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Montreal has been touted as a major creative hub for the video game industry for over twenty years, leading the province of Quebec’s efforts to develop its digital creative sector. The industry reportedly generates CAD$1.4 billion in annual revenues within the province, yet game workers feel the lack of job security more than ever.At the end of the summer, games workers rallied in Montreal to support the Bethesda employees affected by recent layoffs. Back in July, Microsoft announced it was eliminating 3,200 jobs within the Xbox division before the end of the year. Among the employees affected is Simon Préfontaine, a designer with over nine years under his belt at Bethesda Montreal. He explains that layoffs have become an annual occurrence across Xbox studios and the industry more broadly.What does worker power look like in an industry where the people making the games often have little control over whether their jobs, studios, or projects survive? According to Préfontaine, “People are now much more motivated and radicalized. We are ready to strike. [These companies have] pissed these people off enough.” There seems to be a growing sentiment among game workers in Montreal that organizing themselves and unionizing their workplace is becoming necessary.At the heart of Montreal’s game industry, there is a familiar contradiction of capitalism: while workers collectively produce value through their labor power, corporate owners privately control that value. The video game industry exemplifies this contradiction. The people who make the games own very little of what they produce while bearing all the risks. But how did Montreal become such a hub in the first place?The Crisis for Quebecois Video Game Workers Is the Crisis EverywhereThe turning point can be traced back to 1997, when Ubisoft established a video game studio in the city. As Sylvianne Pilon and Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay note in their study of video game clusters, there were multiple converging factors leading to this development, such as the city’s strong digital animation culture and its pool of creative talent. But most important of all was Quebec government policy, which subsidized the employer’s wage bill. A 2020 study found that public support included a 30 percent labor tax credit, amounting to about $100 million per year.What followed was a flourishing of the industry, according to La Guilde du jeu vidéo du Québec, a nonprofit cooperative that brings together members of the video game industry. Electronic Arts Montreal was established in 2004, Eidos-Montréal in 2007, and a wide range of independent developers followed. Quebec, and Montreal in particular, became the hub it is today.If this industry is growing, then why are game workers feeling such pressure? Precarity is at an all-time high, and layoffs occur constantly, sapping the morale of workers already struggling to remain afloat. As Préfontaine puts it, “They’re asking you to give 110 percent, but they’re not even going to give you thirteen months without making you worry [about your job]. It’s very difficult.”What Préfontaine describes is not an isolated incident or a specific case of targeted layoffs at Bethesda Montreal. Rather, it is part of the general experience of workers who bear the brunt when capitalism’s recurring crises hit. As Eric Cazdyn puts it when describing crisis within capitalism in The Already Dead: “Crisis is not what happens when we go wrong; crisis is what happens when we go right.” Crisis, in other words, is built into the system itself. The widespread layoffs affecting the industry over the past three-plus years seem, once again, to confirm this point.Workers organizing in the video game industry are at a disadvantage due to the industry being fragmented across studios, projects, contract types, and national borders. Further, the industry has long relied on the culture of “passion work.” As Carolyn Jong from Game Workers Unite Montreal explains, “It is a very passion-oriented industry. And that is used as a vehicle for justifying a lot of exploitation and poor working conditions.”Jamie Woodcock, a senior lecturer at King’s College London and member of the Game Worker Solidarity Project, identifies an apparent paradox of the industry: despite its enormous profitability, it is repeatedly hit by layoffs. “The reality is that capital doesn’t care about making games. The interest of capital is about extracting surplus value from the production of games. [This crisis is] not a bug.” These conditions help explain why collective organization has proved so difficult for game workers in spite of the example set by established trade unions.Leveling Up to Fight the BossWhile the historical decline of unions under neoliberalism is well documented, Woodcock argues that this is less the result of the disappearance of existing unions than of a failure to unionize new sectors of the economy. Companies have worked hard to convince people that unions are unnecessary or harmful while also engaging in union-busting practices the push the boundaries of legality. A recent example is Rockstar Games’ termination of thirty-four employees, widely suspected of being a union-busting initiative.Yet the reality might not be as grim as it seems. In fact, Woodcock suggests that, when compared to trade unions, which took decades to organize, the video game industry is actually progressing very quickly. “Over the past seven years, we have seen unions go from effectively nonexistent to having unions at some of the largest video games companies,” he explains.Thinking back on the beginnings of Game Workers Unite Montreal’s efforts to organize workers within the city, Jong mentions that an early challenge was the lack of knowledge about unions and how to even begin to organize. It took some time to change the way workers in the industry thought about their relationship to their work. In fact, “the instinct to self-identify as a worker wasn’t really there,” she says.Game worker organizing has progressed considerably since 2018, when the Montreal unit of Game Workers Unite launched. The organization now supports workers across multiple studios, providing resources, materials, workshops, and more. They played a big part in supporting the August 18 rally for Bethesda workers, for example. They also provide a platform for cross-studio organizing within the city as well as bridge between the local realities of Montreal and the global network of game workers worldwide.Bethesda Montreal was the first studio to formally unionize in Quebec back in 2024. However, unionization did not stop Microsoft’s subsequent layoffs. Préfontaine’s experience illustrates the limits of what a union can do. Although often incapable of preventing an employer from cutting jobs, unions can give workers a collective voice over the process and help secure contractual protections.But, as Jong argues, it would be a mistake to judge unions solely by whether they can avert any particular round of layoffs. Their broader value lies in the possibilities arising from an organized workforce.As Woodcock puts it, “labor unions are the vehicle through which workers can fight in the workplace against capital.” On this view, developing an alternative conception and practice of work requires struggle in the workplace — struggle that unions can organize and sustain. “Struggle is also pedagogical. If we can’t learn to fight in our own workplace, then the chance that we can take on a capitalist government or capital is vanishingly unlikely,” he adds.Unions can improve wages and conditions, negotiate severance, and give workers a collective voice. But their importance extends far beyond this. They also provide institutions through which to develop the knowledge, resources, and practices needed to confront the volatility that capitalism inflicts on them. Such gains may not be immediately apparent, but they remain vital for creating a more confident and politically capable working class.Workers’ TalesWoodcock notes that game workers need a “a unionized sector that tells stories about unionization.” This is how both workers and the public can come to see unionization not only as possible but as a source of tangible workplace gains.In Montreal, game workers collectively produce games that generate enormous cultural and economic value. Yet control over employment, investment, and ownership remains largely in the hands of local and multinational corporations. Unions can provide workers with a collective voice and the means to push back in times of crisis, even when the results fall short of what they hope for.Préfontaine encourages all game workers to reach out to Game Workers Unite and other organizations supporting unionization initiatives. Looking back on his own involvement in Bethesda Montreal’s unionization efforts and recent layoff, he states: “I do not regret anything.” Workers may not be able to stop the next layoff on their own, but, organized together, they can begin to build the power to resist not only the next round of cuts but the system that makes those cuts inevitable.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

Jacobin began in the United States, but our emancipatory project has always been internationalist. The questions we’re focused on — about who holds power in our societies, about how capitalism shapes our lives, and how working people can abolish class society — extend across borders.Alongside our English-language magazine, Jacobin publishes regularly in six other languages:Dutch: Jacobin NederlandGreek: Jacobin GreeceGerman: Jacobin MagazinItalian: Jacobin ItaliaPortuguese: Jacobin Brasil, based in BrazilSpanish: Jacobin América Latina, based in ArgentinaWe’re also working on launching editions in French, Romanian, and Urdu. We’ll share more as those projects develop.Building a socialist left means learning from struggles everywhere, and it means exchanges at a more theoretical level with Marxists around the world. Our international editions play an important role in fostering those connections and combating the parochialism that has long plagued progressive milieus in the United States.If you read any of these languages, take a look at the editions linked above. And if you know someone who might be interested, send one their way. And if you’d like to support our work coordinating these networks, please consider subscribing or visiting jacobin.com/donate/ to learn about tax-deductible donations to our project.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

Anwar Shaikh, one of the most important Marxist economists of his generation, died on October 6 at the age of eighty in New York City.Two years ago, a conference was held to mark his retirement from the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research, where he had taught for fifty years. I was one of the speakers on the first panel. I opened my talk by adapting the famous first line of Orhan Pamuk’s Yeni Hayat (The New Life), knowing that Pamuk was one of Anwar’s favorite writers: “I met Anwar Shaikh, and my whole life changed!”That is truly what happened.After the 1971 military coup in Turkey, I went first to Sweden and then came to the United States. While doing political organizing with Turkish students in New York, I was also trying to finish a master’s degree in applied mathematics and statistics, partly to keep myself occupied. My plan was to return home at the first opportunity and work as a journalist, inspired by the politically exhilarating days I had spent at the newspaper Yeni Ortam in the early 1970s.By then I had married, and when complications over my military service obligations made it necessary for me to stay in the United States a while longer, I began looking into the doctoral program in Marxist economics at the New School. That’s where, in 1975, I first met Anwar in his office. He was very warm toward me and strongly encouraged me to apply to the program. I think our immediate rapport came from the fact that he had lived in Turkey as a child, and that I had a background in engineering and mathematics.In the doctoral program, I not only took all of Anwar’s courses but also became his first paid teaching and research assistant. His research helped me settle on my dissertation topic, which eventually led to the book we wrote together. In short, my life really did change. I had met Anwar, and instead of returning to Turkey to pursue journalism, I found myself drawn into economics and, eventually, an academic career.Anything written in memory of someone who taught for fifty years — a man who left behind thousands of pages of published work and thousands of files of unpublished notes, letters, and other materials, and made contributions not just to one field of economics but to nearly all of them — will inevitably be selective. I want to touch briefly on two concepts that Anwar pioneered and on how they inspired me and a later generation of researchers to pursue new lines of inquiry.Anwar’s unpublished 1975 paper, “IO Accounts and Marxian Categories,” and his famous 1978 paper, “National Income Accounts and Marxian Categories,” which circulated from hand to hand almost like samizdat, can be considered early drafts of Measuring the Wealth of Nations, the book we eventually published together in 1994. The 1978 paper contains a preliminary calculation of net tax (taxes on labor income minus expenditures on labor income) covering just three years. This category aimed to show how the capitalist state’s distributional policies affected productive workers and altered the rate of surplus value. In my dissertation, I extended these calculations to cover 1952 to 1980, again using the net tax category.Later, in two papers on the subject, Anwar and I replaced net tax with the category of net social wage (expenditures on labor income minus taxes on labor income) and questioned whether a welfare state could really be said to exist in the United States. Today there is a substantial body of literature on the net social wage in various countries, including Turkey. My younger colleague Yakup Karabacak and I recently completed the most comprehensive of the Turkish studies, contributing once again to a field of research that Anwar had opened up.Let me now turn to profit on alienation (POA), a concept that Anwar began using in the 1970s in the context of the transformation problem and that later appeared both in our joint book, Measuring the Wealth of Nations, and in his 2016 magnum opus, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises.Marxists have generally been reluctant to embrace this concept. After all, under capitalism, the fundamental source of profit is surplus value generated in the sphere of production, while profit on alienation is discussed in the Marxist literature mainly in connection with precapitalist merchant profit.Yet as my former student Alper Duman and I tried to show in a paper we wrote together, POA also provides a useful starting point for analyzing phenomena within capitalism itself: both privatizations, which have been central to neoliberal policies, and the gains banks extract from workers’ incomes. In that paper, we also sought to operationalize the concept in the Turkish context and estimate it empirically. In a sense, following in Anwar’s footsteps, we gave concrete empirical form to a concept whose importance he had emphasized primarily at the theoretical level.Since Anwar’s death, social media posts and written tributes have come mostly from American academic circles, particularly his colleagues and his current and former students. Most, like this one, recall the parts of his work and character that shaped their authors. For me, one of the most remarkable tributes is the personal account of Wando Frank. Frank wrote about how Anwar’s writings had also changed the course of his life:I won’t pretend I didn’t tear up seeing this. I remember working the backshift in Dover, a petrol pump factory, and trying to read Anwar’s excellent book Capitalism in the canteen on my break one night. Whilst I understood the gist of his arguments, it was far too technical in places for me. I was determined that I wouldn’t be defeated and would learn to understand the work. Six months later I applied to go to Dundee University to study Economics, which gave me enough of a basic grounding in statistics to grapple with the book. It became my go-to point of reference for most essays. Any essay I wrote utilising this book was marked first class. Being able to reconstruct his study of American inflation in the British context was one of the most rewarding things I have ever had the privilege to do. We both showed that in the USA, and in Britain, Marx was completely right about inflation and the central bankers were completely wrong. Without Anwar, I would not have a first-class honours degree, and that’s just a fact.Without Anwar, I would not have the life I have today either. And that’s a fact too.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

English food does not have a good reputation. In 1806, Grimod de La Reynière, a pioneering French food critic, wrote that “[England’s] cooking is limited to boiled chickens.” More than two hundred years later, stereotypes about the country’s food have hardly improved.Looking at the staple icons of English cuisine today — fish and chips, the Sunday roast, the full English breakfast — one might agree with Grimod’s point. These dishes are brutish mounds of meat and carbs, the product of a culture that has often seemed more interested in excess than culinary refinement. They hardly suggest the level of technique and attention to simple, high-quality ingredients associated with French or Japanese food.It’s not only the nation’s cuisine that’s in a sorry state. Ultraprocessed food accounts for more than half of the calories consumed in the UK each year, while obesity rates remain substantially higher than the European Union average. How did England come to eat this way? In his first book, The Full English: The Ways We Eat and Why, the chef and writer Lewis Bassett examines the country’s culinary traditions and eating habits in order to understand the peculiar history that produced them.Making a loaf of sourdough in a North London bakery, learning how to cook a balti in a Birmingham curry house, fishing off the shores of Eastbourne: the reader follows Bassett as he improves his technique and expands his repertoire of “English” dishes — a category that is distinctly more multicultural than its marketing suggests. Loosely, the book is structured around a series of stages (from stagiaire, the French term for a professional kitchen internship), with each placement and dish giving Bassett another vantage point from which to investigate English society. He not only moves between restaurants but also across roles, switching from worker to reporter and researcher.Bassett began working in kitchens at sixteen, first making sandwiches before shucking oysters and frying burgers in Melbourne at eighteen; at twenty, he worked in a London fish restaurant where he was taught how to cook professionally. His other education was political. During the Jeremy Corbyn years he became involved in the Labour left, undertaking grassroots organizing and campaigning while completing a PhD at the University of Manchester on Corbynism and democracy under neoliberalism. He has since written about politics and organizing for this publication and others.Cooking and socialist organizing became two different forms of education. As a chef working in London, Bassett has cooked for some of the wealthiest people in the world. As a socialist, he lives in a society in which access to good food made from fresh ingredients remains profoundly uneven. The book is situated inside the tensions that emerge when you do something you truly love in an exclusionary industry.After completing his PhD, and during the pandemic, the culinary work on which the book draws was an attempt to return to what Bassett calls “the careful, physical work that is done with human hands.” What the hands do, the brain wants to understand. The Full English uses the practical knowledge of cooking as the starting point for an investigation into the particular development of British society, its early industrialization, and its imperial expansion.The world of gourmet restaurants depends upon a mostly hidden system of large and highly specialized teams. Behind a Michelin-starred meal are chefs carrying out exacting, repetitive tasks at speed: tweezing fragments of shell from crab meat, slicing paper-thin sheets of apple with a mandolin, coordinating dozens of preparations at the peak of service. The refinement associated with haute cuisine can obscure the conditions required to produce it. Luxury arrives at the table looking effortless only because so much effort has been organized elsewhere, through an intense division of labor.The same tension between refinement and material conditions can be seen in something as ordinary as bread. Sourdough is often treated as a return to an older, more authentic way of eating, yet the highly standardized loaf made from carefully controlled ingredients is product of modern abundance. In preindustrial England, bread was necessarily more of a motley affair, made from whatever grains or substitutes were available, sometimes including peas, and fermented with beer rather than a modern sourdough starter.Industrialization has made food more uniform and predictable; that consumable standardization has helped create the middle-class boom in desire for the artisanal and handcrafted. What looks like a rejection of industrial food is, in part, one of its consequences, one that exists for consumers who want to pay to feel like they’re opting out.English eating habits were transformed unusually early by urbanization and industrialization. Through dispossession and the consolidation of land, England lost much of its peasantry earlier than other European countries. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was already heavily urbanized, with large numbers of people buying bread rather than baking it themselves. The dishes that people ate were shaped by the new rhythms of industrial life. At the same time, British naval and commercial power opened up new systems of trade and consumption. English taste emerged from this “peculiar insistence of modernity,” as Bassett puts it: industrial, urban, and imperial all at the same time.The later sections of The Full English move outward from the kitchen into questions of class, migration, and national identity. The Balti, a Pakistani curry, becomes a way of thinking about the anglicization of so-called South Asian food and the colonial histories behind it; Italian food, meanwhile, is tied to the rise of a new middle class in the 1990s and the cultural politics of New Labour.Elsewhere, the language of dieting and optimization enters the kitchen through food alternatives like Huel and calorie-counting apps, turning eating into another activity to be measured and disciplined. This is perhaps the least surprising part of the book: the critique of neoliberal self-management is familiar even if the examples themselves are revealing. More compelling is the way these examples accumulate into a history of how English tastes have been shaped by empire, class formation, and changing ideas of aspiration.The investigations in the book become most politically urgent when they turn to land. Britain remains dependent on food imports, while the shocks of war, trade disruptions, and rising prices have shown the fragility of the food system. Yet huge swaths of the countryside remain concentrated in the hands of a landed aristocracy, with estates able to attract public money for heritage and wild-farming projects. At the very moment when questions of food security and agricultural production are becoming harder to ignore, the ownership of land itself is often treated as beyond political discussion.The environmental stewardship of heritage projects can therefore be a way of modernizing the image of inherited wealth without disturbing the structure beneath it. The more radical questions, such as who should own land, what it should produce, and whether farming should be organized around national need rather than market return, remain largely outside respectable debate.The tension between luxury, labor, and poverty runs through the book. There is something almost peripatetic about its movement between kitchens, farms, and fisheries, as though the act of working itself were generating the argument, and we were listening to Bassett talk at his prep station. Cooking is treated neither as pure pleasure nor simply as exploitation. It is skilled, exhausting, communal, and often badly paid; it can also produce extraordinary things that remain inaccessible to much of the population. The core political problem is the access to and distribution of good food. Why should refinement, abundance, and pleasure be restricted to those who can afford them?That question is how The Full English uses food to raise questions of broader political significance. For many socialists of Bassett’s generation, the defeat of Corbynism left open the question of where political energies and intellectual habits might go next. One answer offered here is to return to work to apprenticeship and to the material world, and to produce knowledge from those experiences.There is an older leftist tradition behind this: the self-education of industrial workers, or E. P. Thompson teaching adults outside the university, in which political understanding is produced by immersing yourself in a life built around other workers. The Full English belongs, however loosely, to that tradition. It turns the experience of work into a way of telling stories about the nation and makes food a means of asking who Britain is organized for.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

Here’s a question progressives get asked constantly: Fine, you want universal childcare, Medicare for All, and a green economy — but how are you going to pay for it? As part of the Game Changers project, economists Gerald Epstein and Aaron Medlin just answered it with a full accounting. They price out the thirty policies in the Game Changers initiative and show, line by line, how to fund them without adding a dime to the deficit — by taxing wealth and capital the same way the United States already taxes wages and by shrinking a military and immigration-enforcement budget that is both bloated and destructive. The burden of the increased taxes they propose would fall most heavily on those in the upper reaches of the top 1 percent.The Underlying ProblemLet’s start with the scale of inequality that these thirty policy proposals are responding to. The top 1 percent of American households hold about a third of the nation’s wealth and roughly half of the stock market. In income terms, that same 1 percent takes home twice as much as the entire bottom half of the country combined. The effects ripple outward: stagnant demand drags down growth, upward mobility stalls, and a small elite ends up with political influence wildly out of proportion to its numbers. Meanwhile, ordinary families get squeezed from both sides — wages haven’t kept pace with productivity, and housing, health care, and childcare keep getting more expensive. At the same time, advances in AI threaten to make even stable jobs feel precarious.Epstein and Medlin’s sharper point is that this isn’t just about how wealth is distributed — it’s about how the government pays its bills. The way Washington currently finances itself is a driver of inequality. Labor income gets taxed heavily and reliably; wealth and capital income get taxed lightly and unevenly. Whatever isn’t collected gets borrowed instead — mostly from the same wealthy households who weren’t taxed for it, who then collect interest on the loan, year after year. It’s a system that manufactures inequality twice: once by under-taxing fortunes, and then again by paying those fortunes interest on the resulting debt.The numbers back this up. Between 2018 and 2020, the four hundred richest Americans paid an average tax rate of about 24 percent on their pretax income — lower than what the bottom 50 percent of income earners pay on average, and far below the 45 percent top labor-income earners pay. Since two-thirds of federal bonds, which the government issues to borrow money, are held by private investors, interest payments flow disproportionately to people who are already wealthy. The result: the four hundred richest Americans held about $300 billion (in today’s dollars) in 1982; by 2025 that amount had grown more than twentyfold, to $6.6 trillion. Republican administrations from Ronald Reagan’s through both Donald Trump terms accelerated federal government borrowing with tax cuts skewed to the top. Most recently, the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will cut federal revenue by trillions and widen the deficit by roughly $3–4 trillion through 2034, will hand the richest 1 percent over $50,000 a year in tax cuts. Meanwhile, revenue from the corporate income tax, which taxes corporate profits, has collapsed from 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1944 to about 1 percent in 2019. As Warren Buffett famously put it, an economy where his receptionist pays a higher tax rate than he does “does not strike me as a just economy.”The authors are careful to note that deficits aren’t inherently bad — borrowing to fund productive investment (such as education, infrastructure, and most of the Game Changers agenda) pays for itself over time because the social return exceeds the cost. The danger is borrowing to fund waste: excess military spending, fossil fuel subsidies, and corporate giveaways. That kind of borrowing doesn’t just fail to pay off — it deepens inequality and, if debt costs ever outrun economic growth, can become self-reinforcing.The Plan: Tax Capital Like Labor, Cut Wasteful SpendingSo, what’s the fix? The Game Changers policies are split into three funding categories. Many need no new government money at all — things like stronger labor protections, national rent control, fairer trade rules, or a four-day workweek, which change laws and norms rather than spend cash. A second group has dedicated funding mechanisms tied to the programs themselves: polluters fund climate resilience and a fossil fuel phasedown; scaled premiums fund paid family leave, disaster insurance, and long-term care. Medicare for All, the single biggest item, mostly falls into this category too — it eliminates private insurance premiums, leaving most Americans paying less overall and only the wealthiest paying more.A third group of policies — universal childcare, a child allowance, social housing, plus a small residual slice of Medicare for All — requires general tax revenue. That’s the piece this brief is really about, and the plan pays for it two ways.First, spending gets reallocated by cutting military spending deemed unnecessary for genuine defense and shrinking Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget in favor of a more humane immigrant-integration system. Together, these reallocations free up between $208 billion and $413 billion a year.Second, a new revenue package targets the income that goes untaxed or is under-taxed by the current tax code: capital gains, corporate profits, inherited fortunes, and speculative trading, rather than paychecks. Concretely, that means restoring the corporate tax rate from the current rate of 21 percent to 35 percent (its pre-2017 level, falling mostly on roughly 350 highly profitable firms); raising the corporate minimum tax from 15 percent to 21 percent of taxable profits; quadrupling the stock buyback tax (charging corporations when they repurchase their own stock) from 1 percent to 4 percent; funding serious Internal Revenue Service enforcement against wealthy tax avoidance; adding a small financial-transactions tax on trades of stocks, bonds, and other securities; creating a minimum income tax on total income for households worth over $100 million; and eliminating the loophole that lets inherited wealth escape capital gains tax entirely when it changes hands at death.Crucially, wages are taxed in a progressive way, with households earning less than $20,000 paying no wage taxes at all, and even households earning as much as $200,000 paying less overall once lower health costs, the child allowance, and federally funded childcare are taken into account. The bulk of the tax burden would land at the top.Does the Math Work?Yes, with room to spare. Subtracting the military and ICE savings from the cost of programs that require general funding, the needed funds come to between $557.3 billion and $614.3 billion. The revenue package raises between $701.8 billion and $1.425 trillion, exceeding the general revenue requirement by approximately $87.5 billion to $868 billion.Epstein and Medlin are careful to call this one workable combination among many, not the only path — and they note their estimates are conservative, since many Game Changers policies (healthier kids, cheaper health care, fewer financial crises, and avoided climate damage) would likely pay for themselves in ways the brief doesn’t even count. Their larger argument is that funding a fairer economy and shrinking inequality aren’t competing goals requiring trade-offs. They’re the same project, since concentrated wealth left untaxed doesn’t just distort the budget: it buys the political power to keep itself that way.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

Sindicatos e estudantes reivindicam aumento de salários, redução do custo de vida; organizações denunciam repressão policial

Ramsha Jahangir talks with Future of Life Institute's Risto Uuk and MEP Brando Benifei about Europe’s AI policy debate and renewed calls for AI liability rules.

Há um mês, uma pesquisa do instituto Datafolha mostrou que mais entrevistados acreditavam que o escândalo do Banco Master envolvia mais políticos de esquerda (34%) do que de direita (27%). Naquele retrato da opinião nacional, divulgado em 18 de setembro, havia ainda 13% do velho “tá todo mundo envolvido”. A dúvida não parece ser a mesma quando quem fala é o próprio dono do Master, Daniel Vorcaro, ao trocar mensagens com um amigo pessoal: “apoiamos a direita”, escreveu o banqueiro em conversas de WhatsApp interceptadas pela Polícia Federal (PF) às quais a **Agência Pública** teve acesso. Em uma conversa com o pastor e líder da Igreja Batista da Lagoinha, André Valadão, Vorcaro afirmou apoiar a direita brasileira. A declaração foi feita após o empresário demonstrar irritação com uma publicação do deputado federal Nikolas Ferreira (PL), em 27 de abril de 2024. Daniel Vorcaro, que mantém uma relação próxima com André Valadão, encaminhou um link ao pastor e demonstrou insatisfação com uma publicação do deputado. A postagem compartilhada pelo parlamentar trazia a seguinte mensagem: “Ministro do STF, STJ e TSE silenciam sobre quem pagou suas despesas em Londres”. Na legenda, Nikolas classificou a reportagem como “interessante”. “Nikolas repostou a Malu [Gaspar]. Loucura isso. Aliás, narrativa ruim pra ele mesmo”, escreveu o empresário. “Quem me mandou foi um blog de esquerda, que sabe que apoiamos a direita. Olha a bola de neve que pode virar”, disse. “Eu apoio diversos eventos e debates, e nesse caso o apoio foi com a palestra do Tony Blair com quem tive um debate de altíssimo nível. No evento, várias pessoas de direita, apoiadores do evento inclusive vários que apoiaram ele [Nikolas], como nós. Acaba ficando ruim ele incentivar e propagar um ataque a mim, como fez agora. Só preciso saber se estamos do mesmo lado ou agora estamos um contra o outro”, finalizou o banqueiro. Horas depois de afirmar ao amigo que conversaria com Nikolas Ferreira, André Valadão retomou o diálogo e informou que o deputado desconhecia que o evento mencionado na reportagem da jornalista Malu Gaspar havia sido organizado pelo Banco Master. “Resumindo, ele [Nikolas] nem sabia sobre o banco e você, “palavras dele né“, e daí pediu perdão demais e vai contornar tudo. Deve te chamar também, ele me disse. Disse da gratidão com você e por aí vai.” Em março de 2025, antes de pedir ajuda de Vorcaro, Nikolas encaminha áudio ao banqueiro, retoma o assunto e pede desculpa pelas publicações com críticas ao evento organizado pelo Master. “Troquei ideia lá com o pastor Valadão naquela época, lá naquela postagem. Eu falei: ‘Pastor, eu não fazia ideia que era este o banco do Dani etc. e tudo, senão, obviamente, eu não teria postado, já teria conversado anteriormente’, mas, enfim, acabou que a palavra dita não tem como voltar, né? Mas espero que tenha sido esclarecido, enfim, depois vamos marcar de a gente se encontrar também, tá bem?”, disse Nikolas. A relação do Banco Master vai além de críticas pontuais de um ou outro deputado e passa também por manobras no exercício de seus mandatos. No início das suspeitas de fraude de suas operações de crédito, a saída para o Banco Master foi a compra pelo Banco de Brasília (BRB), uma operação que envolveu o senador Ciro Nogueira (PP-PI), o dirigente partidário Antônio Rueda (União Brasil-RJ) e o então governador do Distrito Federal Ibaneis Rocha (MDB-DF). Nogueira ainda foi defensor, no Congresso Nacional, da ampliação da cobertura do Fundo Garantidor de Crédito (FGC). Ao mesmo tempo, ainda foi avaliado por deputados e senadores um projeto de lei, proposto por Cláudio Cajado (PP-BA) para permitir que o Congresso destituísse presidentes e diretores do Banco Central em regime de urgência. A **Pública** procurou Daniel Vorcaro para comentar a divulgação das mensagens e a declaração de apoio. A assessoria de imprensa do empresário informou que se manifestaria a partir de segunda-feira (19). ## **Os Bolsonaros** Entre setembro e novembro de 2025, quem fez contatos recorrentes com Vorcaro foi o candidato à presidência da República Flávio Bolsonaro. Ele cobrou mais de 60 milhões de dólares prometidos pelo banqueiro, que oficialmente seriam utilizados na produção do filme Dark Horse, ainda sem previsão de estreia e sem prestação pública de contas que comprove o destino dos valores. Flávio Bolsonaro negou o contato. Classificou a denúncia original, do Intercept Brasil, como uma mentira de militante. Depois voltou atrás. Uma, duas, várias vezes. Meses depois, com as eleições, próximas da conclusão, passou de “nem conhecer a figura” para a pessoa que diz que “quem tem que explicar é o PT”, porque ele, um senador da República, estaria apenas fazendo uma “captação privada para um filme privado”. Não apenas o presidenciável estava no radar do banqueiro Vorcaro. Quando ainda estava em liberdade, o pai de Flávio, Jair Bolsonaro, preso por tentativa de golpe de estado e outros quatro crimes, fez uma postagem na rede social X “de negócio que ele sabe nem o que é”, reclamou Vorcaro a André Valadão.

Desde o dia 5 de outubro, universitários têm organizado assembleias e manifestações em apoio à reeleição de Lula em diferentes cidades brasileiras. Uma das entidades que organiza e articula esses atos públicos, com a chamada “brigada de vira-voto”, é a União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE), principal entidade dos estudantes brasileiros que representa cerca de seis milhões de universitários de todos os 26 Estados e do Distrito Federal. No Pauta Pública desta semana, Andrea Dip recebe Gutemberg Rodrigues, estudante de História da Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) e vice-presidente da UNE. Ele analisa as manifestações que mobilizam a juventude dentro e fora das universidades e relembra o papel histórico do movimento estudantil na resistência a retrocessos, na defesa da educação pública e na formação de novas lideranças políticas. “O movimento estudantil provoca e ajuda a formar novas lideranças, mas, acima de tudo, ajuda a mobilizar e organizar a luta no nosso país. […] Por isso, o grande grito de ordem dessas manifestações é: ‘ô trabalhador, olha para cá, estou na rua para o seu filho estudar’, destaca. Em relação aos protestos de jovens em outras partes do mundo, como na França, que começou em meados de setembro deste ano e continuam ativos, incluindo pais e professores, ele reforça que para discutir o futuro é preciso buscar as raízes dos atuais problemas. “É importante que [as manifestações] estejam sempre norteadas e muito bem organizadas para apontar, de fato, quem são os verdadeiros culpados por essa crise mundial que vivemos”, avalia Rodrigues. Leia os principais pontos da conversa e ouça o podcast completo abaixo. __ __ ## EP 238 Por que os estudantes voltaram às ruas? – com Gutemberg Rodrigues 16 de outubro de 2026 · Vice-presidente da UNE analisa as manifestações que tem mobilizado a juventude e os desafios para além das universidades __ __ 0:00 -:– __15 __15 ______ ____ Veja mais episódios desta série **Na semana passada, enquanto os estudantes estavam falando sobre proteger a atual democracia, o Flávio Bolsonaro falou sobre querer mudar a Constituição. O que significa para o movimento estudantil, nos próximos anos, uma possível vitória de Flávio Bolsonaro nessas eleições? Como o movimento estudantil e a UNE pretendem atuar e que desafios vão encontrar pela frente caso esse seja o cenário?** É um total descompromisso do Flávio Bolsonaro com a nossa Constituição, com a nossa democracia, e a resposta para ele já está dada. Primeiro, acreditamos que essas mobilizações são capazes de vencer as eleições, reverter o cenário e reeleger o presidente Lula. Mas o Flávio Bolsonaro que nos escute aqui, não vai ter vida fácil se ele for eleito. No dia seguinte, já vamos organizar manifestações em defesa da nossa Constituição, do nosso Estado Democrático, e das nossas instituições de ensino. E não vai ser fácil, porque ele já está falando em usar, se possível e se necessário, a força para passar por cima, por exemplo, do STF [Supremo Tribunal Federal]. É com esse cenário que a gente está lidando. Assim como o movimento estudantil resistiu e lutou contra a ditadura militar, seguiremos e a resistência vai ser firme. Os atos já mostram nossa capacidade de mobilização nas ruas e nós vamos lutar para que não tenhamos nenhum retrocesso em tudo aquilo que se conquistou [de] avanços e em tudo aquilo que ainda precisamos conquistar para garantir o direito pleno à educação pública para todos os jovens, o direito de ter acesso à cidade. Para que os jovens de [cidades do] interior também, tenham acesso a uma educação de qualidade, que tenham acesso ao mercado de trabalho. A gente vai estar na rua para lutar por isso. Não vai ter moleza. Sabemos que é muito mais difícil lutar quando se tem no poder um presidente que não tem apreço pela democracia, mas já tivemos em outros momentos da nossa história, e os estudantes resistiram. Infelizmente, durante a ditadura militar, tivemos a perda de diversas figuras históricas, como, por exemplo, o Honestino, que foi morto pela ditadura militar, e o Edson Luís, aqui no Rio de Janeiro. Mas sabemos que, sem a luta e sem a resistência do movimento estudantil, não será possível, se por um acaso o Flávio Bolsonaro ganhar as eleições, a gente manter o nosso Estado, a nossa democracia e os nossos direitos. Então, ao Flávio Bolsonaro: terá muita luta se você for eleito para que a gente não tenha nenhum retrocesso na nossa educação e, para a juventude no nosso país. **Em São Paulo, as deputadas federais Erika Hilton e Sâmia Bomfim, do PSOL, foram reeleitas com as maiores votações entre as mulheres para o cargo no estado. Assim como outras figuras da nova geração da esquerda, elas começaram e se encontraram na política a partir da participação em movimentos estudantis e universitários. Qual é o papel das organizações estudantis na formação política dos jovens?** São só elas, eu acho que elas são quadros hoje nacionais. A Erika é um fenômeno no país inteiro, tem uma representatividade, é uma figura que tem ajudado, e muito, na disputa das redes sociais a favor da democracia, dos direitos da população, com uma representatividade absurda, em especial entre os jovens, que vieram do movimento estudantil. Hoje são diversos parlamentares oriundos, assim como os que já foram eleitos há muitos anos, que foram de outra quadra histórica do movimento estudantil, como, por exemplo, o [deputado federal reeleito] Lindbergh Farias [PT-RJ], que liderou o movimento de caras pintadas. Eu acho que o movimento estudantil cumpriu e cumpre, durante toda a história do nosso país, um papel fundamental de resistência, de vanguarda contra os retrocessos e na luta por melhores condições para a educação, para a juventude, por menores igualdades sociais no nosso país. Com denúncias sobre a influência e interferência do capital externo, em especial dos Estados Unidos, em nossos processos democráticos. Então, cumpre esse papel de mobilizador, de organizador das lutas, mas também cumpre o papel de formar novos quadros políticos, e isso tem ficado cada vez mais nítido nos processos eleitorais. Nisso, a frase do presidente Lula é muito assertiva, [quando ele diz]: ‘Jovem, você que é rebelde, que acha que ninguém na política presta, você é o próximo político honesto. É o próximo político que vai mudar esse país’. Acho que esse sentimento também tem tomado conta das pessoas que estão indo para as ruas e temos muito claro o que nos leva às ruas. Todo mundo hoje pega o celular, grava um vídeo, faz uma fala num ato, chama uma mobilização. Tem muitas mobilizações que estão sendo convocadas de forma espontânea. O movimento estudantil provoca e ajuda a formar novas lideranças, mas, acima de tudo, ajuda a mobilizar e organizar a luta no nosso país. E existe um respeito muito grande dessa juventude que está indo às ruas com relação a quem está conduzindo as mobilizações com o entendimento de que a gente não pode cair em qualquer armadilha da extrema direita. A gente não representa o que eles querem nos impor, [nos taxando] como baderneiros ou algo do tipo. Nós estamos ali para defender nossos direitos e, por isso, o grande grito de ordem dessas manifestações é: “ô trabalhador, olha para cá, eu estou na rua para o seu filho estudar”. Isso vai ficar marcado na nossa história como o grande grito de ordem dessas mobilizações em defesa da reeleição do presidente Lula. **Há mais de três semanas estão acontecendo manifestações estudantis na França. Começam nos subúrbios de Paris e se espalham por todo o país, e também já inspiraram manifestações em outros países. Existem contatos entre Brasil e França, ou entre movimento estudantil em outros países, e há possibilidade dos movimentos estudantis crescerem mesmo por todo o mundo? Também em resposta às múltiplas crises que temos vivido hoje.** Nós temos acompanhado muito as manifestações que têm acontecido na França, assim como a UNE tem um arco de relação com organizações dos estudantes em diversas regiões do mundo, com foco nos países ibero-americanos e maior ainda na América Latina, por meio da [Organização Continental Latino-Americana e Caribenha de Estudantes] OCLAE, que é uma organização que corresponde aos estudantes da América Latina. A nossa avaliação é que essas manifestações dos estudantes, dos jovens, são fruto de um momento histórico que estamos vivendo, em que a crise do capitalismo está cada vez mais severa e mais impactante no nosso cotidiano. Isso reflete, seja em relação à infraestrutura da educação pública, mas também e, principalmente, nas questões climáticas. São os jovens que são os mais atingidos em relação às questões climáticas, em especial os jovens que são oriundos das periferias e dos territórios, onde a política pública não chega com tanta eficácia. Então, é importante que essas mobilizações aconteçam. Agora, é importante que elas estejam sempre norteadas e muito bem organizadas para apontar, de fato, quem são os verdadeiros culpados por essa crise mundial que vivemos. Seja a crise do capitalismo, seja a crise climática, que é fruto do capitalismo feroz, que se torna ainda mais devastador quando entra em crise. Ou, principalmente, as guerras que são fruto de uma falta de orientação no mundo, em que um presidente [Donald Trump] se acha imperador do mundo, que influencia no processo eleitoral de diversos países e fica por isso mesmo. Então, o que tem acontecido nas eleições do Brasil, a nítida influência dos Estados Unidos no nosso processo de eleição, seja por meio da Meta ou até mesmo pelo dinheiro que possivelmente o Trump está investindo na campanha do Flávio Bolsonaro, é uma eleição que vai ditar também um pouco dos rumos da democracia no mundo. Se o Lula for reeleito, o Lula representa uma figura unânime, uma figura que representa a luta dos países do Sul global para que a gente tenha um mundo multipolar, que a gente não tenha um mundo centrado nas desigualdades, que a gente não tenha um mundo onde poucos podem mandar sobre diversas nações, que é o que tem acontecido com os Estados Unidos, que sequestra o presidente de outro país e julga a partir das leis do seu país. Essas pessoas não escutam o processo democrático. As eleições do Brasil não estão deslocadas desse processo, que tem acontecido no mundo inteiro, de avanço do imperialismo americano, e a influência, principalmente hoje, das redes sociais que elas têm sobre o nosso cotidiano. O Brasil é uma ponta de resistência no mundo para que esses países do Sul Global possam ter a sua soberania e a democracia preservadas.

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