To be fair, I don't think the FT is one of the worst UK newspapers. (The worst is probably The Guardian, positioning itself as the genteel voice of the left and then falling in line at election time when parliamentary social democracy gets anywhere near wielding state power) ...
... & I think this sentence is more of an accidental auto-detourne or self-pwn than the ruling classes dropping their masks and speak frankly as they feast on honey-glazed roast workers. And the article has been 'corrected' (the 'thankfully' moved) ...
...but you can't write a sentence like that unless you're deeply steeped in seeing real human lives as a mere fungible goop that pumps through the crystal tubes of your precious economy. Even 'corrected,' the sentiment is, "Won't someone think of the poor inflationary pressure?"
Went to an interesting Zoom talk by Vicky Osterweil about her book In Defense of Looting. She made the point that the left has often romanticised armed insurrection seizing the state, which is actually a very limited view of the diversity of "violent" tactics (or non-non-violent)
Those often macho fantasies also risk playing into a trap. Fascists and reactionaries of all kinds are very happy for leftists to militarize. The coup will fail & if it somehow doesn't, the real revolution probably will have already been sacrificed to bureaucratic discipline
Why am I mentioning violence and non-violence? Well, partly because it speaks to the article's violence! We have loads of theoretical lenses on this kind of violence: symbolic violence (Bourdieu) structural violence (Galtung), slow violence (Nixon), systemic violence. Words kill.
Eugenics. This article and many like it are part of the apparatus that early last year sprang into motion to use the cover of the the pandemic to start murdering people, especially old people, working class people, poor people, people of colour.
To be honest, I don't know how really useful it is to insist on these broader definitions of violence. Maybe they help to clarify goals, and unify and network people to achieve them? But that's speculation; I'm not sure they do. Could they maybe be used flexible, provisionally?
Can we make more space for the participation and contribution of people who just want to think of violence as some spectacular harm, to flesh or inert matter, unfolding on a timescale of seconds or minutes? Is reluctance to relinquish those instincts really such a red flag?
Anyway, here's a 2014 article by Vicky Osterweil, 'In Defense of Looting': thenewinquiry.com/in-defense-of-…
Here's Charles Cobb's This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: libcom.org/library/nonvio…
Here's my review of Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 SF novel The Ministry of the Future: jolindsaywalton.blogspot.com/2021/01/kim-st…. (I've actually written two separate reviews; the second, which is focused less on violence / nonviolence and more on political economy, will appear in @StirToAction soon) 
Walter Benjamin's 1921 essay Critique of Violence. Slippery thing about strikes, general strikes, law, natural law, means and ends, divine violence. A good one for a reading group or book club, maybe? static1.squarespace.com/static/59fba9c…
In Defence of Looting by @Vicky_ACAB: boldtypebooks.com/titles/vicky-o…
Riot. Strike. Riot. by Joshua Clover: versobooks.com/books/2999-rio…
You see that article lede, you think Guillotine. Here is a voice that needs to *clarify* that it disapproves of the vast massacre of working people! Yet it drops a word in the wrong place, and coincidentally reveals its true feelings. So revolution gets clarified as self-defence.
* Ministry FOR! FOR the Future! Geeze louise
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