I think the author raises some good points but, on balance, I am skeptical of any piece that leans so heavily on classical Marxist assumptions about the origin of conflict.
Just as our own time is beset by cultural Marxists who reduce the world’s problems to a simple interplay of racial and gender forces, so the previous generation did so with class. The author of this article appears to fall into the latter, “classical Marxism”, bracket.
What I find amazing is that Marxist explanations are used over and over again even when they are shown to empirically fail.
As an example close to my heart: Ian Smith, the last Rhodesian prime minister, assumed, as did his Apartheid South African counterpart, BJ Vorster, some years later, that the best chance of stability post-independence was to create a black middle class that would have the same class interests as the white ruling class. With class interests aligned, they imagined a world where the rule of law would remain in tact and where people could still use the basic engine of capitalism with secure property rights.
But during Zimbabwe’s land reform program, not a single white farmer I knew lost his land to a poor person. In each case he lost it to a member of his own class, someone who had a son at the same school as him, who went to the same sports clubs as him and who attended the same church as him. By Marx’s rationale, the farmers I knew should have lost their land to a spontaneously uprising peasant class.
My experience of South Africa is the same: the biggest racists are not lowly workers and the unemployed, but the ANC elites who send their children to expensive schools and who rub shoulders with the settler class they both revere and despise. This group of people are, once again, turning out not to be blind vectors of their class, as Marx envisaged.
Avowedly anti-marxist as both Vorster and Smith were, they nevertheless unwittingly bought into Marx’s key assumptions about class, which I think shows just how pervasive Marx’s world view was and is – even those who loathe him (then and now) still see the world through his lens.
It appears that, no matter how many times Marxist explanations turn out to have weak predictive power, they are still trotted out at every available opportunity, as this article demonstrates.
There is no consideration, for example, of other obvious drivers of wage stagnation, such as mass migration.

There are many more factors that could (or should) be considered outside of a simple class explanation.

I wonder if there’s a way to make a spectator sport out of watching the truly bizarre, contorted theories these guys come up with to attribute every ill to capitalism and big corporations. There could be scores, judges and awards even.

Inflation was entirely predictable. Economic history is littered with lessons as to what happens when governments attempt uncontrolled spending and free money. The 80s were a case study in how to solve this – painfully, but successfully. Argentina, Zimbabwe, Venezuela are case studies in what not to do.
Even Marx recognised that all money is ‘labour value’. I do something for you, then you do something for me that we agree is equivalent in terms of work – money represents the debt between us. To make it easier we use money-tokens to facilitate the trade. When the government expands the number of money-tokens, it devalues outstanding labour debts, and forces prices up to balance labour and tokens. This is where we are. Too many tokens, not enough productive labour. This is then magnified by supply-side shortages in energy – the core multiplier for productivity.
The proven steps necessary to curb inflation are those learnt in the 1980s. Money supply has to be controlled, and the cost of money has to go up while supporting this with incentives for supply-side expansion and increasing economic productivity. The most effective way of doing this is fast, cheap improvements in energy production and increased efficiencies from more effective infrastructure. In the 80-90s it was gas, computers and global supply chains (cheap foreign labour). Now it is likely to be nuclear power, mass automation and autonomous vehicles.

The author points rightly to supply side disruption owing to worldwide lockdowns as the core cause of the current inflation. But minimises the effect of uncontrolled and irresponsible spending in response by governments intent on keeping power. Petrol on fire.

How then can he argue from any standpoint but an ideological one that price controls are a solution to the problem? Even the most cursory understanding of economics tells us that they will discourage investment and cap or reduce supply. Again, petrol on fire.

Unbridled mass immigration was the solution to the labour shortages of the last 20 years, produced by a most unholy alliance between large companies and their lobbyists on the one hand, and “progressive” politicians and the legions of social justice warriors lined up behind them on the other, egged on by a fully compliant mainstream media. This is why they continue to pay little more than lip service to the concerns of low wage labour, who are those most affected.

No mention of massive illegal immigration encouraged by elites in an article about capital’s battle with labor.

No mention of Climate Change or Green New Deals in an article about progressive policy imperatives and energy costs.

The author repeats Joe Biden’s simplistic, self-serving and self-contradictory demands to producers:

“I must tax your profits and you in return must produce more for less to help my re-election.”

Would anyone, including the author, work harder and risk more for a smaller paycheck?

Want to strengthen labor’s hand, Mr. Fazi? Restrict immigration and repatriate all foreign nationals.

If you don’t think that is a death blow aimed at neoliberalism’s heart, then I’ve got a bunch of free airplane tickets to Rwanda to sell you.

“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

It’s interesting how UnHerd journalists are so good at writing cultural pieces and so bad at writing financial ones. I think it is because markets are proactive whereas critique is reactive.

While it’s good that “Unherd” publishes opinions that are under-represented in the mainstream media, one of the reasons that publishing these essays is a social good is that we can knock bad ideas on the head.
The authors opinion that oil firms are using Ukraine as “an excuse” to raise prices is silly. If oil firms can raise prices, they will. They don’t need “an excuse” for public relations purposes.
The author is confused by the fact that the oil companies are making more money. But that’s what happens when your product becomes scarce, because the scarcity allows you to sell the oil at higher prices. The author presumably wonders why the oil companies don’t choose to make less money – surely, he implies, if the oil companies had the public good in view, energy prices could remain low and oil companies would make no extra profit? But that wouldn’t work, because that would create an energy shortage, as in, people would try to buy more oil than was available for delivery.
The “oil company conspiracy” line is a bad one. Unfortunately, it was pushed by the White House itself (by the lauded former Press Secretary, Psaki).
The author also writes about how recent price rises are a result of supply-side issues. This is correct. However, he uses this to imply that there are no demand-side issues. This might be true in some places, but it isn’t true in the United States. The USA saw high inflation some time before the rest of the world, and it also saw both a scatter-gun approach to pandemic spending under both Administrations (eg. a $1000 cheque to everybody, several times, rather than focusing funds on the most affected), and an unprecedented stimulus bill once the Democrats came to power in early 2021. Even pro-Democrat media sources came to agree that there was a connection. Moreover, the USA should be amongst the economies most sheltered from the coming economic crisis – it consumes home-grown grain and home-derived energy – yet its inflation is as high as that abroad.
As a final remark, the author writes that food prices are rising only because speculators are hoarding grain. This is not an historically unprecedented theory, because, of course, when high prices are expected, speculators do hoard grain. However, the belief that shortages are due to hoarding has historically led to disaster – for instance, this was the British theory about the cause of the Great Famine in Bengal in 1942. It was essentially untrue, but it provided an excuse for inaction. The fact is, that if speculators are driving up prices for no reason, then the speculators themselves will lose money, for they will possess unsold grain, and when they all sell together, there will be a bread crash.

That’s some tall tale, right there. Maybe you’re right…OR maybe central banks and policy makers move too slowly and then move too much, and then reverse too slowly and too much. Again. And again.
The idea that this is all The Man sticking it to the downtrodden is as Trumpian as it gets. The Man doesn’t make bank breaking down the downtrodden. That is what The Man has theology for.

Very interesting and well put

To be fair Thomas this is either an under researched article or you have your own agenda … to ignore QE and before that the loosening of mortgage terms under the Blair Govt is wilfull negligence.
Asset prices, along with taxes this last 22 years have gone inexorably upwards.
If we are to protecting working people from inflation and taxes then we have to reduce the size of the state and the the iniquitous tax levels working people are having to pay … aka 20% and over 50% on fuel … I could go on but you get my point?

Thanks for drawing attention to the outstanding analyses on these issues by good Servaas Storm. And yes, there’s no question that back in the 70’s elites exploited inflation to hurt and weaken the working class. Michał Kalecki had foresaw that happening as far as 1943 – Keynesian policy would lead to the working class gaining a record share of profits, also gaining excess power and losing their deference for their “betters”.

But it’s a totally different situation today. As per your own Storm source, workers now “almost completely lack the power to redistribute product market rents from capital owners to labor”. The working class are already suffering intensly,its been recently reported for example that 9% of parents say their kids have started self harming due to the stress caused by the cost of living crisis. Granted, recent studies have found the modern upper class may be the least altruistic in at least some countries, but there’s no reason to think they’ve developed the kind of sadism to needlessly inflict more pain on working class people. A perfect storm of events & conditions have came together to create this crisis, but most unlikely intentionality is a significant one, IMO.

Of course, conservatives are always going to make self serving nonsense arguments like claiming stimulus packages are a major cause, but that’s a different thing, and doesn’t mean they’re intentionally trying to make things worst for working people.

GREAT article T. Fazi. I am 63. Surviving this Stagflation via retirement in Sun City AZ and my modest fixed income (about 27K yearly) is comfortable and financially stable because I owe very little (7K credit card debt – less than a third of credit available) AND EVERYTHING IS OWNED. So, in the Biden Recession we (I live with and care for my 84-year-old Mother) a little less than $1K a month – as opposed to $700 a month when DJ Trump was in charge. We also have sizeable – less than a million but several 6 figures – and – two properties over 200 sq ft – with acreage – in this inflated real estate market.
I am a conservative, a Christian, and an unabashed unionist.
My grandfather was a coal miner who lived the coal wars of western Pa starting as a child worker (coal sorter born 1908) who escaped the mines via a broken back in a cave in (which by the way was rumored to be deliberate – managements version of ‘negotiations’) via self-taught (in those days recovering from a broken back did not include Pell Grant eligibility) car mechanic – which he parlayed eventually into a 30-year post WWII UAW career and (with a modest UMW – because he started non-union but ended Union) very good defined benefits pension.
My father – his youngest of three sons – was a Pipefitter local 120 in Cleveland Ohio- again 30+ yrs – excellent pension. (Both his brothers were likewise union – one a Machinist – the other Telecommunications – AT&T including once entering management – and each had 20 and 30+ years to their careers and again – DEFINED PENSION BENEFITS)
I will tell you as an educated ‘hillbilly’ with a much more intimate connection to prior extended family that far exceeds J.D. Vance’s storied recollections – that nothing has destroyed the American Middle class as has the death of American Labor.
The cost of that debris field is what the current generation is awakening to – and it is fomenting a populism to rival the last great such uprising (which in large measure led to the Unionism that underwrote America’s post WWII prosperity – in my humble view).
I am unsurprised few see the connection to the 1880’s rather than the 1980’s Americans are coping with today – because as a dedicated Unionist I have had a substantive conversation on par with this fine article with as many as 3 people in the past 20 years. Maybe five.
Unionism is that dead in America today.
In my view Unionism – effective Unionism of the kind that helped deliver America from the deprivations of the Great world-wide Depression of the 30’s and the kind that helped build and innovate us to victory in WWII – that kind of effective unionism ended the day the post Bobby Kennedy (the real Bobby Kennedy – not the deified ‘saint’ Bobby that died running for President in ’68) Justice Department managed to put James Riddle Hoffa in jail.
It is so dead that there is not even a hint of a memory of how important it once was when delivering the opportunity for prosperity – not the guarantee of it – which is unfortunately what the remaining bastardized form still around -the Teachers cabal and the Government ‘Pension plans’ (Gangs really) sadly bestows.
Whether one reads Thomas Piketty or Charles Murray or any number of astute minds on similar subjects – there is an unmistakable stench to the similarities of the Post Civil War economics that beleaguered a then prosperous American middle class – most being of the yeoman farmer sect Jefferson and the many other Founders underwrote with their version of constitutional government – as well as the post Reagan/Thatcher revival of robust American Style Democratically Ruled Capitalism.
Overwhelmingly in that equation Labor – the primary (next to of course the right to believe and worship God) RIGHT IN THE RIGHTS OF MAN – has been utterly destroyed – reduced as I mentioned to the equivalent in America to the old version of ‘company’ unions – unions that even FDR dismissed as unworkable folly – that being the government union.
The food and energy inflation we now suffer (and is far worse on your side of the Atlantic) is on par with what my Great Grandfather (mothers’ side) described – as a child not only of the post-Civil War period – but a far worse disaster for him and his farm family – that being the panic of 1978.
And the truth of the matter – the one issue I will take up with You Mr. Fazi – is that the ruling elites today don’t deserve the credit you imply – because it is less about diabolical intent and more about abject incompetence and arrogant self-dealing – much more 1914 than 1898 if you will.
A lot less Sir Robert Peel or even Lord Halifax than Atlee and here in America President’s Buchanan or Harding.
And come November we shall find out just how much fight really still exists in the voting population here. Or wither there is any inclination to revive what it was Unions once stood for and worked to accomplish.
Thank you again for such fine work.