Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, that is, quantities that are recoverable from the subsoil with current technology and prices. That geological circumstance has profoundly shaped the country's politics ever since the first fields were discovered in 1914, when Venezuela had already been independent for a century but was still a basically agrarian and very poor country. It is worth going back briefly to that moment because, paradoxically, it bears a surprising similarity to what is happening right now.

The resource curse

As many developing countries know, being rich in resources does not guarantee a ticket to economic development. In fact, the opposite is more common; that is, the countries richest in natural resources are also the poorest. In economics, the resource curse is the name given to a hypothesis that tries to explain that paradox, and according to which the main problem is that the country throws itself so heavily into exploiting that resource-rich sector (oil, for example) that it “forgets” about almost everything else. In reality, it is not a matter of government decisions but of the market's orientation itself, since both international and domestic capital flow logically toward that resource-rich sector, which, being wanted by everyone, generates higher rates of profit and stops flowing toward the rest. The country quickly becomes an exporter of the natural resource it is rich in, and economic dynamics do the rest (for example, the exchange rate appreciates, which makes other kinds of exports, such as industrial ones, more difficult).

When oil fields were being discovered all over the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, only a few American and British companies had the technological and financial capacity to extract the resource and, in addition, to refine it into a product usable by society (petrol, lubricants, petrochemicals, and so on). Although the oil was in the Venezuelan subsoil, no company in the country could turn it into anything useful, so multinationals were allowed to take charge of everything. The process became more orderly in 1922, when President Juan Vicente Gómez declared subsoil resources the property of the state, which then took control of concessions as well as the applicable royalties and taxes. Venezuelan reserves were such that by the 1930s the country had already become the world’s leading oil exporter.

Thanks to the taxes levied on extractive activity, the state was able to deploy a strategy of building infrastructure and public services that energised the economy, with the consumption of an emerging middle class also rising, while its authority over the territory was strengthened. The oil boom context encouraged the countries where multinationals extracted the resource to claim a bigger slice of the pie, and Venezuela was a pioneer in that struggle and a later example for countries in the Middle East. The 1943 legislation and, later, the consolidation of the 50-50 principle (an equal split of profits) meant that the state captured a much larger share of the profits generated by oil activity.

In the postwar context of economic interventionism and decolonisation, the idea spread that economic development ran through direct control and exploitation of natural resources. National development and economic development went hand in hand in an extractivist imaginary understood as a condition for matching the wealth of the most advanced countries. After the precedents of Russia in 1917 and Mexico and Bolivia in the 1930s, in 1951 Iran was the first country in the Middle East to nationalise its oil and expel the Western companies, but only two years later Mossadegh’s government was overthrown by a coup d’état staged by the United States and the United Kingdom. In 1957, however, Iran allowed in the Italian multinational ENI, which accepted a 75:25 agreement that made the other multinationals nervous and showed that the oil countries wanted larger shares of the sector’s rents. In September 1960, some of these countries, at Venezuela’s instigation, formed the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to strengthen their demands and raise the state’s share to at least a 60:40 ratio. The 1970s saw the first big nationalisations of Western companies, first in Algeria and Libya and then, progressively, in the countries of the Persian Gulf. The so-called producer countries were showing that they now had the technological and financial capacity to carry out the activity themselves and without intermediaries, that is, capturing the whole of the oil rent.

Venezuela’s state company was PDVSA, created in that international context in 1976. Oil rents were so high that the dominant political parties shared its influence in the so-called Punto Fijo pact. The system remained the same, that is, an economic development wholly dependent on oil rents, in which the government had enormous latitude to decide what to do with them (with a strong autonomy of PDVSA from political power and growing problems of corruption and rent capture) and which was consequently very vulnerable to falls in the oil price. During those decades, every attempt to diversify the productive structure failed, including import substitution industrialisation, which created certain industrial capacities but did not substantially alter the structural dependence on oil rent. The fall in prices in the mid-1980s pushed the country into an economic crisis that was managed in a neoliberal manner, leading to a deep political crisis that lasted until Hugo Chávez won the presidential elections in 1998.

Chavismo was built on oil rentierism

Chávez’s victory did not please the elites who had managed the oil rent until then, which is why he suffered the 2002 coup d’état. After surviving it thanks to popular and military support, and after a management lockout at PDVSA, Chávez dismissed thousands of the company’s workers and managers and took much more active control over its decisions. Oil prices played along and the government managed to put in place social policies that lifted millions of people out of poverty and very substantially reduced inequality. The whole system, however, still depended, in the end, on oil rents.

PDVSA is often described as a kind of para-state because it took on projects unrelated to its economic function, such as social programmes or urban infrastructure projects. The company’s debt thus became tied not only to its investment and extractive activity but also to the need to undertake social projects foreign to it. On the other hand, the qualifications of the new managers seemed far from the capacities of the previous ones. In addition, politically it was a way of carrying out public intervention that bypassed the usual controls of the national assembly. Some or all of these elements help to explain why PDVSA was already at very low levels of economic and financial activity before the first American sanctions arrived in 2017. The sanctions did not create PDVSA’s deterioration, which was already evident before 2017, but they did later contribute to deepening it.

As the following chart shows, oil has always accounted for a very large share of Venezuela's exports. Curiously, dependence on oil was highest during the chavista period, with levels above 95%, which shows the failure of industrial diversification strategies. That said, during Hugo Chávez’s period GDP per inhabitant recovered from earlier levels, which is consistent with other social indicators that also improved during that period.

The truth is that under chavismo oil rents, instead of financing the opulent lifestyles of a minority of the population linked to the elites and the PDVSA bureaucrats, served to combat inequality and poverty (without, however, the complete eradication of corruption). But in both cases the rents served to guarantee the social and political stability of the “fat cow” years. When the rents dried up, the problems came.

After Chávez’s death in 2013, Nicolás Maduro inherited an economic model extremely dependent on oil and, a year later, the collapse of international crude prices triggered an economic crisis of enormous magnitude. Electoral support for chavismo gradually weakened and, after losing its parliamentary majority in 2015, the government responded with a growing concentration of institutional power and a progressive erosion of democratic mechanisms. Meanwhile, management of the oil rent increasingly fell into the hands of military factions loyal to the government. Far from abandoning the extractivist model, in 2016 Nicolás Maduro approved the Orinoco Mining Arc project, designed to extract gold and other minerals from an immense area of Venezuela. The declared aim was to encourage exports of these minerals, some of which are important in the energy transition towards renewables, and with a strong involvement of state companies and actors linked to the armed forces.

Venezuelan oil production, however, currently stands far below its potential and its historical levels. The international price situation, poor company management, and sanctions caused a collapse in oil activity that deprived the Venezuelan state of rents. In those conditions, Venezuela returns to the beginning: the need to attract foreign capital to make the investments needed to extract fossil fuels.

Conclusions

For the United States, Venezuelan oil is especially important because it is a type of heavy crude it needs for a substantial part of American refining capacity, but domestic production is not enough to supply it. Although the United States has become the world’s largest oil producer thanks, among other factors, to the development of fracking, it remains a net importer of heavy oil. It is not a coincidence that its two main sources of heavy oil have until recently been Canada and Venezuela, countries with which it is trying to redefine its relationship (with a trade war in the first case, and with violence in the second). In the case of Venezuela, as the following chart shows, imports fell gradually during Hugo Chávez’s government and then collapsed afterwards. With the new developments, the United States government has ensured that this flow is revived.

Although we shall have to wait to learn the exact terms of the agreement, preliminary calculations suggest that the rent the Venezuelan state will capture from the oil sector will be notably lower than what existed even during the Punto Fijo period. In this sense, the United States has managed to capture a substantial part of that rent, something that until a few years ago was unthinkable; and it has done so through the sanctions, which have ground down what was left of PDVSA’s weak productive capacity, and through violence exercised against another sovereign country.

On the other hand, it is worth stressing again that under chavismo, oil rent allowed significant social redistribution and improved numerous welfare indicators, but it was not turned into a productive diversification sufficient to reduce dependence on oil. Popular support for chavismo was real and clearly documented, and rested on reasonable grounds, but the whole system was held up by oil prices; when the extraordinary flow of rents ran out, citizens' withdrawal of legitimacy began too. The economist Edward Barbier pointed out, reflecting on the paradox of the resource curse, that for a country to develop it is necessary not only to have abundant resources and to extract rent from them but, most especially, to reinvest those rents in diversifying economic activity and creating linkages (so that industries need one another). This last step is the one Venezuela has been unable to complete over the last hundred years, and chavismo was unable to complete it either, despite having proclaimed it.

In fact there is an ironic cyclical component to all of this. First, foreign capital exploited a resource over which the state had barely any effective capacity to intervene. Then, through taxes, nationalisations and finally the creation of PDVSA, the state captured an ever larger part of that rent until it held practically all of it. Chavismo inherited that model of state rentierism and used its extraordinary revenues to redistribute wealth, but it did not manage to transform those rents sufficiently into a diversified productive structure. When production and prices collapsed, the state’s capacity to sustain that model did too. And now, a century after the beginning of modern oil exploitation, Venezuela once again needs foreign capital to exploit its main resource. It is as if several decades of political and social struggles over foreign actors' capture of rent had vanished at a stroke. And Venezuela at the very least still has no answer to what to do with the rent generated by a product, oil, which moreover has its days numbered. The additional problem is that they no longer even decide it themselves.

Everything suggests that the ultimate cause of the falling-out is that Acemoglu’s academic work, which revolves around technological change and the role of artificial intelligence, has proposed strengthening the working class. This is precisely one of the points The Economist goes after, labelling his approach pessimistic and unspecific. The economist Mònica Martínez Bravo captured the tension well when she wrote: “what curious things happen when a Nobel laureate in economics writes a book arguing for putting the working class back at the centre of economic policy”. In what follows, I want to examine in what sense, and how far, Martínez Bravo is right. And, along the way, to venture into the fascinating and worrying world of the socio-economic consequences of artificial intelligence.

The role of automation

One of the great open questions in economics is what the effects of automation are, that is, of the replacement of human workers by machines. Does it destroy jobs? Does it depress wages? Does it alter the balance of forces between capital and labour? Two hundred years on, the debate has produced no consensus at all, only a range of approaches for thinking about a highly complex process. And to understand it properly, we have to go back to the early nineteenth century.

David Ricardo is regarded as one of the founding fathers of political economy1. In the first two editions of his major work, the Principles, however, Ricardo had little in particular to say about automation, since he shared the conventional, optimistic view of the economists of his day. It is important to grasp this way of thinking about automation because, in broad terms, it still dominates the profession. On this view, when machines replace workers in a production process, two effects follow. The first is the obvious one: a certain number of people lose their jobs. The second is that introducing the new machinery can create new jobs that absorb the labour previously displaced. In other words, for economists there is nothing here to worry about, because the economy regulates itself in such a way that the introduction of machines —the incorporation of new technology— is able to sustain the level of employment. And Ricardo thought more or less this, but only until 1821.

In the famous third edition of the Principles, Ricardo added a new chapter in which he judged the conventional view to be mistaken and acknowledged that “the substitution of machinery for human labour is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers”. The impact of this shift was enormous, and his disciple John Ramsay McCulloch complained to him bitterly (p. 381), on the grounds that it gave encouragement to the anti-machinery workers’ movements. It was a time of enormous social unrest: the Industrial Revolution was unfolding across the United Kingdom and radically transforming the working class’s way of life.

In a 2024 academic paper, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson have addressed this historical moment precisely. In their account, Ricardo’s change of mind about machinery had to do with his election to the House of Commons. His seat allowed him to see firsthand what was actually happening in the cotton industry, and so correct his earlier views. Because what was happening bore no resemblance to the economists’ optimistic picture: the Industrial Revolution was severely degrading the living conditions of the working class. The paper, incidentally, leans heavily on the work of two giants of British Marxist historiography, Edward Palmer Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm (though it also cites, by way of complement, the eminent mainstream historian Joel Mokyr). Acemoglu’s figures indicate that, with automation, the real wages of handloom weavers fell by at least 25%, with no possibility for those workers of moving into new, emerging sectors. Their living conditions were simply flattened by the introduction of machinery into industry. The paradox is that, because productivity was rising and wages were not, employers reaped enormous profits that pushed inequality upwards. In a phrase Acemoglu returns to again and again: prosperity was not shared.

The logic of this critical reading of automation had been built into Acemoglu’s work long before. It appears most clearly, in a form aimed at the general reader, in his 2023 book Power and Progress, co-written with Simon Johnson, where they stress that introducing new technology is not automatically beneficial for society. Whether productivity gains are shared, they argue, depends on factors such as the type of technology, the institutions (norms, customs, laws), and the direction society chooses to give it. Significantly, Acemoglu and Johnson accept that prosperity is shared only when technological advance departs from elites' self-interest. Hence their account of the improvements in working-class living standards during the second half of the nineteenth century, which they attribute to the democratisation of the political system, the growth of trade unions and legislation protecting workers’ rights; all of them factors that forced technical change in a direction other than that of the elites’ narrow economic interests. Anyone familiar with the history of the labour movement will recognise a clearly subversive political element in this line of reasoning.

It would be a mistake to think that all this is merely economic history, or nineteenth-century political economy. Acemoglu’s point of reference is always present-day technical change, and more specifically the adoption of artificial intelligence in today’s production processes. But he uses economic history to think about the contemporary process, asking (in Power and Progress) what happens if the mainstream economists are wrong: if AI fundamentally generates labour-market distortions that widen inequalities in wages and employment, if its impact redistributes power towards elites, if it impoverishes billions of people in the developing world, if it entrenches ethnic or social prejudice, or if it destroys democratic institutions. His conclusion is that contemporary society needs what emerged in the nineteenth century: the growth of counter-arguments and organisations capable of pushing back against conventional thinking. To give a fuller sense of where he stands, it is enough to note that one of his most recent papers, co-authored with David Autor and Simon Johnson, is entitled “Building pro-worker artificial intelligence”.

He is not a heterodox economist, which makes him more dangerous

Although some have found him too much of a dissenter, it is worth remembering that Daron Acemoglu is no revolutionary in the classical sense. Not even within his own discipline. The first book of his to reach my shelves was not an essay but his 2009 textbook Introduction to Modern Economic Growth: a graduate text of formidable algebraic complexity, which surveys the models of economic growth from a single vantage point, namely, neoclassical theory. This is the dominant theory in economics faculties, and other schools of thought have historically been ranged against it, such as the post-Keynesian and the Marxist, which are for that reason regarded as heterodox2. Acemoglu belongs to the dominant school, and indeed he recently described debate about capitalism as “mindless”. In the worldview underlying his models, there are no relations of production; power enters as a category of bargaining strength and regulatory capture; and the view of institutions is thin and never structural. His concept of the working class is consequently not a Marxist one, but it leads to what he calls “working-class liberalism”.

Yet all this is exactly what makes him genuinely dangerous in the eyes of mainstream economists. Because Acemoglu reaches his “radical” conclusions from inside the profession and inside the mainstream. His entire academic output is a lucid and algebraically demanding reformulation of the neoclassical models of technical progress. And every step he has taken over the past twenty years, such as treating the division of income between capital and labour as endogenous to technical change, he has taken without drawing on the vast body of heterodox work that trod that path long before him. Acemoglu today holds a view of trade that would not seem strange to Marxist authors, and a view of income distribution that post-Keynesians such as Joan Robinson or Nicholas Kaldor would recognise. And we have already seen that his reading of certain aspects of nineteenth-century economic history has striking points of contact with Marxist historiography. The crucial point is that Acemoglu has arrived at conclusions very close to those of the post-Keynesian and even Marxist schools, but through different concepts and methods. Mainstream economists cannot fault him for want of technical brilliance, which is amply established, but they are frightened by the political conclusions that follow from his deviation.

The manoeuvre had already been rehearsed with Joseph Stiglitz. The American economist received the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his contributions to neoclassical theory, in particular his analyses of asymmetric information, and during the 1990s he was known, among other things, for his critique of the hard version of ecological economics. All of this made him chief economist of the World Bank, one of the institutions charged with promoting the “Washington Consensus” among developing countries, that is, with imposing neoliberal policies. Before his term was up, Stiglitz left his post, and in 2002 he published Globalisation and Its Discontents, in which he called much of neoliberal policy into question. It was a harsh diagnosis, and one that those of us who were then postgraduate students of international and development economics always found instructive: a neoclassical economist attacking the conclusions of his own old paradigm. As now, The Economist was the spearhead against what struck it as an inadmissible turn, remarking drily that Stiglitz could have written a good book about globalisation but perhaps next time, and conceding that he was a brilliant economist before proceeding to demolish his standing altogether. Nor was it the only example: Kenneth Rogoff, then director of research at the IMF (the other neoliberal pillar of the international system), attacked Stiglitz fiercely and entrenched what became the settled view among mainstream economists that as a scholar Stiglitz was a genius with a wonderful mind, but as a politician he was far less impressive. It is the clearest precedent for The Economist‘s article on Daron Acemoglu.

What we can expect over the coming years is a concerted effort, led by part of the mainstream community and of which The Economist is merely the advance guard, to devalue Acemoglu’s reputation, not so much on technical grounds as on account of his political “eccentricities”. As we have seen, this is not the first case and probably will not be the last, but the underlying logic has been in place for a very long time. The aura of respectability within the mainstream economics community depends both on technical foundations (with a high degree of mathematical sophistication, which makes the work largely inaccessible to the general public) and on the “reasonableness” of one’s political conclusions. It is worth recalling that the Nobel Prize in economics is not really a Nobel Prize at all, since Alfred Nobel never envisaged one for economics. That such a prize exists today is the result of the interests of the Swedish central bank, which in 1968, amid a bitter confrontation with the Swedish social democrats (then pursuing their reformist road to socialism), needed to burnish the reputation of those who defended its own (conservative) political positions. The great Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal received the prize in 1974, but his own reading of the episode was that, because he was a “radical” (his word), they made him share it with a “reactionary”, Friedrich Hayek. In 1977 he wrote a short article acknowledging that he had been wrong to accept it, that economics is not a science on a par with physics or the “hard” sciences and — take note — that the Nobel Prize in economics ought not to exist. What he was ultimately suggesting is that the award is heavily freighted with political values and principles.

What this means for the present

Daron Acemoglu’s work has, to my mind, many limitations. Perhaps the most obvious is that, for all its focus on technology and technical change, it entirely omits any consideration of energy. To discuss the transformation of the nineteenth-century British economy without mentioning the role of coal is odd. Equally problematic is the scant attention paid to the imperial dimension of British industrialisation, that is, to the fact that colonial trade, slavery, resource extraction and Britain’s position in the world economy were part of the historical conditions under which the Industrial Revolution took place. This connects with another point for which Acemoglu has been widely criticised, this time from the heterodox side, and which is present in earlier books such as Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, co-written with James Robinson. Acemoglu’s account of economic development is institutionalist, treating factors such as innovation, democracy, and types of government as the central variables determining which countries grow and which do not3.

But his interpretation of artificial intelligence, his emphasis on the task model — it is not jobs that are automated but tasks — and his insistence that the effects of automation depend on power and on institutions such as the law, are correct and crucial for our present moment. It is true that other traditions can offer sharper and more structural accounts of the role of technology, but Acemoglu’s originality and brilliance lie in having reached the same destination as heterodox authors, albeit by another route. Complementarities between the different traditions are well worth exploiting. His insistence across several papers that technology can be (mis)used to tighten control over workers (something AI is already doing) could gain a great deal from the entire Marxist tradition that begins with Harry Braverman’s superb book and revolutionised labour-market theory. The same goes for the role of income distribution, which is not only a moral question but also one of economic efficiency (particularly in models where demand plays an important part).

Finally, many unresolved aspects of Acemoglu’s work will require development over the coming months and years, and they are decisive for public policy. His central proposition is that technology must be directed if it is to promote shared prosperity. His critics, including The Economist, point out how vague this is in practice. On this they are right: Acemoglu and his co-authors sketch a course that involves intervening in the outcomes of the self-regulating market in order to steer technology “somewhere else”. The historical comparison implies that the effect sought is the strengthening of trade unions, democracy, and countervailing power against elites (read: the tech oligarchs), but the “how” of achieving all this is still missing.

Acemoglu also insists that society has alternatives to deploying technology in ways that seriously damage the working class. He accepts that employers seek to raise their profits and increase average labour productivity, even where that deployment produces no social benefit (in his terms, where it does not raise the marginal productivity of labour). A structural analysis will object that an employer adopts a given profit-maximising technology because competition compels him to, so it is unclear how things could be otherwise without recourse to classical instruments such as state regulation. At bottom, the ordinary grammar of any process of “directing technology” is that of planning, the state and social protection; and that is probably where the next round of arguments in the field will be found.

In sum, I hope to have shown why I believe, along with other economists, that The Economist‘s attack on a widely respected and brilliant economist can be explained. Acemoglu’s problem, from the mainstream’s point of view, is that he has used mainstream economics’ own conceptual tools to show that technology and the market do not automatically produce shared prosperity. To accept that argument is to call into question every promise made by the promoters of AI (and also its associated costs, in which energy once again plays a central part), and to argue for public policies utterly unlike those defended from the centres of power tied to the big technology firms. To my mind, that is a highly fruitful path, and it is clear that we need more shared prosperity, which is to say, more of the sort of interventions and policies that Acemoglu proposes.

While the EU is sceptical about Chinese foreign investment and is promoting regulatory measures to shape it, and Spain shows a clear interest in attracting it, the United States is far more hostile and fears an alignment of European interests with Chinese ones. That is the geopolitical backdrop. Right now, Spain is one of the main playing fields on which this redefinition of Western industrial policy is unfolding, in a context of clear superiority on the part of the Chinese car industry. As I shall argue in this analysis, the Ferrol case is only one episode within a larger battle that is reorganising both the car sector and the world economy as a whole.

Spain is a car factory

Spain is not one of the main pieces on the board by chance. The first thing to bear in mind is that the car industry has been a pillar of the Spanish economy for many decades. With forerunners such as Hispano-Suiza, which allowed a substantial network of component manufacturers to develop in Catalonia, Spain attempted during the Second Republic to promote the production of national vehicles. The civil war frustrated the project, which was only partially resumed in the 1950s when, under the Franco regime, Seat was set up with majority Spanish capital (albeit with a stake held by Fiat, which supplied the technology). Those years also saw American multinationals enter the country, and by 1971 Spain was already exporting more vehicles than it imported, becoming an important node in the international car industry.

Over the following decades, Spain signed agreements to liberalise its economy, turning the country into an attractive location for multinationals seeking to take advantage of low Spanish wages and use it as a platform for vehicle exports. The 1980s were a time of restructuring that favoured the new multinationals and worked against those already established (Seat, for instance, was sold to Germany’s Volkswagen). After that process, Spain reinforced its importance in the international car sector, but in a secondary role and at the cost of giving up nationally owned, and even publicly owned, firms.

But only in the lower-value segments

In reality, no single company or country manufactures a vehicle in its entirety. Modern production is far more fragmented than it was a century ago, and falling transport and communication costs have made it easier for global value chains to expand in the vehicle sector as well. What begins in research and development and product design offices continues in the mines and refineries, with the extraction and processing of the natural resources required for all the parts — from sheet metal to electronics — going on through assembly, and ends in transport, distribution, sales and after-sales tasks. Firms aim to position themselves in the higher-value segments of that chain, which are those at the beginning (R&D, design, and so on) and at the end (sales, financing, after-sales, and so on). It is well established in development economics that countries wishing to climb the development ladder must work to ensure that their firms capture the higher-value tasks and stop specialising in those that capture value only residually; a process usually referred to in technical terminology as “upgrading” (see, for example, the whole body of work by Gary Gereffi).

This distribution of different tasks along a long production chain makes it possible to speak of a hierarchy, whereby some firms (and countries) take on the tasks that capture the most value and deliver the greatest benefits to their economies, while others take on more thankless tasks, or ones that offer lower economic and social returns. Another common way of referring to this hierarchy is through the notions of core and periphery (and semi-periphery). In the car sector, for example, Petr Pavlínek, among others, has studied this at length. In his latest book, Pavlínek shows that the industry is configured in Europe so that Germany holds a clear core position, reserving for itself the tasks that capture the most value, followed by France and Italy. Spain, by contrast — and despite the fact that the car sector accounts for around 8% of total industrial weight and that exports of vehicles and vehicle parts represented 9.73% of gross exports in 2024 — falls into the semi-periphery category, mainly because of its limited control over the production process and its concentration on assembly work. The periphery, finally, would be occupied by the countries of Eastern Europe, which in recent decades have attracted large capital investments seeking to exploit their low wages and their proximity to the German core.

Historically, core countries have made considerable efforts to keep firms under the control of national capital or even to hold them directly in public ownership. As the chart below shows, Germany has the highest level of national ownership in the sector (79%), whereas in Spain the figure is 29% (defined as control of more than 50% of share capital). This is precisely one of the features that the literature identifies as distinguishing core from peripheral countries, since it allows the former to control firms’ decisions. Nor is it a general trait of the Spanish economy, but a characteristic specific to this sector: national control stands at 73% for industry as a whole and at only 29% in the car industry.

Another relevant figure is that Germany invests two and a half times more in R&D in the sector than France, Italy and Spain combined, which is explained by the fact that it has reserved the highest value-added segments for itself while offshoring and outsourcing others. Both figures reinforce the idea that a hierarchy exists within the chain, placing Spain subordinate to the core (and therefore to the core’s interests).

China’s recent irruption

The arrival of the electric vehicle has changed not only the composition of value chains (where there was once a combustion engine, there are now batteries and other products with different technological and natural-resource requirements), but also international economic geography. The shift of the world economy towards Asia has one of its main vectors here. China began its technological “upgrading” in electric vehicles at the start of the century, when it included them under the well-known Programme 863 on high technology. The new objective was to develop and control the entire value chain of the electric vehicle industry and its critical components, such as batteries and electronics.

As a consequence of those decisions, according to the latest report by the International Energy Agency, China currently controls the refining of as much as 91% of graphite, 85% of rare earth separation, 75% of cobalt, 70% of lithium and up to 49% of copper; in every case these are critical natural resources, since they are indispensable for the production of electric vehicles (although they are also required for other electronic products, such as laptops or smartphones). China also produces 80% of the world’s batteries, and installed capacity is such that there is a real danger of overproduction.

This near-monopoly has, moreover, made Western countries highly dependent on Chinese production, to the point that European battery output covers only 43% of demand, with the rest having to be imported from China — although that share is expected to grow precisely because of the new Chinese investments announced for Europe. These firms dominate the world market by a wide margin (in 2025 CATL held 39.2%, BYD 16.4%, CALB 5.3%, Gotion 4.5% and EVE 2.6%), and clearly outstrip their South Korean and Japanese rivals. European firms, for their part, are some 10 to 20 years behind in technological capability in the battery market, according to a recent research article.

This dominance over batteries extends to electric vehicles as a whole. Behind that success lies the Chinese government’s industrial policy, which takes advantage of economies of scale (with a vast domestic market), technological ecosystems, and the resources devoted to research and development. Most leading battery firms are private, such as BYD and CATL, but other electric vehicle companies, such as SAIC — the firm behind the Ferrol plant — or Chery, are publicly owned. Although the European Commission now criticises the role of Chinese subsidies and accuses its competitors of unfair competition, the fact is that Europe’s decades of neoliberalism were, in this respect, decades lost to China’s far more effective industrial policy.

The world production figures speak for themselves. According to the International Energy Agency, 22 million electric vehicles were produced in 2025, 72% of them in China. And although the European Union is the second-largest producing region, its global share was only 14.6%.

European consumers are also increasingly buying Chinese vehicles, since Chinese manufacturers are achieving relatively low prices through rapid innovation in batteries, electronics and software. As the chart below shows, China is now the EU’s main vehicle supplier, and by a wide margin over those that follow, such as Turkey, Japan and Morocco. This is a radically different picture from five years ago. There are qualitative differences too, however: most vehicles imported from China and Japan are electric (over 70%), whereas those from Turkey or Morocco are internal combustion models.

The role of countries such as Morocco and Turkey deserves to be highlighted here, because their growth as exporting countries reveals the creation of new peripheries by the car multinationals. In the search for cost reductions, these countries offer fiscal, labour and economic incentives with which to compete internationally. In this respect, as far as we know the transition to the electric vehicle has not brought about changes in the core-periphery configuration within the European Union: a recent study by the economists Manuel Gracia, María J. Paz and Mario Rísquez has shown that Germany is managing to reinforce its dominant role in Europe, as against the subordinate role of countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy, and despite the growing importance of Hungary and Poland in battery production. China’s rise as a major automotive power is, however, seriously affecting German business, as we saw in this other analysis discussing Germany’s economic crisis, which some analysts describe as “China shock 2.0”.

Chinese foreign direct investment

Concerned about the competitiveness of Chinese vehicles, the European Union authorities responded by accusing Chinese firms of benefiting from unlawful subsidies, that is, of unfair competition. That made it possible to trigger an anti-subsidy clause, imposing high tariffs on Chinese companies. In SAIC’s case, these reached the maximum rate of 35.3%, for failure to cooperate. In truth, the European Union is not seeking to halt Chinese foreign direct investment, but rather to make its arrival conditional, requiring firms to meet certain commitments in exchange for being allowed to produce within European territory. Spain, incidentally, abstained in the vote on the tariffs — something that may perhaps explain why the SAIC plant will land here and not in Hungary, as was initially mooted.

Another part of the European response has come through the Industrial Accelerator Act, a proposal that is not yet final and is clearly designed to place conditions on China’s expansion. Under the proposal, where FDI exceeds €100 million and originates in countries with a global manufacturing share above 40% — read: China — firms will have to meet at least four out of six conditions, such as not exceeding 49% ownership, having half of their workforce made up of European workers, technology transfer, R&D commitments in the EU, and sourcing at least 30% of inputs from Europe. The regulation is still going through the approval process, and we are still a long way from knowing whether it will work, although it fits the new neo-mercantilist spirit of Western countries.

What is clear is that in 2025 Chinese foreign direct investment in Europe rose by 67%, the highest level since 2018 — when Chinese capital was investing in all manner of activities, many of them considered high-risk by the Chinese government, which eventually curbed them. Indeed, the dynamics of foreign direct investment have changed in recent years, shifting from a focus on mergers and acquisitions to investment in new plants, as in the Ferrol case. It is particularly important to note that 45% of this investment has gone to the car sector, and the overwhelming majority of it to electric vehicle value chains.

According to Rhodium Group data, Chinese FDI is increasingly heading to Spain, although it remains at very modest levels compared with the figures received by other European countries. As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in electric cars has soared since 2019 and, above all, since 2023. Those investments have gone mainly to the periphery and semi-periphery, with a prominent role for Hungary and, more recently, Spain. This is what one would expect from investments that seek to externalise only those parts of the production process that capture the least value. The capital remains Chinese, and R&D and design remain in the Asian giant.

According to official information, the investment in Ferrol amounts to some €200 million, with 120,000 vehicles a year expected to be produced and around 2,000 direct and indirect jobs created in total. The plant’s operations, however, will be those typical of assembly, using previously manufactured components and bodies, and will not yet include stamping, body construction or painting. These operations, along with the manufacture of other components, are envisaged as later developments of the overall project. This is the kind of task within the value chain that the literature identifies as characteristic of peripheral or semi-peripheral countries, since it does not incorporate the upstream tasks of R&D and design, while the downstream sales and after-sales tasks remain uncertain, depending on whether the products are destined for export or for sale in Spain.

The open questions

Several dilemmas overlap throughout this analysis. On the one hand, Spain still depends largely on the European core when it comes to internal combustion vehicles. Pressure from those manufacturers already led, in December 2025, to the European Commission abandoning its plan to ban such vehicles by 2035. Meanwhile, the transition to electric vehicles is rapidly altering power relations within the industry and opening the door to new centres of production and decision-making. Spain has also shown itself in favour of maintaining a degree of autonomy in the dispute between the United States and China. That position may give it an advantage in attracting investment, but it remains to be seen whether it will translate into a structural transformation of our position within the industry.

The problem is that what is at stake is not only how much is produced in Spain, but what is produced, who controls it and who captures the value generated. A country can increase its industrial output, its exports, and its employment and still remain in a subordinate position if strategic decisions, technology, design, research, and a substantial share of the profits remain beyond its borders. The result is enormous vulnerability, as well as a less solid and less prosperous productive structure. That is precisely what has happened over much of the development of the Spanish car industry, as we have seen: Spain is a huge vehicle factory, but the firms that control the main strategic decisions are mostly foreign.

The arrival of Chinese capital also poses a paradox. It may help to reindustrialise Spain and, at the same time, reproduce the country’s position within global value chains. Replacing German investment with Chinese investment does not necessarily change Spain’s position in that chain. If the new plants are confined to assembly, and the higher value-added activities — R&D, design, technology, intellectual property and strategic decisions — remain in China, we shall have gained productive capacity without necessarily gaining economic capacity. But it would not be right to assume this will inevitably be the case. SAIC’s arrival in Ferrol may create jobs and economic activity, but its real industrial impact will depend on whether suppliers, technological capabilities, training, research and new higher value-added activities develop around the plant. Those ideas appear in the official tender documents as aspirations, but with no guarantee that they will materialise.

The European response is a paradox too. For decades, the European Union trusted that liberalisation, competition and international specialisation would be enough to maintain its industrial position. Now, faced with Chinese competition and Chinese technological leadership, it is reaching for tools it long regarded as anathema: tariffs, local content requirements, conditions attached to investment, state aid and industrial policies. Europe, in other words, is turning — partially, but at great speed — towards an industrial policy of a neo-mercantilist character.

It is therefore a mistake to frame the debate around what nationality we want incoming capital to have, whether Chinese, German or American. Reducing it to a matter of espionage is even clumsier. What matters most is knowing what we want to do with the arrival of that capital. If foreign investment expands the country’s productive, technological and knowledge capabilities, it can be an instrument of reindustrialisation. China’s own historical example shows precisely that it can be a viable lever. But if that foreign investment simply turns Spain into the place where various multinationals assemble their products in order to access the European market, the change will be far more limited: we shall have more factories, but not necessarily more control over our own economy. We are trapped in the classic dilemma that has tormented all peripheral and Global South countries — and all development economists — for a century. And that, in itself, already tells us something.

On the other hand, last year the French National Assembly debated another proposal in a similar spirit: the creation of a food social security scheme. If healthcare, education and pensions are — in Europe — rights enshrined in the constitution and guaranteed through public provision, why should food not be one too? The proposal was never passed, owing to a boycott by conservative MPs, but it consists of a programme of some €100–150 a month for the entire population, to be spent in affiliated outlets. There are several dozen pilot projects in France, the most prominent being the one in Montpellier. Although at first sight it may look like a welfare handout, the programme goes far beyond the need to tackle hunger among the poorest families. In Spain, a debate was held recently, promoted by the Carasso Foundation, in which, alongside a discussion of the French experience, a proposal for Spain was presented (there is already a pilot project in Getafe, Madrid).

This renewed concern with the right to food coincides with the hangover from the inflationary process unleashed in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and also with the war in Iran that began this February 2026. As the chart below shows, world food prices remained relatively stable through the 1990s and the early years of this century, but have been highly volatile and on an upward trend since the 2007–08 crisis. Moreover, in most countries food prices have risen far more than wages, causing a worrying deterioration in household budgets, especially among the working classes, who devote a larger share of their resources to food.

In public debate, however, it is rarely mentioned that food inflation is not only the result of short-term episodes caused by wars, geopolitical tensions or financial speculation. It is also the symptom of an agri-food system that is extremely dependent on fossil fuels, global logistics chains and increasingly scarce natural resources — all of this at a time of neo-mercantilism and protectionism. In this sense, the question of how we make food cheaper has to be joined by the question of how we ensure it can continue to be produced at all.

In any case, rising food prices have provoked political reactions in Spain too. Back in 2023 Podemos proposed the creation of a public supermarket; in February this year, 2026, Más Madrid put a proposal to the regional Assembly for a network of public supermarkets — it was rejected by the right, and the Socialist Party did not support it either; in June, at SUMAR’s initiative, Congress approved a non-binding motion urging the government to create “public infrastructure to distribute healthy, organic and locally sourced products”; and a few weeks ago Adelante Andalucía announced that it will be proposing public supermarkets as well.

At first sight, the debate seems to boil down to a choice between two instruments: creating public supermarkets or introducing a food social security scheme. In reality, though, as the political economist of food Raj Patel puts it, the two are more compatible than antagonistic, and they only make sense if they are understood as parts of a much deeper transformation of the agri-food system, which is currently facing ever more serious economic, ecological and geopolitical limits.

Democratising access to food

The first of these proposals, Mamdani’s, is to create a public supermarket. It is worth remembering that a supermarket is part of the infrastructure needed for the food produced in the countryside to reach households — which are generally concentrated in cities. Most of that infrastructure is privately owned today, so the networks of production, transport, distribution, and retailing follow the logic of profitability guided by market signals. This matters because under capitalism, producers do not produce food to feed populations, but to make money. And every agent in the chain follows that logic without exception.

What happens is that the structure of the chain is deeply unequal: a great many producers sell their output to a very small number of large distribution and retail companies, which concentrate enormous bargaining power. In Spain, for example, the five leading retail chains account for a little over half the market, and a single company, Mercadona, accounts for around 27% of food retail spending. That power is exercised throughout the chain: it conditions the prices farmers and livestock producers receive, it sets the terms of supply and it even determines which products end up on the shelves. This structure traps producers between the industrial supply of inputs (seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, diesel and so on) and the purchase of their output by the big chains.

This structure also helps explain an important part of recent food inflation. As the economist Isabella Weber has pointed out, when a supply shock occurs — as it did after the invasion of Ukraine or amid tensions in the Strait of Hormuz — firms with market power can pass on and even amplify those cost increases to protect or widen their profit margins. And these supply shocks are hitting the food channel not only through energy but also through fertilisers. The upshot is higher prices for consumers, while wages fail to keep pace.

In this context, the proposal to create public supermarkets is intended to introduce a counterweight to that private power. Not being subject to the logic of profit maximisation, a public operator could operate with lower margins and help both bring down the cost of the weekly shop and increase competition in a highly concentrated market. That is the main economic argument for the proposal, and it applies equally to the case for a public energy company, for instance.

That said, past experience reminds us that the project is anything but simple. There are precedents for public supermarkets in places private enterprise no longer reaches — so-called food deserts — or set up to compete with it directly, and many have failed. Among the main problems is scale: a handful of supermarkets is not enough to act as a real counterweight to private power, or to negotiate low wholesale prices with producers and distributors. But there is also the question of professional management, financing, the range of products on offer (Mamdani’s supermarkets will not sell meat or hot food), and medium- and long-term political viability, among others. The idea is a good and necessary one, but the best way to make a public supermarket work is to embed it in a broader, more ambitious programme genuinely capable of transforming the food system.

Before turning to that, however, it is worth underlining a blind spot in the proposal. A public supermarket is born with a very clear mandate: to sell more cheaply. Yet in order to sell cheaply you have to buy cheaply. And where do you buy cheaply today? In the industrial chain: intensive production, inputs imported from countries with cheap wages and cheap resources, large volumes and operations at scale, contracts with central purchasing bodies. In other words, precisely the conventional agri-food model. In that sense, the public supermarket is a good cost-of-living policy dressed in the clothes of food policy — but the objective ought to be bolder.

The reason is that we are living in an eco-social crisis. To use this concept is to accept that ecological degradation and the deterioration of living conditions for the majority are not two separate crises that happen to coincide in time, but two manifestations of the same process of accumulation. And, above all, that they cannot be ranked in order of priority. The usual formulation on the left is “first let’s make sure people can eat, and we’ll deal with sustainability afterwards”. But the reality is that the two timescales have converged, as Ukraine and Hormuz have shown: inflation is now eroding the budget of a working household, driven in part by the rising cost of energy and natural resources, and that rising cost foreshadows tomorrow’s biophysical constraint. These are not two problems but one. So the question cannot be only how we make food accessible to the working class, but also which foods and how they are produced.

We are eating oil

Every time we fill the trolley, we think we are buying food, but we are also buying oil, natural gas, and an enormous quantity of fossil energy embodied in fertilisers, pesticides, transport, refrigeration, and packaging. The ecologist Howard Odum was right to say that one of the central features of industrial societies was that we had learned to eat potatoes made partly of oil. The critical point is that, if we count all the energy we spend producing, distributing and consuming food across the whole chain, it turns out to be far greater than the energy we obtain from that same food: a completely unsustainable system, because it depends on what Joan Martínez Alier and Vaclav Smil call the fossil subsidy, or fossil doping. This is part of the anomaly of the fossil fuel era, since no earlier human society was able to sustain negative net energy returns for long before collapsing.

That fossil subsidy serves, above all, to patch up a rift. Marx, reading the agricultural chemistry of his day, described a break in the exchange of matter between human beings and the earth: the city consumes the nutrients the countryside produces and does not return them, so the cycle is broken and has to be replenished from outside. John Bellamy Foster turned that insight into a concept — the metabolic rift — and Kohei Saito has placed it at the heart of the ecological reading of the late Marx. A century and a half later the description still holds; it is simply that the rift has grown in scale. First it ran between the city and its own countryside, then between one region and another, and today it runs between entire countries. In Spain this can be seen very clearly in livestock farming. Almost a quarter of the biomass eaten by our herds is produced abroad, and with that feed comes nitrogen that then stays here. Because the animal is not where the crop is, the nutrients make a one-way journey: where the feed is grown, the soil is depleted, and where the livestock is concentrated, there is a surplus of nitrogen that ends up in the aquifers, polluting rivers and soils.

All this has enormous implications, because what is at stake is not only the consumption of a non-renewable form of energy but also the fact that the whole arrangement rests on unequal ecological relations. The level of food consumption in the countries of the global North, for example, would be impossible without the quantity of food imported from the global South, whose production consumes natural resources there — above all land and water. The European Union uses an area of farmland the size of Spain in other parts of the world. Since the availability of land on the planet is obviously finite, this kind of food supply model cannot be generalised to every country.

For these reasons, in a world that aspires to live without fossil fuels, food production has to change radically. By the same token, guaranteeing universal access to food within a metabolically unsustainable system means guaranteeing access to something that will cease to exist in its current form. The objective, then, must be to transform the agri-food production model and, as we shall see in a moment, consumption patterns.

Transforming demand through Food Social Security

The second proposal, Food Social Security, is a public policy instrument that seeks to influence food demand through incentives. The scheme grants each citizen a set sum of money to spend at accredited outlets, which makes it possible to condition the kinds of spending it goes toward. For that reason, the various formulations of the scheme hold that the aim is not merely to inject money for buying food, but also to encourage the purchase of food with particular characteristics, such as ecological sustainability and a positive impact on consumers’ health.

The food social security scheme does not oblige citizens to consume certain kinds of food; rather, it sets up incentives to gradually change consumption patterns. On the one hand, because the scheme only applies to certain products designated in advance. On the other hand, producers find a stable demand that gives them the security they need to convert their production to agroecological methods. It is a less invasive way to steer the food system towards a sustainable and healthy level, which also makes it a tool for ecological transition. The recent study by the El Pa Sencer cooperative, for instance, calculates that the proposal would cost €76.8 billion (5.7% of Spanish GDP), but argues that the hidden health costs of current consumption patterns run to as much as almost €23.4 billion a year because of diet-related illness.

The logic of the proposal is similar to that already applied in public food procurement, which covers school canteens, hospitals, care homes, day centres, central kitchens and so on. When I was Minister for Consumer Affairs, we set in motion the drafting of new criteria for such procurement, following scientific guidance, and the current ministry, under Pablo Bustinduy, has continued that work and successfully completed several critical stages of the roadmap. The point is to mobilise a large volume of demand that can be planned several years ahead, which is precisely the signal a farmer needs.

The food social security proposal is not without difficulties, however. These range from the exact definition of an “agroecological product” to the design of its governing institutions, which aim to approach a form of participatory democracy in which the community involved decides rather than the state. There is also the fact that, for a proposal like this to succeed and go beyond short supply chains — where the producer sells almost directly — it will need the backing of infrastructure. A farmer may produce splendidly and still have nowhere to store, no way to chill, nowhere to process and no means of reaching a large buyer. It is a logistics problem. As with public supermarkets, Spain could make use of publicly owned infrastructure that already exists: the Mercas network — the wholesale markets under joint state and municipal ownership — which, together with municipal food markets, makes up a system of collection, cold storage and wholesale distribution that is already built, already paid for and already located exactly where it needs to be.

In short, if public supermarkets act on distribution and food social security acts on demand, then a third element is necessarily missing: intervening in the capacity to produce food itself.

Industrial policy for the primary sector

I have already noted that the current food system is ecologically unsustainable, as well as internationally unequal and unjust. That also means it is vulnerable to geopolitical and climatic shocks insofar as its capacity to supply food may be compromised. Transforming it into a system that provides enough food while reducing its ecological impacts must be the main objective.

The problem is that fossil fuels are precisely the magic wand that has allowed farm yields to multiply, producing far more food per hectare. Without them, productive capacity is compromised. There is, however, an important debate ongoing on this point, since certain forms of agroecological production deliver equal or higher yields for certain products. There are other food products, on the other hand, whose production cannot possibly be generalised — such as meat from large industrial units heavily dependent on imported inputs, known in Spain as macrogranjas, or mega-farms.

For this reason, it is not simply a matter of turning an agri-food system based on fossil fuels into one based on agroecological practices. To meet sustainability targets, that shift also requires changes in diets or consumption patterns. I know we are entering a minefield here, because this is the famous controversy over meat consumption that pursued me so relentlessly — or that I pursued so relentlessly, depending on how you look at it — during my time in politics. But it is worth framing it properly, because it is almost always framed badly.

The costs of the current diet are not distributed at random. Diseases associated with poor eating habits, such as the high consumption of ultra-processed foods, show a social gradient that runs inversely to income: the less money you have, the more you suffer from them. Those who fare worst under the dominant food pattern are the working class. The dietary transition therefore consists precisely in lifting a burden that the poorest families have been shouldering disproportionately. And we need to clear up a misunderstanding about which diet we are talking about. The one prescribed by health professionals and traced by biophysical models — with a greater emphasis on pulses, cereals, olive oil, seasonal vegetables, and occasional, good-quality animal protein — is not an invention of urban nutritionists. It is essentially what we call the Mediterranean diet, which we export as a national brand and celebrate as part of humanity's heritage, even as it is in clear retreat.

The problem is that the current food system is deeply distorted, and transforming it is no simple matter. As the chart below shows, for example, Spain imports a great deal of grain for animal feed, which is used to feed animals whose meat is then exported: the classic model of intensive livestock farming, sustained on very serious ecological imbalances. It is a deeply entrenched dynamic, one that many economic actors live off, making transformation harder.

Even so, the report by the think tank Alimentta, published at Greenpeace’s request, argues that such a transformation is perfectly feasible for Spain. According to its modelling, Spain could have a fully sustainable agri-food model by 2050. At present the Spanish system emits 107 megatonnes of carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change that, as the report itself recalls, “will produce a greater reduction in domestic production” in the future. None of this is news to the sector: a few years ago COAG published its report Empieza la cuenta atrás (”The countdown begins”), assessing the impact of climate change on Spanish agriculture. According to Alimentta, ecological modelling suggests that by 2050 the Spanish food system could become a net sink — that is, not emitting carbon dioxide but absorbing 17 megatonnes a year. The conditions for achieving this are an enormous transformation in the way food is produced and consumed, ending models such as intensive livestock farming and promoting the production of foods typical of the Mediterranean diet.

As can be seen, all these elements — the public supermarket, food social security, changing the model — are deeply interrelated. Consider what would happen if, following the reorientation of demand induced by food social security, billions of euros of new demand for organic products suddenly appeared. In Spain, only 12% of cultivated land currently meets those criteria, a share wholly insufficient to supply the population. The consequence would be tremendous inflation in that market niche, which is why food social security schemes advise a gradual implementation approach.

There is another option, however: industrial policy. Insofar as the primary sector is becoming an ever more critical and vulnerable sector, direct state intervention to plan its reorientation is justified. Something similar to what is happening in industry in these new neo-mercantilist times, and particularly in the energy transition, but applied to the system that feeds us. This would entail specific programmes that might include the purchase of land, adequate aid and subsidies for agroecological production, and the creation and strengthening of new public infrastructure, supermarkets among it. All of it aimed at ensuring that sooner rather than later any given country — Spain, for example — has an ecological agri-food system with which to produce healthy food.

Conclusions

Let us return, then, to the question we began with: public supermarkets or food social security? The answer is that the question is wrongly posed. Not because either proposal is mistaken, but because both are necessary and, at the same time, insufficient. One acts on distribution; the other on demand, but neither can, on its own, transform the way we produce food. And that is one of the critical issues of the twenty-first century.

So if we really want to guarantee the right to food over the coming decades, we need an industrial policy capable of transforming agricultural production, public infrastructure that allows that new production to be distributed, mechanisms that steer demand towards healthy and sustainable food and, finally, instruments that ensure every family can gain access to it. Thinking about any of these pieces in isolation inevitably leads to frustration.

The central question in all of this is how to build a food system capable of feeding the whole population within the planet’s ecological limits. That is why I say that making food cheaper is not enough. The task is a rather more complex one: to guarantee that food continues to exist, that it can be produced sustainably, and that no one is excluded from it. Only then will we be able to speak, properly, of a genuine right to food.

In 1957, the Franco regime created the Ministry of Housing and appointed José Luis Arrese, a Nazi sympathiser who, during the Second World War, had gone so far as to meet Hitler, as its head. As minister, Arrese pushed for a shift towards a model based on private development and the spread of ownership. Anticipating Margaret Thatcher by several decades, Arrese summed up his policy in a 1959 lecture, declaring that “we do not want a Spain of proletarians but of owners”.

In the 1980s, Thatcher popularised the idea of “popular capitalism”, under which the whole of society could become capitalist — that is, owners of financial assets such as shares, investment funds and other securities representing rights, generally of trifling magnitude, over the ownership of companies. The lifelong wage earner thus also took on the functions of a capitalist investor. The entire neoliberal programme revolved around this project of social reorganisation, and although there was a very marked transfer of wealth — a carving up of public spoils among private agents, as happened during the privatisations — it was also, and above all, an ideological matter: under “popular capitalism”, the interests of certain segments of the working class were aligned with those of the capitalist elite, since if firms made more profit, investors would also receive a share. The ordinary wage earner remained an employee working for someone else, but now had additional income in the form of dividends, interest and other financial returns, which, as a rule, they monitored as though they were George Soros.

This model of “popular capitalism” was never widespread, not even in the United Kingdom, but it further fragmented the working class — a class then suffering the hard blows of globalisation: the erosion of labour rights and wages, deindustrialisation, and the loss of any horizon for the future, in other words, greater precarity and vulnerability. What is surprising is that this “triumph” of Thatcher’s neoliberalism would never be called into question by her successors, still less by Tony Blair, nor indeed by the other European social-democratic parties: the idea that workers could, and even should, top up their meagre wages with financial investment became normalised.

Thatcher’s project might be called a “first cousin” to Arrese’s, since it, too, consisted of extending property ownership. The mass sale of public housing to its tenants — set in motion by the “Iron Lady” in the 1980s — followed the same logic: turning millions of workers into owners so as to tie their material interests to the movement in the value of their assets.

The difference with Spain is that here only one of those two dimensions took full root. Although there were privatisation processes that partly broadened popular share ownership, they never attained the economic, political and cultural significance they had in the United Kingdom. In fact, in Spain property investment is so attractive that even the rich hold the greater part of their wealth in housing rather than financial assets — which already alerts us to the extraordinary appeal of housing as an investment in our country.

The Crisis of the Spain of Owners

It is estimated that in the 1950s fewer than half of households owned a home, a proportion that fell below 10% in large cities such as Madrid or Barcelona. Subsequent Franco-era policy managed to raise those figures, creating a class of small owners whose wealth (the value of their homes) hung on the economic cycle—the property cycle in particular. Over time, those owners who managed to accumulate further homes could also use them as investment assets — like any other financial asset — selling them at a higher price or renting them out to supplement their income. Very few questioned this system, and access to housing via ownership, along with the possibility of anyone becoming the landlord of one or more homes, was read as a sign of prosperity.

This order of things, however, is coming undone. As the following chart shows, at the start of the century the proportion of owners was above 80%, whereas today it is in the region of 70%. That figure conceals, however, that the impact is highly uneven. The wealthiest households have barely seen their housing tenure change, but among the poorest households it has plunged by twenty points. Twenty years ago nearly 74% of the poorest households owned a home, whereas now they barely exceed 50%.

In other words, there is a growing share of society — the poorest — that is being shut out of the owner-occupied housing market. We are currently talking about 30% of families, with roughly two-thirds of these households living in rented accommodation and another third under other arrangements such as homes granted rent-free by relatives, by an employer, and so on. For these non-owners, access to housing has become an almost impossible challenge. According to the Bank of Spain, 32.5% of households living in rented accommodation have to devote more than 30% of their income to payments; in some cities such as Málaga or Seville this proportion exceeds 46.5%. These households, which make up 20% of the total, are living on a knife-edge and are the ones least served by housing policy.

The usual focus of the debate, though, is placed on the other side of the line: on how homes are distributed among those who do own property. According to the Bank of Spain, 45.3% of Spanish households own some property in addition to the home they live in, and 33.7% own specifically another dwelling. That means one in three households in the country has a home it does not live in, which it can put up for rent — which is to say that multiple ownership is a phenomenon with considerable political weight.

The Great Transfer

The central point is to understand what the report by Ainhoa Díez and Raúl Sánchez calls “the great transfer”. Each month, millions of households living in rented accommodation transfer part of their income to owner households that let out homes. Taken together, that flow amounts to some €28 billion a year. Of that sum, the richest 10% of landlords account for 44.7% of the income, more than €12.4 billion. This is no surprise: those who accumulate the most property are also those who capture the largest share of rental income.

But why would the wealthiest households accumulate more homes in ownership? Quite simply because the total return on housing is higher than most alternative financial investments, as I explained in this article. For these agents with “surplus capital”, housing is conceived not as a place to live but as an additional source of wealth and income. As with financial returns, rental income has been naturalised to the point where it raises no objection to accepting that some people earn money by the mere fact of being an owner—that their account grows “while the owner sleeps”: rentierism has been completely normalised.

As happened with Thatcher’s “popular capitalism”, part of the explanation for its naturalisation has to do with the fact that this rental income is, for many people, a genuine supplement to their modest regular earnings. The image of a retired family drawing a pension and topping it up with the rent from their second home is not unreal. For many people, rentierism has become a mechanism that substitutes for decent wages and functions as a guarantee that, despite low pay, their living conditions do not deteriorate. That is why the left finds it so hard to talk about rentiers: because within that category there are not only investment funds run by multinationals of dubious morality, but also a great many “ordinary people”.

Tax data sheds some light on how rented homes are distributed and who benefits from them. According to these figures, 76% of the people who declare rental income have only one home in that situation, which allows the Bank of Spain to conclude that the rental market is highly atomised and little concentrated. But if we talk about rented homes, 50% belong to landlords with more than one dwelling, which leads the CSIC report for the Ministry of Social Rights to conclude that the rental market is highly concentrated and dominated by multiple landlords. The data are the same, but the interpretations differ and are both true at once: most landlords rent out only one home, but multiple landlords hold enough homes to cover almost half the market. There are professional rentiers who grow rich hand over fist on the rental market, but there are also traditional rentiers who “merely” secure small extra top-ups.

Property-Based Popular Capitalism

These rules of the game have ended up shaping four social positions — though the boundaries between them are sometimes blurred — and each answers a very simple question differently: who stands to gain from a fall in house prices?

Non-owners certainly stand to gain, and as I have said they make up 30% of households today and have nothing to lose. A collapse in prices would simply make it far easier for them to access a home. Owners of a single home, by contrast, do not stand to gain. When prices rise, their houses appreciate, even if it is wealth they cannot touch: they are not going to sell — they have to live somewhere — nor can they afford to buy another. They are not rentiers but hostages.

This last point is especially true for the poorest households, where housing can amount to as much as 85.3% of all their wealth. This is to be expected in a distribution of this kind, since the wealthiest households diversify their “portfolio” with other types of assets (business, financial, and so on), so that their wealth is not as vulnerable to the property cycle as in the case of the poorest households.

In third place among our social positions are the modest multiple owners, those who supplement a pension or scant salary with rental income from a second home that was inherited or bought with a mortgage; here we have that “popular capitalism” made flesh, and it is a great many people who see themselves as working class. And of course, a fall in prices is of even less interest to the multiple owners who have already cleared the barrier to entry and can buy even without bank finance. For them, housing is just another investment asset — probably the best one. Let us recall that, in 2025, 30% of purchases were made in cash.

Of these four positions, three have material reasons to oppose any fall in house prices, and only one — the youngest, the worst organised, the one that votes least — has reasons to want it. Therein lies an important part of the answer to the question with which we opened this analysis.

That is why the dilemma facing governments has a structural dimension. Making housing cheaper eases access for those on the outside, but it erodes the wealth of those on the inside, who are the majority and vote more. What is more, in an important respect they are right to defend it: as long as housing is the guarantee of a decent life, protecting its price is a form of prudence. In this sense, the small owner’s resistance is a correct reading of their incentives in a country where it was decided that material security is bought through home ownership.

Ultimately, the real question we have to ask ourselves is why we have built a society in which millions of people feel they cannot afford for house prices to fall. As long as the home remains (almost) the only thing people have, they will defend it, and with it they will also defend the business that grows rich at their expense.

This brings us to the most uncomfortable conclusion, above all for the left: rentierism cannot be dismantled without first rebuilding what modern rentierism replaced. There is no viable housing policy without adequate pensions, without wages that allow people to save, and without a stock of public housing that provides security without the need for ownership. Thatcher understood that transforming the economy meant first transforming the material interests of ordinary people: she once said that economics was the method, and the object was the soul. Anyone seeking to reverse that project will have to begin by understanding why she acted as she did.

Although the conservative Chancellor Merz attributes this situation to bureaucracy and to the supposed generosity of the welfare state, the German crisis cannot be understood without reference to growing international competition, particularly from China. More than that, it constitutes one of the most visible symptoms of the shift now taking place in the international division of labour.

It is worth recalling that the international division of labour is a notion that represents the way in which the world-economy is “ordered”, and it is never static: it expresses a productive hierarchy in which some countries concentrate on the most technologically complex activities while others remain specialised in lower-value-added tasks. This carries implications of both economic and ecological inequality, but what matters here is that this hierarchy is changing. China’s industrial ascent and the United States' protectionist turn are eroding the export model that made Germany Europe’s great economic power.

We are talking about a problem that is not only German but European. The current European institutions and their economic integration cannot be understood without the central role historically played by both France and Germany, especially the latter since reunification. Indeed, since the 1990s Germany has been Europe’s undisputed economic power, its influence over the others visible in the ordoliberal spirit—a mercantilist neoliberalism—that dominates institutions such as the European Central Bank as well as European rules and regulations. During the 2008-2010 crisis and the subsequent euro crisis, we Mediterranean countries largely bore the consequences of this conservative economic vision, so deeply rooted in the German economic imagination. Those were years in which the German economy seemed to be the only one capable of withstanding the economic crisis, turning Chancellor Merkel and her economic model into the canonical reference for what apparently did “work”.

Yet one of the most visible symptoms of the current deterioration of the German model is its loss of economic dynamism. While Spain has recorded higher GDP growth for much of the past few decades, Germany has spent several years in recession. So much so that, following the economic recovery of 2015, Spain has grown faster than Germany in practically every year. We should be precise: this has not made the two economies alike, since the Spanish one starts from a substantially lower level. As the chart below shows, Spain’s GDP per capita is still 80% of Germany’s (in purchasing power parity terms).

The current situation is paradoxical because, as I have mentioned, the German model has habitually been presented as a success story. On the one hand, German industry is the most powerful in all of Europe and is concentrated in technologically intensive sectors. On the other, economic growth has been based on a strong orientation towards exporting those industrial goods (cars most notably, but also machinery, biotechnology and other high value-added products). The global value chains organised by German firms have been structured according to that logic, with subsidiaries in countries such as Spain devoted to assembly and other lower-value segments while the head offices in Germany retained the most valuable segments and the largest profits. The eastward expansion of those global value chains—taking advantage of geographical proximity and, above all, cheaper labour—has shaped the European economy over the past two decades. The European Union’s enlargement to the east is closely bound up with this new function assigned to the post-Soviet economies.

That specialisation turned Germany into an economy extraordinarily dependent on external demand. So long as international trade was growing and its principal markets remained dynamic, the model worked. But that same dependence makes it especially vulnerable when the conditions of international competition change—and that is what we are now seeing.

Indeed, this order of things worked as long as Germany had no economic rival in its dominant sectors and could draw on the cheap labour and natural resources it extracted from other countries. Russian fossil fuels have been just as important a support as the offshoring of industrial segments in the drive to maximise profits. China’s incorporation into the world economy in 2001 allowed German firms not only to outsource production to “cheaper” locations, but also to expand their sales markets, since an industrialising economy such as China’s required vast quantities of machinery and other products in which Germany dominated production. While that was happening, China devoted itself to producing and exporting low value-added goods—toys, textiles, furniture, basic electronics—none of which competed seriously with German production. It was, apparently, a win-win for both Germany and China.

The German problem arose once China began to emerge as a producer of high-value-added goods: electric vehicles, energy transition technologies, and chemical and pharmaceutical products that now compete with German ones. For two decades, China used the rents generated by its rapid industrialisation and export expansion to finance a gigantic industrial policy, invest in technological capabilities, and climb progressively towards higher-value-added segments. Moreover, the specific circumstances of Chinese production—a state-planned industrial policy and backing for both private and public firms, together with enormous economies of scale—have given Chinese products a considerable advantage. As if that were not enough, China is not only pushing its economy towards high-technology production but also seeking to control the entire supply chain: from critical minerals through to intermediate inputs. The Chinese strategy aims at a high degree of self-sufficiency, which has led it to reduce its dependence on imports that previously came from Germany, among others. To make matters worse, the United States government—which faces the same competition from China—has imposed 15% tariffs on European production, thereby narrowing that market as well (in 2024, it was the destination of 11% of German exports).

The indicators of German industrial production leave no room for doubt. As the chart below shows, industrial production has been in sustained decline since 2018 and has now fallen by a cumulative 14%. The external demand that sustained its growth model has collapsed—with China and the United States prominent among the causes—and nothing suggests the trend will reverse.

All these events are unfolding very rapidly in historical terms, and they raise unsettling questions that are rarely the subject of political discussion. What impact does this transformation have on the rest of Europe’s economies, especially those intimately connected to Germany's, as is the case in the countries of the East? What kind of consequences will be unleashed by a mercantilist reaction, of the American sort, on the part of the European Union? How does it affect energy transition trajectories that most renewable infrastructure is produced in China? What sociopolitical effects follow from a region such as Europe, once the centre of the world-system, being “demoted” within the new international division of labour? Is the rise of the far right in Germany connected to this crisis of the export model and to that sense of political and economic downgrading?

At bottom, this case allows us to recall that the capitalist economic system is an institution in which everyone competes against everyone, and that there are respects in which the rules operate as a zero-sum game. It is not only a question of ecological limits, which I repeatedly insist on, but also of the fact that not every country can be a net exporter. One country’s exports are another’s imports, so that the exaltation of a model based on exporting more than one imports—Germany, China—is sustained only at the cost of ferocious competition and the existence of other countries that import more than they export. And yet, in Europe we have for many years been encouraged to believe that the German growth model was the undisputed benchmark, the mirror in which to see how things are done properly. That model is now in crisis because there are competitors that are fiercer and more capable, so that, in the new international division of labour—with China’s ascent and the United States’ neomercantilist attempt at self-defence—Germany has been left trapped in old inertias.

All of this is one of the most visible symptoms that the economic architecture which organised Europe over the past three decades is ceasing to exist. Understanding that transformation and being able to address it will be among the most important intellectual and political tasks of the coming years.

A few days ago Anthropic, the company that owns the Claude artificial intelligence, released its Fable model. This model is supposedly designed to improve the capabilities of generative AI, allowing users to perform far more sophisticated tasks in less time—that is, it increases productivity in certain tasks. The United States government has responded by prohibiting foreign citizens from using the model, citing national security reasons. In what is so far the latest development, Anthropic has withdrawn the model from everyone.

This move by the U.S. government has been placed within what some have called a “digital cold war,” and it can only be understood in the context of the decline of the American power’s hegemonic position. Just as Trump’s tariff policies seek to protect American industry from the effects of free trade—which is now assumed to benefit adversary countries, especially China—restricting the use of the most advanced AI to domestic users is an attempt to seize any opportunity to gain an economic advantage. Both measures are part of a protectionist package that some of us call neomercantilism, and for which there are historical precedents that can help us understand the current situation.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example was eighteenth-century England, which was beginning to surge ahead thanks to its mechanics’ ability to build more effective and efficient machines for the textile industry. So important was this knowledge that, from the start of the century, the English government banned the emigration of skilled workers. From the second half of the century onward, the government extended the ban to the machines themselves, already built, so that rivals could not replicate them and use them for their own economic development. The mercantilist policy of the era held that this advantage in knowledge and technology should be kept “private” in order to provide an edge in the economic struggle; there was as yet no such thing as free trade, which the United Kingdom adopted only a century later, when it was already the undisputed economic power.

This was not a strategy of England alone, but also of the Netherlands and some Italian republics such as Venice—that is, of those more advanced regions where industrialisation was beginning to take firmer hold. Nevertheless, there is consensus that most of those measures were not very effective. The reason is that the lagging countries, such as France, Prussia, or the United States, responded by combining (illegally) policies to lure away workers with industrial espionage. For example, the American Samuel Slater, known in England as “Slater the traitor,” emigrated to the British Isles disguised as a farmhand in order to memorise Arkwright’s spinning machinery; thanks to that, the United States acquired the technology that for decades had given the United Kingdom its key economic advantage.

The current pattern is similar. Although there are academic debates on the matter, it is obvious to anyone that AI does raise productivity in certain tasks (for example, in processing and manipulating large amounts of data or drafting documents). If such a function were available only to the United States, it would grant a notable advantage to its companies compared with their competitors. Although the U.S. government cites “National Security” as the reason for its decision, this is a typical way of disguising mercantilist policies that ultimately seek an economic advantage for its companies.

We should add that the United States’ generative artificial intelligence programs are not entirely its own. As Albert Einstein recalled in “Why Socialism?”, no individual achievement arises from nothing: each person’s life is made possible thanks to the work and achievements of the many millions, past and present, and it is society that provides language, the forms of thought, and most of their content. In this sense, all knowledge is a collective and intergenerational inheritance. Just as the machines of the industrial revolution embodied the resources that were expropriated and plundered from the colonies and the world’s periphery—for without them it was impossible to conceive of building the artefacts in question—generative AI embodies knowledge that is, by default, common property. Even all our data, including my own articles, is appropriated by generative AI both to train it and to construct the results offered to the user. Thus, one of the questions of our time might be: who controls and appropriates knowledge of common origin?

At the same time, the whole process depends on a network of infrastructure that is built asymmetrically according to the logic of capital—that is, heading toward those places where nature and human beings are most accessible, most pliable, and, above all, cheapest. This is what Cecilia Rikap, in her superb book “A Theory of Digital Dependency,” has called “twin extractivism.” The result is a process that concentrates profits in a few actors (the large AI corporations) and distributes the economic, social, and ecological costs across peripheral regions. And the on/off switch for the AI’s essential functions still resides in the center, whether the United States or China.

The case described here highlights a critical vulnerability for the rest of the world’s countries, including European ones, which already depend on the artificial intelligence services of American companies. Although many countries have plunged into a struggle to attract AI data centers, the truth is that this infrastructure—which is, moreover, highly intensive in energy and water consumption—is only the part of the chain where data is processed, and it generates neither many skilled jobs nor any capacity for control over the software. They are merely extraction enclaves over whose crumbs certain regions of the world fight—regions that, like Argentina, officially offer precisely abundant energy and cheap labor as an “advantage.” In any case, the owners of the AI can always selectively disconnect its use, as they have just done with the Fable model, at the behest of the U.S. government or for even more mundane reasons.

The only solution available to other countries is to deploy their own artificial intelligence models, which is no simple task. On the one hand, the effectiveness of generative AI is the result of accumulating vast amounts of knowledge and of using cheap labor that, through arduous and repetitive tasks, helps improve the model’s accuracy. The implications of that “gestation” process are not minor for building an alternative to American software. On the other hand—and perhaps the most important factor—no European or Latin American country will, on its own, be able to build a competitive alternative to the American or Chinese models. The prerequisite for achieving this is necessarily a change in scale, that is, working cooperatively among countries. But scale is not enough, and if knowledge is a common inheritance, the alternative cannot be limited to reproducing the same extractivism under a European flag. It should aim at public and open models, governed as what that knowledge is at its origin: a collective good. It is precisely this hypothesis that the far right and the MAGA movement are trying to sabotage at the root by eroding Europe’s fragile institutions.

Between the first and fourth centuries of our era, several epidemics and pandemics ravaged Western Europe. The Antonine Plague, which broke out between 160 and 189 AD, carried off even the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and some sources attribute up to 2,000 deaths per day in Rome. Over the following centuries, various diseases—which present-day historians believe were malaria, smallpox, and bubonic plague—caused sharp declines in population. War also contributed to this dynamic, turning that era into a far-from-peaceful time for the majority of the population, especially, of course, for the poorest and worst-fed.

Those epidemics forced millions of people to confront the fragility of existence daily, pushing them to seek explanations, new communities, and certainties. Perhaps that is why moments of greatest material and existential insecurity tend to coincide with profound cultural, religious, and political transformations—something that may help us understand certain phenomena of our own time.

It is well known that this kind of public health episode has historically altered the dominant social and cultural institutions. For the Roman period, some historians, such as Rodney Stark, have noted that one of the most important changes brought about by the persistence and intensity of the epidemics was the growth of Christianity. That sect, which promised miracles and cures—remember: in a context of recurring plagues—is said to have flourished in circumstances of desperation for millions of people. It is a controversial thesis, but a plausible one: it is easy to imagine a suffering population watching, every few years, as many of their relatives and friends die from wars and incurable diseases.

Although the interrelation between climate change and disease is studied today from a scientific standpoint, with data such as analyses of carbon dioxide emissions (which decreased as the population shrank, while forests also expanded), this thesis has been invoked again and again to help explain important political changes. In fact, it is well documented that the combination of climate change and bubonic plague during the fourteenth century lay behind the conditions that favoured the end of feudalism in Western Europe. In the end, we human beings are part of the Earth System and respond to changes that threaten our own lives.

If in those centuries existential insecurity shaped collective beliefs, it is reasonable to ask what happens when that insecurity disappears. The ancient and medieval worlds are, in this sense, very different from our own. Since World War II, the generations raised and grown in the West have lived through what is called the “golden age of capitalism,” with spectacular increases in material well-being and, in general, guaranteed jobs and living conditions—particularly in health care. In that context, collective anxieties bore little relation to those of the peasants and slaves of the late Roman world, who were far more aware of the vulnerability of their own existence. More than a few thinkers have seen in this one of the causes of the secularisation of the West: the absence of any need to take refuge in the hopes of a world beyond the earthly and mundane.

But, as Mercedes Sosa would have it, everything changes. And that world of “golden capitalism” (which was not so brilliant for the millions of people who sustained it with sweat and blood from the Global South), and upon which the melancholies and nostalgias of the left and the right are now built, is disappearing. Neoliberalism has spent decades eroding collective and communal networks, from welfare states to the way cities are built and neighbours relate to one another (a transition evident in many cities that have seen traditional neighbourhoods shrink in favour of the PAUs—a Spanish acronym for the large new-build developments, in practice private neighbourhoods—and individualist detached houses, both dependent on fossil fuels and peripheral shopping malls). Little by little, the individual has been cast into what Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity,” which, as he so aptly understood, runs through every social dimension, from work to consumption to love. The common thread is that everything seems commodified—that is, passed through the filter of market logic. The Black Mirror episode in which every worker is assigned a numerical value, the result of the ratings others give them after each interaction, is the ultimate expression of that relational form.

This is a recurring trope throughout history. The peasants who fell victim to the enclosures surely must have felt something similar. Erich Fromm believed as much when, in Escape from Freedom, he warned that liberation from feudal bonds did not automatically translate into a freedom to develop life projects with any guarantees. It is in that tension that monsters tend to be born. Because in such contexts of transition, the individual is stripped of the networks of material and spiritual security that, for better or worse, had been taken for granted. The post-Fordist worker, after all, recalls with melancholy the rights of the Fordist worker even if he has never witnessed any of them. It is a matter not only of giving meaning to life—whatever that may mean—but of having the assurance that life can go on without too many upheavals. That, today, hangs by a thread.

Among other factors—because there is never just one—this phenomenon perhaps helps explain the renewed appeal of various modern spiritualities, beginning with religion. People need stable bonds with their surroundings, material security, and a certain confidence in the future. The philosopher David Hume went so far as to conclude that there could be no scientific thought if we did not assume that the world had a certain regularity and that, at least in principle, tomorrow would resemble today. Perhaps it is not only science: nothing makes sense if we do not know whether there will be a tomorrow for our loved ones and us.

That is probably why we are witnessing, simultaneously, the rise of very different phenomena that share a common root: the growth of certain religious expressions, the search for strong national identities, the proliferation of communities (even digital ones), or the appeal of political discourses that promise protection against a world perceived as chaotic. Although their answers differ and are even mutually incompatible, they all seem to respond to the same need for belonging, stability, and orientation.

It is precisely for this reason that I regard with suspicion a certain left that trivialises these feelings, condemning them in advance as expressions of irrationality with which one must neither engage nor argue. But the sense of belonging or the desire to rebuild communal ties cannot be linked solely to conservative ideologies or religions. It is also present in that impulse we all have to form social groups (even political parties), and perhaps our greatest political challenge is precisely how to respond to those social anxieties from a transformative program—a place where science and rationality—which envision the feasibility of another possible world—come together with the emotions and aspirations for emotional and material security.

Can you imagine living in a society where the entire population, across the whole planet, received an annual income of 60,000 euros? That figure corresponds to roughly 5,000 euros a month, somewhat above the current average in North America, but far above the 290-euro average in sub-Saharan Africa. Well, that is the figure that the recently published Global Justice Report (GJR) considers viable for combating global inequality and its consequences while also averting global warming.

The report was produced by the team of economist Thomas Piketty, and it deserves special recognition because it strives to demonstrate that the fight against inequality necessarily goes hand in hand with the defence of the planet that sustains life. This runs against the grain of a long tradition that holds that the fight against inequality—as well as the economic question in general—is only possible through economic growth and at the expense of the natural environment; a way of thinking that still pervades most of progressive economic thought and, of course, conservative thought as well.

The keystone of the report is, in fact, the recognition that economic activity necessarily entails the consumption of natural resources and energy, which generates ecological impacts, most notably climate change. Thus, the only way for the global average temperature in the year 2100 to remain below 2°C relative to the pre-industrial era—and thereby avert a catastrophe with unpredictable costs—is to reduce economic activity starting today —that is, to reduce economic growth. In this sense, the report shares central intuitions of the ‘degrowth’ tradition, though its authors do not adopt the label. And it also contributes substantial nuances of its own.

To begin with, this is not merely a downward rescaling of economic activity, as would occur with an economic crisis, a pandemic, or a war. What it advocates is a general reorientation of the model of production and consumption, seeking a dematerialization of the economy, which means the growth of sectors that are low in material and energy consumption but highly intensive in providing well-being: for example, the education and health sectors would grow enormously. As the ecological economist Herman Daly noted, it is important to remember that growth and development are not the same thing, and that while the former refers to the monetary value of production, the latter concerns the services that directly provide us with well-being or happiness. The GJR focuses on the biophysical and social conditions that make the development of the world’s population as a whole viable; nothing more and nothing less.

In these pages, we have often discussed the paradoxical role that technology and productivity play under the capitalist economic system. The point is that although innovations make it possible to produce the same quantity of goods in less time, under capitalism this option is foreclosed. The reason is that the system's logic forces all agents to compete with one another and, consequently, to resort to technology not to produce the same amount in less time, but to produce more in the same time. The liberating option—working less while maintaining well-being—is thus blocked. In this way, over two centuries productivity has increased extraordinarily, but most of that increase has translated into more production and consumption rather than more free time. Only the struggle of the labour movement managed to offset this in part, securing that a fraction of those gains was devoted to reducing the working day. The GJR report builds on this idea by proposing that working hours should be reduced from the current average of 2,100 hours per year toward 1,000 hours by 2100. This would amount, roughly, to workdays of a little over four hours, or to workweeks notably shorter than today’s.

One of the central variables that calibrates the entire model is precisely what they call sufficiency, which has to do with consumption. With far shorter working days and with the growth of immaterial sectors such as education and health, consumption must necessarily be based on a change in habits: a more ecologically sustainable diet (with a 25% reduction in meat consumption worldwide) and even non-linear taxes where the first purchases of a good (such as a flight) are affordable, but subsequent ones less so. All these proposals respond to a single idea: shifting well-being away from the accumulation of material goods and toward universal access to services, free time, and economic security. Sufficiency also entails a rapid and forceful energy transition to decarbonise the economy, as well as a reforestation effort to restore the forest cover that existed in 1900. That is, this is not a degrowth that seeks to return to the parameters of pre-industrial societies, but rather a harnessing of accumulated knowledge and technology to “leap” toward a new renewable energy model.

For all this to be possible, the report stresses the need to combat income inequality both between countries (to allow the poorest to grow and converge toward a dignified standard of living) and within each country. Not only for moral reasons but also economic ones: the money needed to launch the program comes from heavy taxation of the wealthiest strata. The report does not appeal to money creation, but to redistribution, since the spending is financed at the outset by taxing those who have the most. Then, in turn, a common fund (belonging to all countries) is created to invest in sustainable companies and obtain the necessary financing: an idea with echoes of radical social-democratic proposals. In any case, this transfer of income and wealth from the upper strata to the base of society explains why the model reconciles near-zero economic growth in the richest countries with the fact that the majority of their populations can considerably improve both their incomes and their well-being. In the same way that economic growth currently does not “reach” a large part of the population, the absence of aggregate growth is compatible with an improvement in the individual well-being of the majority.

Although the report contains much more information and data, it is important to retain the overall picture: it is possible to imagine a world where the entire population has very reasonable minimum standards of living (health, education, free time), where well-being depends neither on economic growth nor on unlimited consumption of natural resources, and where inequality has been drastically reduced as a result of a major offensive against the economic elites. Thanks to this, the parameters of the Earth System can be kept within margins that, while not risk-free, avoid the points of no return. It sounds radical, and in a certain sense it is (which is not a bad thing, because it means going to the root of the problem), but any other alternative—such as carrying on as before—would mean venturing into very dark territory for human civilisation and for life in general.

Against that dark territory, the GJR report inscribes itself in the utopian tradition, but in its positive connotation: the kind that, as in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, made people dream of desirable worlds and mobilised them politically. The chief virtue of those classic utopias, from More to those sketched by Marx, is the desire to project desirable horizons into the future that, in the present, had to begin to be built. We need these utopian guides because they trace the perimeter of what is possible, and they chart a path that, although not perfectly defined—it never will be—is already clearly the road we must travel.

Decades later, in the year 2000, historian Kenneth Pomeranz revived that notion in his influential book The Great Divergence to answer the old question of why certain regions of Europe industrialised before other, equally advanced regions, such as China’s Yangtze Delta. His answer combined coal, which allowed England to stop depending on wood just as the deforestation crisis was becoming acute, with colonial networks—those “phantom acres” that freed the European economy from the constraints imposed by land.

The fact is that land is a finite good that does not allow for simultaneous uses: a single hectare cannot at once be forest for timber, cereal for people, fodder for livestock, and fibre for clothing. A choice has to be made. And since Europe did not have enough land for everything, the New World colonies provided it. In that era of industrial capitalism’s expansion, this international asymmetry between the European centre and the global periphery rested on extra-economic mechanisms such as the violence that empires exercised over their colonies. Today, however, the forms have changed, but the underlying phenomenon remains in force, insofar as the richest countries benefit from an international division of labour that sustains consumption in rich countries by exploiting the labour force and natural resources of poor countries. A paradigmatic example is the agri-food model in the European Union.

According to the FAO, Europe is a net exporter of agricultural and livestock products in monetary terms. That means we export more euros in food than we import, which invites the conclusion that “we have food to spare”—something very different from what happens in Asia, where there is a net deficit of 300 billion dollars. But that accounting in euros conceals more than it reveals. As soon as we swap money for a physical metric—the hectares of land behind each product—the picture changes radically.

In recent decades, the notion of “phantom acres” has spurred the development of methodologies to put physical figures on trade flows: the aim is to calculate how much land—measured in hectares—is needed to produce each good that crosses a border. This is known as the land embodied (or “embedded”) in products, that is, the soil footprint that travels, invisibly, inside each sack of soy or each coffee bean. One of these methodologies is that of the European Commission and Eurostat, on which the charts in this analysis are based. For example, in 2024, the European Union imported 55 million hectares of crop products, an area slightly larger than Spain (around 50 million hectares). We Europeans also import 35 million hectares of forest land and just over 3 million hectares of pasture land.

If we look at where those hectares of land come from (again: embodied in products), the main supplier countries are Brazil, Ukraine, the United States, and Argentina. As the following chart shows, we import 15 million hectares of land from Brazil, while from Ukraine we import more than 10 million. As might be expected, these are large countries and, in general, with an overrepresentation of so-called ‘developing countries’ or the Global South (especially in cropland).

But what are we really importing? As the following chart shows, the leading product by far is soy feed, followed by cocoa beans, sunflower oil, rapeseed, and coffee. The key role is played by soy feed, especially from Brazil and Argentina, which is imported into Europe for animal feed and whose production is closely linked to Amazon deforestation. This already gives us signs of the ecological unsustainability of the European agri-food model and its relationship with the world-economy.

But this works in both directions: just as we import land embodied in soy or coffee, we export it embodied in what we sell abroad. The final tally—imports minus exports—shown in the following chart, leaves Europe as a net importer of cropland and a net exporter of forest and pasture. Here lies the key to the accounting mirage, since Europe imports cheap land—a hectare of soy for feed is worth little—and exports more expensive products, such as dairy, wine, and meat. That is why the accounts in euros show a surplus while the accounts in hectares show a deficit.

These data describe a European agri-food model—an aggregate with differences between countries—that is highly dependent on imported cropland, with soy and other crops destined for animal feed. In this sense, the European economy consumes hectares of foreign land to produce food for livestock on intensive farms. These data are consistent with the system of the notorious mega-farms, especially those for pigs and chickens, because in such large factories, the animals can barely move, and feed must be imported. That food is what we consume domestically, often in the form of cheap meat (re-exports of animals to third countries are already discounted from the data).

On the other hand, European countries export animal products from extensive livestock farming, that is, animals that feed on the pastures of their surroundings (sheep, cows, goats…) and that consume land in Europe. In this way, at the same time that Europe imports cropland, it also exports pasture land—and likewise with timber, of which it sells more abroad than it buys.

In short, when a European eats pork, drinks coffee, or buys chocolate, they consume not only a product. They also consume an invisible portion of land located thousands of kilometres away. Monetary statistics record the price of that transaction, but they do not record the material geography that sustains our way of life. These biophysical methodologies have their limitations, but there is no doubt that monetary metrics conceal physical relationships that reveal profound asymmetries. It is what ecological economics—from Joan Martínez-Alier to Alf Hornborg—has called ecological unequal exchange: a trade that, under the appearance of an exchange between equals, systematically transfers land, energy, and materials from poor countries to rich ones. A hierarchy of the world-economy that is, at once, ecologically and socially unsustainable.

Since the dawn of capitalism, the fear of being replaced by machines has been one of the deepest and most persistent anxieties of the working class. Workers had been dispossessed of control over the means of production through violence and theft — as paradigmatically illustrated by the enclosures, those fencings-off of common lands that drove the peasantry into urban factories — so they always sensed that the reorganisation of labour around new machinery would not redound to their benefit. The Luddite movement, in the early nineteenth century, is perhaps the best-known expression of that popular resistance, precisely because it was a rebellion that sought to destroy the machines that were ruining traditional trades and casting thousands of workers into unemployment and destitution. It is sometimes forgotten that the State at the time responded with still greater violence, with laws that punished by hanging anyone who broke a loom, and with a clear defence of the machine owners’ private property over the workers’ livelihoods. The State was then, more than ever, an instrument fully committed to the proprietors of the means of production.

Those means of production were machines designed to cut costs. Although mainstream historiography has sweetened the inventive capacity of the mechanics who produced the first power looms or the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution, the truth is that the purpose pursued was, above all, to replace expensive workers — skilled adult men — with women and children, who were worse paid and less able to organise collectively. Moreover, and as Andreas Malm has documented in detail in Fossil Capital, those machines were at first very inefficient from a thermodynamic standpoint — the water wheel was often cheaper than the coal-fired engine — but they allowed far greater control over the workforce. Workers went from producing with a certain autonomy in their homes in the rural world, setting their own pace, to doing so, piled together and supervised, in the factories of the polluted and overpopulated periphery of industrial cities. From the outset, in short, capitalism’s technological innovations have been geared towards maximising profits at whatever social and ecological cost was necessary, not towards lightening human effort or democratising wealth. And this is the result of capitalism’s deep logic, not of technology in itself, which also explains why, more than two centuries on, the process feels so familiar to us.

Against this critical reading of machines, economists tend to insist that, although there is a painful adjustment process, after the introduction of each new labour-replacing technology new jobs are always created in other sectors — usually, it is said, better paid. Carl Benedikt Frey, the author of The Technology Trap, opens his book by recalling the replacement of lamplighters, who used to light oil lamps, by electric lighting. Marx, for his part, saw in this kind of change horrific consequences for the workers who lost their means of subsistence, but also evidence of the progressive character of the capitalist system as it moved towards more modern relations of production. David Ricardo thought the same at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and attributed any unemployment caused by machinery to a transient friction. However, in the third edition of his Principles — a famous change of position too often forgotten by contemporary thinkers — he introduced a modification that made his argument far more sceptical: he accepted that substitution could be permanent and harmful to workers. That the intellectual father of much of liberal economic theory ended up acknowledging this should invite us to take a much more cautious view of the promises of technological optimism.

It is true that, in general, mechanisation almost never entails the automation of entire jobs, but rather of specific tasks within each post. That usually forces workers to specialise in activities that the machine cannot yet perform, often requiring higher qualifications: supervising, managing, caring. This process also lies behind the failure of what Marx expected to be a total polarisation of society between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. As it turned out, alongside the classic industrial worker, throughout the nineteenth century there grew a sizeable middle class of salaried employees specialised in activities involving more intellectual management than manual labour: technicians, administrators, professionals, supervisors. The so-called “problem of the middle class” — already debated by Bernstein and Kautsky at the end of the nineteenth century, and revisited in detail by Erik Olin Wright — is not new, but it has taken new forms with each technological wave. What is distinctive about the current one, as the Economic and Social Council’s report on the future of work emphasises, is that automation hollows out intermediate jobs in particular and polarises the labour market between highly qualified posts and highly precarious ones. In other words, it worsens an inequality dynamic that is already quite pronounced for other reasons.

Despite all this complexity, in our societies we absolutely idolise technological progress to the point of refusing to problematise its role. Any criticism of the specific direction of innovation is quickly neutralised by labelling it “technophobic” or “Luddite”, as if the choice were between uncritically admiring every novelty and going back to live in caves. But anthropologists like Alf Hornborg have been warning for decades that the machine is a condensation of materials and energy flows extracted by the centre from the peripheries of the world economy. As is well known, behind every mobile phone there is Congolese coltan extracted under conditions of semi-slavery, lithium torn from the ecosystem of the Andean salt flats, Chilean copper, and silicon refined with enormous amounts of electricity. In short, machines do not fall from the sky and are built from materials and energy flows that come from somewhere specific, even if we don’t usually think about it. That turns every technological leap into an operation of unequal ecological exchange, in which the apparent well-being of a few rests on the depletion and contamination of many others, almost always far from our sight.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example of all this is so-called artificial intelligence. Although it is sometimes presented as an almost dematerialised process — a magical, ethereal “cloud” — the truth is that it entails an extraordinary consumption of water, minerals and energy: the large data centres that train generative models require huge amounts of resources, and the dispute over electricity supply has become one of the central concerns of the tech sector itself. Even so, and bearing in mind the need to manage these costs, the technology could be used for socially desirable ends: contributing to scientific research, helping to diagnose illnesses, translating minority languages, easing tedious or dangerous tasks, freeing up working time for care and rest. In practice, however, its use is widespread in the industrial production of digital nonsense — empty images, repetitive texts, advertising content designed to capture attention — or, worse still, in the hyper-exploitation of workers: algorithms that dictate every metre of a platform courier’s route, systems that time work down to the second, or apps that assign impossible shifts to people already earning subsistence wages. It is not so much a paradox as the incorporation of technology into capitalist logic: artificial intelligence could raise productivity in countless areas — eliminating a whole list of tasks that are tedious for the worker — and produce the same output in far less time, but that option is foreclosed under capitalism.

And it is foreclosed because the system’s blind objective is to produce more and more and more, regardless of the social and ecological costs and regardless of the availability of other social alternatives. Every increase in productivity translates into greater profits for owners and either intensified tasks or outright redundancies for those who carry out the work. Digital platforms — that latest frontier of wage labour — are a good portrait of the phenomenon: cutting-edge technology placed at the service of extreme precariousness, greater labour informality, permanent algorithmic surveillance, and an attempt to reimpose the old relations of servitude with a user-friendly interface. The more serious analysts acknowledge that the future of work will depend less on the technical power of machines than on the democratic governance — in labour, fiscal, and industrial terms — that we collectively decide to build. It seems obvious that without social dialogue, collective bargaining, and markedly progressive public policies, technological change will be just one more mechanism for redistributing wealth upwards.

And that, ultimately, is the real absurdity of contemporary automation. It is not that it replaces workers — in itself, having machines and algorithms take on some of the heaviest tasks could be excellent news — but that it is not directed towards any democratically planned social end. It responds solely to the insensitive stimuli of the market, to quarterly stock-market pressure, and to the individual calculation of profit. In that way we have become part of a mechanism that never stops, precisely because there is no common plan to justify the effort. We are at the mercy of a great unconscious force. To debate the automation of work is therefore not to debate whether machines are good or bad: it is to debate who decides what is produced, how it is produced, and what it is produced for. And that is also the question that the Luddite of two centuries ago was hurling with his hammer, and which the contemporary left should not give up on posing with every tool — technical, trade-union and political — within its reach: technology, like the economy, what for?

To understand what is happening, it is worth revisiting an idea put forward in the 1970s by the economist Herman Daly — a disciple of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and, together with authors such as the Spaniard Joan Martínez Alier, one of the founding figures of ecological economics. According to Daly, the economy is not an autonomous universe but a subsystem of the Earth System, and must therefore operate within its limits if its own reproduction is to be guaranteed in the medium term. For most of the industrial era, the impact of human activity was small relative to the biosphere as a whole: we lived in what Daly called an “empty world,” a world in which natural resources appeared abundant even though, by definition, they were finite. That has been the “normal” period in which modern economics took shape, and in which we naturalized the current state of affairs, with all of its infrastructure dependent on fossil fuels and the level of consumption made possible by the petrochemical industry. The problem, Daly and his colleagues warned, is that gradually — and therefore almost imperceptibly within individual lifetimes — human economic activity has continued to grow until it has overflowed the planet’s capacity. The accumulation of knowledge since then has confirmed this trend through various scientific indicators: planetary boundaries, the ecological footprint, biodiversity loss, climate change… And what was finite but abundant is starting to cease being so. We have entered what Daly called a “full world.”

Ironically, this story of struggle over resources — so familiar to anthropology, history or sociology — has been sidelined by mainstream economics. Even though Lionel Robbins’s definition, which appears in most textbooks, describes economics as the discipline concerned with the allocation of scarce resources, in conventional economic thought natural resources in particular are conspicuous by their absence. In fact, the factors of production taught to university students are only two: capital and labor. The natural resources that once preoccupied the classical economists so much — land, for instance — do not appear in the lessons that future economists receive at university. Although more recent textbooks have incorporated the environment and natural resources, they continue to treat them as secondary variables and, above all, as highly substitutable for other factors of production — as if, when water runs out, we could simply replace it with capital.

This is not to say that economists are deliberately stupid: for a long time natural resources were extremely abundant and, as a result, extremely cheap. Consequently, they did not concern themselves with these resources when defining and specifying the models meant to represent the real world. Economists are interested in prices, and anything so abundant that its price is irrelevant — oxygen, water — tends to attract little interest. The same thing happened for decades with energy. When oil extraction began in the United States, the problem facing the major companies was that this viscous liquid was too abundant: the early strategies of American oil firms were aimed at moderating and restricting extraction in order to prop up prices. Until the 1970s the barrel was, in real terms, extraordinarily cheap; with the first oil crisis of 1973 it rose slightly above $10 nominal, and with the second it came close to $40 — the equivalent of more than $130 today. The era of cheap crude ended then, even though the economic culture built on it survives intact.

Ecological economists have for decades questioned the way conventional economics treats fossil fuels. According to standard frameworks, fossil fuels and energy in general contribute little to a country’s GDP: in accounting terms, the energy sector as a whole accounts for less than 5% of the monetary value of output. This is the same logic by which we are told that “tourism” — or any other sector — is important because it accounts for 12% of GDP. In growth accounting — the framework used by every economic institution for its forecasts — what is decisive is the contribution of capital, labor and technical progress, but not energy. Ecological economists — Robert Ayres, Reiner Kümmel, and more recently Steve Keen — have spent decades warning that this way of thinking is misleading: oxygen does not appear in GDP either, and yet without it no economic activity is possible. The same goes for energy: although its accounting weight may be small, if it is interrupted the entire economy collapses. Which is, after all, common sense.

Like any living organism, all economic activity requires energy inputs and produces waste as output. Conventional economics does not conceptualize it that way, which allows it to treat the economy as a closed system, with circular flows of capital and labor but no physical inputs, no residual outputs, and little regard for the laws of thermodynamics. Reality, however, asserts itself: when energy sources are interrupted, the whole metabolism falters. And those flows are more likely to be cut off the scarcer the resource, or the more concentrated its extraction and processing. It is worth recalling just how concentrated fossil fuel production is globally: just three countries — the United States, Saudi Arabia and Russia — account for more than 40% of oil extraction, and an even higher share for natural gas, led by the United States, Russia and Iran.

If hydrocarbons are concentrated, the minerals required for the energy transition are even more so — and that is something few people are aware of. The so-called critical minerals — essential for producing renewable technologies and a large share of electronic goods — exhibit concentrations even higher than those of oil. As the chart below from the International Energy Agency shows, in the case of lithium three countries account for over 80% of extraction, while nearly 70% of cobalt is located in a single country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the processing stage the picture is even sharper: China controls more than 80% of rare earths, around 70% of cobalt and close to 60% of lithium. The combination of geological chance and industrial policy has produced a scenario in which the elements crucial to the metabolism of modern societies are in the hands of very few.

The full world thus has a precise geography: a handful of countries and a handful of mines and refineries that control the physical flows on which everything else depends. And on top of that geography a major political crisis is now building. Traditional liberalism was built during this fossil-fuel anomaly, naturalizing a state of affairs in which energy was abundant and the economy seemed to have no limits. Within that framework, any country that needed energy or any other resource could in theory obtain it by turning to the international market; the key to progress, we were told, was the opening of markets. The current crisis of liberalism, therefore, has less to do with its ideas than with the loss of the material base that sustained them. In a full world, interdependence has become vulnerability: energy and resources are once again scarce and fiercely disputed. This does not happen with all of them at the same time or to the same degree; some are especially critical — hence, precisely, the name “critical minerals.”

As I have argued in La guerra por la energía: poder, imperios y crisis ecológica [The War for Energy: Power, Empires and Ecological Crisis], this is the situation that explains the return of neo-mercantilist practices, and of violence, on the part of a great power, the United States, which was hegemonic in the fossil-fuel era and now fears losing that privileged position. Making sense of the geopolitical phenomena of the contemporary world is only possible if we draw on the tools of history and ecological economics, and avoid as much as possible what we call conventional economics.

If you see an economist speaking as though we still lived in an empty world, remember that he is a zombie: someone who appears to be alive, but isn’t.

The economic historian Karl Polanyi explained masterfully in The Great Transformation that the market-State dilemma — according to which we must choose one or the other to allocate resources properly — is a false one. Markets, in fact, never existed apart from the State, and were indeed deliberately created by its hand; most often through merciless violence against the popular classes — as occurred with the enclosures — and against indigenous populations, since Western institutions made their way into the world propelled by the sabres and gunpowder of imperial armies. The market is not, as liberals would have it, a natural institution.

Pulling on that thread, the historian Quinn Slobodian, in Hayek’s Bastards, sets out a very different account of the origins of neoliberalism from the usual one. Against the conventional narrative, which holds that neoliberalism was chiefly an ideological project to deregulate the market — because, supposedly, this was preferable to having the State direct the economy — Slobodian reminds us that markets are always regulated. The real motive behind neoliberalism was to insulate economic decisions from the popular will, rendering them independent so that the passions inherent in democracy would not interfere with the optimal allocation of resources that markets would secure.

The European Union of today is a product of that neoliberal historical moment, and this is most clearly expressed in the European Central Bank's anti-democratic character. Although this institution is responsible for managing monetary policy — and can, for example, influence the “price” of our mortgages — in the exercise of its functions it is independent of political power and is, in fact, prohibited by law from directly financing States, an option that was common practice among earlier central banks. The underlying logic is plain: the management of monetary policy is far too important to be left at the mercy of citizens’ wishes; far better that technocrats should be at the helm. This idea of outsourcing responsibility to an independent — though public — entity lay at the heart of the neoliberal thesis and of the spirit of Friedrich Hayek. The result was not a super-State but, as Perry Anderson put it, an infra-State: one in which institutions prevent popular interference in markets.

This tension between the wishes of the majority and the limits imposed from above has been intrinsic to the very evolution of democracy. As far back as ancient Greece, the dispute between the radical factions — Solon, Ephialtes, Pericles — and the conservative ones — Aristotle, Plato — turned on the scope of the demos and on the matters about which it could legitimately decide; institutions such as the Senate arose precisely out of the aristocratic interest in curbing popular impulses. The modern rule of law is a direct heir to that tension: a historical construct that channels, through rules — usually constitutional — what majorities may or may not decide. But not all conceptions of the rule of law are alike. Progressive authors such as Luigi Ferrajoli defend the existence of a sphere of the undecidable that shields personal liberties and social rights, understood as the necessary condition of democracy itself. Neoliberals, by contrast, prefer to remove economic decisions from the democratic sphere. The undecidable, depending on who defines it, either protects the citizen or disarms them.

Yet neoliberalism as we knew it from the 1980s up to the financial crisis of 2008 is dead. What is replacing it — as Slobodian himself has been pointing out in his most recent work — is an authoritarian populism with neoliberal roots. This is an unprecedented political formation that brings together four elements: a strong executive willing to intervene in the economy, a selective neo-mercantilist protectionism, a highly restrictive conception of human rights, and a technological oligarchy that aspires to merge with the state apparatus. It retains the neoliberal contempt for popular sovereignty but sheds its liberal façade. And there is no better place to see it than in the United States, where Donald Trump’s external neo-mercantilism has been wedded to the authoritarian liberalism of the techno-oligarchs.

A few days ago, Palantir — a company founded by the reactionary billionaire Peter Thiel and now run by his counterpart Alex Karp — published a terrifying, if perfectly transparent, manifesto setting out its position. Palantir is a technology company and an arms manufacturer for the wars of our time — drones, digital espionage, artificial intelligence, and so on — that has for several years been winning lucrative contracts, above all from the United States government. Amnesty International has accused the company of complicity in the war crimes of the Israeli military, and its involvement in the war in Iran is a matter of public record.

This is not, however, a phenomenon confined to the United States. Palantir has signed contracts with the defence ministries of Germany, France and the United Kingdom, operates within the data infrastructure of the British National Health Service (NHS), and aspires to embed itself in the European Union's digital infrastructure. To this must be added a structural dependence on a wider handful of US corporations increasingly aligned with the political project of Trump and his techno-oligarchic allies — Peter Thiel, Palantir’s founder, gave $15 million to J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign. Technological dependence thus inevitably becomes political dependence.

Palantir’s manifesto is clear in its intentions, arguing that it should no longer be States that handle crucial elements of warfare, but technology companies. The company’s technology already underpins the automated decision to identify enemies, dispatch drones, kill targets and return to base. But what these techno-oligarchs want is to go further still, for their worldview also entails a forceful rejection of pluralism, of cultural diversity, and of any values that threaten the American way of life. In this respect, the interests of these corporate giants are perfectly aligned with those of Donald Trump and his administration. They likewise share the conviction that contemporary democracy is incompatible with such aspirations — or, as they put it, that “democracy” can only be saved if it is transformed by integrating these large technology firms into the heart of the State and by deploying more active military intervention both abroad and at home (these technologies are also being applied in the identification of undocumented migrants in the context of the United States’ anti-immigration policy).

The challenge is enormous, and yet it scarcely features in everyday political conversation. Certainly, we can say that European sovereignty is at stake, given our technological dependence on a techno-oligarchic elite based on the other side of the Atlantic and ever more closely intertwined with the American apparatus of power. But democracy as we have known it is also under threat. If Europe fails to articulate a strategic response that recovers sovereign capacity in critical sectors — energy, defence, data, digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence — and that, at the same time, reaffirms the undecidable core of rights that Ferrajoli identified as the condition of possibility of democracy itself, the danger is plain: a sustained drift toward authoritarian regimes of a new kind, no longer grounded in fascist-style terror but in pervasive algorithmic surveillance, in the automated identification of dissidents and migrants, and in an architecture of citizen control operated by private corporations whose owners openly despise pluralism.

One central point bears repeating: this does not belong to some distant dystopia. The systems are already operating in Gaza, Iran, the English Channel, and British hospitals. The tension that Polanyi and Slobodian described — between market and democracy, between popular sovereignty and technocratic insulation — thus enters a new and qualitatively more dangerous phase. Neoliberalism removed the economy from citizens’ judgment. What is coming seeks to remove the citizens themselves.

Although the official narrative does not yet acknowledge it, the situation is much more bogged down than the US government anticipated. In fact, Donald Trump launched the war by framing it as a brief, surgical operation that would bring “freedom” to Iranians while providing greater peace of mind to Israel — which regards Iran as its principal existential threat — and to the Gulf states. Reality has turned out very differently.

The Strait of Hormuz is a node in the metabolism of the world-economy, and it is also a chokepoint extremely vulnerable to geopolitical shocks. The impact of its closure on producer countries is very big and, according to data from the International Energy Agency, the volume of oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz has fallen to an average of 10% of pre-war levels. As the chart below shows, alternative routes — via the Red Sea, for example — have had to sustain the bulk of exports since the war began; clearly insufficient to maintain pre-war export levels.

Of all the Gulf countries, the largest share of exports is held by Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates, followed by Iran and Kuwait, as shown in the following chart. This means that, although Iran is bearing the direct costs of the war — including the majority of fatalities and the destruction of infrastructure — the aggregate economic losses fall on countries that maintain historical ties with Washington.

And it is not just about oil. Around 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas transits through Hormuz, and Qatar is the big loser on the gas side. This particularly aggravates the situation in Asia: around 28% of the LNG that China imports comes from Qatar, and almost a third of total LNG flows to Asia depend on the strait. The global energy crisis, therefore, has two simultaneous legs — oil and gas — which reinforce one another, on top of all the industries producing goods derived from fossil fuels.

As I explained last week regarding the petrochemical sector, the Gulf states have spent decades deepening their commercial ties with Asia, particularly with China: between 2010 and 2024, this trade has practically tripled. According to estimates from the think tank Asia House, this dynamic will only intensify in the coming years.

This is a delicate situation for the Gulf states, which must maintain a careful balance between their alliances with the West and their growing ties with Asia. It is worth bearing in mind that the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, which reports to the US Congress, has declared that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea form a new “axis of autocracy” and asserts that they share the desire to challenge US global leadership. To some extent, this framing operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more Washington harasses and sanctions the peripheries, the more it pushes the Gulf states to think twice before any gesture of distancing from Beijing.

Under normal conditions, most of the crude oil leaving the Strait of Hormuz in 2025 was destined for Asian countries, as shown in the following chart. We can see that both Europe and the Americas depend only marginally on physical oil supplies from the Gulf countries. This does not mean the closure leaves them unaffected, since prices are determined globally and they do suffer the impacts of inflation — and they can also be particularly dependent on specific products, such as fertilisers. But in general, it is clear that Asia is the chief casualty of the current situation, as demonstrated by the fact that measures to reduce energy consumption — degrowth policies, we might say — have been faster and deeper there.

The interruption of trade flows has serious physical implications, not just economic ones. It is not merely that oil becomes more expensive — as is the case in Europe or the United States — but that it may simply stop arriving in sufficient quantities to meet demand. Anticipating this possibility, China has spent years building up its oil reserves, which are estimated to be sufficient to cover four months without new imports by sea; though with demand-reduction measures we could be speaking of a considerably longer period.

As the following chart shows, China is heavily dependent on oil imports from Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Emirates, Kuwait and Oman, most of which transit the strait. But official data do not show imports from Iran or Venezuela, as both countries are subject to international sanctions. The standard practice is “rebranding” — that is, setting up complex operations to pass off sanctioned oil as imports from legally traded countries, such as Indonesia or Malaysia. The most reliable estimates indicate that, once this strategy is taken into account, nearly 50% of Chinese oil imports come from the Gulf.

One consequence of the above is that China has turned increasingly to Russia, its major oil supplier. In fact, Russia is one of the big winners from the energy crisis, and according to International Energy Agency data, its export revenues practically doubled in March, reaching $19 billion. Contributing to this, of course, is the relief the United States has afforded it on international sanctions — just as it has with Venezuela.

Yet if China’s dependence on oil imports is great, its inverse is even greater: the dependence of Iranian exports on China. As the following chart shows, China has, in recent years, become the customer for 90% of Iran's oil exports. The consolidation has been rapid: although China was already the main buyer in the wake of Trump’s 2018 sanctions, the leap of the last three or four years towards near-exclusivity turns Tehran into a fully-fledged energy client state of Beijing, with all that this implies in terms of negotiating asymmetry.

Today we know that Israel has entered this war mainly because it projects into the future its idea of a “Greater Israel”, in which territorial expansionism would allow it to consolidate its position as the region’s hegemonic power. We also know that Iran has found in its control over the Strait of Hormuz its principal bargaining chip, aimed, as far as possible, at securing guarantees against future attacks. The real objective of the United States is more opaque than the initial naivety of those who believed it would be a quick and easy operation. The situation has become stalemate, giving rise to a global energy crisis of considerable magnitude.

That said, crises never strike everyone equally. As I have tried to show, the main economic impact is being felt in the Gulf and Asian economies, precisely at a moment when both regions are deepening their relations and challenging Western primacy. It is not clear whether this war will weaken that prior dynamic or, on the contrary, deepen it; but what is clear is that China has sound structural reasons to push for de-escalation.

Although it is not the main party affected, the United States cannot afford for the war to drag on indefinitely. Its problems have to do with inflation, the impact on financial markets and the domestic political erosion of Donald Trump. For Europe, the situation is considerably worse: more exposed to the energy shock through prices and supply chains, with the ECB caught between imported inflation that cannot be tamed by rate hikes and a slowdown that those very hikes would aggravate. Europe’s room for manoeuvre, once again, is narrower than that of the United States.

What is being decided in the Strait of Hormuz is the energy architecture — and therefore the balance of power — of the 21st century. The chokepoint symbolises the vulnerability of the world-economy’s metabolism, but the war is also revealing the United States' inability to impose, by force, a geographic-energy order that is slipping towards Asia at an accelerating pace. When China defends peace, it knows better than anyone that its structural gains — the consolidation of the Eurasian axis, the strengthening of its ties with the Gulf, the gradual autonomy from the dollar in strategic exchanges — are incompatible with a long war. In that equation, peace suits Beijing today more than it suits Washington. And the price of that asymmetry could be measured, in the medium term, in a faster shift of the world-system’s centre of gravity towards Asia.

As early as 1920, Staudinger had argued that molecules could be joined into long chains. It took more than a decade for the scientific community to accept the idea, but today we call those macromolecules polymers (DNA, RNA, starch and proteins, for instance, are all polymers). As though it were a train, each polymer is made up of a series of subunits — the carriages — called monomers; and the way the monomers are combined determines the chemical properties of the polymer in question. We can think of them as building blocks that can be arranged in different ways, giving rise to different substances which are naturally present all around us. And which can also be created artificially.

Take the case of vulcanised rubber, a semi-synthetic product created from natural rubber, which in the 1930s was obtained 90% from Sri Lanka, India and Malaysia — a dangerous concentration from a geopolitical point of view. Rubber was indispensable militarily, used for tyres and for sealing and insulating vehicle components, so learning to create fully synthetic rubber became a central objective of the chemical industries — always backed by, when not directly run by, the state. In those turbulent times, countries sought to guarantee their self-sufficiency, which required both active control over natural resources — a driver of territorial expansionism and imperialism — and a reduction in their commercial dependencies on other countries.

From the late twenties, and above all during the thirties, discoveries of how to build synthetic polymers on a large scale cascaded one after another. PVC, synthetic rubber, polyethylene — the simplest polymer of them all — nylon… all came onto the scene. As on other occasions, the military industry became the catalyst for innovation and discovery. Indeed, the researcher Adam Hanieh argues that the Second World War can without exaggeration be labelled the ‘Polymer War’. In any case, these products transformed the world: they made goods cheaper and reproducible on a large scale, ideal for war, but also paving the way for the subsequent democratisation of consumption and the multiplication of goods. This was the deployment of the petrochemical industry, and our present-day world cannot be understood without these events — even though they scarcely feature in contemporary debate.

To understand why the current war in Iran is not merely a matter of barrels of crude, but a blow to the very heart of contemporary material production, we need to open the black box of the petrochemical industry and grasp what it is made of.

They Are Fossil Products

With the production of synthetic polymers, countries managed to escape their dependence on certain natural resources, freeing themselves from geographical servitudes. In reality, one form of dependency was swapped for another. The problem is that, then as now, the importance of fossil energy was underestimated: whether coal or oil, it was so abundant that it was not considered a serious constraint on the production of polymers and consumer goods. But the fact is that the entire petrochemical industry depends on these energy sources, and according to the International Energy Agency it currently accounts for 14% of global oil demand and 8% of natural gas demand. What is relevant here is that this demand is for use not only as energy but also as an input into the productive process itself.

It should be borne in mind that when crude oil is extracted from the wells, what comes out does not look much like the petrol we put into our vehicles every day. It is a mixture of hydrocarbon compounds which have to be transformed, or ‘refined’. This refining phase follows extraction, and consists of chemically separating the different components of the crude using processes involving very high temperatures. At the same refinery the qualities of the resulting products are also typically treated and upgraded — among them petrol, which represents around 45% of the barrel of crude, along with gas oil and diesel, jet fuel, and other substances used as inputs by the petrochemical industry, such as naphtha.

In a third phase, the chemical industry takes the relevant inputs from the refining process and transforms them into basic petrochemical products. Thus, what enters this phase is naphtha, ethane, propane and methane — all derived from the refining of oil and natural gas — and what comes out are products such as light olefins (ethylene and propylene) and aromatics (benzene, toluene and xylenes). All these names are wholly alien to our daily lives, yet they form the basis of 95% of all manufactured goods: few of today’s goods are not produced in one way or another by the petrochemical industry. For example, product packaging accounts for 36% of global plastic demand, followed by the synthetic textile industry, the construction industry, and consumer goods such as toys and household utensils — as well as medicines, solar panels, spectacles, bicycles, and even bulletproof vests.

The central point of this analysis is to understand that all of these manufactured products depend on the extraction and processing of fossil energy. As I have already mentioned, fossil fuels — primarily oil and natural gas — are used both as fuel and as raw materials. This explains why vertical integration is so common — that is, a single company's ownership of both the extraction and refining and petrochemical phases. It also explains the advantage the Middle East enjoys in developing the petrochemical industry: its energy costs are much lower.

The Middle East’s Pivot Towards China

As I explained in an earlier analysis, the growing importance of oil at the start of the twentieth century turned the Middle East into the central object of European imperial rivalry — with Great Britain directly or indirectly controlling everywhere from Egypt to Iran, where it acquired control of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), today’s BP. After the Second World War, hegemony passed to US companies, but nationalist movements also emerged, culminating in episodes such as the Iranian nationalisation of APOC — by then known as Anglo-Iranian — under Mossadegh in 1951, and the subsequent Anglo-American coup d’état. As Adam Hanieh has shown in Crude Capitalism, that nationalist spirit crystallised in the creation of OPEC in 1960 and, in the heat of the Yom Kippur War, in the wave of oil nationalisations of the 1970s. Significantly, those movements to socialise companies were not reversed in the following decades when neoliberalism became the official ideology of the West.

Indeed, during the eighties and nineties, Western countries embraced the neoliberal ideology that championed the triumph of the market over the state, leading to a wave of privatisations that also reached Spain, with more than a hundred public companies privatised. The irony is that at that very moment, China was rolling out a development strategy based on state-led industrialisation, with a huge role for public and semi-public enterprises. The Gulf countries, for their part, not only retained public control of their companies but also embarked on a process of diversifying their economies to reduce dependence on oil extraction.

The Gulf states became convinced that they had to industrialise by developing new manufacturing sectors, as well as refining and petrochemicals, but they did not entrust this to the free market. On the contrary, as early as 1968 a country like Bahrain launched its first five-year plan aimed at creating an aluminium industry and shipyards; something Dubai and Oman would also do a few years later. In 1976, Saudi Arabia made the leap with the creation of the Saudi Arabia Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), today one of the world’s leading petrochemical companies and owned principally by Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil and gas company. Other countries, such as the UAE, have likewise used their state oil companies for decades to control the refining and petrochemical phases and, in this way, to exercise greater control over the fossil chain while partially diversifying their economies. The Gulf’s state-owned firms are not entirely public, but are also held in part by private capital, both domestic and international — which has given rise to the proliferation of a billionaire elite tied to their governments.

This energy strategy has not been confined to the region. China’s industrialisation process, and its incorporation into the world economy from 2001 onwards, required vast quantities of oil which the Gulf countries were willing to supply. Since then, relations between the Gulf and China have become so close that 2024 was the first year in which Gulf–China trade surpassed Gulf–West trade. In the case of petrochemical exports, the Asian orientation is clear: China accounts for 28% and India for 23%.

In 2024, the two world regions which grew most in petrochemical production were China (6.8%) and the Gulf countries (5.7%). The interrelation, however, has not been purely commercial but also in terms of investment, with Asian capital investing in the Gulf and Gulf capital investing in Asia. As Adam Hanieh has pointed out, between 2017 and 2021 more than 30% of China’s oil investment was directed towards the Middle East — five times more than in the previous period. The reverse is also true, with companies such as Aramco taking positions in Asian refining and petrochemical industries.

The Problem of the War

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has not only interrupted the passage of oil but of all the trade that crossed it. And that includes fertilisers and petrochemical products. The entire industrialisation strategy of the main Gulf countries — Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar — has been brought to a halt, to say nothing of the costs inflicted on the infrastructures under attack. In Saudi Arabia’s case, the impact is somewhat smaller because it still has an outlet via the Red Sea — at least so long as the situation in Yemen continues to allow it.

The consequences, however, ramify far beyond the region. The interruption of refined-product supplies directly affects East Asia’s petrochemical plants, which depend on these inputs, thereby raising the cost of producing plastics, synthetic textiles and nitrogen fertilisers, among other things. For Europe, which had already reduced its dependence on Russian gas after the war in Ukraine — albeit while increasing its reliance on liquefied natural gas from the United States — the closure of the Strait of Hormuz represents another shock to the energy and industrial supply chains. And the longer it lasts, the higher the inflationary waves will be.

On a global scale, the conflict accelerates a trend that was already underway: the bifurcation of petrochemical supply chains between a Euro-Atlantic bloc trying to retain its power and a Gulf–Asia axis deepening its integration. But this bifurcation does not resolve the underlying problem, since both blocs continue to depend on the same fossil material base — only now fragmented into tenser circuits that are more vulnerable to the next geopolitical disruption.

In that context of reconfiguration, the Qatari analyst Khalid Al-Jaber, who is linked to the Doha government, has recently suggested that the war in Iran has shown the Gulf countries the need to ‘reformulate’ the alliance with the United States. The reading is clear: Washington has proved incapable of guaranteeing the security of its Gulf allies when that objective collides with its commitment to Israel. Yet reformulation does not necessarily mean breaking. What is taking shape instead is a scenario of multiple hedging, in which the Gulf countries maintain the military alliance with the United States while deepening economic integration with China — already their main trading partner — and exploring ties with other actors such as India and Turkey. The new global scenario does not allow them to choose a side; rather, it forces them to move within a precarious, highly unstable equilibrium, aggravated by the frustration of having watched war break out without Washington taking their interests into account.

As I have argued on other occasions, we are witnessing the reordering of the international division of labour in a context of a war for hegemony. But this very fact also reveals the structural fragility of an economic system built on an extremely concentrated and finite material base. After all, we live in a world of synthetic polymers and fertilisers whose existence depends on continuous flows of oil and gas that pass through a handful of geographical bottlenecks. When those flows are interrupted, as is now happening at Hormuz, the energy supply wobbles and the social metabolism that sustains daily life in industrial economies begins to crack. The real question, then, goes beyond who controls the Persian Gulf or the Strait of Hormuz and instead points to how far it is viable to sustain, indefinitely, a civilisation based on the expansion of a global petrochemical infrastructure that, sooner or later, comes up against its own material limits. We live in a historical anomaly made possible by fossil fuels, and the necessary adaptation involves far more than a mere energy transition: it demands rethinking the material base on which the global economy is organised.

I enthusiastically showed my daughters the photographs of the Earth taken a few days ago by the Artemis II mission. What was enthusiasm for me translated, for them, into nothing more than genuine curiosity — albeit one that became especially compelling when they saw the beauty of the aurora borealis reflected in the images. In truth, they are still too young to grasp the significance of a photograph that reveals the fragility of our planet and of life itself.

Most of us are thoroughly familiar with the image of our planet, so we are not easily impressed either. It was very different for those who, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, saw for the first time the various photographs of the Earth taken by the Apollo missions. The most famous of all was taken during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972: it depicted the entire planet and gave rise to the concept of the “blue marble.” In environmental studies, that period is known as the Second Copernican Revolution, defined by the fact that, thanks to certain technological instruments, we were able to see our own planet with our own eyes.

If the astronomical work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and others had displaced the Earth from the centre of the universe, consigning it to a peripheral corner of the solar system, this second Copernican revolution redirected attention towards the Earth to assess, among other things, its exceptionality and fragility. It is hardly surprising that this had an enormous impact on the development of what we now know as Earth System science, and also on the emerging environmentalist movements: James Lovelock, for instance, acknowledged that these photographs encouraged him to put forward his famous Gaia hypothesis, according to which the Earth was an organic entity.

Thanks to the advances of science, we now know a great deal more about our planet. We know, for example, that the Earth needs only to move roughly five per cent closer to the Sun to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, or the same distance farther away to turn it into a world of ice. We know that if it were somewhat larger, it would retain gases that would render the atmosphere unbreathable, and that if it were smaller, it would have lost the oxygen and water vapour we need. We know, in short, that life depends on an extraordinarily precarious equilibrium, protected among other things by a magnetic field that deflects lethal solar radiation and which, in passing, bestows those aurora borealis that my daughters admire and that seem drawn from a fairy tale.

When one is aware of such fragility, it is natural for conservationist and even humanist discourses to emerge. One of the Artemis II astronauts declared from space that “up here we are one single thing: Homo sapiens, all of us, regardless of where you come from or what you are like — we are one people.” Such assertions are true, of course, but they remain unrefined. It is the same discourse as fifty years ago — not free from ideology, still less so then, in the midst of the Cold War — yet one that fails to internalise all the things that have changed, nor indeed the things that have not.

In the early awakening of the environmentalist movement and the unfolding of Earth System science, it was understandable that attention should focus on a system as complex and fascinating as the Earth. What is more, we are still far from understanding how all the parameters of this life-sustaining system function and interact. But today we know enough about the principal danger — though not the only one — threatening our very existence: the emission of greenhouse gases and the consequent climate change. We also know the main cause of this excess of emissions: a model of production and consumption whose dynamic of unlimited growth is unsustainable within the planet’s limits. With good reason, the human species has been described as a geological force capable of altering the parameters of the Earth system, giving rise to the view held by many geologists that we live in the geological era of the Anthropocene.

That view is correct, but incomplete. Notions such as the Anthropocene run the risk of equating the responsibilities of every individual of the species Homo sapiens, as though neither power nor inequality existed within our community. On the contrary, some human groups bear greater responsibility than others for the situation in which we find ourselves: the wealthy nations that achieved their wealth through the uncontrolled emission of greenhouse gases; the large energy companies that deliberately concealed for decades their knowledge of the harm caused by burning fossil fuels; the countries that outsource their production so that ecological damage takes place elsewhere; the social classes that benefit from this political and economic order; the specific individuals whose luxury lifestyles carry carbon footprints larger than those of vast segments of the population put together… We could go on, but I trust the point is clear.

The fact is that whilst the astronauts of the American Artemis II mission were sharing their beautiful photographs of what planet Earth looks like from space, offering reflections on what unites us as a species, the President of the United States was threatening to destroy a millennia-old civilisation in a war he himself has initiated — without having yet explained why or to what end. The paradox is that the Artemis II mission is itself a propaganda device of American imperialism, so that one of the world’s greatest threats will also derive benefit and pride from this space venture. Two worlds will then intersect: destruction and conservation.

The day will come when my daughters understand that the beauty of the aurora borealis is also a sign of how fragile everything is: the magnetic field that generates it, the atmosphere we breathe, the equilibrium that permits life. And they will understand, I hope, that protecting that equilibrium is not an abstract or merely technical matter, but a profoundly political one. Behind every tonne of CO₂ lie concrete decisions, identifiable interests and unequal responsibilities. The blue marble is not breaking on its own. Quite the opposite: an economic system serving very specific interests is cracking and destroying it whilst others photograph it.

Felipe VI has acknowledged that among the actions of the Spanish Empire during the conquest of the Americas there was “much abuse”, as well as “moral and ethical struggles and controversies”. This is a modest gesture intended to help normalise relations with Mexico, which in 2019 asked the monarchy to apologise to Indigenous peoples for the violence, plunder and massacres committed during colonial times. That request, which actually took the form of a private letter, was deliberately leaked by the Spanish monarchy and led to a diplomatic crisis in which Spain —both government and monarchy— dug in its heels and refused to apologise.

Such an apology would not have been unusual. The letter from then Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador was also sent to the Vatican, since the Church played an active role in the invasion of the Americas and in subsequent processes. In fact, the Church had already moved ahead: in 2015 Pope Francis asked forgiveness for the “many sins committed in the name of God against the native peoples of America”. Even earlier, in 2000, Pope John Paul II had lamented the “painful violence and persecution” suffered by Indigenous peoples. Why could Spain not do the same?

Other countries that had colonies or that killed and expelled Indigenous populations have apologised for their imperial past. The United States Congress, for instance, passed a resolution in 2009 that explicitly apologised “to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted upon them by citizens of the United States”. Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan are other examples that, to varying degrees, have acknowledged their colonial past and issued apologies in one form or another. In general, however, former colonial powers have refused to recognise that such gestures entail legal responsibility, which would lead to compensation. And almost always these are partial acknowledgements, referring to specific cases or motivated by the desire to improve contemporary economic relations —as occurred with Italy’s apology to Libya prior to agreements on gas and oil. In other words, there is strong resistance to structurally linking the old colonial networks —and their many abuses— with the benefits extracted in the metropole.

The visceral response of Spanish nationalism, which has been stirred even by Felipe VI’s modest and informal remarks, must be understood in the context of the fragility and reaffirmation of an identity built upon founding myths and extreme violence. This is not unique to Spain —it has occurred in other former imperial nations— but in Spain’s case it seems particularly difficult to acknowledge.

Spanish imperialism was built on conquest and slavery, but this began well before the invasion of the Americas. In fact, the slave-based sugar plantations that Columbus established just months after arriving on the island of Hispaniola —which were effectively the first capitalist factories, later “improved” across the Americas to make African slave labour more efficient— were imported from practices already developed by Spaniards and Portuguese in the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands. Likewise, brutality towards Indigenous populations had already been rehearsed against the Guanches in the Canary Islands, in accounts that are chilling to read. More broadly, the Atlantic islands functioned as a laboratory for developing a model of colonisation based on sugar, deforestation, forced labour and the slave trade, as historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has pointed out.

We must not forget that the main interest of the conquistadors was the plunder of resources such as gold, silver and coerced labour. The Spaniards —in reality, predominantly Castilians— enslaved Indigenous peoples from the outset, using methods already employed on the Iberian Peninsula against Muslim populations: they referred to rapid raids on Indigenous communities to capture new slaves as cabalgadas, razias, or even, strikingly, vendimias (“harvests”). This forced labour was used across all economic activities, especially plantations and mining. But as the Indigenous population rapidly declined due to the devastating combination of disease and malnutrition, Charles I authorised the African slave trade from 1518 in order to maintain a supply of cheap labour.

It is also true that there were moral and ethical controversies, as Felipe VI notes, since part of the Church was deeply disturbed by the treatment of Indigenous peoples. The Crown was receptive to this view until the mid-sixteenth century, leading to the enactment of the New Laws in 1542 —which is what the current monarch refers to when he insists that his predecessors attempted to protect Indigenous populations. Certainly, these were reforms and laws that were largely unenforced, a point that underpins the description of “much abuse”, through which Felipe VI appears to absolve the monarchy of responsibility, placing it instead on encomenderos and conquistadors who disobeyed the metropole.

But the entire process of the invasion of the Americas involved more than human suffering. It also constituted what Marx termed the “primitive accumulation” of capitalism —the initial step in the enrichment of fortunes that would go on to drive the expansion of capitalist dynamics in Europe. It is true that Spain failed to convert that wealth into a fully fledged capitalist transformation, largely due to the rent-seeking character of its elites, something already criticised at the time by mercantilist economists. Luis Ortiz, a sixteenth-century royal official, bitterly complained that foreigners “treat us worse than Indians” because European countries exported manufactures to Spain while Spaniards exported raw materials, wool, silks and similar goods. Spain, despite being an empire, already occupied a “semi-peripheral” role in economic terms in the sixteenth century: although Spaniards extracted gold and silver from the Indigenous populations —Ortiz’s own words— other European countries took “the money of the kingdom through their industry, without working to extract it from the mines, as we do”. In other words, Spain actively participated in colonial extraction but failed to translate that accumulation into domestic industrial development, remaining subordinated to other European economies.

In subsequent centuries, other countries —notably England— would provide the decisive impulse to capitalism both domestically and across Europe, a process built upon the combined availability of fossil fuels and colonial networks. Spain, however, did not remain outside later forms of plunder. More than 8% of enslaved Africans —over one million people— were transported on ships flying the Spanish flag. A substantial body of academic literature, beginning with the work of historian José Antonio Piqueras, has documented how Spanish and Catalan families enriched themselves through the slave trade —a relationship that contributed to the emergence of early industrial capitalism in Spain. Human trafficking was a highly profitable business that enabled the accumulation of large fortunes on the peninsula, which were later reinvested —centuries after the conquest of the Americas— in early bourgeois projects. Indeed, Spain was the last European country to abolish slavery, doing so in Cuba as late as 1886.

None of the above would have been possible without the complicity of the monarchy, which not only enacted the laws governing the empire and its possessions but also owned slaves itself —the so-called “king’s slaves”. Needless to say, subsequent legislation was deeply shaped by commercial and economic interests in which the monarchy was, at the very least, complicit —not least because the revenues from the slave trade also flowed into the state’s coffers. The monarchy thus bears a long record of accumulated grievances that could justify an honest recognition of the facts and a corresponding apology. Because this is not merely a matter of “many abuses”, but of a structural relationship between the welfare of some —at the centre of the empire— and the plunder, massacre and violence inflicted upon others —in the colonies.

Fortunately, we have long since left that period behind and can view the past with far greater objectivity. The danger is that Spanish nationalism refuses to do so, because doing so would mean recognising that the identity it celebrates is built upon the suffering of others. Modern democratic societies confront their past, learn from it, and look to the future with new principles and values. What Felipe VI’s words reveal is that the monarchy itself is still unwilling to take that step: it prefers to speak of isolated “abuses” rather than acknowledge the structural relationship of plunder and violence upon which its own power was also built.

This represents an ironic convergence between an ecological political movement—which argues that reducing energy and resource consumption is a necessary condition for making our economic activity sustainable within planetary limits—and a mainstream organisation founded more than half a century ago, whose primary purpose is to monitor and ensure the security of the energy flows on which contemporary societies depend. While degrowth advocates defend these measures as structural and think in ecological terms, the IEA sees them as temporary adjustments to cope with the current crisis. Even so, the convergence is significant.

As with the recent energy blackout in Spain and Portugal, the current energy crisis highlights our profound dependence on flows of energy and resources that are usually invisible to us: we switch on lights and computers, turn on heating or air conditioning, take hot showers, and fill up our cars without pausing to consider everything that makes such actions possible. Energy surrounds us, yet we ignore it. As a result, we tend not to worry about its supply: we take it for granted. In fact, most people pay attention only to price, not to physical quantities (for example, the tonnes of resources required) or to their origin. Energy is the black box of the economy: an essential mechanism on which our way of life depends, but whose functioning remains opaque to most.

The truth is that, as a species, we are living beyond what the planet can sustain. According to the latest State of the Global Climate report by the World Meteorological Organization, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in 2024 reached their highest level in two million years. Indeed, the annual increase in 2024 was the largest recorded since 1957, pointing towards a very bleak future. This is despite the fact that we have known for almost a century the main—and highly damaging—consequences of this trajectory. Yet global indicators have continued to worsen since the major international climate agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997. This does not mean that what has been done so far is useless—far from it: every effort counts, and every fraction of a degree avoided is a welcome contribution—but it is clearly insufficient.

Our global economic system remains off track, and the resulting adjustments in the Earth system’s parameters already entail irreversible consequences for millions of species… and no less dangerous ones for humans. This horizon is especially harsh for the poorest within each society and for those living in regions most affected by global warming. The ecological—or ecosocial—crisis is far deeper and broader than the energy crisis triggered by the war in Iran. And what is most striking is that mainstream thinking can propose extraordinary solutions that should long ago have been incorporated into everyday, normal policy.

However, it is essential to understand that demand-reduction measures are not socially neutral. It is not the same to ask someone with an office job to work from home as it is to ask a warehouse worker or a truck driver; it is not the same to recommend public transport to someone living in a city with a metro network as to someone in a poorly connected rural area of depopulated Spain. If this asymmetry is ignored, the risk is clear: that the burden of adjustment will fall on those who have contributed least to the problem and/or have the fewest resources to adapt. For this reason, any serious programme to reduce material consumption must incorporate a redistributive policy to compensate for these initial inequalities. Otherwise, degrowth will become a privilege for those who can afford it and a burden for everyone else.

In any case, governments could turn necessity into virtue and use the current crisis to address some fundamental challenges. Nearly half of the oil consumed in the European Union is used for road transport, so emissions could be drastically reduced through strong intervention in this sector. According to the IEA, teleworking in jobs where it is feasible could reduce total vehicle fuel consumption by up to 6%; another 6% could be achieved by lowering speed limits by 10 km/h; a further 3% by promoting public transport; and up to an additional 8% through measures such as car-sharing, more efficient driving, and proper tyre maintenance. While the IEA frames this in terms of reducing oil consumption to lessen dependence on imports, it also implies a reduction in emissions. This is where degrowth meets energy security.

Governments have generally focused on supply-side policies, such as producing electric vehicles and shifting the energy sources of large industries. These measures are necessary, but they can—and should—be complemented by demand-side policies like those proposed by the IEA. The effects here would be much faster, though they would also require strong political determination. For example, massive investment in public transport is essential to make it a viable alternative to private vehicles—especially those powered by internal combustion engines. This would also help address persistent service-quality problems in rail networks. New routes and connections must be designed, higher frequencies guaranteed, and above all, priority given to infrastructure that moves the largest number of people. Existing inertia works against us, as urban geographies have been designed as if the fossil fuel era would last forever; adapting mobility to new conditions is therefore a major challenge.

Central banks and the European Union “found” sufficient funds to bail out banks during the 2008 financial crisis. Something similar happened in 2020 when the world came to a halt due to the pandemic, and governments launched massive stimulus plans. Now we should do exactly the same—indeed, with even greater urgency. But not only because of the war in Iran, but because of the broader ecosocial crisis that forms the backdrop. Although degrowth means much more than reducing energy and resource consumption, this is precisely one dimension that must be addressed swiftly. And this is a major opportunity to do so.

In short, the measures that conventional thinking proposes as emergency responses are precisely the kinds of transformations that should constitute the normal functioning of any responsible economic policy. The choice is clear: either we manage the reduction of material consumption in an orderly, democratic and just way, or crises themselves—energy, climate, geopolitical—will impose that adjustment in a chaotic and unequal manner. Degrowth, far from being a naïve utopia, is simply one of the political names we give to the recognition of the planet’s physical limits. The material metabolism of our societies will sooner or later see a reduction in energy and resource use; the time we still have allows us to decide how—and for whom—those adjustments will be most severe.

The British Empire dominated the world in the nineteenth century thanks to the technological and economic development brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which in turn would have been impossible without the combination of fossil fuels and colonial networks that supplied cheap labour and resources. Geological chance had granted England what the historian Rolf Peter Sieferle called the “subterranean forest”: vast available quantities of coal that gave the British a considerable advantage over other countries. In 1800, more than 80% of the world’s coal was produced in the United Kingdom.

Geological luck did not only “bless” the United Kingdom; generous coal deposits were also found in France, Belgium and Germany. Thus, although the British were the first, by the end of the century other European countries —and also the United States— had joined in exploiting and consuming coal on a massive scale. Undoubtedly, the energy from this fossil fuel sustained European imperialism in the nineteenth century; it was the engine of the conquest of the world by European powers, which went from controlling 37% of global territory in 1800 to 84% in 1914, as described by historians Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke.

However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, European strategists realised that coal would cease to be the key fuel of modern warfare, and with it their previous advantage: modern transport vehicles —with internal combustion engines— required petroleum-derived fuels. The famous Royal Navy, which for centuries had guaranteed British control of the oceans and the protection of its trade routes, had to switch to oil. The obvious problem was that Europe had hardly any reserves of this other fossil fuel, a point not lost on contemporaries. Fearing dependence on others, the British and the French sought to control Middle Eastern oil; the first company to extract Iranian oil was the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which the British government acquired a majority share in in 1914 and was the precursor of today’s British Petroleum (BP).

After the Second World War, the two emerging superpowers were oil exporters: the United States and the Soviet Union. Europeans, with their infrastructure still devastated by the war, lagged behind. For that reason, the British manoeuvred to retain control or influence in the Middle East, even partnering with the United States to carry out the coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, in 1953; Mosaddegh’s “crime” had been to express his intention to nationalise oil companies. When three years later, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal —until then owned by the British and the French, and still a key node of global trade— the old European powers responded with an invasion coordinated with Israel. However, the United States opposed the operation and threatened the United Kingdom with severe economic reprisals; the British and French had to cancel the intervention, and today most historians regard this episode as the decisive moment in the “downgrading” of European powers.

That failure in Suez led to a deepening of energy dependence. At the same time, the major Western oil companies —the so-called “Seven Sisters”— negotiated long-term concessions with authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, guaranteeing abundant and cheap supply in exchange for sustaining their political systems. The result was an implicit pact in which Europe accepted dependence in exchange for the fuel that lubricated economic growth. The oil crisis of 1973, when Arab OPEC countries imposed an embargo that quadrupled prices, was the first serious warning of what those relationships implied. The European response was partial: the United Kingdom accelerated exploitation of the North Sea, France turned to nuclear energy, and all governments sought to diversify suppliers. But no one questioned the underlying model, nor were sufficient efforts made to explore a possibility that was already emerging at the time: renewable energy. This explains why, half a century later, structural vulnerability still persists.

Within the territory of the European Union, oil is currently extracted mainly in Italy, Denmark and Romania, but overall European production barely exceeds 15 million tonnes —Norway is a major non-EU exporter—. To put this into perspective, crude oil imports amount to around 470 million tonnes. This explains why the European Union’s oil import dependency rate stands at 96%. This fossil fuel runs through the entire European economy: nearly half of the oil consumed in the EU is used for road transport, while 16% goes to industrial uses —especially petrochemicals—, 5% to electricity generation, 9% to aviation, 8% to maritime transport and 5% to households, among other uses.

Europe’s dependence, however, is not limited to oil. In parallel, Europe built a new dependence on another fossil fuel: natural gas. Since the 1960s, gas has become a pillar of the European energy model, used for heating, electricity generation and industry. This further intensified import dependence: pipelines from Algeria, Norway and, above all, Russia created a supply network that tied Europe to decisions made far from Brussels.

As I have already noted, lacking its own resources and fearing economic disruption, European governments over recent decades have forged alliances to secure supplies of both oil and natural gas: the British with Gulf monarchies, the Italians with North African countries such as Libya, the French with West Africa, Germany with Russia, and Southern European countries with African states such as Algeria, Congo and Guinea. In most cases, these alliances have been established with countries lacking democracy and respect for human rights, but these aspects have been deliberately overlooked given the importance of supply.

Russia exemplifies European vulnerability better than any other case. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Union imposed sanctions and sought to reduce its high dependence on fossil fuel imports: for example, in 2021 Russia was the main oil supplier, with more than 100 million tonnes. The reduction has been effective, but at the cost of turning the United States into the main supplier, with more than 60 million tonnes per year. The same has happened with natural gas. This means that one dependency has been replaced by another, while Russia has not fared badly at all. In fact, Russia has found ways to circumvent many of those sanctions and has strengthened ties with other buyers. China is now the largest purchaser of fossil fuels, accounting for more than 50% of Russian revenues, followed by Turkey, India and the European Union itself —which remains the main buyer of natural gas.

Indeed, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to the war in Iran implies good news for Russia. On the one hand, it would benefit from higher fossil fuel prices, which would increase its revenues. On the other hand, the United States has announced that it will lift previous sanctions, allowing Russia to trade under better conditions. Moreover, many buyer countries will need Russia even more as a supplier —as is the case with China—. The conclusion is fairly clear: in all this, the European Union appears more as a spectator that loses in every scenario —and that will suffer an internal inflationary process that could be very painful and costly— than as a relevant actor with its own project.

The irony is that European Union countries have long had within reach a way to break free from these dependencies: the energy transition. Unlike critical minerals, which for now represent a structural dependency without known substitutes, the technology to replace fossil fuels in electricity generation and much of transport has existed for decades, and China has helped drive costs down to levels that would have seemed utopian fifteen years ago. The logic is simple: every kilowatt-hour generated from renewable sources is a kilowatt-hour that does not depend on what happens in the Strait of Hormuz, in Russian pipelines or in OPEC decisions. And the room for manoeuvre is enormous, as electrification of transport —and above all massive investment in public transport networks— could reduce Europe’s oil dependence to an extent that would substantially alter the geopolitical equation.

As I have argued elsewhere, the problem is not technical but political. A European investment plan commensurate with the challenge —comparable to the one approved with remarkable speed and ambition during the pandemic— could accelerate the transition in both electricity and mobility. Yet nothing of the sort has been implemented. The paradox is that every year without action at the necessary scale is another year in which Europe continues to pay an exorbitant price for a model it knows to be economically and ecologically unsustainable.

There is something almost symmetrical in this entire story. The “subterranean forest” described by Sieferle was exhausted or became irrelevant, and with it disappeared the material basis of European hegemony. But today Europe has at its disposal a resource that does not depend on geological luck or colonial control: the sun and the wind are abundant, spread across the continent and cannot be embargoed. Renewables could be the new “subterranean forest,” but this time its own and shared. And, moreover, clean and free of greenhouse gas emissions — albeit with ecological costs in mining and infrastructure production. The tragedy is that, despite having alternatives, the European Union, in practice, prefers to continue sending hundreds of billions of euros each year to autocracies and petro-states while endlessly debating the details of an ecological transition that is also threatened by a far-right with growing influence. Meanwhile, Russia collects revenues, China manufactures the solar panels Europe needs, and the United States sets conditions and drags everyone into war and economic crisis. Europe, the spectator that loses in every scenario, cannot even console itself with the excuse of having had no alternative.

In 1971, the ecologist Howard T. Odum wrote in Environment, Power and Society that “industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy” but rather “now eats potatoes partly made of oil.” This striking remark responded to the widespread belief that the Green Revolution—a term for agricultural innovations that began in the 1940s—had provided humanity with a definitive solution to feeding growing populations without fear of famine. For Odum, the high productivity of land was in fact underpinned by intensive fossil-fuel use, both in the mechanisation of agriculture and in the production of fertilisers and agrochemicals. In other words, our food system had become deeply dependent on fossil fuels.

This is something we rarely think about, because we tend to assume that our dependence on fossil fuels is limited to transport infrastructure and electricity generation. That is why, when part of the inflow of fossil fuels is disrupted—as is happening now with the war in Iran—we immediately become concerned: we know that gasoline prices will rise and that life will become more expensive. Unfortunately, our food system is also profoundly dependent on fossil fuels, which means that price pressures eventually show up in the food we buy and eat.

According to estimates by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, food systems account for up to 15% of total fossil-fuel consumption. Of that share, 42% corresponds to food processing and packaging, 38% to retail distribution and household consumption, and the remaining 20% to agriculture and agrochemical inputs—the point Odum was highlighting. In other words, we eat food grown with oil and natural gas, and this fossil-fuel support is responsible for both climate change and the possibility of very large human populations.

We must remember that there are currently around eight billion people in the world, a number that would be nearly impossible to feed without mineral fertilisers. In the United States, for example, between 40% and 60% of agricultural yields are estimated to depend on such fertilisers. According to the physicist Vaclav Smil, without them the global population would need to be about 40% smaller. This chemical “miracle” is produced by the petrochemical industry, and fertilizers fall into three main categories: nitrogen fertilizers—such as urea—phosphate fertilizers, and potash fertilizers. The largest group is nitrogen fertilisers, produced by a process that captures nitrogen from the air and converts it into a liquid solution, which is spread on fields to increase soil fertility.

The problem is that producing these fertilisers requires large amounts of natural gas, both as a feedstock—about 60% of the input—and as an energy source, because the process requires extremely high temperatures and pressure. In fact, the nitrogen fertiliser industry alone accounts for around 2% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. For this reason, our current method of producing food poses a very serious challenge that is often overlooked—although during my years at Spain’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs it was a priority issue, as the controversies over steak consumption and industrial livestock farms made clear.

Given these relationships, we need to look at the entire production chain. Fossil fuels and fertilisers become production costs for farmers. While the key variable in food prices is usually the climate, any disruption in fossil-fuel or fertiliser prices will exert pressure across the entire chain: beginning with farmers, moving through distribution, and ending with retail markets, ultimately pushing up the final price of food. This transmission of costs is exactly what happened between 2021 and 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it is also what is beginning to occur again as a consequence of the war in Iran.

One indirect channel through which fertiliser prices rise is the cost of raw materials—especially natural gas. The fertiliser industry is highly concentrated because plants tend to locate where raw materials are cheapest. Phosphate fertilisers depend on phosphate mining, whose largest reserves are in Morocco and the occupied Sahara, which explains why Morocco is the leading exporter. Potash reserves are concentrated mainly in Canada, Belarus, and Russia, and the war in Ukraine dealt a severe blow to this market. Nitrogen fertilisers depend particularly on natural gas supplies and are therefore often produced where gas is cheap, such as in Russia and the countries of the Middle East. For this reason, geopolitics immediately affects the supply and trade of all mineral fertilisers.

During the era of free trade, it was assumed that any country needing a specific product—if it did not possess it domestically—could obtain it through global markets. By contrast, in today’s emerging neomercantilist era, and amid a geopolitical rivalry for hegemony between the United States and China, economic powers increasingly use trade as a strategic weapon. Protectionist policies and sanctions imposed by countries such as the United States, the European Union, and China follow this logic. After the invasion of Ukraine, for example, the European Union sanctioned Russia and Belarus, tightening the supply of potash fertilisers and driving up prices—by 2020, the EU imported 64% of these fertilisers from those two countries. Meanwhile, in a world of increasingly scarce resources, states are also seeking greater self-sufficiency in sectors considered strategic or critical. China, for instance, restricted fertiliser exports in 2021, which also pushed up global market prices.

All of this was already happening before the recent attack by the United States and Israel on Iran—and precisely for that reason the current impact may be even greater. As noted, the Middle East, and particularly the Persian Gulf, exports large quantities of both natural gas and manufactured fertilisers. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz prevents these supplies from reaching their destination markets. Through this narrow passage—known in English as a “chokepoint”—flows roughly one fifth of the world’s oil, but also up to one third of globally traded fertilisers.

After just a few days of conflict, prices of mineral fertilisers and natural gas have already surged. Urea ended the week close to $600 per tonne—after finishing the year slightly above $360. Although this is still far from the $1,000 per tonne reached in the spring of 2022, the rapid increase suggests that if the conflict continues for a few more days, those levels could easily be surpassed. Natural gas prices are also rising quickly, although supply sources are more diversified—Russia and, especially, the United States export large volumes—so we remain far below the levels seen a few years ago. Nevertheless, at the regional level, it is clear that fertiliser production will be affected by higher gas prices—and in Iran’s case, directly by the bombing of fertiliser plants.

In short, Hormuz is a critical node in the global agro-industrial metabolism. If the conflict drags on and the Strait remains closed for weeks, the rise in fertiliser prices will eventually feed through into staple food prices around the world, including in Spain. The effect will not be immediate—the transmission takes months to move through the production and distribution chain—but it will be inevitable. And when it arrives, it will remind us once again that food security depends critically on a fossil-fuel energy infrastructure that is increasingly exposed to geopolitical instability.

There are alternatives to reduce this vulnerability: from transitioning toward agroecological practices to developing fertilisers produced with renewable energy—the so-called green ammonia, which today accounts for barely 0.3% of global production—and even policies aimed at reducing and restructuring food demand similar to those already being proposed for energy consumption. But all of these require time, investment, and political will—three things that tend to be in short supply when missiles are already flying.

PS: If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading Raj Patel, a specialist in food systems.