Life After Oligarchy

Oligarchs are now our greatest threat and they are out of control. The only hope for the good society is to build a world beyond their reach.

If you read regularly, you won't have missed my growing fears that the oligarchs are going to kill us all. Throughout history, they always do, they're baking endemic risk into our economic system, yet because one nation can't reform them, our best course of action is to walk away, to build a different system.

Last week, I started to map out what that might look like. What follows is hardly a comprehensive vision of a post-oligarchical world, but this is the outline of my thinking. Some of it might sound familiar, some sounds unorthodox. But these ideas aren't weird at all in the face of where we are.

Because what is really strange is what we allow. This is a democracy, and the rich promised that if we let them get richer and richer, they'd share it with us (via that great economic hoax 'trickle down'). Well, they didn't share it with us at all; they just took more and more. And then we let them use their money to persuade us that it was really because of immigrants. Now that is weird.

Mamdani's public grocery stores are not, so let's start there in my trip around the post-oligarchy. The big argument for monopoly capitalism was defined by Robert Bork in the 1970s, who argues that preventing monopoly is perverse because it is efficient, and that's what the economy is meant to do, maximise efficiency.

Great – so the ultimate efficiency would be nationalisation, because that's the ultimate monopoly. So let's take that to its logical extension – what is there in the economy that doesn't greatly benefit from competition? Distribution and intermediation. That is what US capitalism now specialises in – not making the product but acting as the gatekeeper to the product.

Amazon stands between manufacturers and you, extracting from both. Uber stands between drivers and you, extracting from both. AirBnB stands between property owners and guests, extracting from both. Supermarkets are much the same. None of this is really productive; all it does is reallocate wealth to those who already have it and make production economically unsustainable.

So let's move to a different system. Let's take distribution into collective ownership. Ban private couriers and integrate it all into a consistent (and properly paid) delivery system based on saving the Royal Mail. This would be massively more efficient.

Then accept that the means of accessing products are 'infrastructure'. Like a road just takes you somewhere, a supermarket just lets you buy something. Let the producers compete in a fair market on price and quality. Any producer can put their food on the shelves, nationally or locally. People can buy what they want. The supermarket itself would just take a ten per cent 'facilitation' fee or whatever.

Now we have a rapidly expanding economy of high-quality and innovative food producers. So help them out by implementing an externalities tax. The rich get away with what they get away with because while they're counting their profits, we are left with the bill for the mess they leave behind. Ultra Processed Foods kill and cost the NHS a fortune.

Just like environmental harm. Just like social harm. So let's make the producer pay. Let's add a tax to products to capture this real cost. So now our better quality domestically produced food is more competitive, and we have a thriving economy.

Then just tell Amazon they have to unionise and, when they leave, take their premises. Now we have a distribution hub for other goods. Again, let sellers sell. That might mean the actual producers, but it could also mean Scottish sourcing businesses or businesses setting up to commission Chinese manufacturers to make core products. After all, that's what Amazon does now.

So we can have goods and services in a genuinely competitive market, facilitated by treating distribution as infrastructure and using it to drive quality for customers and economic viability for producers.

Now let's deal with the risk of global markets. As I argued last week, buffering saved us from a massive oil supply shock this year. There are aspects of food where competition makes sense, like 'who makes the best jam'. Then some aspects don't – staples. The cost of staples in the supermarkets are pretty steady across different companies, because these are basically global commodity prices.

So set up a national company to buy and stockpile staples. Have a large buffer to which you add more when prices are low and from which you sell directly when they're high. Lentils, beans, pulses, legumes, coffee, olive oil, tea, rice, grains, pasta, noodles, nuts, dried fruits, cereals – these can be stored long term. We could create a system where you guarantee prices a year ahead.

Then let's start making things again. I go on about this a lot, but the reason we don't make things is that we rely almost wholly on the upfront capital cost of a product when making purchasing decisions, so the marginal costs of labour really matter. But consumption is how the rich take our money, so we need a different model.

Set up a National Leasing Company. Set up factories to make the best white goods you can – best washing machine, best dishwasher, best fridge freezer, best microwave, best oven... Make them durable, upgradeable and repairable, and so now they last. A £800 washing machine would be out of reach of most people, but if it lasts 20 years, then at five per cent interest, it would cost a touch over £5 a month.

So for £50 a month you could have a completely equipped house with the best gear you ever had, made here by us on environmental principles, and you'd never have to put your hand in your pocket for an unexpected expense ever again.

“A life lived in fear is a life half lived. Get the oligarchs to fuck and let’s do something better”

Replant Scotland's empty land, use hemp, bamboo and nettle crops to make fabrics. Create a high-quality 'national clothes library', driving a surge of new fashion design and manufacture in Scotland. Grown here, designed here, made here, unique to us. Then let people rent, say 20 outfits a year. No more fast fashion, just quality, stylish clothing instead.

Do the same for things that only get used for a while. A leasing tier for children's toys (average play time – oh, three months), for tools (average screw gun use – ten minutes for a shelf perhaps), for equipment (only play golf occasionally? Rent the clubs). All this is much cheaper and more efficient, and cuts out the oligarchs in the middle.

Then encourage a flourishing of small leasing shops. Your local music shop, for example, could be supported to refocus on leasing instruments to people. A gamer shop would lease you game consoles and games. Both would make much of their business about building a community and providing services.

This creates a sort of actual capitalism in a system guided by data that facilitates real innovation and is owned by the public. You can keep expanding the model to anything where competition doesn't make sense – a national car leasing services for example.

But if that is goods and services, the environment around it must be right. We should set up a national mutual bank, a safe, steady savings and loans. There is no need for banking competition if it is a mutual. Just provide core services. Then we need to get equity investors out of the picture.

You know I would dispose of bond markets through a carefully controlled system of central bank finance directly to the government. When the government needed money, the central bank would create it, not bond markets. We would only be in debt to ourselves. Now use the same system for a proper Scottish National Investment Bank.

Elon Musk is no longer a trillionaire – which just shows that he never really was. The reality is that the rich basically just invented a lot of their 'money' through chicanery. We can just 'invent' our own. They are rich because they used quantitative easing for share buybacks, which made them giant profits. We could have used it for something else. This idea that 'they' have money and 'we' need it is one of their tricks.

Money isn't real. That's the dreadful truth of it all. We just all pretend like it is. So whether we borrow it from others or just print it doesn't really make any difference – what matters is how much of it there is in the system and how it gets used. So stop borrowing from others. That only applies to the domestic economy for the most part, but we do not need oligarchs to give us money.

As long as we manage international finances. We need to make sure we have deals with key suppliers globally and that we maintain a foreign currency reserve to trade with them. In fact, I am increasingly wondering if Scotland shouldn't trade domestically in our own currency but internationally in Euros. Just quit this idea that 'they' have money, we need. It isn't true.

But to keep all this running, we need the underlying systems, and today that means tech. We need an oligarch-free software environment. That is much easier than you think. I am in favour of building a new operating system (built on top of Linux, which runs most of the world's computers, though you wouldn't know it).

Then, with this new open source operating system, get a really good software suite. There are loads and loads of high-quality open source clones of US applications – Photoshop replacements, Digital Audio Workstations (for music), Computer Aided Design (for product design). I haven't used a piece of US software for writing or editing for 15 years now (I use OpenOffice).

So gather all these alternatives, create an Open Source Institute and build an entire open source software environment. Build everything into it – the systems which run government, store patient health records, make the court system work... Built in the mutual bank. Build in the leasing service, the newly-nationalised Amazon. Think of it as 'a nation in a box', linking all of this together. Then users pay a small monthly subscription to fund the Institute.

And once you've done that, build a new internet, a new information environment. Take what you want from the internet, but let's build our own, a place where you can find recipes, television, shopping, advice, news, and magazines – don't be afraid to imagine a world of content we build ourselves, not one foisted on us by others.

Now work with others on open source chip design. Buy sovereign chip capacity (the top-end machine that makes computer chips costs about one year of Scottish Enterprise's budget). Create the capacity to build good, solid computers here. Now make one, stack it on top of a large capacity battery, a communications hub and a second data server. Put that in a box.

Now put one of those in every house in the country. Everyone gets fast, cloud-like computing capacity, an energy storage capacity across the whole of society, and distributed data servers to replace Amazon for hosting the internet domestically. Then get on with a proper Public AI model and ban all proprietary AI.

At which point the US may try to sanction us, so as long as we've played nice with China and India, just tell them we no longer recognise their IP laws and clone all their medicines for the NHS. By this stage, we wouldn't need their dollars or their code.

All this will generate enormous collective wealth, so redirect it to the public via a Universal Basic Income. And that's the end of the oligarchs. Damn, I'm way past my word limit. I want to show that so much more is possible (particularly a democratic underpinning for all of this, and a governance model).

Imagine Scotland created this 'nation in a box' model as preparations for independence. Now imagine we told any other nation that wanted its own sovereign independence that they can just have it too. Now we have a partner nation. Now two. Now ten.

This isn't all that hard, this post-oligarchical world. You can imagine it quite easily, and that is the biggest challenge. We don't need to be serfs. This is our fucking country, and we can run it differently if we like. A life lived in fear is a life half-lived. Get the oligarchs to fuck and let's do something better.