Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

1. As another deadline for a deal with the EU sails by, there is still no sense of urgency from the UK government. It’s letting the clock run down towards the no-deal Brexit it wants. But why?
Because Brexit can best be understood as a civil war within capitalism.
Thread/

2. The point of it was best summarised by Steve Bannon: “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” If you create enough chaos, regulations cannot be enforced, tax evaders go unpunished, and the restraints on the most brutal and exploitative forms of capitalism fall away.

3. Broadly speaking, there are two main types of capitalist enterprise. One seeks an accommodation with the administrative state, and benefits from stability, predictability and regulations that exclude dirtier and rougher competitors. It can live with a thin form of democracy.

4. The other is raw, unrestrained accumulation, which sees democratic constraints as illegitimate. Only “the market” is a legitimate forum for decision-making. As Peter Thiel, echoing Hayek, insisted, market freedom and democracy are incompatible.
cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/pet…

5. “The market” is a euphemism for the power of money.

6. Brexit is an opportunity not just to rip up specific rules, which it overtly aims to do, but also to tear down the uneasy truce between capitalism and democracy under which pro-social rules are set and enforced.

7. In other words, it’s the denouement of the Pollution Paradox. Though some people find this concept difficult, it’s actually quite simple. It’s hard to understand what’s been happening over the past 40 years without grasping it. Definition in Tweet 8
monbiot.com/2017/01/20/the…

8. The more polluting a company is, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it's not regulated out of existence. Political funding is thus dominated by dirty companies, which then wield the greatest political influence. They crowd out their more accommodating rivals.

9. It’s not just about pollution: the same tension plays out across capitalism. Banks developing exotic financial instruments, property developers who hate the planning laws, tax-avoiding oligarchs – all have an interest in pouring money into politics.

10. The capitalists who profit by working within the quasi-democratic system are terrified by Brexit, as it destroys the market advantage for cleaner enterprises created by the regulatory state. They know that without regulatory constraints, the robber barons will wipe them out.

11. This is why the CBI and other august institutions of capital opposed Brexit, and why Boris Johnson made that remark, that sounded so astonishing coming from the mouth of a Conservative: “fuck business”.

12. The ultimate purpose of a no-deal Brexit is to replace democracy with plutocracy: rule by money’s warlords.

13. Farage and his ilk are just tools, whose role is to distract us from the true aims of brutalist capital, by creating a smokescreen of xenophobia and culture wars. It’s not about culture. It’s not about sovereignty. It’s about the power of a particular capitalist faction.

14. The media sees the smokescreen, not the manouevres. By design, in the case of the billionaire press. By default, in the case of the BBC. Instead of explaining the real conflict at the heart of Brexit, they focus on the manufactured conflicts.

15. They latch onto personalities like Cummings and Farage, and make it all about them. This is why so many political reporters genuinely seemed to believe that, with Cummings gone, the policy would change. But it wasn't about him. It's much bigger and deeper.

16. Perhaps most importantly, this is not just about the UK. Brexit is of great interest to money's warlords worldwide, as it turns the UK into a beachhead among the richest and most powerful nations. Taking Chile or Indonesia is one thing. The UK is a much bigger prize.

17. This is why plutocrats around the world – from US billionaires to Russian oligarchs – have got involved. This is their battleground.

18. A no-deal Brexit will be devastating for millions of people in the UK. But it’s not about us. We are just the grass that gets trampled in capitalism's civil war.