present, with its implementation more urgent than ever.