The finance curse is devouring the UK


Prem Sikka ·

Left Foot Forward

JUNE 17, 2026

The finance industry now controls significant parts of the UK economy. It extracts wealth, destroys jobs and weakens economic resilience. Governments go to extraordinary lengths to promote and protect the finance industry, whilst neglecting other productive areas, such as manufacturing.

Obsession with Finance

Not so long ago, finance industry was mainly about loans, overdrafts, debit/credit cards, insurances and pensions, which we are all accustomed to. But investors wanted more. So, banks gambled on financial horses and committed frauds. The result was a secondary banking crash in the mid-1970s. The state bailed out banks, insurance and property companies. Governments remained besotted with the finance industry. The UK had a banking crisis in every decade since the 1970s with entities such as Johnson Matthey, Barlow Clowes, Barings, Bank of Credit and Credit International and British & Commonwealth Bank making headlines.

In 1986, the government deregulated finance. People continued to be ripped-off by mis-selling of endowment mortgages, investment bonds, split-capital investment trusts, precipice bonds, interest rate swaps, self-invested personal pensions, payment protection insurance, pensions, and other products. Reckless lending, speculation and low capital requirements became the mantra for rejuvenating the economy. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns led the stampede. Building societies such as Alliance and Leicester, Bradford & Bingley, HBOS and Northern Rock joined the chase for easy profits and converted to banks. All collapsed and in 2007-08 the crisis rapidly spread to the entire economy.

The state provided £1,162bn (£133bn cash and 1,029bn guarantees) to rescue banks, and £895bn of quantitative easing to stimulate financial markets. The economy is yet to recover. The average real wage has hardly changed since 2008. Between 1995 and 2015, the finance industry made a negative contribution of £4,500bn to the UK economy, effectively wiping out 2.5 years of gross domestic product.

After the crash some reforms were introduced, including higher capital requirements, closer monitoring by regulators, ring-fencing of retail from speculative banking and a cap of bankers’ bonuses. This was not accompanied by any attempt to rethink finance even though some 40% of the world’s dirty money is laundered through London and UK Crown dependencies. Governments permitted unregulated shadow banking, which includes private equity and hedge funds, to expand and devour the economy.

Devouring the Economy

Private equity takes over existing businesses with finance from banks, insurance companies, pension funds and wealthy individuals seeking higher returns. It acquires control but injects little share capital. Takeover targets are loaded with the secured debt, often routed through opaque offshore entities, and are expected to pay it off. Financial engineering, asset-stripping, staffing and wage cuts, dumping liabilities and tax abuse are key elements of the business model. When businesses are collapsed, private equity and banks, as secured creditors, walk away with most of the proceeds from the sale of the business assets, leaving little for unsecured creditors and pension schemes.

The list of private equity victims is long, and includes entities such as Bernard Matthews, Body Shop, Byron Burger, Casual Dining, Cath Kidson, Claire’s, Comet. Debenhams, Flybe, Four Seasons Health Care, Homebase, HMV, Maplin, Monarch Airlines, The Original Factory Shop, Payless Shoes, Poundworld, Silentnight, Southern Cross, Thomas Cook, TM Lewin and Toys “R” Us. Thousands of jobs have been lost, creditors have not been paid, supply chains have been destroyed, workers have lost some of their pension rights, town centres have been decimated and the country’s tax base has been eroded.

Private equity now controls large swathes of the UK economy including AA, ASDA, Bella Italia, the Blackpool Tower, Center Parcs, Legoland, Morrisons, Travelodge and Zizi. It has extensive stake in UK airports, seaports, hospitals, care homes, law and accountancy firms, football teams, housing, GP surgeries, veterinary services, dental services, motorway service stations, energy networks and water companies.

Thames Water never recovered from its 2006-2017 ownership by a private equity consortium led by Macquarie Group. It extracted annual returns of between 15.5% and 19% a year by dumping raw sewage in rivers and by neglecting investment. To date, Thames Water has paid out £10.4bn in dividends since privatisation in 1989. Despite inflation-busting price rises, it has not built a single new reservoir since 1989. Despite changes in ownership, Thames Water continues with the extractive business model. It is deeply embedded in the water industry. Private equity also has a stake in Northumbrian Water, Southern Water and Yorkshire Water, and the entire sector survives by exploiting customers.

Financialization of Humanity

To appease the finance industry, governments have financialised humanity. Care and compassion have become profit centres and commodities.

Instead of expanding the capacity of the National Health Service (NHS), governments have handed contracts for eye-care to private equity-controlled entities, making profit of between 32% and 43% from NHS work.

With the NHS dentistry in disarray, people are turning to the private sector. Private equity is making inroads into the £8.4bn sector. The initial consultation fee has increased by 23% in the last two years, and the price of a simple tooth extraction has increased by 32%. Gross profit for private equity-owned My Dentist, PortmanDentex and Rodericks Dental, and Bupa Dental Services, rose by 20% year-on-year between 2023 and 2024. Profit margins are in the range of 20%-30%.

84% of children’s homes and over 80% of adult care homes in England are run by for-profit entities, increasingly controlled by financial investors. Private equity is a key player in the sector. Around £1.5bn is extracted from the care home sector each year in the form of returns to investors. The quality of care is poor.

Since 2015, over 40 fostering agencies in England providing homes for vulnerable children have been taken over by private equity companies. The fees are double the cost of local authority placements. Profit margins for these private agencies average around 21%.

Six companies backed by private equity control 60% of the UK’s £6.3bn pet-care market. Average vet prices rose by 63% between 2016 and 2023, well above the rate of inflation. Vets working for large companies are under pressure to hit profit targets by offering repeat appointment and unnecessary treatment at exorbitant prices.

Gifts from the State

Governments bend laws to support the finance industry. Most of the post-2008 banking reforms have been reversed. Shadow banking remains unregulated and almost everything is financialised.

Millions of motorists have been mis-sold car purchase loans. As the case for possible £44bn compensation reached the Supreme Court, Chancellor Rachel Reeves made an unprecedented intervention. The Treasury sought the Court’s permission to contribute evidence to argue that high compensation could “cause considerable economic harm.” Such lobbying was rejected as the Supreme Court is solely concerned about interpretation of law. Undeterred, the Chancellor considered emergency legislation to shield lenders from claims. Ultimately, the court judgment was not severe.

Tax laws are bent to appease the finance industry. Wages are taxed at marginal rates of 20% to 45%, and earners also pay national insurance. In opposition Chancellor Rachel Reeves said that these arrangements should apply to private equity bosses too. However, the promised reform has not been delivered. The income of private equity bosses continues to be taxed as a capital gain, with maximum tax rate of 34.1%. No national insurance is charged.

Banking frauds are swept under dust-laden carpets. HBOS frauds, dating back to 2002-2007, provide an example. The Financial Conduct Authority, the Serous Fraud Office and the City of London Police were unwilling to prosecute. In February 2017, the Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner decided to prosecute and secured six criminal convictions, including a senior ex-HBOS banker. Despite that there has been no detailed regulatory investigation. The Commissioner said, “I am convinced the cover-up goes right up to Cabinet level. And to the top of the City.” In this vacuum, Lloyds Bank (owner of HBOS since 2008-2009) appointed former High Court judge Dame Linda Dobbs to investigate and publish a report by 2018. No report has been published and ministers dodge questions in parliament. Victims await compensation which could run over £1bn.

The Financial Services and Markets Bill now weakens the role of the Financial Ombudsman Service to secure redress for complainants and imposes a ten-year limit within which complainants can secure redress. Compliance with rules rather than whether companies acted reasonably and fairly is the proposed rule.

Finally …

The above is brief indication of the capture of the UK state by the finance industry and its consequences. The economy has been devoured. Low wages and tax abuse have been normalised. Town centres have become economic deserts. Wealth extraction is prioritised. Unprecedented resources are devoted to financial engineering and tax abuse. The UK has over 405,000 professionally qualified accountants, the highest per capita in the world and more than the rest of Europe combined. Inevitably, other sectors are denied graduate talent.

Appeasement of the finance industry hasn’t delivered the promised investment in productive assets. For the last 30 years, the UK has languished at or near the bottom of the G7 and OECD league of investment. When the financial bubble bursts, large tracts of the economy will be washed away and there won’t be enough money to bailout the infected sectors.

Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.

Op-Ed

Trump’s Violent Memes Expose Long-Simmering Truths About US Imperialism

Trump’s white nationalist revanchism is on display as he turns state violence into entertainment.

By Michelle Chen ,

Truthout

May 31, 2026

It seemed on brand for our meme-obsessed President that the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury with an epic video mashup. While Trump never bothered to articulate a real justification for waging war on Iran, he gestured toward a righteous mission with a montage of dramatic violent scenes, featuring heroic and antiheroic characters from Braveheart to Walter White of “Breaking Bad,” spliced like a Hollywood trailer under a banner proclaiming “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” The cinematic celebration of American “justice” came about a week after about 155 people, mostly children, were killed by a U.S. strike on a school in Minab, in a spate of bombings aimed at schools and hospitals across Iran.

The valorization of military power as a force of justice has always colored the nation’s imperial imaginary. Around 130 years ago, Puck magazine promoted the Spanish-American War to readers with “The Cuban Melodrama,” a cartoon depicting a gallant Uncle Sam in a feathered cap and star-print pantaloons shielding a damsel in distress with a pro-U.S.-annexation flag emblazoned on her hip, while her swarthy Spanish colonial master scowled behind a bandit’s cloak. People in the U.S. continue to see Cuba through media spectacle, detached from the reality of the war back then, and from the cruel U.S. economic siege of the island now. The White House has fired off many such spectacles to glorify or sanitize U.S. and Israeli military operations, including an action-movie–style video depicting the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and a grotesquely surreal AI-slop showcase of a genocide-ravaged Gaza rebranded as Palestine’s Vegas Strip.

The aestheticization of military brutality is not limited to warfare abroad. The administration has posted propaganda videos of immigration raids in Black and Brown communities, lionizing the ferocity with which ICE agents are tearing apart families.

Never miss another story

Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day.

Email*









Trump’s treatment of state violence as entertainment speaks to a longstanding animating force behind U.S. jingoism and militarism: the lust for empire has been as much about projecting dominance as it is about grappling with the U.S.’s internal racial and class tensions and the surrounding infrastructure of oppression.
American Injustice

Trump’s boorish war cheerleading recalls past symbols of U.S. empire as providence, a political and media narrative that lashed the nation’s fate to the expansion of slavery, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands under the halo of “Manifest Destiny.” It also evokes the image the nation has long projected as a crusader for “freedom” while imposing its economic and political hegemony abroad. The current warmongering overseas accompanied by domestic anti-immigrant crackdowns represent twin faces of settler colonial violence, both constitutive of the nation’s founding myth: that the U.S.’s destiny is to grow — to expand westward, to open new markets, or, as Trump mused about Venezuela and Iran, to “take the oil.”

Related Story
Op-Ed |
War & Peace
Trump Has Made the US War Machine a Spectacle – and It’s Spectacularly Unpopular
Trump has brought the full extent of the war machine out into the open. Let’s channel public anger into organizing.
By Khury Petersen-Smith & Azadeh Shahshahani , Truthout/InTheseTimesMarch 3, 2026

As historian Nikhil Pal Singh noted in a recent talk with fellow historian Greg Grandin (a talk hosted by Democratic Socialists of America Academy in New York City that I helped to organize), Trump’s brand of imperialism departs from the Cold War “liberal” order, which nominally enshrined civil rights and racial equality in a framework of egalitarian, free-market capitalism. Instead, Trump pushes a revanchist, white supremacist ideology that the U.S. is what Singh described as “a nation based upon a particularistic ethno-racial conception of heritage or ancestry.”

Fueling Trump’s neoimperialist adventures, Singh explained, is a drive to “revalorize white supremacy as the basis of U.S. citizenship.” The White House and the MAGA movement have channeled their white nationalist fervor into “a project of mass deportation,” to roll back the whole edifice of civil rights legality” that buttressed the liberal ideal of “a nation of equals.” But in breaking from the veneer of egalitarian democracy, Trump lets the mask slip on the brutality underwriting the American Dream.

While the conventional narrative myth of U.S. society emphasizes inclusive democracy, the ideal of liberal values has always belied a paradox of colonial and imperial oppression. As Grandin explained, “what we think of as liberalism, all the great progressive advances … has all been in many ways achieved through a trade off with empire, with expansion. Andrew Jackson’s extension of suffrage of white men was tied to indigenous dispossession. … During the Cold War, the expansion of civil rights was a tradeoff for support of containment [of Communism].”

The prosperity that came with industrialization and global commerce was premised on the entrenchment of wage capitalism and the exploitation of Black and migrant labor, which in turn paralleled the marginalization and eventual exclusion of “undesirable” foreigners who were deemed biologically and morally deficient. Today, the perception of immigrants, particularly those who are not white or Christian, as dangerous social parasites, is key to the Trump administration’s narrative of “securing” the border. Sidestepping the fact that the U.S. has in many cases exacerbated the “migrant crisis” by political intervention and economic destabilization of countries in the Global South, Trump adviser Stephen Miller warned that “migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
The Long History of U.S. Nativism

Since the 19th century, the systematic exclusion and criminalization of “aliens” has been integral to the enforcement of the boundaries of whiteness (even though the category derives its power largely from its arbitrariness), giving rise to the security apparatus built along the Southern border, along with restrictive ethnic quotas that privileged white Western Europeans.

The globalization of white nationalism under Trump and other right-wing leaders reflects the enduring concept of “herrenvolk democracy,” (a reference to the Nazi “Master Race” idea) which frames democratic rights as the province of a racial in-group. In politics and culture, historian Cristina Beltrán writes, “herrenvolk democracy was a mass-based, participatory endeavor, reproduced and administered from both above and below.”

Both herrenvolk nativism and imperialism derive from the overarching concept of a nation built on the freedom of some to subjugate others, whether they live down the street or across an ocean. In enforcing the boundaries of empire and the internal social borders of race and class, a pattern of dehumanization through institutionalized violence has spanned the globe, extending from the Black Codes and racial pogroms in the post–Civil War South, to the U.S.’s first colony in Asia a generation later. It was in the Philippine-American War that the modern torture technique of waterboarding was first routinely used by U.S. soldiers on Filipino people before becoming an officially authorized practice in the U.S. “war on terror.” During the U.S. occupation of the archipelago, during which U.S. troops committed many acts of torture and sexual abuse, a soldier wrote that the land “won’t be pacified until the [anti-Black slur] are killed off like Indians.” Invoking an anti-Black slur to refer to Filipinos, he seems subconsciously to grasp that he is fighting a much deeper war, which traces its lineage from the cleansing of North America of its Indigenous inhabitants, to the enslavement of Africans, and to the suppression of so-called “savages” in newly colonized land across the Pacific.

Under Trump, the crusade to bolster U.S. hegemony continues with an added boost of racial panic. The Trump administration is pushing the narrative that white men’s dominion is existentially endangered: the white share of the population is shrinking amid broader demographic shifts, while the U.S.’s superpower status appears to be waning, at least in Trump’s narrative of populist grievance, stoking paranoia about national decline and “white replacement.”

The fusion of authoritarian repression with imperial power dynamics is evident in the chaotic expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a paramilitary-like force. In recruiting some 12,000 new agents, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has lowered training standards systematically, reducing the length of its course for new recruits from 22 weeks to just eight weeks and centering the curriculum on “more tactical and operational drills” rather than studying the immigration laws they are supposed to be enforcing. The barrage of social media posts vilifying immigrants as alleged criminals and flashy videos of vicious ICE raids formed the backdrop to DHS’s claims that the killings of two individuals during protests in Minnesota, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were somehow justified. The brazen aggression, directed in this case at white citizens, suggests that a so-called imperial “boomerang” may be in play, in which the practices of right-wing authoritarian militarism and repression in the Global South, often supported covertly by the U.S., are now mirrored within the homeland.
Anti-Imperialism From Within

Yet the historical resonance of Trump’s domestic and international tyranny points to a history of anti-imperialist, anti-fascist resistance from within. The Black Power and Third World movements of the late 1960s understood the U.S.’s racial hierarchy as an imperial project and oppressed communities as internally colonized peoples.

As the Black radical organizer Kwame Ture (who then went by the name Stokely Carmichael) explained in his 1967 address to the Organization of Latin American Solidarity in Havana, Black power was the domestic battlefront against a white supremacist empire. “Our people are a colony within the United States,” he told the gathering of liberation movement activists from across Latin America. “You are colonies outside the United States. It is more than a figure of speech to say that the Black communities in America are the victims of white imperialism and colonial exploitation.” But the connective tissue of oppression could also be a source of empowerment, he added, saying:


Black power means that we see ourselves as part of the Third World; that we see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world…. We must, for example, ask ourselves: When Black people in Africa begin to storm Johannesburg, when Latin Americans revolt, what will be the role of the United States and that of African Americans?

What would a movement for democracy and self-determination look like for working-class and oppressed communities in this country? Such a movement might emerge from the grassroots coalitions and ideological connections being forged as communities confront ICE assaults on immigrants and constitutional rights.

The Sunrise Movement, for example, incorporates ICE resistance into a global agenda for environmental and economic justice, connecting the crackdown on immigrants to the fossil fuel industry’s global expansionism. The organization targets a “self-sustaining cycle” in which fossil fuel corporations collaborate with governments to pursue mineral extraction, economic coercion, imperialist expansion abroad, and the corruption of democracy at home. Under the convergence of state and corporate oppression, “extraction drives instability, and enforcement manages the consequences.”

The United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers Union of America (UE) — which has for years organized cross-border labor solidarity campaigns — has condemned Trump’s assaults on immigrant communities within a broader critique of U.S. foreign policy and trade policy, especially as migration is oftena response to political and economic crises fomented by Washington. In its recent statement calling for a pro-worker foreign policy, the union argued, “The biggest threat to the people of the U.S. is not Iran, China, or military invasions from other countries, but a rapacious military-industrial complex, which fails to provide living-wage jobs, affordable healthcare, education, housing, and necessary social services…. Further, we must recognize our responsibility, as workers in the U.S., to workers elsewhere who are affected by U.S. foreign and military policies.”

What responsibility do denizens of an empire bear toward subjects of neocolonial oppression, whether they are being attacked abroad or exploited at home? Amid the wars raging inside and outside U.S. borders, working-class communities are realizing that the fight against empire starts at home, and the homeland itself must be liberated from the imperial framework behind its myth of liberal democracy. Turning away from brutal spectacles of “Justice the American Way,” we can start to envision a society built not on dominion, but on equity and dignity for all.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Michelle Chen  is a contributing editor at Dissent Magazine, and a contributing writer at The Nation, In These Times and Truthout. She is also a co-producer of the “Asia Pacific Forum” podcast and Dissent Magazine’s “Belabored” podcast, and teaches history at the City University of New York. Follow her on Twitter: @meeshellchen.

Trump 'dementia' claims fly amid 'completely insane' posting spree: 'Nonstop nuttery'

David McAfee
May 30, 2026
RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump reacts while sitting next to the President of Poland Karol Nawrocki during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 3, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder


Donald Trump lit up Truth Social on Saturday afternoon with a stream of posts that left onlookers across the political spectrum questioning his state of mind, ranging from a drone port rendering on top of the White House to an AI image of himself appearing to blow his nose on an American flag.

The spree drew immediate reaction from all corners of social media sites. "Trump's Truth Social posting over the last hour or so is completely bats--- insane," independent journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X. "Get a load of this nonstop nuttery."

In a later post, Rupar declared, "Trump’s behavior on social media today is so unhinged even by his standards that I can’t help but wonder what the doctors really told him the other day. This is a deeply unwell person."

Among the posts, Trump shared attacks on judges, criticisms of musical performers who bailed on his event, and a rendering of what he called a "DronePort" on the roof of his proposed White House ballroom. Regarding the latter, Bill Kristol, the veteran Republican commentator, noted the structure would also include a bunker underneath. "It's not just a childish extravagance," Kristol wrote. "It will be a kind of military encampment. All the more reason, obviously, for Congress to stop it."

Trump also posted a meme depicting Rep. Lauren Boebert and several other Republican lawmakers in a vehicle captioned "GET IN LOSER, WE'RE GOING LOSING" — this despite the fact that Boebert had recently pushed for the release of the Epstein files, a cause popular with the MAGA base.

Separately, Trump posted an AI-generated watercolor image of himself clutching the American flag to his face in a pose that critics immediately compared to using it as a tissue.

He also reshared an old post of himself declaring, "I just want to stop the world from killing itself," which prompted the PatriotTakes account to reply: "Says the guy who bombed a girls elementary school."

Political analyst Molly Jong-Fast offered a dry summary: "He's probably fine, right?"

Former Ambassador Dan Shapiro kept it simple: "It's a beautiful day in Washington. Wish he would go outside and touch grass."

Spanish-language commentator Dr. Mario Muñoz offered a blunt diagnosis of the afternoon's activity. "The gentleman with dementia who lives in the White House is bored," he wrote on X, according to a translation.

Melanie D'Arrigo, a progressive activist and former congressional candidate, similarly connected the dots between the posting spree and broader questions about Trump's fitness for office. "When a President is posting insane stuff like this, it really doesn't matter how many dementia tests he passes to tell that he's not mentally fit for office," she wrote.

'Such a baby': Trump ridiculed after 'crash out' over Kennedy Center 'narcissistic injury'

David McAfee
May 30, 2026 

RAW STORY


President Donald Trump points a finger during a meeting with Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney (not pictured) in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 7, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Donald Trump's Saturday Truth Social spiral drew swift mockery from critics across the political spectrum, with a prominent journalist declaring the president was "really crashing out" and a former Republican congressman summing it up in three words.



Trump said Saturday:

"We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before! It would have also been nice to see a Republican/Democrat union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is broken, unsafe, and $busted, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name 'TRUMP' despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (obfuscation anyone?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED."

Aaron Rupar, who has built a large following tracking Trump's online behavior, quoted Trump's lengthy rant calling for a MAGA rally to replace the America 250 concert and his threats that the Kennedy Center would collapse without him. "Holy s---, Trump is really crashing out," Rupar wrote.

Adam Kinzinger, the former Illinois Republican congressman who voted to impeach Trump and has since become one of his most outspoken GOP critics, had a shorter take. Quoting Rupar's post, Kinzinger wrote simply: "Such a baby."

Author Jennifer Erin Valent chimed in, "His notorious self obsession has reached the stage of derangement, and still, no one seems inclined to do a thing about it. The dereliction of duty in our time is truly staggering."

Academic Karen Piper said, "This is called a narcissistic injury."

The posts came as part of a broader meltdown that included Trump unveiling a drone port rendering for the White House roof, posting an AI image of himself appearing to use the American flag as a tissue, calling Republican allies "losers," and demanding that Judge Christopher Cooper be impeached after the jurist ordered Trump's name removed from the Kennedy Center.

Ban U.S. Gun Production Now!

Seth Sandronsky

May 22, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

The shooting deaths of teen perpetrators and adult victims at the Islamic Center of San Diego, California, recently are horrific. This horror, part of the 121 gun deaths (homicides and suicides) in the U.S. daily, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2024, demands drastic measures. In brief, now is the time to call for an immediate ban on the production of guns stateside.

Decisive action to prevent the chronic problem of firearm deaths in the U.S. is long overdue. How? The answer seems plain as day: ending the for-profit production of guns.

Gun control, while I support it, does not address the root of this problem. Gun production is where the focus belongs, economically and politically. There is no market with politics.

This “hidden abode of production” that Karl Marx writes of in Capital, Volume 1, is the location of making guns, a deadly commodity. Politics is the grease that makes the market move, extracting and exploiting humans and Nature.

Ending the scourge of gun deaths is a left-center-right, or working class, issue. Why? The working class is centrally involved as perpetrators and victims, with an estimated 383,000 employees involved in the firearm industry, from the factory floor to the gun store (direct, supplier and induced), according to the The Firearm Industry Trade Association figures for 2025.

Taxpayers can compensate the 383,000 employees in the firearm industry, earning $89,000 (salaries and benefits) annually, for a total payout of $34 billion. Before you recoil in outrage, recall that President Obama gave $290 billion to bail out the bankers that caused the housing crash and Great Recession (Troubled Asset Relief Program). The TARP bailout is nearly nine times the dollar amount of a firearm industry employee payout.

Consider a related taxpayer expenditure. According to the Costs of War project, and the Climate Solutions Lab, at Brown University: “The costs of the Iran war that started on February 28, 2026 extend well beyond the missiles, bombs, and deployment of personnel and munitions that have totaled upwards of $29 billion thus far.”

Think of the spending impacts of this war on American consumers, according to the Brown University researchers. “As of May 18, 2026, our calculations show that Americans have spent over $40 billion of extra gasoline and diesel costs, above what they had been paying in February.”

Let’s be real. The working class does not control production of guns or goods generally. That productive control resides in the ruling class, if I may use that term, that profits from the labor services of the working class. Class control of production and distribution propels the for-profit system.

Politically, the pro-war two-party system is the main obstacle to a ban on gun production. It’s a morbid symptom of the system of legalized bribery (campaign donations) from the gun lobby (e.g., National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, Second Amendment Foundation). This political economy makes corporations and the wealthy richer via their tight control of the local, state and federal governments.

To this end, an effective strategy for a minority to dominate a majority is to encourage working class hatred of the government. That can and does work, maintaining a dollar-drenched ruling class control of the government for reasons of growing profits and market share. Controlling the economy and polity is key.

The gun lobby calls the shots, economically, politically and thus socially, at the workplace and away from it. However, on the shop floor is where this action begins. This “hidden abode of production” is the place where the making of guns, a deadly commodity, originates.

Controlling guns post-production is assuming what requires explaining. Class control and power over production is where the focus belongs. Politically, the working class needs a party that represents its interests, a gun-free society that benefits Americans on the left, center and right.

The rulers, a demographic minority, have two parties that represent their interests, and it’s time for the majority to have theirs. Demanding a ban on gun production could open the door to that end. The political obstacles are formidable, but what is the alternative if the status quo keeps raising the body count of gun deaths?

Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com

The road to hell — and back

By Phil Hearse

Published 14 May, 2026

Email

Epochal Crisis: the Exhaustion of Global Capitalism 
By William I Robinson 
Cambridge University Press, 2026.

Tune your radio to something like the BBC World Service for a week and you will get a full picture of the global crisis: climate disaster, genocide in Gaza, militarisation and ongoing wars, economic collapse, poverty, political-military repression, and conspicuous consumption by emergent ruling elites within billionaire capitalism. 

For socialists and the left, a key theoretical task is pulling this together to grasp where we are going and, as ever, what is to be done. In his latest book, Epochal Crisis, William I Robinson attempts just that. It is, to put it bluntly, a mind-blowing assessment, in which Robinson claims world capitalism has entered a final, epochal, multidimensional crisis. 

His book is filled with immense insights and written in a very accessible style. If you want to understand what is going on in the world, then read this.

Economic crisis

Underlying the economic crisis lies the workings of fundamental Marxist categories: the overaccumulation of capital, especially by digital capitalist corporations, matched by corresponding underconsumption by vast sectors of the world’s population, especially workers, the marginalised and the “surplus population” — “illegal” workers living on the margins of rich countries, socially or geographically, and integrated into or expelled from the labour force as needed.

It is a its heart a crisis of profitability — a long-term economic crisis that is accelerating. Robinson claims artificial intelligence may be able to hold this off, but just like the dot-com bubble two decades ago, it will not be able to do this for long.

This long-term economic crisis has generated a crisis of social reproduction. All the forms of social stability associated with the “Golden Age” — the period between 1950–75 — are breaking down. In advanced capitalist countries such as Britain, there is a housing crisis, an education crisis, a healthcare crisis, a prison crisis, and the appearance of what Gilbert Achcar, following Antonio Gramsci, calls “morbid symptoms.”1 You could also place in the same category the crisis in the ghettos, the crisis in refugee camps, and the overarching crisis in the Global South.

How can we measure this “crisis of social reproduction”? One way is healthy life expectancy — not the number of years people live, but the number of years they live healthy lives, free from major long-term illness or disability. A recent British report demonstrated an overall decline in healthy life expectancy by an average of two years. It also showed a 20-year gap between the most deprived areas, such as former coalfields, and wealthy areas, such as Richmond, on the southwest fringe of London.

Military accumulation

In a series of overlapping analyses, Robinson show how all these elements generate inevitable systems of control, summed up in the idea of global civil war. Some have objected to this terminology, but the reality of a cascading story of mass repression against the poor and exploited when they resist cannot be denied. This overlaps with another key Robinson category: militarised accumulation.

The past five years have demonstrated militarised accumulation on an epic scale. Donald Trump’s administration has just announced its 2026 “defence” budget: an astounding US$1.4 trillion, which represents a rise of 40%. 

Militarised accumulation includes the rise of military-monster corporations, such as RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Northrop Grumman, which are closely integrated with hi-tech corporations such as Apple and Meta. Four key AI executives have been awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel in the US army: Andrew Bosworth (Meta), Shyam Sankar (Palantir), Kevin Weil (OpenAI) and Bob McGrew (Thinking Machines). 

These awards are far from purely symbolic. They represent a deep-seated integration of the military and computing companies through cloud data storage, surveillance, target acquisition, weapons design and logistics. You can see all this in action in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and a host of countries targeted by US-made drones and missiles.

So, the epochal crisis finds expression in wars and domestic repression all over the planet. The boosting of domestic repression agencies aimed at immigrant populations and refugees is also a fundamental aspect of the war on unruly populations. ICE agents raiding US cities and terrorising immigrant communities are the most vivid example of this process.

Fascism

Epochal economic and social crises come bundled with political crises. State repression both gives rise to and is a product of the era of neofascism. Modern fascism strongly opposes climate science. As the example of the Trump regime shows, neofascism is a major obstacle to fighting climate change.

We are now in the epoch of climate catastrophe. In the next five years, we are likely to have at least one year where the global average exceeds 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. A devastating 2 degrees above pre-industrial averages would unleash major social catastrophes on a dystopian scale. 

If this happens, waves of climate refugees would leave the Middle East, Western Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa for Europe.

Tipping points

We should keep in mind that, on the economic front, key tipping points may be caused by developments “outside” the economy. Such was the case with the 1974–75 recession, the result of an oil shock caused by the Arab-Israeli war, which ultimately crashed the Keynesian welfare state and mixed-economy Fordist regime and eventually ushering in neoliberalism.

We are living through a period where another 2007–08-style stock market crash is highly likely, but this time much worse. That is because the 2007–08 crash was overcome by swamping the banks with quantitative easing, with Britain and the United States in particular accumulating gigantic debts so that banks could survive. The huge debt overhang was never paid off: US public debt is now more than $38 trillion and British debt is £2.88 trillion.

A new major banking or financial crash could see one or more major capitalist powers unable to raise sufficient funds to allow banks to meet their obligations, including the personal savings of millions of customers. 

A “global Argentina” could ensue: customers unable to withdraw cash, credit and debit cards unusable, standing orders failing, people defaulting on mortgage and rent payments, and a purely cash economy emerging. Millions would lose their jobs and social catastrophe would ensue, just as it did in Argentina after the 2001 government bankruptcy.

Resistance

In a global Argentina, all bets would be off as far as political outcomes are concerned. If the world enters such a phase without a strong anti-capitalist and workers’ movement, fascism would run rampant. Most people would be primarily concerned with survival, with little time for politics. 

But as Argentina showed, millions could turn to social and collectivist solutions when capitalism neither wants, nor can, provide the means for them to live.

To be clear, Robinson does not explicitly predict this outcome. But you do not need a weather forecaster to see the dangers and urgent need for ecosocialist alternatives. 

Doubts and elaboration

There is one nagging doubt, however, and one area that needs further elaboration.

The nagging doubt is the use of the word “imperialism.” Robinson thinks that globalised capitalism makes assigning capital to particular national states misleading. Perhaps, but I think he goes too far down this road. 

There are still nationally-based state apparatuses that try to bully weaker states and act as if they are defending national capital. Britain, the United States and China fall into this category. Imperialism has changed, but at the level of inter-state competition, it is alive and well.

The area that needs more elaboration — and the author knows this — is how to build an anti-capitalist, ecosocialist movement on a mass scale. 

Nevertheless, what this book does is vividly outline the terrain of struggle and where we have to fight. The definitive account of how catastrophe capitalism gets turned around will be written in the streets, the factories and in communities.

• 1

  Gilbert Achcar, Morbid Symptoms, Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016). See also his The New Cold War: the US, Russia and China (2025), where Achcar provides a very different take on imperialism to that of Robinson.