When one thinks of the rich in the United States, the first people who come to mind are the megabillionaires whose extravagant consumption, eye-popping wealth, and notorious political interventions have transformed them into household names. Perched atop the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest individuals are Silicon Valley moguls and Wall Street executives who command some of the most prominent corporations in America.Beneath this elite stratum of capitalists lies a vastly less conspicuous group of still-wealthy but lesser-known business owners. Far more numerous and more geographically dispersed across the country than their billionaire brethren, this “American Gentry” exercises great influence on local, state, and even national politics. The relatively scant attention they receive compared to their headline-grabbing compatriots means that their collective effect on the American wealth distribution has been hitherto mostly unexamined.A new book by Princeton economist Owen Zidar and University of Chicago economist Eric Zwick attempts to correct this relative neglect by quantifying the place of “The Everywhere Millionaire” in the American wealth distribution. The book is a popular exposition of previous academic work that celebrated scholars of inequality Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman deemed (despite some critiques) an “important contribution” to the estimation of wealth inequality in the United States.What emerges from Zidar and Zwick’s investigations is the fundamental role of “pass-through” businesses in securing their owners a place near the top of the American wealth distribution. Changes to the tax code in the past half century, some lobbied for by the very business owners receiving their benefits, have made the pass-through business structure even more profitable than it would have been otherwise. The result is an astounding amount of wealth collected by the American Gentry, who often employ it toward corrosive, self-serving political ends.Do Not Pass Through, Do Not Collect $200Zidar and Zwick coin the term “Main Street Millionaires” (MSMs) to signify households with at least $5 million in wealth (meaning they are in the top 4 percent of the US wealth distribution) and private business ownership. This group, around three million in number, collectively owns an impressive thirteen times the combined wealth of the Forbes 400.The collective wealth of the MSMs has more than doubled over the course of the twenty-first century, to the point where it presently stands at around $55 trillion. MSMs are also more geographically dispersed than their Forbes 400 colleagues. Half of the latter live in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Miami, whereas less than a quarter of the MSMs do.The businesses that MSMs run are often classified as pass-through entities in the tax code, which include sole proprietorships, partnerships, limited liability companies, and S corporations. Unlike a C corporation, which treats the company as a separate taxpaying entity from its owners, pass-throughs do not pay corporate or dividend taxes, and instead their profits pass through to the owners’ individual income taxes.The Tax Reform Act of 1986, which pushed the top individual tax rate below the corporate tax rate for several years, triggered a major shift in the legal structure of American business. The result is that today 95 percent of all US businesses are pass-throughs, accounting for the employment of half of all American workers and more than half of American business income. Indeed, Zidar and Zwick and other coauthors have calculated that 41 percent of the rise in the income share of the top 1 percent of Americans since 1980 is due to pass-through income.With almost all US businesses now classified as pass-throughs of one sort or another, the businesses the MSMs own run the gamut of American commerce. Zidar and Zwick profile businesses that manufacture everything from seamless gutters to tanning beds to laboratory chemicals to quiche and provide services that span from ambulance billing to trade show planning. It should be stressed, however, that private business is not necessarily small business. Major corporations such as Fidelity and Hobby Lobby are registered as pass-throughs, while large firms like Koch and Mars are private C corporations. But even more modest MSMs can generate serious profits, as the authors demonstrate with some revealing figures. For instance, “there are 25 autodealers [in the top 0.1 percent of the US income distribution] for every member of the Forbes 400.”Previous attempts to more comprehensively map the upper reaches of the wealth distribution used one of three methodologies, all of which generated results but had various shortcomings: surveys, investigative reporting, and nonlinked databases. Surveys have limited coverage, face difficulty cajoling the rich to disclose information about their financial situation, and are sometimes subject to anonymization procedures precisely to prevent users from linking the data to identifiable persons. Investigative reporting’s reach is inherently limited; even the people behind cataloging the Forbes 400 can’t be certain that they are not overlooking less ostentatious billionaires. Finally, nonlinked databases are not as useful as those that can match their data to others.Zidar and Zwick instead follow the lead of Thomas Piketty and his collaborators in using tax data as their fundamental data source. The core methodological innovation informing the book’s findings is the linkage of tax databases within the US Department of the Treasury to match businesses to their owners and employees (all anonymized). The authors then combed through auxiliary sources, such as registries of private jet and yacht owners, to attempt to deanonymize these millionaires. Resulting interviews with various capitalists the authors identified comprise a significant portion of the book.Zidar and Zwick frame their findings as a contrarian exercise highlighting how much relatively unassuming professions contribute to the upper layers of the American wealth distribution. However, some of the evidence they present in the book qualifies this narrative. A table showing the industries generating the most pass-through income is heavily populated by the highly paid professions one might expect: lawyers, doctors, financiers, accountants, dentists, realtors, architects, and consultants. To be sure, plenty of more plebeian businesses are represented as well: lumberyards, motorcycle dealers, and paper product distributors, for instance, and these less glamorous trades are often the focus of the book’s anecdotes.The Everywhere BilkerPart of the story of the MSMs’ affluence is the squeezing of their workers. Smaller businesses are legally exempt from many of the labor protections that larger corporations must enforce. For instance, the Family and Medical Leave Act only applies to firms with fifty or more employees, portions of the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act only fully apply at a fifteen-employee threshold, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act only regulates employers with at least one hundred workers, and the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that businesses provide their employees health insurance only kicks in at a minimum of fifty employees. On top of these difficulties, smaller shops are notoriously harder to unionize.Zidar and Zwick briefly weigh in on the controversy regarding why labor faces an ongoing decline in its share of national income. One factor they highlight as driving this trend is the increasing use of noncompete agreements to discourage workers — now even low-paid and entry-level ones — from switching employers. In previous work, Zidar and Zwick and coauthors suggested that a third of the declining labor share was a statistical artifact created by the classification of many American businesses as pass-through entities.When assessing the effect of MSMs on politics, it’s noteworthy that MSMs themselves make up a significant share of American politicians. Nearly a quarter of congressional representatives own a business, as do over 40 percent of legislators at the state level and a third of all mayoral candidates. This means that a large share of legislators have a personal incentive to support the interests of business owners generally and individually will be tempted to promote their own business interests.MSMs have secured anticompetitive legal protection of their businesses in a variety of industries, pushing up costs for consumers. Beer distributors, for example, benefit from laws that prevent brewers from also owning distribution and make it difficult to terminate a distribution contract. Franchise laws give auto dealers similar protection from rivals. Realtors guarantee their positions as middlemen by restricting access to information about real estate sales. Doctors inflate their profits through restricting access to medical care, which they do by putting a ceiling on the number of residency positions and limiting the ability of nonphysicians to deliver care. Powerful sectional lobbies ensure the maintenance of their members’ privileges through organizations like the National Association of Realtors, American Medical Association, and National Automobile Dealers Association.MSMs skew politically conservative, and some of them have unsurprisingly used their fortunes to advance right-wing causes. In 2022, the largest federal campaign donors for Republicans were Dick and Liz Uihlein, whose income derives from the shipping supplies company Uline. The late Republican senator and presidential nominee John McCain’s political career was largely funded by his wife’s inherited riches from a beer distribution company.The MSMs’ political influence has been most nefarious, perhaps, in the domain of taxes. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that around $600 billion dollars of taxes are owed but not paid every year; pass-through owners are responsible for almost half of this “tax gap.” “More than at any recent time,” Zidar and Zwick write, “the tax code for pass-throughs runs on the honor system, with predictable results.”And MSMs are progressively seeing more tax loopholes enacted to their benefit. Estate taxes have been whittled down to the point where only 0.1 percent of households face an estate tax of any sort. The 2017 Trump tax cuts allowed pass-through owners to deduct 20 percent of business income from their taxes, and the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act made these temporary provisions permanent.Dream OnEven though Zidar and Zwick recognize that upward social mobility is becoming more difficult in the United States, a major theme of the book is that the “American Dream” of upward mobility remains attainable, primarily through private business ownership. The authors plainly have admiration for the MSMs who have achieved entrepreneurial success, and much of the text is content drawn from interviews with MSMs about their achievements. Clearly the authors intended these profiles both as ways to de-anonymize the “stealthy wealthy” and to give their account some narrative color, but the stream of self-reported business heroics of various MSMs becomes tedious.Despite large chunks of the book reading as inspirational literature for aspiring business owners (the largest of three segments is entitled “How To Get Rich”) or a celebration of the everyman capitalist, Zidar and Zwick recognize the negative effects of MSMs in exacerbating social inequality. They end the book with some policy reform proposals, such as raising the minimum wage and reforming the tax code to harmonize tax rates. Useful steps, of course, but these proposals fall far short of a comprehensive program to rein in the economic and political power of the MSMs.The main value in Zidar and Zwick’s book, however, is not in its politics but in its empirical research. The authors have gone some distance toward unmasking a stratum of the capitalist class that too often escapes recognition, not to mention criticism. A serious left-wing political project needs to grapple with this overlooked but powerful section of the American elite.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.

More than the “revolutionary historian” promised by the subtitle, the Eric Hobsbawm chronicled in Emile Chabal’s biography is above all a canny academic entrepreneur. Early in his career, Hobsbawm found a literary agent and converted his lectures for undergraduates into a series of best-selling books. He made valuable contacts with rising-star scholars and publishing houses in continental Europe. He traveled widely: not so much for archival research, which he practiced sparingly, but for conferences, lectures, and intellectual tourism in appealing destinations. The Soviet Union, which occupied a central place in his thought for obvious reasons, did not qualify for more than a brief, unpleasant visit.He displayed a knack for keeping himself in the public eye, with a steady stream of journalism and polemics, and for a degree of tactical adaptation. In the 1980s, he pivoted from writing the histories of the working class that defined his early work to studies of nationalism and invented traditions. By the late 1990s, he had achieved such eminence that he could turn down a knighthood while requesting — and receiving — a considerably more prestigious and exclusive appointment to the Order of the Companions of Honour, an award also tied to the monarchy but with less symbolic baggage.Eric Hobsbawm, Careerist?If all this sounds less than flattering, it isn’t because Chabal has written a hatchet job. On the contrary: The Age of Hobsbawm is admiring of the historian’s accomplishments while mercifully free of the emotional overinvestments he inspired in earlier generations. The absence of tedious Cold War moralism — alternately prosecutorial or tortured on such questions as Hobsbawm’s failure to leave the party after 1956 or his enjoyment of establishment privileges — is refreshing. Chabal offers a decidedly twenty-first century perspective, concerned more with explaining the global phenomenon that was Hobsbawm than judging the man or seeking to revive his ideas. But the line between demythologization and deflation is thin. Turning a high-resolution lens on the sausage-making of academic advancement and intellectual reputation-building is bound to leave any subject diminished.While some of the details will be familiar to those who have read Richard Evans’s 2019 biography, Chabal’s cool-eyed appraisal repeatedly brings the legend down to earth. As a supervisor of graduate students, Hobsbawm was usually inattentive, veering into downright hostility to approaches he disliked: women’s and feminist histories foremost among them. He never made peace with the New Left sensibility that took gender and race as seriously as class. For all his interest in cultural production — an enthusiasm shaped, though not straitjacketed, by the Marxist catechism of base and superstructure — his tastes were fusty. He found jazz a worthwhile topic in the 1950s only insofar as it met his standards for popular authenticity, which meant embodying black folk traditions while retaining mass commercial appeal. For a man whose aesthetics were enduringly forged in the same 1930s youth as his politics, Miles Davis and John Coltrane missed the mark. As for the actually existing popular music of rock and roll, Hobsbawm thought Elvis Presley “peculiarly unappealing” and wrote dismissively of the Beatles that “anyone can produce that sound.”Old-fashioned in some ways, Hobsbawm was extremely well matched to his time in others. The success of his books reflected their timeliness. The massive expansion of higher education on both sides of the Atlantic created demand for accessible introductions to economic history, such as his Industry and Empire (1968), and modern Europe, covered in the famous tetralogy that began with The Age of Revolution (1962). The “paperback revolution” described by historian Peter Mandler solidified the market for serious nonfiction in affordable editions. Not least, Marxism enjoyed enormous intellectual cachet — and a mass following — in societies as disparate as Italy, India, and Brazil. The Eurocentrism of the Ages volumes, so conspicuous in retrospect, mattered less at a time when many of the most pressing Marxist debates — about the demise of feudalism, the advent of industrial production, and the immiseration of workers — were being waged on the terrain of British history.Little wonder that Hobsbawm’s work repeatedly circled back to what he saw as the formation of mass society in the late nineteenth century. Universal education, rising literacy, new communication technologies, a popular press: these were not just the preconditions for nationalism, democracy, and ideological politics in the fin de siècle. They were also the foundations, in a more distant way, of Hobsbawm’s success in the literary marketplace. The volume devoted to the late nineteenth century, The Age of Empire (1987), marked a turning point in the series, arguing that the forces that destabilized and ultimately destroyed bourgeois society emerged from the triumphant capitalist order it had built. Hobsbawm doubtless savored the irony, in his own career, of leveraging the commercial incentives of the book business to deliver left-wing history to hundreds of thousands of readers.An Annaliste From the AnglosphereParticularly in the Ages series, it is difficult to disentangle Marxism from other historiographical influences. It is also true that the tetralogy is at its least convincing when it hews most closely to orthodox Marxism. Yes, the elegant architecture of the series derives from the interlocking advance of a new mode of production (industrial capitalism), a new social grouping (the bourgeoisie), and a new ideology (liberalism). But this master narrative strains to meet the facts at crucial moments. Hobsbawm’s interpretation of the French Revolution — one half of the “dual revolution” that kicks off the series — in the strict class terms of a “bourgeois revolution” was outdated almost as soon as the ink was dry. The risk of historiographical obsolescence became more acute as the interval between volumes lengthened; by the 1980s, historians were questioning whether the bourgeoisie anywhere in nineteenth-century Europe was really so triumphant in the face of what Arno Mayer called “the persistence of the old regime.” At the same time, as Chabal points out, Hobsbawm’s decision to elevate political principles of liberty and equality to the same explanatory rank as the Industrial Revolution marked a bold departure from strictly materialist analysis.It is something of a cliché to describe Hobsbawm as cosmopolitan because of his birth in Alexandria, childhood in Vienna, and adolescence in Berlin. The label fits best as a statement of his role as an intellectual intermediary, bringing elements of the French Annales school into mainstream Anglophone historiography at a time when few others were doing so. I am less sure than Chabal that “total history” is the right term for the Ages series; Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949) and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1975) traded specific geographic boundaries for depths of environmental and anthropological texture not captured by the ostensibly global scale on which Hobsbawm was working.Marxist annalistes such as Ernest Labrousse, who in 1955 issued a prominent call for a history of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, represent a more obvious influence. But if Hobsbawm and the other towering figure of his generation of British historians, E. P. Thompson, both subordinated high politics to social history, Hobsbawm’s route to that destination — reflected in the pages of tables and charts that adorned many of his books — was paved with the quantitative data that the Annales valued so highly. Without ever bogging down the fluent prose of the Ages series, price cycles and export volumes provided the materialist grounding for Hobsbawm’s confident pronouncements on everything from urban planning and domestic architecture to music, painting, and literature.Looking BackThat confidence in the power of empirically derived data, Chabal shows, might be the most British thing about Hobsbawm. He was a product of the Oxbridge system in his talent for generalizing from well-chosen details, though probably no one could do it as artfully. A flair for what Hobsbawm himself called haute vulgarisation served him well as a university lecturer and is the reason that the Ages books remain so readable today. Unlike Thompson, Hobsbawm did not forsake high culture along with high politics, and his sympathetic interest in popular protest did not foreclose writing about the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven, Honoré de Balzac, and Albert Einstein. Hobsbawm’s identification with “history from below,” more pronounced in some works than others, was always more equivocal than for some of his peers — perhaps because, at least to some degree, he absorbed and accepted the cultural values of the Bildungsbürgertum.Chabal emphasizes the critical edge of Hobsbawm’s take on the superficiality and artificiality of the bourgeois world. But there was also nostalgia, or at least ambivalence, in Hobsbawm’s attitude to the class that dominated his magnum opus. In the introduction to The Age of Empire, the historian’s affective connection to the era in which his parents came of age inspired some of his most lyrical lines:For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory. . . . For individual human beings this zone stretches from the point where living family traditions or memories begin . . . to the end of infancy, when public and private destinies are recognized as inseparable. . . . It is itself an incoherent, incompletely perceived image of the past, sometimes more shadowy, sometimes apparently precise, always transmitted by a mixture of learning and second-hand memory shaped by public and private tradition. For it is still part of us, but no longer quite within our personal reach.The tantalizing proximity, yet ultimate inaccessibility, of those years before 1914 is especially poignant because Hobsbawm’s parents died young. But there is a hint of social as well as personal loss, a longing for the solidity of the bourgeois order swept away by the war. The final volume in the series, The Age of Extremes (1994), has an unmoored quality as violent events overwhelm structures and processes in the maelstrom of what Hobsbawm termed “the short twentieth century.” The better companion for the first three Ages volumes is arguably Peter Gay’s The Bourgeois Experience (1984–1998), the work of another Jewish émigré from Central Europe, born six years after Hobsbawm, though with Sigmund Freud rather than Karl Marx as the theoretical lodestar. In different ways, both works are about the “fragility” and the “tenuous grip” of bourgeois dominance (to borrow from Chabal’s gloss on Hobsbawm).The twentieth century might have appeared less disjunctive in Hobsbawm’s telling if colonial violence had featured more prominently all along. The treatment of the Haitian Revolution as an afterthought in The Age of Revolution is symptomatic of the series as a whole: the world-systems weighting of “center” and “periphery” applies not only to capitalist development but to ideas, experiences, and people as well. Even The Age of Empire fails to live up to its title in large part because Hobsbawm leans so heavily on the Hobsonian-Leninist model of imperialism as an outgrowth of monopoly capitalism. It is a book about the “apotheosis” and “destruction” of the bourgeoisie, Chabal writes, while the human catastrophe of imperial conquest is reduced to the abstract “terms of a political and historiographical debate that needed to be settled.” Even on Hobsbawm’s own terms, this focus on Europe represents a missed opportunity, because the vulnerability of the bourgeoisie was nowhere more acute than in the colonial outposts that strove to replicate European society far from home.Though he famously refused to join Thompson and others in leaving the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956, Hobsbawm emerged from the shattering of its intellectual milieu with a more flexible and questioning attitude to the party line, producing some of his most interesting work as a consequence. His 1959 book Primitive Rebels took seriously the political aspirations of peasant uprisings far removed from the industrial proletariat privileged by Marxist theory. His later work on nationalism discussed ideological regimes of collective identity with only limited reference to material causes.Where Hobsbawm evolved least was almost certainly in his Eurocentrism: an imperfect term, not least because it masks the novelty of his attention to the ways that global and imperial forces remade Europe. It would be difficult to imagine Sven Beckert’s “war capitalism” or Kenneth Pomeranz’s “ghost acres,” for instance, without the pioneering argument of Industry and Empire, which linked the onset of the Industrial Revolution to the demand boost of imperial expansion. Of course, Hobsbawm’s books will continue to be read for the sheer artistry of their craft: the subordination of narrative to structure, the fluency in shifting between macro and micro scales, the promiscuous variety of sources, the plain yet vigorous expository prose.Yet his reluctance to wrestle with topics that most historians today would consider central — genocide and decolonization — shows that the path for history after Hobsbawm is not only a matter of geographical rebalancing. Rather than writing Europe out of the story, we must write about it differently: no longer as the cradle of an immanent logic of history but as the cockpit of a violent, acquisitive, sometimes irrational, and often unpredictable project of domination whose consequences we have yet to fully grasp.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.

The English inventor Charles Babbage is best remembered for his work designing the foundations for all digital computers with Ada Lovelace in the nineteenth century. What’s lesser known is why he wanted to build them. In the decades leading up to the British Empire’s abolition of slavery in the West Indies in 1833 (which Babbage supported), there was a serious question of how to get free and rebellious industrial workers to produce enough to sustain the empire. Babbage’s answer was to surveil workers and divide their efforts into standardized, measurable tasks — a project he saw as a necessary step on the way to automating labor entirely.Babbage didn’t invent these methods, as Meredith Whittaker, an artificial intelligence scholar who coled Google’s 2018 walkout, writes in a Logic(s) essay. Similar technologies of labor control were developed first on plantations to extract maximum labor from enslaved people, with management guides routinely circulating among British capitalists. “Babbage’s proto-Taylorist ideas on how to discipline workers are inextricably connected to the calculating engines he spent his life attempting to build,” Whittaker writes. Automation gave bosses a tool to replace striking workers and provided a disciplinary check, in Babbage’s words, “against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents.”There’s a neat alpha and omega quality to computing: its ultimate effort, the Obsoleting Project — the industry’s drive to build machines that can do all our jobs — rhymes with its earliest. Should they work as intended, those machines would act as the tireless, pliant, cheap workers that bosses could previously only dream of. From Babbage to Bezos, managers have always resented the various ways that humans aren’t optimized for output — and therefore, their bottom line.For bosses, cost savings alone are only part of the attraction. Automation also weakens workers’ bargaining power and is used to make organizing even harder. After workers alleged Amazon used algorithmic management to surveil and stifle protected labor organizing, Stanford Law Lecturer Seema N. Patel told The Guardian that AI lets employers discipline hundreds of thousands of workers “in a way that no human manager or group of managers could even do.”“You feel like you’re in prison,” Wendy Taylor, an Amazon packer, said. “They know every move you make, when you’re working, when you’re not working.”Of course, Amazon is also leading the charge on replacing workers entirely.Yoshua Bengio is the most-cited living scientist thanks to his foundational contributions to deep learning. “I’m talking to a lot of CEOs around the world,” he told me, “and they’ll automate [jobs] as fast as they possibly can.” Indeed, a 2025 World Economic Forum survey of more than one thousand large employers found more than 40 percent planned to reduce their workforce as a result of automation by 2030.Companies are also creating more wealth with fewer people than ever. Per employee, the world’s most valuable companies in recent decades were worth anywhere from $3.5 million to as much as $30 million. Nvidia? More than $100 million. Pure AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI have pushed the trend even further, with ratios between $140 million and $167 million.This surge in AI-driven wealth concentration builds on a decades-long rise in inequality. As the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have shown, inequality levels in the United States are the highest they’ve been since the 1920s. If machines can truly substitute for human labor across the board, the result could look like a worldwide game of musical chairs, where your economic position is determined by whatever wealth you happened to have at the moment your work stopped being worth paying for.Looking at this data, AI appears less a bolt from the blue than the next — and perhaps final — frontier in the endless pursuit of profit.Can They Really Do It?It probably comes as little surprise to you that many capitalists want to automate their workers away. But can they?The question is difficult to answer definitively. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sounded the alarm in mid-2025, predicting what Axios dubbed a “white-collar bloodbath.” AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike overall unemployment to 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years, he told the publication. Of course, to skeptics, the CEO of an AI company warning that its technology would be so effective it would soon replace human workers was nothing more than a savvy earned media campaign. But that’s hard to square with more recent reporting that OpenAI blocked its economists from publishing research that showed its technology was displacing jobs.By 2025, signs of AI’s deleterious effects on the workforce appeared to be everywhere. Rising unemployment for college graduates, dips in job postings, and dramatic Big Tech layoffs were all pointing the same way, and software engineer hiring in particular cratered. People were quick to attribute the drop to AI.However, as keen observers noted, the plunge in hiring coincided more neatly with the Fed’s increases to interest rates than with the rise of ChatGPT, which didn’t become much of a coder until after net hiring had (barely) resumed. Generative AI rose to prominence at around the same time as today’s turbulent macroeconomic and political conditions, making it fiendishly difficult to explain changes. Anecdata in the form of news stories about young people struggling to find programming jobs won’t cut it.I hate to say it, but this sounds like a job for economists.In 2024, when Daron Acemoglu — who would go on to share that year’s Nobel Prize in economics — predicted the labor market effects of AI over the next decade, people took notice. Against Goldman Sachs and McKinsey predictions that AI would add trillions to GDP, he expected a nothingburger, forecasting that US GDP would only be around 1 percent higher in ten years due to AI.Economists mostly don’t believe there’s any real chance AI could put most people out of work anytime soon, Stanford economics postdoc Phil Trammell told me, but Acemoglu’s view is even “more pessimistic than the mainstream.”On the opposite end of the spectrum is Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia economist on leave at Anthropic since March, who uses standard economic models to look at what might happen if firms can effectively turn capital into more labor. Assuming full automation is reached in twenty years (“baseline AGI”), he and his PhD student Donghyun Suh predict the economy would double over the subsequent decade. If it’s possible in five years (“aggressive AGI”), they predict a tripling of GDP by 2034 — ten times faster growth than the business-as-usual scenario. “However,” they write, “wages collapse as the economy approaches full automation.”“Economists have been telling the rest of the world for the past 200 years that we shouldn’t worry about automation,” Korinek told me, “because if you destroy some jobs, the economy always creates new ones.” That was true in the past, he acknowledged, but only because “there were always things that only humans could do.” Indeed, there are more people than ever before, with more jobs than ever before, even after more than two centuries of automation. However, we’ve never had a machine that can actually make labor. (Korinek has separately clarified he’s not predicting imminent AGI himself, but rather using traditional economics to show what would happen if the predictions of AI experts like Geoffrey Hinton actually came to pass.)Economic forecasts are notoriously sensitive to their underlying assumptions. Acemoglu’s 2024 paper uses mainstream ways to measure a task’s automation potential. But when it comes to AI’s capabilities, he takes a distinctly conservative approach, assuming they won’t significantly advance beyond GPT-4’s, which was the state of the art at the time.Trammell told me that the difference between the Acemoglu and Korinek camps comes down to “whether the economic impacts of AI over the next ten years will be mainly about the diffusion of what AI could already do as of a year ago versus the things it becomes able to do over the next ten years.”That’s not really an economics question, Trammell said. “It’s a question about technological forecasting. I think reasonable people can disagree about it. But it’s also not Daron’s wheelhouse.”In September 2025, I interviewed Acemoglu for a Nobel Foundation panel during the United Nations General Assembly. To my surprise, he said he was going to “stick to his guns.” In a late 2024 interview, he had argued that the productivity story depends on the technology creating genuinely new tasks and new products, and he doesn’t see the industry’s current focus delivering much of that within a decade. He expects near-term gains to concentrate in relatively “easy-to-learn” white-collar tasks, while jobs that rely on tacit judgment, social interaction, and hard-to-verify outcomes remain far less exposed.It is true that, even years after the release of ChatGPT, it’s been hard to find evidence that AI is actually killing jobs. An October 2025 Yale study using the standard dataset for labor economists, the US Current Population Survey (CPS), found that “currently, measures of exposure, automation, and augmentation show no sign of being related to changes in employment or unemployment.” Also in October, when I asked Korinek about the data to date, he admitted that we only have “tiny little bits of empirical evidence that are not rising to the level of transformativeness.” So, “if you say I’m an honest evidence-bound economist, it’s still fair to say that the evidence doesn’t suggest that this is different from any prior technological revolution.”But focusing on whole occupations may miss the early signs of automation. This is where three Stanford economists stepped in with a groundbreaking paper in August 2025. Rather than rely on traditional government sources like CPS, which offer a useful — but bird’s-eye — view of employment changes, they got their hands on data from a payroll processor, allowing them to zoom in on trends too subtle to spot otherwise. Spoiler: the anecdotes were a real sign that the white-collar bloodbath was already well underway, and like the 1918 flu, it claimed young people most.With payroll data going back to 2021, the authors split professions into six age cohorts, starting with twenty-two- to twenty-five-year-olds, and bucketed jobs by AI exposure using the same metric as Acemoglu. The most exposed were in fields like programming and customer service.After controlling for interest rates, pandemic-era overhiring, and other factors, the data tells no clear story at first. Even for the youngest, most AI-exposed workers, relative employment bounced around for years, declining as much as 6 percent in 2022 before recovering to zero in mid-2024. But then it falls off a cliff, plummeting 16 percent in just over a year, with little sign of stopping.By late 2025, the macro data looked consistent with this story. The US economy grew at 4.3 percent in the third quarter — the fastest in two years — while job creation averaged an anemic 51,000 per month. Joseph Brusuelas, the chief economist at the accounting firm RSM, writes, “The great decoupling of jobs and growth will take some explaining to the American public.” The Stanford paper offers one compelling explanation.Who Else Stands to Lose?Korinek worries that we’re heading toward something more fundamental than a rough patch for entry-level coders. “The main economic risk under AI,” he told me, “is that it will fundamentally undermine labor, that it will lead to essentially a large part of the population becoming losers of this technology.” He observed that wage labor was “basically a construct of the industrial age” — one not likely to survive long term under AGI, where, by default, he expected labor to “experience a very significant devaluation.”The rise of automation in the United States is happening after decades of declining union density, with just 6 percent of private sector workers belonging to one. Currently, labor automation mostly doesn’t look like mass layoffs; instead the Stanford paper suggests firms will increasingly avoid hiring anyone they might be able to automate — a group that will grow larger as AI improves.And since AI labor is typically orders of magnitude cheaper than the human variety, substitution doesn’t require that AI be as good, just good enough.Collective PowerAfter years reporting on the Obsoleting Project, I’ve found that lawmakers won’t stop it unless we make them. The industry has captured them, and they were already catastrophically insulated from what the public wants. What has slowed automation down, where anything has, is workers organizing.One place where bosses tried — but largely failed — to use automation to reduce labor power was in scriptwriting. To better understand how, I spoke to Ellen Stutzman, the chief negotiator for the Writers Guild of America (WGA) 2023 strike. She told me that AI concerns emerged organically from what members were already experiencing: a speedup. As streaming replaced broadcast television over the preceding fifteen years, studios shifted from fewer shows with twenty-two-episode seasons to more shows with just eight-episode seasons, asking writers to do more work in less time for less money. The writers were already going into the strike seeking contractual minimums on staffing levels and time to do jobs. So when ChatGPT arrived, it looked like the natural progression of that trend. “It’s like one writer with an AI system doing an entire season,” Stutzman said, “or eventually no writers.”The WGA didn’t go into bargaining demanding a ban on AI. Instead, it wanted restrictions on how the technology was used, namely for AI-generated material to be treated the way Wikipedia articles were — as research, not writing. If a studio hands a writer AI-generated material, the writer should still get full credit and compensation. Whatever the machine spits out doesn’t count as literary material under the contract. And writers shouldn’t be forced to use AI tools. That last one mattered, she said, because members’ views ran the whole spectrum: “People like David Simon, who was on the negotiating committee, who I think said, ‘I would rather put a gun in my mouth than use AI.’”It was only on the final weekend before the contract deadline, Stutzman said, that the studios were willing to say anything at all about AI. At that point, they finally pointed to language in the existing collective bargaining agreement saying that a “writer” is a human being and told the guild that, at least on paper, AI could not be credited as the writer. But they stressed that they did not want to limit how they might use the technology in practice.This coincided with concerns over studios using AI to scan actors to create “synthetic performers” for background shots. The Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) launched its own strike a few months later, in which the use of digital replicas became a key sticking point.It took a five-month strike to get the protections writers wanted, and Stutzman is clear-eyed about the limits of what they achieved: the WGA has no power over any AI company. “What we can do in a collective bargaining agreement is regulate our employers,” she said, “but OpenAI is not our employer.” The companies that scraped writers’ work to train their models remain beyond the guild’s direct reach — a problem the WGA is now trying to address through litigation and legislation.Against this bleak backdrop, I asked Stutzman what other automation-exposed workers could learn from their experience. She didn’t hesitate. “It’s the same lesson I have on everything, which is about collective power,” she said. “If you want to push back, if you want to regulate AI, if you want to make it a tool that you use versus one you’re being replaced with — it’s all about collective action.”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.

Over the past decade since his first presidential run, no one has done more to reshape the American left than Bernie Sanders. He is the most influential left-wing leader this country has seen since the 1960s, if not longer.While Sanders’s political career began decades earlier, his influence took on national dimensions ten years ago, when Sanders first campaigned for president against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. He lost that campaign, but few losses have looked so much like a victory. Clinton has no political heirs openly claiming her legacy; indeed, today’s technocratic centrists squirm away from the association. Meanwhile, Sanders has dozens of self-professed acolytes at the federal level, hundreds or even thousands at the state and local levels, and an organization in the Democratic Socialists of America that, though he has never been a member, has grown from obscurity to 120,000 members since he first ran.Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign, then, is a significant event in twenty-first century American politics and the broader history of the American left, and its ten-year anniversary is a notable milestone. But Sanders himself hasn’t marked the occasion. Unlike most politicians, he demurs from telling his own story or touting his achievements. He’s also busy, playing a leading role in demanding artificial intelligence regulation and ending the war in Iran, with the next fight and the one after that.That laser focus on the present is why we love Bernie; it also means that commemorating and reflecting on the campaign that changed everything falls to us.At the top of any accounting of Sanders’s achievements since 2016 is the wave of young socialist elected officials he has inspired. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a volunteer organizer for Sanders’s 2016 campaign, which she credits with motivating her to run for office. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called Sanders “the single most influential political figure in my life” and has said it was “Bernie’s campaign for the presidency in 2016 that gave me the language of democratic socialism to describe my politics.”Sanders’s protégés in Congress now span two generations. There are the upperclassmen elected around 2018, including Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. And pending November confirmation in their deep-blue districts, there’s now an incoming freshman class including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, while several other Sanders acolytes, chief among them Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, are fighting through their general elections with a good shot at victory.Valdez best summarized this cohort’s indebtedness to Sanders when she said, “Three things made me a democratic socialist: sh–y jobs, the labor movement, and Bernie Sanders’s runs for president. His political revolution changed my life — and showed millions of Americans what’s possible when working people organize.”Sanders’s influence, however, is hardly restricted to office-seekers. His political orientation has reshaped the culture and strategic orientation of the American left as a whole.To appreciate how, recall what that culture looked like before he arrived. From the Battle of Seattle in 1999 through Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the American left was dominated by horizontalism, an anarchist-inflected politics that distrusted not only politicians and parties but mass politics itself. The Occupy-era left was suspicious of formal leadership, considered demands a concession to the system, and rarely organized itself beyond the affinity group or temporary action committees.The mobilizations of this period produced indelible images and genuinely radicalized participants, but they left behind no institutions capable of seriously contesting power. Meanwhile, those progressives who did continue to wage fights within the Democratic Party did so timidly and without ambition, failing to advance a robust legislative program and inspiring moral vision. Sanders offered an exit from both culs-de-sac.By running for president on a far-reaching program of reforms that were coherent and achievable but also highly audacious and transformative, he demonstrated that the Left could flourish by articulating clear demands and waging campaigns for Democratic Party nominations that were mostly independent of Democratic Party leadership. He showed that we could seek majorities and contest for power rather than just protest it — and that millions of ordinary people, mostly indifferent to the subcultural preoccupations of the already-existing activist left, would respond when we did.Bernie speaks at Transmitter Park in Brooklyn, New York, on April 8, 2016. (Timothy Krause / CC BY 2.0)If horizontalism was the radical left’s dominant tendency when Sanders arrived, identity politics was its successor in the decade that followed. The Right makes no distinction between the two emergent politics of the 2010s, Sanders-style democratic socialism and “wokeness.” In reality, however, Bernie Sanders has provided an alternate example for a left that otherwise finds it difficult to avoid the seductions of identity-based oppression rankings, elaborate deference pageantry, and shallow representational concerns. A universalist at heart, Sanders instead has modeled a politics genuinely progressive on civil rights and social equality that nonetheless declines the invitation to the culture wars, fixing its attention instead on what unites the broad working class rather than on the infinite ways it can be subdivided.That Sanders’s politics, forged in the crucible of the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements, remained wholly intact through the Left’s darkest decades is a testament to his idiosyncratic personality as much as his political convictions. Through sheer force of will, he has served as a bridge between the 1960s and our time. We’re lucky that a veteran of the nation’s last great left upsurge was still around to guide a new generation of democratic socialists — and that he had spent decades in office sorting what earlier generations got right from what they got wrong.There’s no one like Bernie Sanders. He remains singular today, even among the crop of leaders and activists who strive to emulate him. His obdurate universalism, unique and even comical ability to stay on message, and unyielding focus on issues of real importance to the long project of class struggle remain aspirational qualities. Society has not evolved past the need for Bernie Sanders.To mark the decade anniversary of Sanders’s first presidential campaign, we will be publishing a number of articles in the coming days by Jacobin contributors and contemporary socialist leaders reflecting on how the American left has changed since Bernie first ran. These articles will cover his impact on socialist organizations, his part in the still-unfinished effort to revitalize the labor movement, personal essays by socialist elected officials on his influence on them, and more.Though he’s far from finished remaking American politics, Sanders has already left a profound legacy that will not recede when he does eventually exit the public stage. Above all, he has broken the spell of demoralization that had settled over the American left, and over the working class itself. He has rekindled in millions of Americans the belief that things can change — that domination can be challenged, inequality overturned, injustice repaired, and power structures transformed in the interests of the many, not just the wealthy few.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.

“When I first saw it, I was like, ‘It’s a block.’” Woodlawn resident Linda Spears had been watching the construction of the Obama Foundation’s sprawling campus from her condo overlooking Jackson Park in Chicago, but it wasn’t until opening weekend, when the barriers came down, that she finally went inside. Sitting on a bench near the Barack Obama Presidential Center’s playground, she recited the former president’s 2015 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march from memory, as if echoing the words that appeared on the facade behind us.Spears explained that the museum tower at the Obama Presidential Center had actually been designed to resemble four hands reaching upward. She pressed her hands against those of a young woman beside her, as if playing patty-cake. “It’s like we’re all coming together,” she said.I saw this demonstration of the four hands many times during opening weekend, literally gesturing toward Obama’s vision of the center as “not just a monument to my presidency” but “a tribute to all the people and the forces and the community that helped to make this so special.” It’s an inspirational story every American liberal knows by heart: Obama arrived on the South Side of Chicago as a wayward twenty-three-year-old in a junky used car and left as the president of the United States. He envisioned the sprawling Obama Presidential Center campus as a thank-you gift to the city that created him, complete with a playground, a public library branch, gardens, and spaces for democratic education in a basement “forum.”On opening weekend, visitors lined up for paletas and Obama-themed merchandise at stands encouraging them to “bring change home.” They nodded along to Stevie Wonder’s live performance while inspecting hot peppers in the garden and wrote notes to Obama on index cards in the Forum basement and pinned them to the wall. Even on Sunday, when thunderstorms thinned out the crowds, a DJ shouted over the promenade, “We may be small in number, but we can make an impact.” Meanwhile, a cluster of visitors with umbrellas wobbled through the Electric Slide.Nowhere had I seen so many slogans: a T-shirt featuring Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson with “I regret nothing” in Impact typeface, Future voter pins for the kids. Some seemed to be handmade — a group visiting from Mississippi had matching traffic-cone-orange shirts with Obama’s head superimposed on a photo of the Obama Center campus; the words “where we come to be inspired and change” appeared in white italics across the bottom. Another woman wore a white shirt with a wanted poster featuring Obama’s face. Above him read the headline “Have you seen this man? If so, can you please let him back into the White House?” Visitors would also see these kinds of handmade slogans and signs in the museum itself, relics from the civil rights movement and Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign as well as a display of 440 buttons from Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign — German-Americans for Obama, UAW for Obama–Biden, Vote Hope.The Obama museum’s celebration of the power of ordinary people may ring hollow, given the high-profile donors required to fund its $850 million budget. It’s difficult to sustain the cognitive dissonance of seeing an Occupy Wall Street display funded in part by Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, or stomach an exhibit about labor organizing after having wandered past a sign thanking Jeff Bezos.Even more ironic is the Obama Foundation’s apparent hostility to community organizers on the South Side. After the foundation announced in 2016 that the center would be built in Jackson Park, local faith organizations, tenant groups, and neighborhood associations formed a coalition to negotiate a community benefits agreement (CBA), a legally binding contract intended to protect Woodlawn residents from displacement. The foundation made a series of vague, voluntary commitments to community demands but chafed against the request to formalize them into a legally enforceable agreement. During a 2017 meeting, organizer and now alderwoman Jeanette Taylor asked Obama directly why he would not sign a CBA. “I was a community organizer,” Obama replied. “I know the neighborhood. I know that the minute you start saying, ‘Well, we’re thinking about signing something that will determine who’s getting jobs and contracts and this and that’ . . . next thing I know, I’ve got twenty organizations coming out of the woodwork.” It did not go over well. “He’s forgotten who he is,” Taylor later told a reporter. “He forgot the community got him where he is.”When Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, his wife, Michelle, said, “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” In 2008, Sarah Palin mocked Obama’s lack of government experience from the Republican National Convention stage, sneering that “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” In his ascent to the Oval Office, Obama brought the question of what it means to be an organizer to the center of American politics. In the form of a near-billion-dollar museum, it seems that he has finally given his answer.On the third floor of the Obama museum, under a spotlight, is a magazine open to an article entitled “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City.” In it, a twenty-seven-year-old Obama reflects on his time on the South Side. He begins the essay with an anecdote in which a public school administrative aide pulls him aside on a “bleak January morning” to ask why “a bright young man like [him] would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer.” In the gentle, even-keeled mode that would eventually become his signature style, he argued that political and economic representation for black Chicagoans — in the form of elected officials like Harold Washington and “increased hiring of black contractors and corporate managers, or Buy Black campaigns” — had been largely “symbolic.” Only through organizing could the South Side harness its “internal productive capacities” toward systemic change.It is difficult to reconcile “Why Organize?” with the building in which it lives. The Obama Foundation celebrates the strategies that Obama had himself dismissed in 1988. Press releases proclaim the museum as a totem of Obama’s symbolic victory as the first black president and an engine of economic development on the South Side, “supporting thousands of jobs during and after construction.” The museum’s exhibits breeze past these contradictions. To wrap up Obama’s time as a community organizer, text strewn on the wall explains that “victories were rare,” and “Barack decided he could make a bigger difference in his community if he ran for elected office.”Filling in these gaps is a series of documents that line the walls. A couple years after “Why Organize?” was originally published in 1988, it appeared in an anthology, After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, reflecting on the legacy of Saul Alinsky, a towering figure in Chicago organizing. Alinsky tried to systematize the ad hoc techniques he encountered during a lifetime of organizing in Back of the Yards into a set of replicable methods, which he listed in his book Rules for Radicals (on sale at the Obama Center bookshop). Alinsky hoped to bring unions, churches, and other local groups together in a “People’s Organization” that could represent a neighborhood in perpetuity rather than wilting after the end of a particular campaign. At the age of twenty-three, after seeing a help wanted ad in The New York Times, Obama joined an attempt at one such organization, the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a coalition of Catholic parishes on Chicago’s far South Side. Obama’s bosses at the DCP, one of whom described himself as an Alinsky “disciple,” were trained in Alinsky’s methods. The museum displays a fax pinned to a wall, a lesson on Alinsky’s approach to coalition building, with Obama’s handwritten marginalia, notes like “self-interest” and “systemic,” in careful cursive.The museum includes little information about what Obama worked on at the DCP, save for a newspaper clipping from 1988. A grainy black-and-white photo shows a young Obama speaking to a couple of frowning white men, residents of Hegewisch, a southeastern Chicago neighborhood that borders Indiana. Hegewisch is enclosed by what activist Hazel M. Johnson called the “toxic doughnut,” a ring of landfills, highways, sewage treatment facilities, and chemical plants that pollute the surrounding neighborhoods. In his last months at the DCP, Obama was on a task force to prevent the development of new landfills through regulatory blockades. After he left for Harvard Law School later that year, the campaign won a moratorium on new waste sites. But fifty dumps and more than one hundred industrial plants remained, managed by both city agencies and private companies. The toxic doughnut exists to this day.In “Why Organize?,” Obama wrote that Chicago was haunted by the “skeletons” of these campaigns, dismayed to find that community organizing at the DCP felt more like cutting heads off a hydra than the David-and-Goliath fights he had romanticized before he took the job. Still, Obama had not abandoned Alinsky’s dream of the “People’s Organization” that could buoy movements across long-haul fights against overlapping public and private institutions. The future president wondered if he could “rework old models” of organizing like Alinsky’s “to fit new realities,” allowing community organizers, elected officials, and private companies to work hand in hand.The result of such a proposal was 2008’s Obama for America (OFA). OFA sought to imbue a presidential campaign with the energy of community organizing. Washington strategists set the agenda from the top down, but volunteers were encouraged to personalize it. Marshall Ganz, an activist and academic who helped shape the campaign’s organizing model, designed and led “Camp Obama,” volunteer training boot camps that were essentially storytelling workshops. Whether canvassing door-to-door or training new recruits, volunteers were instructed to move from “self” to “us” to “now”: beginning with a personal story, connecting it to the shared values of a community, and concluding with a call to action. Obama’s eventual victory was fueled by one of the largest volunteer organizations in American political history. The 440 campaign buttons lining a semicircle at the center of the museum’s third floor each represent five thousand campaign volunteers. Obama attempted to make OFA’s grassroots power permanent, transforming it first into Organizing for America (a project housed within the Democratic National Committee) and later into the independent nonprofit Organizing for Action. But the experiment proved difficult to sustain. Fundraising and staffing declined after 2012, and by 2018, Organizing for Action had merged into a redistricting committee before fizzling out altogether.Although it says little about Obama for America or Organizing for Action as institutions, the Obama Center Museum perfectly embodies Marshall Ganz’s three-act canvassing structure. The emotional climax of the campaign floor features a video of people around the world celebrating Obama’s election, complete with a box of tissues provided on a nearby chair. The galleries focused on the presidency years continue this move from “self” to “us” by showing the everyday people who benefited from Obama’s policies. There is the framed letter from Natoma Canfield, an Ohio cleaner who gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and the wedding ring and marriage certificate of Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. In the last few galleries, visitors are invited to design a campaign button of their own on an elaborate digital display before finally ascending to the “Sky Room” to look out at the city and reflect on their own capacity for action.But the Obama Presidential Center wants to do more than inspire visitors — it aims to be a civic institution capable of reshaping Woodlawn through a grab bag of community initiatives. It’s not as strange an ambition as it sounds. From its origins, the American presidential library has occupied an ambiguous space between public and private. When Franklin D. Roosevelt went looking for a way to institutionalize the preservation of presidential documents, he used the model of the National Gallery, which was then under construction, to structure his own archive: a private foundation would construct the building, while the federal government would maintain the records therein. He called this institution a library, a friendlier, folksier term than the imposing “archive,” with a clear connection to the public good. But as presidential libraries have ballooned in both size and construction costs in recent years — and become opportunities for elite fundraising — this system has been subject to increased scrutiny, as former presidents have saddled the federal government with the responsibility of maintaining increasingly palatial monuments to themselves.The Obama Foundation tried to skirt these controversies by cleaving the museum itself from the archive. Unlike traditional presidential libraries, the Obama Presidential Center contains no federally operated presidential records. Instead, the National Archives digitized and maintains Obama’s presidential records, while the Obama Foundation operates the museum independently.But the foundation has muddied the waters between private and public in other ways. In 2014, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who once served as Obama’s chief of staff, allowed the Obama Foundation to appropriate acres of Jackson Park to build the presidential center. City officials put more than $123 million toward infrastructure improvements surrounding it. Resource appropriation on this scale was not uncommon for a presidential library under construction. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts purchased land from Boston’s transit authority for the JFK Library, while Lyndon B. Johnson’s library was constructed on public land donated by the University of Texas at Austin. Rather than going to war against the tangled web of public and private institutions he faced as a community organizer, Obama joined them. With a ninety-nine-year contract from the city and over $1 billion in assets, the Obama Presidential Center can make greater claims to permanence than OFA or the DCP ever could. Perhaps in that luxurious time frame, it can make good on its promise to transform Jackson Park into a “living, working center for citizenship.”Obama told The New Republic in 2007 that “people’s hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people’s self-interest.” His foundation describes the presidential center as “a place of dreaming,” and indeed, the Obama museum follows the tautological logic of a labyrinthine Escher staircase endlessly looping upward. Organizers of the past inspired Obama to become an organizer himself, and the people he met along the way inspired him to run for office, where he could inspire the public to elect him, who then inspired Obama to fight for them as president, who built a museum to inspire the public to take action yet again.This gives the museum’s anecdotes of public service a flat quality — all they are allowed to do is inspire. On touch screens throughout the building, you can see examples of ordinary people who participated in civic action, from abolishing a luxury tax on sanitary products in the UK to giving legal land titles to indigenous people in the Colombian Caribbean. The museum doesn’t say whether these efforts were insurgent or conciliatory, nor what kind of setbacks they faced or how communities responded, just as it does not dwell on the specifics of Obama’s campaigns as an organizer, the movements of the past that inspired him, or the troubles of his presidency.At the center’s opening ceremony, Obama remarked that his museum “won’t just be an exercise in nostalgia or looking backwards. We want to look forward.” But one cannot create a museum about something that has not happened yet, any more than one can create a top-down grassroots organization, a People’s Organization without the people.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.

On Sunday night, the Irish soccer team bowed their heads in silence as the Israeli anthem echoed through the all but empty Nagyerdei Stadium in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city. The Irish players, who wore black armbands, skipped the traditional pregame rituals. There were no handshakes, no pennants, and (for the most part) no fans.After months of deliberations and growing demands for a boycott, these trite gestures of dissent were all the Irish team could muster. Having spurned an opportunity to set an international precedent, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) succumbed to fear, meekly agreeing to go through with the matches.This was a decision that the Irish players had seemed destined to glumly accept until some final deliberations nearly scuttled the ship at the eleventh hour. In the end, goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu opted to take a one-man stand after a truly dramatic day for Irish soccer.The evolution of this match into a contentious diplomatic high-wire act demonstrates the full extent of Israel’s international isolation. Nonetheless, the saga ultimately reveals how, despite ardent public support, fears of punitive action continue to undermine Irish support for Palestine.From Dublin to DebrecenIsrael selected Hungary as the location of its Nations League clash against Ireland, the site of nearly all its “home” internationals since October 7, 2023. Although the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) did not allocate away tickets for Irish fans, a dozen or so diehards managed to enter the stadium to offer their support.Not only were Irish fans effectively blocked from attending, but the national broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), also decided to strip back its coverage to the bare minimum. Television viewership dropped below its usual levels as fans across the country staged mini-boycotts of their own.The shrill blast of the opening whistle ultimately brought down the curtain on a failed boycott campaign that had gripped the country for months. At this late stage, the very fact that the game was even happening seemed to overshadow the importance of its actual outcome.At the end of an admittedly challenging week, Ireland took out their frustration on their opponents from the start, amassing a three–nil lead in the space of just twenty-five minutes. After scoring Ireland’s third and final goal, Jack Moylan removed his black armband and kissed it in front of the Israeli fans in an apparent gesture of Palestinian solidarity.No number of goals or pointed celebrations could dampen the spirit of the hundred or so Israeli fans who had made the pilgrimage to Hungary. Regardless of the result, they seemed to be celebrating the mere fact that the game had gone ahead.A Pyrrhic VictoryEven after their team had gone three goals down, the Israeli supporters continued to chant in support of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In a video recorded from the stands, Yoseph Haddad, a far-right Israeli activist, proclaimed that while Ireland might have won, “they will never, ever break the Israeli spirit.”The Israeli fans reportedly directed racist abuse at one of Ireland’s goal scorers, Adam Idah. UEFA have since declined to investigate the incident on the basis that the Irish players did not properly report it. This appears to mean that while Idah’s teammate Jayson Molumby asked the match officials to listen to the chanting, he did not specifically mention the word “racism.”As the game wore on, tempers frayed. Various on-field scuffles later culminated in an alleged changing room melee between Irish defender Jake O’Brien and Israeli captain Manor Solomon.The hostility continued well after the final whistle. In a post-match outburst, Solomon boasted to reporters that “we have a country that is ten times better than theirs.” When asked about the Irish players, the former IDF soldier said that he would probably be suspended if he stated his opinion in full: “Obviously they hate us, and we don’t like them.”Ireland, who have not won a competitive game by this margin in over three years, sliced through the Israeli defense with uncharacteristic precision. Any satisfaction came with a nagging sense of guilt, knowing that any victory pales in comparison to what could have been gained by a full-fledged boycott.Bypassing the BoycottAs soon as UEFA announced the Nations League draw back in February, many Irish fans mobilized behind the boycott campaign. On the eve of Sunday’s game, over 160 Irish sports figures had signed an open letter urging the team to stop the game.With public pressure mounting, the FAI opted to play Ireland’s second game against Israel, which was due to take place in Dublin, at a small stadium in rural Serbia instead, citing “security concerns” as a rationale. The FAI’s decision essentially denied Irish fans the chance to directly picket any of the games.Within the Irish football community, the debate has created a rift between the grassroots and those at the institutional level. A broad coalition of fans, players, and coaches from the domestic league has come out strongly against the FAI’s decision.War of WordsThe FAI officials responsible for the decision to play seemed keen to avoid the spotlight and left the team’s Icelandic head coach, Heimir Hallgrímson, to bear the brunt of public scrutiny. The Israel Football Association launched an extraordinary attack on Hallgrímson after he made the following statement in the run-up to the game: “We’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide. We are playing against Israel; we are not playing with Israel.”There can be few if any precedents in modern sporting history for the Israel FA’s official response:We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a cure for stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy displayed by the Republic of Ireland team coach. We’re not playing with ignorance, hypocrisy and stupidity, we’re playing against the coach who embodies them.This put paid to any notion that it was possible to keep politics out of sport in this situation. However, the FAI did not see it as an opportunity to revisit their decision to play the games.Nor did they see any need to publicly defend Hallgrímson. The Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, did intervene on his behalf, branding the Israeli remarks “unacceptable” and calling for them to be withdrawn: “Israel can’t keep denying what the world knows, and what the world understands.” But there was no statement from the FAI, although it was reported to have complained to UEFA privately.The FAI could easily have stated that Hallgrímson was using the word “genocide” because this is the official position of the Irish government, which has decided to join the South African case at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention through its actions in Gaza. It could also have briefed Hallgrímson to make the same point in his defense. There appears to have been no effort to do so.Ill-equipped to handle the political weight of the situation, the former dentist wilted in the line of fire at the pre-match press conference. Hallgrímson fielded questions from combative Israeli journalists, hounding him over a past coaching position in Qatar as well as Ireland’s decision to play against Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Under pressure, he apologized for using the word “genocide” in his previous statement: “It is a strong word and the wrong word for me to use.”Hallgrímson’s capitulation seemed only to embolden the Israel FA, which flippantly declared, after Ireland agreed to play, that “football had won.” Israel FA Head of Communications Shlomi Barzel was asked if he was responsible for the statement that charged Hallgrímson with “stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy.” His response was defiant: “I am responsible for that, and I am not going to apologize. After hearing him today, I will take back the word ‘stupidity.’” In other words, he stood by his description of the Ireland manager as an ignorant hypocrite.Uncomfortable PositionWith most of the public discontent directed at both the FAI and the Irish government, recent protests had started to target the players themselves. Activists had picketed the team’s Dublin hotel before they departed for their upcoming games.After the team suffered an ignominious defeat to Kosovo a few days beforehand, Irish midfielder Jason Knight became the first player to state that the games against Israel should not go ahead. Others, such as Chiedozie Ogbene, later vented their frustration, urging the public “not to put pressure on us.”As uncertainty spread through the camp, news broke on Saturday that goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu would be withdrawing from the match-day squad. He issued a statement explaining his motivations:My decision is based purely upon my personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong. It is important to note that my stance is not in opposition of the Israeli people or the Jewish community but against the atrocities in the region. There are few times where you get a chance in life to stand up for something bigger and I strongly believe this is one of them.Reporters camped outside the hotel as Irish players deliberated on whether to go ahead with the game.Former Ireland manager Brian Kerr, who has been a vocal supporter of the boycott campaign, was in touch with Bazunu. He reported that a vote was held with Bazunu absent, with the players voting 14–8 in favor of going ahead. The FAI declined to confirm or deny the exact figures, merely referring to a “significant majority” among the players.Having had months to establish a firm stance, the FAI haplessly equivocated. According to Brian Kerr, Bazunu was left “feeling quite low and shunned by some of the players and by the FAI” after his decision.Seemingly immune to the chorus of criticism, FAI President Paul Cooke later claimed that the situation “went as well as could be expected in the face of unprecedented coverage.” Opposition parties have since called on the FAI leadership to step down in the wake of the fiasco.Fear of RetributionThe FAI cited the threat of disciplinary action in support of its decision not to boycott the matches. The decision also comes against the backdrop of Ireland cohosting the 2028 European Championship — the country’s first time staging a major tournament.In a bulletin distributed to FAI members at a July extraordinary general meeting (EGM), the association suggested that Ireland could be suspended from future competitions in the event of a boycott. Further estimations of a potential $10.3 million loss of revenue seem overblown in the light of other recent boycott actions.Since 2024, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have all refused to play various women’s and underage matches against Belarus, citing the country’s ongoing involvement in the Ukraine war. UEFA docked the Baltic teams no more than three points each, and in one instance dished out a €5,000 fine.After the match on Sunday, the FAI’s Paul Cooke referred to the exclusion of Southampton from the promotion playoffs for the English Championship earlier this year as an example of what might have happened to Ireland in the event of a boycott. But the two situations could hardly be less similar: Southampton were punished for spying on the training sessions of their rivals.The Irish players may have also been subjected to other forms of external pressure. Several well-informed sources passed on rumors that some players were told by their agents that they might be blacklisted from playing for English clubs with American owners if they chose not to play.Inconsistent ActionAlthough they rejected the boycott at the July EGM, FAI members voted overwhelmingly last November to submit a motion calling for Israel’s suspension from UEFA. This obvious contradiction demonstrates how institutional support for Palestine does not yet outweigh the perceived costs of unilateral action.Under similar circumstances in 1999, Ireland chose to boycott a European qualifier against Yugoslavia because of atrocities carried out in Kosovo. The FAI avoided expulsion from the European Championship, receiving only a moderate fine from UEFA.Norway, which hosted Israel in a World Cup qualifier earlier last year, has spearheaded the campaign to suspend Israel from UEFA. Its officials have drawn comparisons with the ban on Russian national and club teams that UEFA imposed soon after the invasion of Ukraine began.Following the recent controversy, the FAI asked that Ireland and Israel be separated from future group stage pairings. UEFA denied the request on the basis that the two nations “have never been in direct conflict.”Cognitive DissonanceThe ongoing controversy has unfolded against the backdrop of Ireland’s increasingly strained relations with Israel. The Irish government has imposed travel bans on two far-right Israeli ministers and recently moved to prohibit the import of goods from Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories.Ireland’s heavy reliance on US investment leaves it potentially vulnerable to pressure from Washington. Before his recent death, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham threatened that countries that “participate in the effort to marginalize Israel in sports” would “pay a heavy price when it comes to access to the American economy.”The Occupied Territories Bill had promised to be a groundbreaking piece of legislation when first proposed to the Irish parliament in 2018. After extensive deliberations, the government eventually passed a diluted version of the bill earlier this year, which excluded trade in services from the ban.Despite otherwise advocating for international sanctions on Israel, the Irish government has supported the FAI’s decision to participate in the games. “We don’t want to damage ourselves unnecessarily,” cautioned Micheál Martin. In a separate interview, he argued that “sport is an area that can be challenging when it crosses into the realm of politics.”Martin’s comments echo the rhetoric of international soccer bodies that extol the sport’s power to unite people while approaching contentious political issues with caution if not cowardice. Amid demands for Israel’s suspension, FIFA President Gianni Infantino has said that “football cannot solve geopolitical problems,” instead summoning its “power to bring people together in a divided world.”At FIFA’s annual congress this year, Infantino tried to organize a now infamous photo op between Israeli and Palestinian delegates. The toe-curling gaffe followed a passionate speech by the Palestinian representative in which he called for sanctions against Israel over the formation of soccer clubs in the occupied territories.Looking AheadAlthough the decisive nature of the victory may have restored some public faith in the team, it remains to be seen how the fans will receive the players when they take on Austria in Dublin today. The match comes just days before the second clash against Israel in Serbia.The FAI has already moved fans with pitch-side seats in anticipation of further protest action. Ireland’s last home game, a May friendly against Qatar, featured a demonstration in which fans threw tennis balls with printed Palestine flags onto the pitch.In what briefly promised to be the dawn of a new era in the global campaign to boycott Israel, the limits of Irish institutional support for Palestine have become clear. Without coordinated multilateral action involving other associations, the FAI seems unlikely to lead by example, particularly under its current gutless leadership.Despite the best efforts of those leaders to isolate sports from politics, this contentious match proves that the two are inseparable, if not integral to each other. With the FAI’s credibility all but erased, it’s left to the players once again to make a decision.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.

Is the US Constitution for or against slavery? Questions concerning the legacy of America’s founding and how to interpret the Constitution have long gripped public discourse; in recent years they have become inseparable. From the 1980s came the originalists, a group of legal theorists who sought to recover the Constitution’s original meaning through textual analysis buttressed by historical investigation. Adhering to the document’s original meaning, they argue, promotes institutional stability and the rule of law.Scholars have long contested these claims, challenging the plausibility of recovering an “original meaning” or doubting the authoritative nature of such meaning even if discovered. Recently, however, a second phenomenon has brought constitutional discourse closer to political discourse. The 1619 Project has inspired new attacks against the originalist normative claim, as it recasts the nation’s history in terms of its legacy as a slaveholding nation committed to white supremacy. Scholars are now challenging originalism on the grounds that it is part and parcel of a tradition of oppression that cannot demand a people’s loyalty, much less respect.This reframes the question from the accessibility of original meaning and its authoritative nature to the problem of original meaning as it relates to constitutional evils. Still, originalists continue to defend the founding of the United States as a moment that instilled constitutional norms worth preserving. Indeed, they are compelled to do so. Originalism would not be worth its salt — promoting stability and the rule of law — if it meant only preserving oppression and white supremacy. Increasingly, we find two historical accounts representing two mutually exclusive Americas: an America founded on perpetuating slavery and white supremacy versus an America dedicated to liberty and equality.This clash of narratives is hardly new. The antebellum period was rife with political disputes concerning the future of slavery. Proslavery and antislavery advocates alike turned to the past to measure America as it was against what it should be. Slavery’s defenders argued that the institution was a positive good and that the framers of the Constitution enshrined protections for it. Fidelity to the founding of the nation, in their view, required protecting slavery as an indispensable American institution. Antislavery advocates, alternatively, argued that the Constitution did not recognize slavery as a positive good but set it on a course for eventual extinction.Defenders of slavery and antislavery advocates used conflicting interpretive frameworks to justify their respective understandings of the Constitution’s treatment of slavery. As is the case in the present day, both narratives posited conflicting accounts concerning history and its authoritative grip on the present. Still, both sides recognized that, at some level, one could not chart a course for a future that had no regard for the debt owed to the past.Frederick Douglass’s AlternativeThere is one figure in history who is uniquely positioned to shed light on complex nineteenth-century constitutional development and to speak to our current constitutional-political moment: Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned radical activist turned statesman.Modern-day critics and proponents of the Constitution’s beginnings alike reference the controversial conclusion in his famous speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” that the Constitution was a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” In that speech, Douglass has many rhetorical flourishes that either side might find useful in vindicating its position on the Constitution. Those who seek to salvage the Constitution from its relationship with slavery hold Douglass up as paradigmatic of proper veneration of the Constitution. Those who seek to malign the Constitution’s beginnings tend to focus on his scathing rebuke of America — in the very same speech — as his true message. Any reference to the Constitution or the Founders in positive terms, they argue, is nothing more than a rhetorical device aimed at increasing the potency of Douglass’s censure of the nation.But both groups fail to seriously consider the method behind his conclusion. What both accounts miss is that Douglass has much more to offer concerning constitutional fidelity and constitutional interpretation than his “Fourth of July” speech. Constitutional fidelity is not to be blindly adhered to; nor is it merely a pragmatic consideration. The Constitution is truly good when correctly interpreted.Douglass’s constitutional thought uniquely answered the question of what the Constitution’s posture toward slavery was. While some abolitionists simply accepted slavery as an indelible blemish on the Constitution, Douglass sought to redeem the Constitution from the evils of slavery. Indeed, he helped constitutional abolitionists popularize a natural rights theory of interpretation that excised slavery from the Constitution. Through this interpretation, he sought to put all persons on equal footing before the law. His great task, as he described it, was “by voice and pen . . . to stand for the freedom of people of all colors, until in our land the last yoke was broken and the last bondsman was set free.” His approach to the Constitution was critical in that endeavor, and it contributed to burgeoning constitutional thought in the antebellum period.Douglass was a cardinal figure during one of the most consequential moments in US constitutional development. He was a direct participant in the antebellum debate over slavery, which set in motion several theories of constitutional interpretation. Though methods and conclusions varied, each side of the debate claimed fidelity to the Constitution through an appeal to its text and to history. These debates shaped constitutional thought during the antebellum period and carried over into public deliberation during Reconstruction.Among the throng of opinions, we find Douglass arguing that based on the text, history, and natural rights, the Constitution was resolutely antislavery. His method was based primarily on natural rights principles. He argued that the Founders built this nation on a natural rights foundation, the principles of which were pronounced in the Declaration of Independence. As such, one had to interpret the Constitution according to those natural rights principles.But studying Douglass provides more than an arresting theory of constitutional interpretation. His intellectual journey is fascinating: he discovered for himself the significance of the nation’s founding principles after having survived harrowing experiences of cruelty and oppression under the color of law. Insufficient attention is given to just how exceptional Douglass was. After he escaped to freedom, he ventured into the world of the antislavery movement. There he quickly found fellowship with William Lloyd Garrison, an experience-hardened abolitionist who famously referred to the Constitution as “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” Garrison and his camp, relying on James Madison’s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, argued incessantly that the Constitution was irredeemably a proslavery document and that the Union, by extension, was a curse. This left the Garrisonians only one possibility: the abolition of slavery meant disunion and abolishing the Constitution along with it.At first, Douglass adopted these views without reservation; he spoke at antislavery conventions across the North, disparaging the framers, cursing the founding, and expressing nothing but contempt for the Constitution. Douglass’s inquisitive and capacious mind could not long be satisfied with received wisdom, however. In a short time, he abandoned the Garrisonian position. As he consulted more accounts of the founding and the Constitution, Douglass became convinced that the Constitution was in fact an antislavery document, and that the truest interpretation of it would require abolishing slavery for the sake of union. Most look to him for his exceptional oratory skills, which have withstood the test of time, and rightfully so. Yet lurking under his witty remarks and fierce retorts attacking the power of the slave-owning class rested a cogent theory of law and legal interpretation.Douglass also offers a lesson for political actors who must confront the tension between their own theories and the demands of politics. Rarely does history provide an example of a figure with an intellectual stature comparable to Douglass and place that figure at the center of great constitutional change. He had a robust theory of law and justice that guided his actions during the antebellum period. It was only during Reconstruction, however, that political realities forced Douglass to act in ways that did not always reflect his theory. Douglass believed that the United States would be “complete” only when it granted equal rights to all its citizens, and especially universal suffrage.At the time, this meant expanding the circle of democratic participation to African Americans and women. But after early defeats in Reconstruction, it became clear to Douglass that there was insufficient political will to extend suffrage to both groups. Douglass’s natural rights constitutionalism had a clear answer for what the nation needed to do, but ideas alone could not bring a constitutional amendment into being. Confronted with the political exigencies of Reconstruction, Douglass pushed for African American suffrage at the expense of women’s suffrage to move the arc of justice forward. Douglass calculated the move to be an unfortunate but necessary one. As soon as the Fifteenth Amendment — which guaranteed suffrage regardless of race — was ratified, Douglass went to work again in favor of women’s suffrage. Indeed, he proves an excellent exemplar of the timeless question of prudence when confronted with this tension between theory and practice.For these reasons, Douglass remains relevant for Americans today. He teaches us much about our past and how to confront it in a sober but hopeful way. He also teaches us something of what it means to traverse adversity for the sake of justice, and how it at times might require momentary sacrifice for long-term gains. Douglass preserves the legacy of the Constitution in favor of freedom and provides a method for ensuring the Constitution delivers a brighter tomorrow.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.

“The number one rule of political fundraising,” Evan Barker writes in the first line of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, “is to never, ever, under any circumstances, speak about it publicly.” Then she spends 288 pages talking about it, and it’s a wonderful thing that she does.Barker’s insider account of her time deep in the bowels of the Democratic Party often reads like The Jungle of Democratic fundraising: Upton Sinclair showed readers how the sausage got made, and Barker shows how the candidates do. By the end, it’s clear that the Democrats are a glorified fundraising organization with an electoral department attached, one that absorbs idealism, monetizes it, and then disciplines anyone who threatens its arrangements, often with the cynical deployment of identity politics.Some of the book’s most compelling sections are autobiography. At times, it’s like Hillbilly Elegy but one that wears a blue lanyard. Like J. D. Vance, Barker is a striver from the hollowed-out middle of the country. In her case, that’s Missouri, where her mother and grandmother live on Social Security checks and the towns feel, as she puts it, “stripped for parts and left behind.” At seventeen, she was cutting class to intern for Barack Obama in Kansas City, running phone banks for volunteers three times her age.For Barker, politics was a matter of life and death in the most literal sense — she has a rare genetic lung disease. Insurers could reject her because of a preexisting condition, and her parents could not simply buy their way around the problem. “My disease will kill me if I can’t get insurance after high school,” she told the law students she trained to register voters, and a version of her story later turned up in a Michelle Obama speech.Barker Joined the Dems for All the Right ReasonsIt’s an interesting paradox: Barker joined the Democrats because she believed they could turn a private struggle into a collective solution, but her career reveals a party that’s much better at turning that struggle into a fundraising pitch. The book follows her journey as she climbs the ladder: Brent Welder’s Bernie Sanders–backed 2018 primary campaign in Kansas’s Third District, then Adam Green’s Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and finally Left Rising, a progressive consultancy.Barker’s specialty was “call time,” the hours-a-day ritual in which fundraisers artfully beg rich people for money. Along the way, she found an unlikely professional inspiration: Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross, the motivational sadist who browbeats salesmen into following his personal mantra: “ABC — Always Be Closing.” Left Rising’s ambition was to “professionalize” the Left, equipping insurgents with the skills to navigate the corrupt political system their establishment opponents already knew. This strategy had obvious logic: candidates cannot win on righteous intentions alone. But professionalization also brought the insurgency deeper into the world it hoped to overturn.Through Barker’s career, we peer behind the curtain and watch political candidates, many handpicked by the establishment, learn the art of being a Democrat in the 2010s. This was the decade both parties got taken over. Donald Trump seized the GOP like a casino he’d leveraged to the hilt. The Democrats were captured by something softer: they tried to keep perpetuating incremental Clinton- and Obama-era politics while adopting the vocabulary of a humanities seminar/HR department.The machine’s main job was keeping the Bernie wing out. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) blacklisted any consultant who worked for a primary challenger, and Barker says she ended up on the list. EMILYs List, which she argues cares about little except money, lined up early behind the establishment candidate, Sharice Davids, against Welder. In Omaha, in 2018, the House Majority PAC pulled its money out of left-populist Kara Eastman’s winnable race in the home stretch, and she lost to the Republican. Barker is convinced that the Third Way and the establishment preferred this outcome, even if it meant handing a seat to the GOP. In Texas, she claims that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) helped plant a spoiler candidate to drain Latino votes from Cristina Tzintzún Ramírez’s Senate primary. And in an election twist that Jacobin readers are no doubt familiar with, Elizabeth Warren smeared Bernie as a sexist on a debate stage in 2020. Barker is less successful with her half-hearted criticisms of the Bernie left (if the insurgents are too pure and the establishment is bought, where exactly is a left-winger supposed to go?) and the man himself, who has the gall to ask for his water bottles at rallies to be stripped of their labels — how dare he!Many of Barker’s other observations and behind-the-scenes details ring as grimly funny. Her working theory is that politicians are often high-functioning psychopaths, and she teaches trainees a taxonomy of candidate types. Gavin Newsom is “The Machine.” Jasmine Crockett is “The Influencer,” convinced she’ll go viral and raise millions — no matter where those millions come from (the crypto industry, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Last on the list comes “The Lost Cause,” which is “regular people who are running for the right reasons but who lack the ruthlessness required to fundraise.” Her example: “No one you’ve ever heard of.”Fittingly, Barker eventually ends up at a fundraiser in Alec Baldwin’s New York home, surrounded by portraits of Civil War generals and a jelly bean tower. Baldwin, gruff in public, turns out to be warm and curious in private, asking Barker where she’s from. He may be the most likable figure in the book.How “the Race-Class Narrative” Dooms the DemsBut it’s not all bad. Early in the Biden years, Barker describes a moment of hope, when the Democratic Party seemed to have learned something from the Bernie campaigns. There were stimulus checks, an expanded child tax credit that cut child poverty nearly in half, and a Build Back Better agenda that was the closest the Democrats had come to embracing material politics in a generation.Then the child tax credit lapsed, and Joe Manchin killed Build Back Better. The party’s energy went instead into what Barker calls “RCN” (the Race-Class Narrative), a framework in which every economic demand had to justify itself in racial, rather than universal, terms. She recounts one Zoom call that raised almost half a million dollars for outreach to “the LatinX community,” with Christine Pelosi — Nancy’s daughter — among the donors.She also describes a bleak working environment after 2020 in which “life became a virtue-signaling contest between me and other white operatives.” If you couldn’t sh-t-talk white men or self-flagellate about your white woman privilege in Dem World, you were playing the game wrong. After Bernie lost, Barker observes, universal health care went from the primary issue to a secondary one as “identity politics and social justice issues were a good distraction for us all.” But health care is what brought Barker into the belly of the Democratic Party beast in the first place.By the time she reaches the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC), when she’s surrounded by goofy chants of “joy” and “Brat Summer” while her mother and grandmother struggle with grocery bills back home, she cracks. A woman with a camera asks her to name her favorite Kamala Harris policy, and Barker’s mind goes blank. She walks out partway through the convention and, as her book’s title suggests, finds there is nothing left for her at the DNC.The problem is that somewhere along the way, Barker gets red-pilled. The podcast Red Scare becomes her secret refuge (“Finally, I had friends to laugh with at the dumb politicians I was helping elect”), and after the convention she sits for a friendly interview with Lara Trump. Then she votes for Donald Trump. She presents the vote as revenge, a middle finger to the people who burned her. But the two years since have not been kind to the politics of “F-ck you.” The Republican mega-bill Trump signed in July 2025 made the deepest cuts to Medicaid in the program’s history; the Congressional Budget Office projects the bill will leave around ten million more Americans uninsured. For someone whose political awakening began with a preexisting condition, it’s a strange way to get even.To modify a line from Glengarry Glen Ross, Barker was right that the Democrats’ leads were weak. Her mistake was taking them to Trump.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.

In the late 1870s, a visitor to Karl Marx’s North London house might have found the author of Capital on his hands and knees in the garden, with his grandson Johnny on his back shouting, “Go on! Plus vite! Hurrah!” Marx was past sixty, and he would keep at it until he was covered in sweat.This is not the Marx most people picture. He is commonly known as a curmudgeon — a “salty” fellow with harsh words, not exactly the warm and fuzzy type. Saul Padover begins his introduction to Karl Marx on Education, Women and Children with just such a characterization: “In speech and writing, his attacks on those he deemed to be personal or ideological — or merely unintelligent — opponents were unsparing.” A familiar image comes to mind: Marx, unshaven, with thick hair in all directions, a towering figure in a three-piece suit smoking cheap cigars, ranting and raving with pride and contempt. But there is no contradiction between his tenderness with children and his polemical politics: he wrote some of his most passionate prose about what capitalism does to children.Marx found time for his own children and grandchildren. On Sundays, he would march out of his smoke-filled office to Hampstead Heath, where he would picnic and frolic with his family. There, onlookers could find him on all fours pretending to be a horse while the children joyfully rode him. As Padover writes, “Marx’s extraordinary love for children, his own and others, is the most luminous feature of his character. He was, a friend who knew him intimately said of him, ‘a child among children.’” Padover also paints a picture of Marx during his weekly outings: “When out walking on Hampstead Heath he would stop and play with children, who responded easily to the bushy-bearded kindly stranger. . . . Although a materialist with an antipathy for all religions, including Christianity, Marx used to say that what he liked most about Christ was His great love for children.”Marx’s personal attitude toward children offers an intimate reflection of his broader political commitments, especially his conviction that human beings should have the opportunity to develop their capacities free from oppressive social and economic conditions. Seeing the joy and energy of children, as well as the suffering of children under capitalism, strengthened Marx’s principles and motivated him to continue his fight to abolish class society. A significant portion of his life’s work and personal correspondence was devoted to challenging the brutal exploitation of children, lamenting his own family tragedies, and expressing ongoing anxiety about the state of his kin.Marx and his wife, Jenny, had seven children together, only three of whom survived into adulthood: Jennychen, Laura, and Eleanor. The other four died in childhood or infancy: Edgar, Henry Edward Guy, Franziska, and an unnamed infant son. He expressed a deep attachment to all of his children, and the loss of Edgar was particularly devastating for him; he never fully recovered. Marx gave each of his children a special nickname, and Edgar’s was “Musch.” He was the only son of Marx and Jenny to survive infancy, and he died at the age of eight in his father’s arms, most likely from tuberculosis. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who attended Edgar’s funeral, described the crushing grief of Marx, whom family and friends called “Mohr” (the Moor): “Marx sat in the carriage, dumb, holding his head in his hands. I stroked his forehead: ‘Mohr, you still have your wife, your girls and us — and we love you so well.’ ‘You cannot give me back my boy!’ he groaned. . . . At the graveside Marx was so excited that I stepped to his side, fearing he might jump after the coffin.” In a letter to Friedrich Engels on April 12, 1855, Marx wrote:Only now do I know what real unhappiness is. I feel broken down. Since the funeral I have been fortunate enough to have such splitting headaches that I can neither think nor hear nor see. Amid all the fearful torments I have recently had to endure, the thought of you and your friendship has always sustained me, as has the hope that there is still something sensible for us to do together in the world.Accounts of Marx as a parent paint him as an affectionate, doting, anxious figure who was deeply concerned for and protective of his family. He was adamant that his three daughters would grow up with a bourgeois education, and he exposed them to a range of literature and politics early in life: he read his children works by Homer, the Nibelungenlied, Don Quixote, and A Thousand and One Nights. Eleanor remarked that “Shakespeare was our house bible; at the age of six I knew whole scenes from Shakespeare by memory.” The girls were enrolled in music and art lessons and studied several languages. Marx and Jenny were poor during this time, and occasionally the family went hungry in order to pay the children’s school tuition. Jenny proudly remarked that “They are completely at home in English, and they know French well. In Italian they understand Dante, they also read some Spanish; only in German is there a hitch . . . ”For his part, Marx believed that all children deserved a high-quality education not only within the four walls of the schoolhouse, but also at home with their parents. In fact, in line with many progressive approaches to education today, he said, “Children should educate their parents.”Such a view of education as a comprehensive and lifelong endeavor enriched his relationship with his three girls, which was cemented by mutual respect and love.As indisputable as Marx’s love for his daughters was, it was also plagued by deep prejudice. While his worldview demanded equality and dignity for all, Marx himself harbored patriarchal and racist views in his personal life that stand in tension with his socialist politics. In his letters to the revolutionary Paul Lafargue, who was courting Laura, Marx sometimes adopts the view that his daughter could not take care of herself and needs to be guarded by others. These letters also include racist remarks, such as “When you invoke your Creole temperament, then I consider it my duty to step in between your temperament and my daughter with my healthy common sense. If you are unable to show your love for her in the form consonant with the London latitude, then it is advisable that you love her from a distance.”Other moments of sexism come through in Marx’s letters, from describing to Engels how his wife spent her weekly allowance — “Women obviously always need a guardian!” — to his description of his youngest daughter, Eleanor, who was pained by her love for Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, whom Marx did not approve of: “Tussy [Eleanor] feels much better; her appetite grows in geometric proportion, but this is peculiar to these feminine sicknesses where the hysterical plays a role; one has to act as if one does not notice that she again lives on terrestrial nourishment. But this too will disappear as soon as there is complete recovery. . . . ” Here Marx makes light of Eleanor’s eating troubles and her health, attributing her struggles to hysteria and a supposedly feminine emotional condition. On the one hand, Marx’s politics sought the abolition of domination and exploitation; on the other hand, he espoused prejudices that stood in tension with those same emancipatory commitments.Marx’s thought and, in particular, his analysis of the family in Capital pushes beyond his own interpersonal limits. In his magnum opus, he investigates the impact of industry on the traditional family unit. With the advent of modern machinery and the factory system, older economic relations are destroyed, and society reaches the point where “the rights of the children had to be proclaimed” against their exploitation. But even more radically, Marx claims that industrialization, despite its brutal form under capitalism, creates the conditions for “a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes.” It breaks down the division of labor that confined women and children to fixed roles in the household.The Stolen Children of CapitalWhile Marx fought for the best educational circumstances available to his own children, he was all too aware that thousands upon thousands of working-class children were deprived of those chances and forced to labor under harrowing conditions. Much of Marx’s writing in Capital explored the terrible exploitation of children in factories, workshops, and mines. Such abuse and terror of the young drove him to be unapologetic and adamant in his push for socialism.It was easy to see where these commitments came from. Marx documented the reality of the dangerous and horrific work throughout England in Capital. Some of the worst workshops were tiny cottages where workers gathered for lace-making, straw-plaiting, and straw-hat-making, many of them working from six in the morning until ten o’clock at night and beyond. Children as young as two-and-a-half years old worked alongside over a dozen people, with only 24.5 cubic feet per head, about the size of a large refrigerator.Long stretches of the first volume are devoted to the fate of children in conditions like these, and Marx’s writing on their exploitation and neglect is among his most devastating and moving; it was a driving force of his revolutionary rage and determination to hold the ruling class accountable for its disregard for human life.Drawing on British parliamentary investigations, factory inspectors’ reports, and medical testimony, Marx examined the exploitation of children in factories, mines, workshops, and domestic industries that were dangerously overcrowded and poorly ventilated. Children suffered chronic exhaustion, deformities, stunted growth, disease, and constant injuries, while their education and opportunities for intellectual development were sacrificed to production. For Marx, these conditions were not just a collection of abuses committed by cruel employers; they followed from the logic of capital itself: “Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society,” he wrote. Confronted with “physical and mental degradation, premature death, [and] the torture of over-work,” capital effectively answers: “Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits?”In 1853, Marx published “Prosperity — The Labor Question” in the New-York Daily Tribune, where he reported statistics on workers age nine to twenty-two and their weekly hours. He wrote: “Boys of nine and ten working sixty hours consecutively, with the exception of three hours’ rest! Let the masters say nothing about neglecting education now. One of the above, Ann. B., a little girl only nine years of age, fell on the floor, asleep with exhaustion, during the sixty hours; she was roused and cried, but was forced to resume work!!” In chapter ten of Capital, “The Working Day,” Marx cites reports of boys in glassworks whose minimal periods of rest also had to include traveling, washing, dressing, and eating, leaving “none for fresh air and play, unless at the expense of the sleep necessary for young boys.” Not only did children work exceptionally long hours, but capital absorbed the precious time that should have belonged to childhood itself.In “Important British Documents” (1858), Marx returned to the reports of the British factory inspectors and the limitations of the Factory Acts, which attempted to restrain some of the worst abuses of industrial capitalism. Even under these laws, children as young as eight could legally work in tiny, dirty, and oppressive rooms for extraordinarily long periods of time, while a boy “having attained the age of 13 may, and is often, lawfully employed day and night for any number of hours, without any restriction whatever.” These laws provided minor limitations on exploitation without abolishing it, and capital continually resisted even those limitations. Marx later wrote in Capital that the shortening of children’s working hours by the state was necessary “to prevent the coining of children’s blood into capital.”The Factory Acts’ provisions for education encountered similar problems. Marx highlighted the ways in which children’s working conditions produced irregular school attendance. For example, children employed in printworks were required to “complete” a mandatory number of school days and hours over six-month periods. The result, however, was incredibly sporadic attendance, with children showing up at school for the chunks of time required by law and then disappearing for weeks at a time. The widespread inconsistency of schooling was organized once again around the needs of employers rather than the healthy development of the child. A factory inspector quoted by Marx captured the absurdity of this system in a single line: “Thus the child is as it were buffeted from school to work, and from work to school, until the tale of one hundred and fifty hours was told.”A government inspector, John Kincaid, visited two schools from which children were required to obtain attendance certificates. At the first school, the teacher, Ann Killin, could not spell her own name, unsure whether it began with a K or a C. At the second school, seventy-five children were packed shoulder to shoulder into a fifteen-by-ten-foot room. The schoolmaster was unable to identify these children, let alone tell Kincaid which of them were his students. Marx commented on these observations: “The educational clauses of the Factory Laws, while they require children to have certificates of school attendance, do not require that they shall have learned anything. . . . ”Under the Factory Acts of 1833 and 1844, younger children were bound by a “half-time system” under which they were to divide their day between factory labor and schooling. Parents of poor working-class boys and girls were eager to find ways for their children to earn full-time wages to assist the family. They were therefore anxious to pull them out of school, and off half-time wages, so they could earn more. Meanwhile, the mill owners were only concerned with getting full-time workers who had strength in their hands to perform the work. Advertisements even sought young people “not younger than what can pass for 13 years.” Employers opposed enforcing school attendance for half-time children, maintaining that it was cheaper and less of a hassle to employ one set of children rather than two sets alternating six-hour work sessions.Marx rejected the explanation of child labor as merely a result of irresponsible parenting: “It was not, however, the misuse of parental authority that created the capitalistic exploitation, whether direct or indirect, of children’s labor; but, on the contrary, it was the capitalistic mode of exploitation which, by sweeping away the economic basis of parental authority, made its exercise degenerate into a mischievous misuse of power.” Marx argued that the exploitation of children under capitalism had weakened the economic basis of parental authority and altered family relations through material necessity. As Marx explained in Capital, “Now the capitalist buys children and young persons under age. Previously, the workman sold his own labour-power, which he disposed of nominally as a free agent. Now he sells wife and child.”Machinery drastically changed who could be paid for their work, which exacerbated the transformation of the family. “In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power,” Marx writes, “it becomes a means of employing labourers of slight muscular strength, and those whose bodily development is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple.” Consequently, “The labour of women and children was, therefore, the first thing sought for by capitalists who used machinery.” The machine, which had the potential to reduce the many hardships and suffering that accompany labor, instead became a method of enrolling “every member of the workman’s family, without distinction of age or sex” under the direct dominion of capital. “Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children’s play,” Marx concluded, “but also of free labour at home within moderate limits for the support of the family.” For Marx, Mammon worship becomes Moloch worship, where unchecked capital’s pursuit of profit demands the sacrifice of children. So too does the health of the family suffer, as time at home is subordinated to capitalist greed.Work was, of course, common for the young before industrial capitalism, but Marx highlighted the printing industry as an example of how machinery particularly stunted children’s development. Under an older apprenticeship system, young workers progressively advanced from simpler tasks to more complex forms of printing and were expected to develop literacy as part of their profession. However, the introduction of printing machinery eliminated this process of education and skill development altogether. Instead, factories divided labor between skilled adult workers and young boys whose only responsibilities were repetitive tasks, such as placing paper into machines or removing finished sheets, that offered no chance to develop skills.Marx understood factory legislation as more than charitable relief for the workers and their families. The struggle over the working day revealed that “free” contracts between workers and their bosses could not protect workers from intolerable abuse and misery. When the worker goes to the market to sell their labor power, it seems as if they are doing this of their own free will, but inside the factory, that freedom is exposed as an illusion. Workers, according to Marx, had to “put their heads together, and, as a class,” compel the construction of “an all-powerful social barrier” that would protect “themselves and their families” from “slavery and death.” For Marx, a legally limited working day was the “modest Magna Charta” of the working class, one that finally established some — albeit small — limits to capital.Hardware manufacturing in Birmingham, which included very heavy and physically demanding labor, was a common area of child exploitation, with some thirty thousand children and young persons employed. This included brass foundries, button factories, enameling, galvanizing, and lacquering works. Citing the Children’s Employment Commission, Marx reported that “owing to the excessive labor of their workpeople, both adult and nonadult, certain London houses where newspapers and books are printed have got the ill-omened name of ‘slaughterhouses.’” Young women and children were engaged in what seemed like constant labor in bookbinding; children worked in exhausting circumstances in ropewalks and on night shifts in salt mines, candle manufactories, and chemical works; meanwhile, in silk weaving, children were worked to death turning the looms in place of machinery. But perhaps one of the most unsanitary and disgraceful lines of work for women and young girls was the sorting of rags. Great Britain was the hub of the global rag trade, with rags coming in from all over the world, chiefly Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Belgium, and Holland. The rags were used for “manure, for making bed-flocks, for shoddy, and they serve as the raw material of paper.” The rag sorters would frequently contract smallpox and other infectious diseases and then spread them to others.Another example of brutal work that was completely unsuitable for young children was tile- and brickmaking, where the newly invented machinery was used sparingly owing to the cheapness of labor. Here, children — both boys and girls — as young as four, were employed, and often worked longer hours than the adults. The summer heat contributed to the treacherous conditions: “In a certain tile field at Mosley, e.g., a young woman 24 years of age was in the habit of making 2,000 tiles a day, with the assistance of two little girls, who carried the clay for her, and stacked the tiles. These girls carried daily 10 tons up the slippery sides of the clay pits, from a depth of 30 feet, and then for a distance of 210 feet.”The harms of child labor, it was clear, extended far beyond the physical dangers of industrial work. The emergence of capitalist production had deprived children not only of their health but also of their moral, intellectual, and emotional development by forcing them to mature in overcrowded environments marked by exhaustion and neglect. By highlighting these conditions in his analysis, Marx demonstrates that capitalism’s exploitation of children permeated every aspect of their lives, reinforcing his belief that a just society must protect children’s dignity and capacity for true freedom. When all of this is stripped from young children, what is left? Marx wrote: “That excessive insobriety is prevalent from childhood upwards among the whole of this class, is only natural.”Similar exploitation and oppression befell women and child lace workers in domestic industry. The making of lace itself was done by machinery, but the finishing and mending took place outside factories, in “mistresses’ houses” kept by poor women. These women took orders from manufacturers and employed as many women, girls, and young children as could fit in their tiny rooms: sometimes ten to twenty, and at other times twenty to forty. The average age at which children started this work was six, and in many cases, it was below five. Twelve-hour shifts were the norm, with a mere hour and a half for meals, which were taken at irregular intervals and often in filthy workrooms. When business was booming, the workday could stretch to fifteen hours or more. In order to keep the lace clean, the children were compelled, even in winter, to take off their shoes. To observers, the children seemed to have become machines: “Even the very youngest children work with a strained attention and a rapidity that is astonishing, hardly ever giving their fingers rest or slowing their motion. If a question be asked them, they never raise their eyes from their work for fear of losing a single moment.” The Children’s Employment Commission stated that “their work is like slavery.”The preconditions for manufacturing did not only coincide for Marx with a new period of colonialism and New World slavery; the birth of large-scale industry also came about through a “vast, Herod-like slaughter of the innocents.” The young workers in the factories were recruited by means of a press-gang. Marx is clear that capitalism was born through “child-stealing and child-slavery for the transformation of manufacturing production into factory production and the establishment of the true relation between capital and labor-power.” Manufacturing required the ransacking of cottages and workhouses for poor children who were taken away, forced to work at night, and robbed of their rest. It was the “small and nimble fingers of little children” that were most in demand to operate the new machinery in the large factories. Parish workhouses were emptied of their children, and “many, many thousands of these little, hapless creatures were sent down into the north, being from the age of 7 to the age of 13 or 14 years old.”The new capitalist masters were for Marx “child-stealers,” and they appointed overseers whose interest was to “work the children to the utmost, because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work that they could exact.” The consequences were cruel to the extreme. The manufacturer and reformer John Fielden recounted that “cruelties the most heart-rending were practiced upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of the master-manufacturers”; the children “were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour,” “flogged, fettered and tortured,” and “in many cases starved to the bone while flogged to their work.” Some “were driven to commit suicide.”These horrors were secluded from public view in what became “dismal solitudes of torture and of many a murder.” But the exploitation and murder of these children of the early factory system need to be studied carefully, not for antiquarian reasons, or merely sentimental ones. They should be studied because they remind us of what capital is capable of when its drive for profit goes unchallenged. As Marx shows, so long as capitalism exists, so too does the monstrous tendency to turn the blood of children into profit. All the evil creatures of Grimms’ Fairy Tales have nothing on the child-eating monsters of Capital.Children in the Realm of FreedomBut aren’t we citizens of a new and enlightened age? Aren’t these childhood horrors of the nineteenth century things that belong only in Charles Dickens novels? According to 2024 figures from UNICEF and the International Labour Organization, about 138 million children are still engaged in child labor; 54 million of these children perform hazardous labor.Of course, the industries Marx described in Capital have evolved since the nineteenth century, but the persistence of child labor in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and brick production demonstrates that Marx’s critique of the exploitation of children remains relevant. Across the world, millions of children continue to sacrifice their education, health, and future opportunities to meet the demands of economic production and a society organized around profit.If capitalism steals the future from children, how can that future be restored? All of the atrocities outlined above, coupled with Marx’s compassion for children, raise the question of what a healthier society would mean for young people. Critics of Marx argued that he wanted communism to function as a giant factory or workshop, where everyone would be leading a drone-like existence in a collective hive. But this is a caricature. Inspired by utopian socialists who preceded him, such as Robert Owen, Marx called for the all-sided development of human beings and the overcoming of the divide between physical and mental labor. And when it came to children, Marx was not entirely against the idea that they should in some capacity participate in organized labor.This was not an atypical position in the socialist movement. Indeed, in the instructions he drafted for delegates to the First International’s 1866 Geneva Congress, we find the following vision for childhood development combined with industrial education:We consider the tendency of modern industry to make children and juvenile persons of both sexes cooperate in the great work of social production as a progressive, sound, and legitimate tendency, although under capital it was distorted into an abomination. In a rational state of society every child whatever, from the age of 9 years, ought to become a productive laborer in the same way that no able-bodied adult person ought to be exempted from the general law of nature, viz.: to work in order to be able to eat, and work not only with the brain but with the hands too.Marx continued by proposing three different classes of children to fulfill this plan: both sexes from the ages of nine to twelve; those from thirteen to fifteen; and those aged sixteen and seventeen. Marx suggested that the first group’s employment in any workshop or housework be legally limited to two hours; the second class, to four hours; and the third class, to six hours. The third class should also be given a break of at least one hour for relaxation or meals.Marx acknowledged that children could benefit from beginning their education before the age of nine, but his primary concern was addressing how capitalism forced working-class families into impossible choices. As he argued before, workers are reduced to mere instruments of production, and parents are compelled to send their own children into labor. Marx thus insisted that society has a collective responsibility to protect the rights of workers of all ages and ensure that children especially are not sacrificed to the demands of capital. For Marx, defending and safeguarding children was not simply a matter of improving education or working conditions; it was a deep moral obligation, rooted in the belief that every child deserves the opportunity to develop free from exploitation.According to Marx, the methods of schools should be based on independent science and kept free from the influence of the state or the church. Protecting children, Marx argued, required “general laws, enforced by the power of the state”: “In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts.” Marx did argue in favor of free education for all children in public schools. But by public schools, he did not mean what is commonly thought of as “state schools”:Defining by a general law the expenditure of the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc. and, as done in the United States, supervising the fulfillment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people. Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the schools.For Marx, neither parents nor employers should be permitted to send children into the workforce unless their labor is combined with a real education. Education extends far beyond classroom instruction, and Marx included three core areas for what constitutes a meaningful education: intellectual development, physical education that promotes health and strength, and technological training that introduces children to the fundamental principles of production while providing practical experience with a variety of tools and trades. By integrating mental, physical, and practical learning, Marx envisioned an education that would cultivate well-rounded individuals rather than preparing children for a lifetime of restricted and repetitive labor.In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx wrote:A general prohibition of child labor is incompatible with the existence of large-scale industry and hence an empty, pious wish. Its realization — if it were possible — would be reactionary, since, with a strict regulation of the working time according to the different age groups and other safety measures for the protection of children, an early combination of productive labor with education is one of the most potent means for the transformation of present-day society.The above statement reflects a potentially controversial aspect of Marx’s thinking, since it is clear he rejected a blanket prohibition of child labor. However, this is not at all because he endorsed the exploitation of children but because he maintained that such a prohibition ignored the material realities of industrial society. Instead of advocating for a complete separation of children from productive activity, Marx argued that the problem lies in the capitalist organization of labor, where children are exploited for profit instead of being educated and developed. In his view, productive labor, when strictly regulated, age appropriate, and integrated with intellectual and physical education, could become a powerful means of developing versatile human beings with the ability to participate consciously in the betterment of society.At the heart of the matter lies a distinction between labor and exploitation. Marx did not altogether condemn work; instead he denounced the capitalist system that turned child labor into a source of profit while depriving children of education, health, and opportunities for development. By combining highly regulated productive labor with comprehensive education, Marx believed that children could cultivate a wide range of practical skills, intellectual growth, and physical well-being simultaneously. This reflects his broader revolutionary commitment to creating a society in which work serves human development rather than reducing human beings to instruments of capital.Today we may very well challenge his notion that children should be participating in any form of organized labor as young as nine, or balancing formal work with their schooling. Modern progressive education places heavy emphasis on unstructured time for play and outdoor exploration. But one could argue that we should keep the three foci that Marx emphasized — intellectual, physical, and technological training — all of which benefit children’s development. What counts as “technological training” will change with time and new inventions. Could it be beneficial if, between the ages of nine and seventeen, children devoted two to five hours a week to something besides schooling? Farming, taking care of household duties, gardening, engineering, or learning to code can all be part of a meaningful education. Certainly, most people would advocate for a healthy balance of learning inside school and outside of it; and in our contemporary capitalist society, where we are bombarded at every turn with screens and AI, perhaps some limited skill-based work could be a healthy choice for most children.Even though the conditions facing children today differ from those Marx encountered in the nineteenth century, the fundamental contradiction he identified remains unresolved. Exploitation is prevalent in both obvious and more obscure ways. Most modern children may no longer be confined to a factory floor in the same way as the children Marx described, but many are still shaped by systems that value profit over humanity and prepare them to participate in an unequal economic order. The persistence of these conditions reveals that the problem Marx confronted was not merely the heartless cruelty of particular employers or the excesses of nineteenth-century industry but the broader structure of a capitalist society that places accumulation and profit above human flourishing.This much has not changed. If children are to be truly liberated, Marx’s analysis suggests that the solution cannot be found simply through reforming the existing system; rather, it requires a fundamental transformation toward a socialist society organized around collective responsibility, equality, and the free development of every individual. Here, socialism is not only a political alternative but the logical extension of Marx’s critique: namely, that human beings, especially children, should never be reduced to instruments of production. What Marx called the realm of freedom is only worthy of that name if children are no longer denied their own human nature.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.

In 2011, Owen Jones solidified his reputation as one of Britain’s sharpest political commentators when he published Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. In the aftermath of the longest-serving Labour government in history, Jones asked how working-class people came to be vilified not just by elites but by representatives of the parties that supposedly existed to serve their interests. He followed this book up in 2014 with The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, a study of Britain’s powerful elite.His most recent book, The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost, looks at the dangerous and hysterical politics that emerged after the 1990s, the period that came to be known as “the end of history.” For Jones, the decline of the West that conservative commentators obsess over is not driven by immigration or the permissive culture of liberalism but by the self-inflicted harms caused by decades of neoliberalism.Jones, who joined the Labour Party at age fifteen but canceled his membership two years ago, spoke to Jacobin the day after the party’s conference. In this interview, he discusses the strength of the soft left during these early days of Andrew Burnham’s premiership, the origins of the right-wing panic about the decline of the West, and what kind of organizations socialists need to really build power.John-Baptiste OduorYou’ve just come back from the Labour Party conference. What were your impressions?Owen JonesI left the Labour Party about two and a half years ago, which has obviously been great for my mental health; it’s been quite useful to be detached from it. Last year, I went, and you could feel the stench of death everywhere during the height of late Starmerism. Now the soft-left element feels quite triumphalist. It also thinks that it’s going to see off the left challenge from the Green Party, which was posing an existential threat to the Labour Party as they saw it.But I think the most disturbing dichotomy was obviously the limited shift on Palestine in terms of the sanctions, which was only secured because of a mass movement on the streets. It obviously doesn’t go anywhere near far enough, but we shouldn’t demobilize people and make people think there’s no point campaigning and organizing. Gains can be secured through mass pressure. We need to encourage people to keep fighting and organizing.John-Baptiste OduorOne of the lessons that Burnham seems to have learned from his predecessor is that the problem with Keir Starmer was a communications issue. What you needed was sparkly, Zohran Mamdani–style video work to give the impression of listening to the concerns of people on the Left. That doesn’t necessarily have to translate into a left policy program if you can saturate the media with images of yourself looking busy. Many of the center-left media have taken Burnham at face value. Do you see him as offering Starmerism with better PR, or do you think there’s been a genuine shift?Owen JonesStarmerism pretended to be more right-wing than it was. I’m not saying he was left-wing in any shape or form, but he emphasized the most reactionary elements of his program, beginning with cutting the Winter Fuel Payment, attacking disability benefits, committing to the so-called fiscal rules [of budgetary restraint], and the authoritarianism epitomized by his government’s crackdown on Palestine Action.What Burnham is doing, I would say, is bringing to the fore the mild social democratic elements that already existed in that program and trying to stitch them together with an analysis and a vision. So, the seminationalization of the railways, the mild improvements in workers’ rights, and the increase in investment in certain areas are now being stitched together with an analysis and a vision. This didn’t exist before. Now there’s talk of ending neoliberalism without actually changing the substance.John-Baptiste OduorThe main challenge Labour has faced has come from the Greens, led by Zack Polanski. He has succeeded in mobilizing a coalition of people frustrated with austerity and Labour’s position on the genocide in Gaza. This constituency — much like the voting bloc behind the independent MPs who stood and won against Labour in 2024 — has been made up of Muslims frustrated by the Islamophobia and hawkishness of the Labour Party and progressive left-wingers. How did this coalition emerge?Owen JonesThat electoral coalition is largely in urban England. We’re talking about the Greens and various independents, because there is also a separate dynamic in Wales, where Plaid Cymru is picking up disaffected support from the Left. In Scotland, there is the dynamic involving the Scottish National Party and the Scottish Greens.In English cities and some towns — Greater Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, and so on — it’s Muslim voters who, I think it is always important to emphasize, have been affected by Israel’s genocide. But that disaffection predates the genocide. We saw Muslim disaffection with Labour before the genocide began. It’s due to Islamophobia, the so-called war on terror, the legacy of the Iraq War and the wars in Afghanistan and Libya. It’s about how Muslims have been othered during the war on terror.It’s also due to the fact that Muslims suffer disproportionate levels of poverty and unemployment and face discrimination. All of that has come together and politicized them. But of course, when you speak to Muslim voters, they often talk about issues such as housing and the National Health Service, which have affected them.There are about four million British Muslims. They have become part of a coalition with younger voters in urban areas, often in precarious employment and privately renting in diverse communities. Israel’s genocide is part of what has politicized people. But it’s also years of austerity and the unprecedented squeezing of wages since 2008.It’s important to say that I’m not arguing that millions of people have suddenly become politicized socialists. I wish that were true. Most people outside an activist movement would not describe themselves that way. You do, however, have a very politicized constituency of people in a way that did not exist before.There have been waves of political events. The Iraq War was the first major one. Then came the crash and austerity; the social and economic impacts of COVID-19, which are sometimes forgotten; the genocide; and Starmer’s inadequate response to the UK’s broken economic and social system.The question is, when will the contradictions of Burnhamism come to the fore? I think that is likely to happen [next month] when the budget is announced. We can see previews of what might come in Labour’s attack on the triple lock [which increases the value of state pensions each year in line with inflation]. Getting rid of it will hurt younger people in the future because younger people are aspirational pensioners.But whatever the Greens say or do now, they are going to struggle during the honeymoon period of Burnhamism. Burnhamism emerged because of pressure from the left flank, and it is trying to deal with that to restore Labour’s hegemony. There were genuine fears among sections of the Labour hierarchy that they were going to lose their hegemony over the progressive bloc permanently. Restoring that hegemony is what they are focusing on now. The underlying essentials will reassert themselves.John-Baptiste OduorYou argue in your book that many of the problems Western democracies face are the products of poor decisions they made after the 1990s “end of history” period.Owen JonesIt was the economic, military, and moral triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War that led to their downfall. In the 1990s, the West created an ever more financialized system based on extraction rather than investment, ever greater deindustrialization, and ever more complex financial products instead of making things. Companies increasingly gave money to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends. Even before the crash, you saw stagnating and falling wages for huge numbers of people.Then you got military adventurism based on the same principle: “We’ve won. It’s the end of history. Our military opponents are no more, so we can do as we see fit.” It was all underpinned by moral triumphalism.Those forces collided. The wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan] cost vast sums of money, which in the case of the United States diverted huge amounts of money away from the economy and weakened it when the financial crash happened. At the same time, the reason the far right has risen in the way it has is that the dogma that “There Is No Alternative” collided with what I call a great reverse.To restore the old system, there was a full-scale attack on living standards, security, the public realm, and economic and social rights. That led people to believe they were in a zero-sum game, competing for ever-scarcer resources. At the same time, there was population movement fueled by the instability created by Western wars, and that became the scapegoat for the wreckage.People felt, or were encouraged to believe, that if there was no alternative to the economic system, their lives could only be improved by removing competition. That meant migrants and refugees, as well as various stigmatized minorities. This is what the far right has fed on, particularly in the age of the war on terror. In this context, Muslims have been racialized and cast as an existential menace.John-Baptiste OduorThe ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is, you argue in your book, related to this Western hubris. Could you talk us through this?Owen JonesWith Russia, you see economic and military triumphalism collide with each other. After the Soviet Union collapsed, shock therapy was promoted. That was the jewel in the crown of post-1991 triumphalism.Russian elites did not have a gun to their heads. Leon Trotsky noted in The Revolution Betrayed that the Soviet bureaucracy lacked property rights. It had privileges conferred by the state, and it wasn’t a class; it was a caste. With the restoration of capitalism, he predicted, it could become a class. Instead of having privileges, it would have property rights.You saw that with a receptive section of the Soviet bureaucracy becoming the new so-called oligarchy. It happened during a period of capitalist triumphalism. Neoliberalism was hegemonic in the West and was actively promoted by Western states, economists, and institutions, including the International Monetary Fund.That led to the worst peacetime economic collapse of any industrialized nation other than Ukraine, which had a slightly worse economic collapse at the same time. I interviewed Wayne Merry, who was the chief political analyst at the US embassy, for my book. He is not a left-winger in any shape or form, but he saw the political and economic consequences of shock therapy.He saw a society unraveling, a collapse in life expectancy and health, and an explosion in poverty, with people begging and starving in the streets. In 1994, he sent a memo warning that, although Russia was then a pro-Western state with pro-Western leadership, the situation would lead to antidemocratic and anti-Western elements triumphing and to a return to an adversarial relationship between the West and Russia.At the same time, in terms of NATO and the Western military bloc expanding toward Russia, George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who coined the term “containment” and was the architect of postwar containment policy toward the Soviet Union, was not a tankie. The West had promised not to expand NATO to the Soviet leadership when the Soviet Union was collapsing. The private view of the West, according to the declassified documents, was that Russia was weak but would not always remain so. It was weak because of the economic collapse and the policies the West had promoted. The view was that while Russia was weak and unable to resist, NATO should expand as far as possible. It was a kind of insurance policy and a form of containment.Kennan and other American establishment figures warned that this would provoke hostility from Russia. Even the pro-Western elite in Russia was infuriated and enraged by it. It was responding partly to sentiments within Russian society.You had a combination of economic ruin and the mass anger and disillusionment that this caused, as well as a sense of humiliation at the West. At the same time, Boris Yeltsin shelled the legislature and possibly killed hundreds of people in 1993, with the active support of the West. He helped rig the 1996 presidential election with Western support. That helped discredit democracy as a concept in Russia, because people associated what they called democracy with an oligarchic, authoritarian, and undemocratic regime.I’m not saying everything is always caused by the West. There are other factors and other social forces at play. But the West played a pivotal role in creating the conditions out of which Putinism emerged. It’s pointless pretending otherwise. It’s simply what happened.John-Baptiste OduorAt points, it seems like you treat the decline of the West as entirely a product of the choices of elites. But weren’t elites up against real structural constraints? The lack of competitiveness of European industry in a world of Chinese growth is a real thing. Declining birth rates are real — so too is the effect that they’re going to have on the tax base of Western democracies, in a world where the ratio of workers to dependents will change radically. Similarly, the fact that large parts of the constituencies of the Left are very invested in supranational and antidemocratic institutions like the United Nations and the European Union has made left politics practically incoherent.These don’t seem like issues that can be reduced to mistaken decisions. It seems like there’s a deeper problem with the left alternative.Owen JonesFirst of all, the West would be in decline anyway. The argument in my book is that the West’s decline was inevitable. My point about triumphalism is that it makes the decline chaotic because the West behaves as though it’s stronger than it is, given the material conditions. Its economic supremacy obviously causes problems. By doubling down on an economic system that benefits elites and is about extraction rather than investment, the West creates dire consequences. Military adventurism assumes that Western military supremacy existed in the way they thought it did. That is a case of triumphalism colliding with reality.It’s important to make the point that Western decline was always going to happen, but it has become chaotic because Western elites opportunistically used the end of history moment for their own benefit.In terms of the wider challenges for the Left, of course, it’s not simply a case of there being an economic order based on extraction rather than investment, or of the balance shifting in favor of capital over labor. There are other wider structural problems in Western societies that we must address. That’s definitely true; an aging population is one example.Even if you restore the old social democratic consensus that existed, which the Left wanted to transcend, it was based on a broader tax base. One of the clever things the [2010 Conservative–Liberal Democrat] coalition government did was to further undermine that. So, if we simply increased taxes on the top 5 percent or on big business, it’s unclear whether that would even produce the revenues we need.The book isn’t about the West in general. It’s about why the West is in chaotic decline and how that has led to the rise and resurgence of far-right authoritarianism.The Left in the 2010s began to reemerge as a political force. It didn’t exist in 2008, when the financial crash happened, as a meaningful, coherent force. It was fragmented and defined by what it was against, not what it was for. It didn’t have a coherent vision for the world of capitalist globalization, the end of the triumphalism at the end of the Cold War, or what that meant for the Left and the defeats suffered by labor movements.It started to reemerge in the mid-2010s through Corbynism, Syriza, Podemos, Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and similar movements. But these movements didn’t have the political experience or the economic vision that already existed. They were suddenly put in very adverse political circumstances and had to learn at the same time.The Left is intellectually in a much better position than it was in terms of developing a vision to deal with the world as it actually is, with all the challenges that go beyond the basic problems of the economic system. That doesn’t mean we have resolved all our internal contradictions.The Left’s coalition includes people who are socially progressive and socially conservative. It includes people who have more illusions in existing institutions than others do. It includes people who emphasize social progress more than challenging the economic order.That’s why I think the danger for the Left, particularly in the so-called culture wars, which were a manufactured backlash against the rights and demands of minorities, is allowing itself to be caricatured as obsessed with identity politics. This is what happens when class is stripped out of the equation.Mamdani hasn’t thrown migrants or trans people under the bus. He’s focused on the economic issues that unite and transcend the divisions within the Left’s internal coalition. He obviously has people voting for and supporting him who don’t have good politics when it comes to trans people or migrants, but he hasn’t conceded anything to them. He’s focused on what unites an otherwise divided coalition. I think that’s what we have to learn from.John-Baptiste OduorMamdani was partly a product of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is a party-like organization capable of engaging in political education and cadre formation. Nothing like it exists in the UK. Attempts to create an equivalent organization that is outside of a mainstream party but able to act on it have largely failed. Do you think the Left needs something like an organization with a party-like structure to be able to wield electoral power effectively?Owen JonesI think so. The reason that an organization like this hasn’t come into existence in the UK is that the circumstances are different. In the United States, the Democrats are not really a political party in the way we have political parties in Europe. The negative side of this amorphousness is that they are traditionally dominated by corporate interests and lack democratic structures. At the same time, in Britain, if the Labour leader wants to get rid of a candidate, they can simply do it. That’s what Starmer tried to do. He carried out a purge of the Left within the Labour Party.You can’t do that in the Democratic Party. You can’t arbitrarily exclude anyone. It doesn’t matter what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says or does; they can’t get rid of her. What they can do, and what the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has done, is use big money to defeat candidates. That got rid of Cori Bush, for example. But I think that strategy has hit the buffers, because the backlash against AIPAC is so great that it has diminishing returns.In the age in which we live, partly because of the internet, the Left can raise money on a mass scale. Bernie Sanders pioneered that on the Left. Through online crowdfunding, you can challenge the power of big money in politics in a way you couldn’t before.DSA can stand aside from formal party politics because it isn’t an entryist organization in the Democrats. You can operate that way because the Democrats are an amorphous party in which individual candidates are selected through highly personalized primary competitions. Those competitions rely on building a war chest of money and resources and a grassroots army to get candidates selected.You can’t do that in Britain. Instead, you have a closed selection system in which the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party draws up a long list and a shortlist and can easily prevent someone like AOC from being elected.That is why left-wing candidates have to emerge primarily through the Green Party. You have a pool of progressive people in which anyone who wants to put themselves forward can do so and they’re not in a massive internal competition to get selected for a particular seat.John-Baptiste OduorA friend of the magazine, Anton Jäger, published a book called Hyperpolitics, and one of its arguments is about the effects that deinstitutionalization has had on the Left. In the UK, what you have is a center left that is highly institutionalized. That means outsiders can’t challenge the Labour Party, whereas in the United States the Left is incredibly weak and lacking in institutions, so outsiders are able to take over the Democratic Party, at least in primaries.Envy of Mamdani often, to me, dovetails into envy of American political fragmentation. The latter opens the door to a certain kind of chaos.Owen JonesI’ve seen clips from some DSA conferences. I feel bad because the clips I’ve seen are generally rage bait posted by right-wing accounts, but it’s difficult not to have concerns about the way political discourse works within organizations that are so open. I don’t want to pile on that person whose comments went viral, so I’ll stop here.The problem is that you need a political environment that is inclusive and allows representation, particularly of underrepresented minorities. That remains a major problem for the Left. People from privileged backgrounds often end up dominating, and we have to rectify that.At the same time, I think Yascha Mounk had a point in his book The Identity Trap, where he argued that a culture had emerged in which people defer to what is defined as lived experience. That can produce conflicting outcomes, because conflicts arise between people with different lived experiences. And these conflicts can be very difficult to resolve.A fear of discipline can emerge because discipline is seen as authoritarian or not inclusive. But you need discipline, leadership, focus, and a Left that addresses people’s actual material conditions. It needs to speak to where the working class is and address its priorities. Otherwise we are never going to achieve mass support.Mamdani is a good example of that. He’s perhaps the most disciplined person I’ve ever seen. When someone heckles him, he brings the discussion back to the cost of living: “I want to fight for the right of that heckler to be able to live in New York so he can keep heckling me.”A Left that abandons or throws minorities under the bus is not a Left I want to be part of, and it is not worthy of the name. That doesn’t mean we can’t build a Left that focuses on uniting the working class as a rainbow coalition.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.

Albanian-born activist Rexhino Abazaj faces imminent extradition from France to Germany, where he is wanted for charges of violent assault against neo-Nazi plaintiffs. One remaining hurdle was France’s Court of Cassation, which this Wednesday ruled in favor of a lower court’s ruling from last month that validated Berlin’s issuance of a European Arrest Warrant (EAW). Abazaj, better known as Gino among friends and allies, could now face up to ten years behind bars if he is convicted in Germany.Beneath the procedural complexities, Gino’s case represents one front in a sprawling legal tug-of-war that began in Budapest back in February 2023. Taking to the streets of the Hungarian capital, he was among the scores of activists that counterprotested that year’s Day of Honor rally, one of the largest annual gatherings for Europe’s ultraright and neo-Nazi scenes.The confrontation quickly degenerated into violent clashes, with the attendees and their antifa adversaries exchanging blows that resulted in several non-life-threatening injuries. According to the evidence cobbled together by Hungarian investigators, the injuries that Gino is purported to have caused resulted in eight days of work incapacity for the victims. For Gino’s supporters, that’s vastly disproportionate to the lengthy prison term he potentially faces should he be convicted in German court.Former Hungarian Premier Viktor Orbán’s government long sought to turn the February 2023 clashes into a morality tale on the specter of left-wing terrorism. Before losing power in this April’s election, Orbán made a pet cause of pursuing activists alleged to have participated in the counterprotests. The most recognizable public face of Orbán’s manhunt has long been Ilaria Salis, an Italian member of the European Parliament who was arrested in Hungary and elected to office during her pretrial detention. When Donald Trump moved to declare “antifa” a terrorist organization in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder in September 2025, Orbán rapidly followed suit. “They have come to Hungary, beaten peaceful people in the streets, beaten some half to death,” he said last September.Budapest AffairIn antifascist circles in Europe, the scandal is sometimes known as the Budapest Affair, referring to over a dozen individuals whom the Hungarian government tried to chase down, with varying degrees of success, from states like France, Germany, and Italy. It has been a litmus test of EU states’ willingness to condone a blatant far-right manhunt. In France, Gino’s cause has garnered the support of major artists and intellectuals such as Nobel Prize–winning author Annie Ernaux and film director Robert Guédiguian.Up to now Gino was among the relatively lucky ones. In 2024, he was facing extradition from Finland but took flight, fearing a sham political trial should he be handed over to Hungarian authorities. The thirty-four-year-old activist, who had much of his upbringing in Italy, found refuge in France, settling in the Paris area. Though he was arrested by a squadron of anti-terrorist police officers in late 2024, he went on to win his first case before the Paris Court of Appeal in April 2025, which blocked Budapest’s extradition order on the grounds that Gino’s right to a fair trial and decent detention would not be respected. (Another extradition request from Budapest, targeting Zaid A., a young Syrian national residing in France, is still before a Paris tribunal, though it is now in limbo amid the political transition in Hungary).Gino had ample reason to oppose the handover. Ilaria Salis, a teacher in Italy before her antifascist activism catapulted her into the political spotlight, was arrested in Budapest in the immediate aftermath of the Day of Honor clashes and endured a grueling fifteen months in Hungarian jail. She was ultimately granted house arrest in Budapest in May 2024, having launched a campaign for European Parliament on a left-wing ticket while in Hungarian custody.When she won office in June 2024, her newfound parliamentary immunity led to the suspension of her trial and her release from house arrest. But even that didn’t stop Orbán. In October 2025, the EU parliament finally dealt Budapest a defeat by voting down its request to waive Salis’s immunity. The vote nonetheless highlighted the inroads made by Orbán’s lobbying: by the narrowest of margins, 306 of the parliament’s members (MEPs) voted in favor of maintaining her protection, against 305 in favor of lifting it.European Arrest WarrantsGino’s April 2025 victory seemed to grant a reprieve from politicized prosecution, but a surprise turn came when his case was revived by Germany’s issuance of its own European Arrest Warrant against the activist. And this time around, the defense’s arguments about the sanctity of legal and incarceration systems — that of Germany, not Hungary — stood on less firm ground. That distinction was confirmed when the Paris Court of Appeal decided in favor of Germany’s request, green-lighting Gino’s handover this past August 19.Still, Gino’s impending handover marks a worrying new precedent. “We have never seen in European Union criminal law a situation when another state basically steps in to remedy the fact that an EAW was not granted,” Matteo Zamboni, a Brussels-based attorney who has represented Salis and is currently advising Gino’s legal team, told Jacobin.In fact, there have long been reasons to doubt Germany’s ability to act as an honest arbiter in the Budapest Affair. Even before it made the move to revive Orbán’s pursuit of Gino, Berlin proved willing to play the Hungarian strongman’s game. In late 2024, it extradited Maja T., a German activist also implicated in the scandal, to Hungary before full rights to an appeal were exhausted. Maja T. appeared in irons before Hungarian court and ultimately received an eight-year prison sentence this February. It was far too late, but the German Federal Constitutional Court eventually issued a retroactive ruling overturning the extradition.As far as Gino is concerned, the deeper problem now is that evidence of what surpassed in February 2023 is tainted by the work of Orbán’s clientelist justice system. Here is a case that was, from the beginning, stitched together by investigators and prosecutors subordinate to Orbán’s political priorities.Evidence that now appears before a German court will likely have been drawn from that compromised source. Germany’s filings in the hearings for Gino’s extradition from France, cited in the August 19 decision that Jacobin was able to consult, try to dance around this. “The Hungarian investigative file was neither forwarded by the Hungarian authorities nor carried out by the German authorities,” reads the summary, adding that, “the exchange of information between the German and Hungarian judicial authorities took place within the framework of European investigation orders.”Gino’s imminent transfer to Germany has the Budapest Affair entering into ever murkier legal waters. “In the decision not to surrender Gino to Hungary, doubts were expressed about the Hungarian legal system as a whole. Given that, how can Germany jump on a case that was built in Hungary? What are the criteria for this? We don’t know,” said Zamboni, arguing that the case should be referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union.After Orbán’s defeat in elections this spring, many hoped that Europe might be turning a new page. The saga of Gino’s ongoing prosecution — and the willingness of justice systems elsewhere in the EU to pick up where Orbán left off — tells a different story.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.

As the Brazilian presidential election on October 4 draws closer, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is in a very tight contest with Flávio Bolsonaro, the son and heir of the Bolsonaro political dynasty. Lula is leading most of the polls for the first round, but the race appears too close to call in the event of a runoff between them.This election does not merely pit two opposing candidates against each other. It is a struggle between Brazil’s democratic forces and the return to power of a reactionary bloc.Lula’s ChallengeLula is seeking a fourth term as president at the age of eighty-one. The Brazilian constitution allows for this: it does not impose any limits on how long one person can be in office, so long as they do not serve more than two consecutive terms.After his first victory in 2002, Lula went on to complete two highly successful terms. His government lifted millions out of poverty with social programs like Bolsa Familia, greatly expanded Brazil’s education and health care systems, and achieved some notable diplomatic victories at the United Nations.When he left office in 2010 with an 87 percent approval rating, most people assumed that this would mark the departure of the man Barack Obama described as the most popular politician on earth from the political scene. However, the failure of his successor Dilma Rousseff to deal with a hostile Congress, endemic corruption, and Brazil’s economic slowdown led to her impeachment — which many refer to as a soft coup — in 2016.Lula was prepared to run again in the 2018 presidential election, but the Lavo Jato (“car wash”) corruption inquiry resulted in his arrest on charges of corruption. With Lula barred from running, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro defeated his Workers’ Party (PT) ally Fernando Haddad and became president. The magistrate Sergio Moro, the main figure behind Lavo Jato, soon accepted a position in Bolsonaro’s government.When further revelations discredited the investigation against Lula and revealed its chief enforcer Moro to be profoundly biased, the Supreme Court annulled his sentence and he was released. He went on to win the 2022 election after four disastrous years of Bolsonaro’s presidency before fending off a coup attempt by his vanquished opponent. Bolsonaro is now in jail because of his role in the failed coup and prohibited from seeking political office.Four years after his triumphal (some would say messianic) return to the front of the political stage, Lula’s government only has lukewarm achievements to its credit — in large part due to a hostile Congress — and it has failed to adapt to the age of social media. Lula is a figure rooted in a now bygone age of struggle for democracy during the 1970s and ’80s who reached his pinnacle in the civil and democratic 2000s. His greatest appeal at present derives from his status as the sole defender of democracy in an extremely polarized 2020s Brazil that is rife with disinformation.Bolsonaro 2.0This amounts to a tepid appeal that is not enough for many younger voters — opposition to the far right can only carry a politician so far. Flávio Bolsonaro, who is more civilized in style but no less vile in substance than his father, has the evangelical right firmly behind him. He also has the backing of many figures within Brazil’s financial system, not to mention open support from the United States. His brother Eduardo, who is based in Florida, is almost single-handedly responsible for urging Donald Trump to impose tariffs on Brazil.Bolsonaro has suffered from a series of scandals that resulted in the viability of his candidacy being called into question just a few months ago. He was implicated in a major financial scandal with a bizarre twist, having asked a corrupt banker to finance a biographical film about his father (starring Jim Caviezel of The Passion of the Christ as Jair), Bolsonaro also fell out with his stepmother Michelle, who is herself a powerful figure among evangelicals.None of this has deterred him from carrying on, and he has bounced back in the polls with a vengeance over the course of September. This in no small part due to the fact that Alexandre de Moraes, one of Brazil’s chief jurists and a hate figure for the Bolsonarist right, has been embroiled in a corruption scandal of his own. This supplied ammunition to the Bolsonarist camp.In the event of a runoff election between Flávio and Lula, the former will be expecting to win over most of those who voted for the other candidates in the first round. All of those candidates are right-wingers of one kind or another, and the Bolsonaro camp appeals to their base far more than Lula does. In fact, they neatly represent the spectrum of the Brazilian right, with each laying claim to their own niche.The Miscellaneous RightRomeu Zema, governor of Minas Gerais, is the candidate (and only noteworthy member) of NOVO, the New Party. This is a libertarian, faux-technocratic party that promises to cut back on government excesses and do away with the corrupt state machinery. In practice, this would mean privatizing all social services and dismantling state institutions before selling them to the highest bidder.The traditional neoliberal political forces in Brazil have collapsed in the face of the Bolsonarist far right, so Zema is now the closest thing the country has to that old style of politics. His disastrous tenure in Minas Gerais, where the state debt skyrocketed during his time as governor, tells us all we need to know about his approach to managing a government.Ronaldo Caiado, governor of Goiás, is a representative of the traditional Brazilian Centrão, the “Big Center” — that is, the large, nonideological, profit-based section of Congress composed of figures who care only about preserving their own power, regardless of political positioning or policy.As governor of Goiás in the midwest, Caiado is extensively connected to Brazil’s agribusiness bloc. This bloc comprises a handful of large landowners whose properties often dwarf small countries in acreage, and who are determined to go on clearing rainforest so they can claim new land. The agribusiness bloc is one of Brazil’s most powerful lobbies, and it is squarely opposed to Lula’s environmental protection policies.Renan Santos is the political chief of the Free Brazil Movement, a reactionary, Tea Party–style movement that emerged in the early 2010s. It preaches libertarianism, demonizes anything left wing, and argues for “free speech at all costs.”The movement is heavily composed of dissatisfied young Brazilians, many of whom belong to online subcultures such as the “manosphere.” They are hostile not only to the current Brazilian state but also to many of its democratic institutions. Santos comes out with fiery rhetoric: at a debate held in August, which neither Lula nor Flavio attended, he cursed and insulted both of the leading candidates.His crypto-fascistic stances, his speeches, and his personality bring back memories of Jair Bolsonaro. However, whereas the former was a reactionary harking back to the 1960s dictatorship, Santos looked forward to a more social-media-savvy, anti-democratic future under the specter of anti-statist tech magnates such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.Capitalist MindsThe most curious figure among the lesser candidates is the best-selling author Augusto Cury, whose self-help book and highly questionable positions on psychology have made him a rich man. Cury presents himself as a centrist candidate with a “capitalist mind and a social heart,” and is at best unclear about any major policy or position.Cury managed to reach third place in the polls, albeit with a meager 11 percent, for a few days in early September, in the midst of Flávio Bolsonaro’s many scandals, before falling back to 6 percent. Not as radioactive to left-wing and middle-ground voters as the other candidates but firmly separate from Lula and the traditional Left, Cury is the quintessential “independent” candidate.None of these candidates poll much higher than 5 percent, and all of them draw support from segments of conservative Brazilians who are frightened of Bolsonaro but will take any alternative to Lula. Lula is unquestionably a political and electoral titan, but he has not produced a successor or replacement who could give the sense that there is a younger generation coming forward in Brazilian politics.Dilma Rousseff now serves as president of the World Development Bank, while Fernando Haddad has been tainted by multiple defeats. Flávio Dino, the former governor of Maranhão, was a popular and charismatic figure, but Lula nominated him to serve on the Brazilian Supreme Court in 2024, which removed him from the political scene.Instead of grooming a replacement for 2026, Lula chose to run for a fourth term, which pits him against a much younger option. The results of the upcoming election will reveal whether this proves to be a bridge too far in his long career.

Although Amazon is increasingly synonymous with worker surveillance, the logistics behemoth has never been a pioneer in that space. UPS was the first fleet to install GPS in their vehicles back in 1991. Netradyne, the company that makes the AI-powered product Driver.i installed in most vehicles in Amazon’s fleet, had already logged over a hundred million minutes of driving time before Amazon signed the firm on.But with each new iteration of its delivery-aid-cum-surveillance tech, Amazon has proven its knack for taking an existing product and deploying it in a dystopian direction. And other companies tend to follow its lead.“Smart delivery glasses,” Amazon’s latest gadget, which come with a specialized vest with a built-in battery-pack, was introduced on their in-house news site last October to little fanfare; only a couple of niche tech websites covered it. According to a recent post on r/AmazonDSPDrivers, a Reddit community for Amazon’s scattered global network of Delivery Service Partner (DSP) drivers, training with the smart glasses at some DSPs has begun. It’s not unlikely that a nationwide rollout may come as soon as this year’s holiday season.On the surface, the aim of smart delivery glasses is to replace the use of the smartphone on the job, allowing the driver to pay attention to their surroundings instead of looking at their phone. For DSP drivers, the smartphone is everything: It identifies packages, provides a walking path from the vehicle to the delivery location, instructs drivers on where and how to deliver items, photographs packages at the designated drop-off location, and requires a swipe to confirm completion of a delivery.With smart delivery glasses, Amazon promises to make delivering “safer and more seamless,” which is very likely true — I imagine, as a former DSP driver myself, that at least they will make it less annoying to sort through an overpacked cargo area. But the smart glasses reflect a larger philosophical position, one ubiquitous in Big Tech and fueled by the artificial intelligence gold rush: that the human is not enough, and that we need to be aided — and disciplined — by AI.A Formidable Surveillance ArsenalEach device in Amazon’s surveillance arsenal serves a unique function. The Amazon app tracks a driver’s location and pace in real time, sending that information to Amazon and the driver’s DSP. Then comes Driver.i. With one camera pointed at the road, one camera at the driver, and two side-view cameras, the platform records drivers at all times, analyzing 100 percent of driving time. When an infraction occurs — whether an actual infraction or one that Driver.i has made up — the Driver.i robot scolds you in real time, sending video of your alleged infraction to Amazon, to you, and to your DSP.Right now, the surveillance stops there. But with the introduction of smart delivery glasses, surveillance never has to end. Put your delivery vehicle in park, and the glasses automatically turn on. Like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s sketches of his never-created Dune, the latest technology is Amazon’s mad vision come to life: the ouroboros of watching people at work.Amazon’s model is more than surveillance. At the core of its vision, Amazon is doing what it has always done best: both spearheading and reflecting the worst antihuman impulses of our age. Its proliferation is the result of what David Moscrop calls our “shared pastureland” breaking. Ring cameras, for one, have been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2018; the desire to protect one’s packages from would-be thieves prompts many people to purchase Ring cameras. Last year, Ring announced a partnership with Flock Safety, the increasingly maligned surveillance company, which was canceled this February after a public backlash over a Super Bowl ad. (Flock has an entire page dedicated to how it serves Amazon.)Isolation is central to both the consumer and employee experiences. Amazon, which does not directly hire any of the hundreds of thousands of workers who deliver its packages, nevertheless pays millions of dollars yearly to union-busting consulting firms to ensure workers’ isolation, claiming that its tactics are protected by the First Amendment. Just last year, Amazon fired 150 workers who had organized with a Queens-based DSP. The year before, eighty-four workers at a DSP in Palmdale, California, successfully negotiated a union contract with its DSP; the DSP’s contract with Amazon was quickly terminated. And when workers in Quebec unionized a warehouse, the company responded by shutting down its operations across the whole province.Not only does Amazon use technology to push humans to the limits of their productive capacity at work, but it also creates tandem machine-human systems that encourage humans to become nonthinking bodies: isolated and automated. Every critical decision, from deciding how many workers will deliver in a given day (a common DSP practice is to schedule more workers than it needs, waiting for the algorithm to decide how many it can put into vehicles), to configuring routes, to punishing driving infractions, is configured by an automated AI system. For example: If the AI decides you’ve run a red light, and you can’t prove you didn’t, it’s an immediate termination.A Human Future for Work?Amazon’s plan to surveil and automate work at every step is a vision mid-implementation. The logical end point of this AI-driven efficiency is pure automation: in other words, brainlessness. The last stop of ultimate efficiency is what some people might call animal, and others might call lobotomized. Both terms gesture toward the same thing: at best, that human workers are too slow, and at worst, that human workers are not to be trusted. The source of this tendency is, of course, the long-standing capitalist goal of asserting ever-greater control over workers and replacing them entirely where possible.UPS workers, who are unionized, have demonstrated an alternate vision for the future of work. When UPS decided to install its own Lytx DriveCam monitoring system in 2022 (followed shortly thereafter by FedEx and Walmart), the Teamsters union disputed the use of the technology, claiming that it infringed on workers’ rights. What workers and the company eventually settled on was to record only when a driving infraction was detected, such as a vehicle swerving or impact, to protect the driver as much as to surveil them.To evaluate the difference between each technology, you might ask: When a new AI-first technology is implemented, does the technology actually aim to make drivers safer — giving them more protection in the event of an accident? Or is its point to punish drivers by using negative reinforcement to curb bad driving habits? You might then look at how the implementation of the technology aligns with the company’s long-term vision. For instance: Is the point of technology like Driver.i — whose creator Netradyne began with self-driving aspirations — to make the driver safe, or to ultimately make the driver obsolete?Despite our moral qualms with these labor practices, Americans can’t seem to get over using Amazon. When I worked for a DSP last summer because I was desperate (and it was one of the better-paying jobs in the area), I felt a little like my Amazon job was penance for all of the Amazon shopping that I had done over the years: for all of the delivery drivers who had come to my various houses and apartments in the extreme heat and cold; who hadn’t had a break in ten hours; who had nowhere to pee.Yet there’s no fundamental reason why efficient package delivery needs to involve dehumanizing surveillance, AI discipline, and otherwise degrading labor conditions. The unionized UPS drivers who have successfully fought back against surveillance, and the growing efforts to organize Amazon itself, point to the possibility of a more human future for work, one where collective action limits management’s ability to spy on and control its workforce.

Primetime has an interesting look that’s the key to its worldview, which is that our society is so bad that no one can escape its infecting qualities. There’s a smeary effect around the edge of the lens in many shots, which are generally in shallow focus, making everything appear greasy and defiled and half-hidden. This is in addition to a lurid color scheme dominated by nasty shades of red, green, and blue that are often clashing with each other, so that characters’ faces emerge out of surroundings that seem disgustingly tainted. Robert Pattinson, playing Chris Hansen — the real-life former host of the hit NBC Dateline series To Catch a Predator that ran from 2004 to 2007 — appears in certain close-ups with his face suffused in an unwholesome tint of hellfire red. Appropriately enough, much of the film was shot with an actual colonoscopy camera.Hansen is portrayed as a self-deluding creep who ultimately gets less sympathy than the entrapped pedophiles. At some level, it seems, Hansen knows how rotten he is. In an early scene, when he’s in the first-class section on an airplane with a seatmate who’s a big fan of the show, he quickly warms to all the praise. He starts to confide in the sadistic old man, who ultimately wants to know: Doesn’t Hansen want to personally beat up the sexual predators he puts on camera? “Don’t you want to make them bleed?” he asks in a hideous close-up.And Hansen brags, with a horrible shit-eating grin, that actually, “I think what we do might be even worse.”Primetime is the first narrative feature film directed by Lance Oppenheim, who’s best known for the HBO documentary series Ren Faire. Oppenheim had an incredible twofer triumph at film festival premieres earlier this month, as Primetime garnered enormous attention at the Venice International Film Festival while the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, which Oppenheim codirected with Nathan Fielder, created a sensation at the Telluride Film Festival. Both films portray a person being studied in endless close-ups who represents a bottomless pit of social corruption, and both films were shot with approximately the same crew, including David Bolen, who’s long been Oppenheim’s chosen director of photography. You Can See Everything doesn’t open in theaters until October 16, but its signature shot is already iconic and widely memed. It’s a long-held close-up of the appallingly blank, infantile face of blue-eyed blonde businesswoman Elizabeth Holmes. Those baby-blues are wide open and unblinking in the film’s preview as she says over and over that she’s “being real” and telling the truth about her health technology company Theranos, through which Holmes was then committing fraud on a vast scale. She’s now serving an eleven-year prison sentence.Corruption in Close-UpPrimetime also spends a lot of time contemplating faces in close-up. There’s Pattinson’s face representing Hansen as all sharp vulpine lines, slit-eyed, hungry, and almost feral when he thinks he’s unobserved. There’s the smushier, harder-to-read face of his show’s producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), who occasionally ponders her own limitless indifference to morality or the well-being of others right before sliding back into producer mode, cracking the whip or smoothly shifting over into soft, specious persuasion in order to keep the show running as a ratings winner.And then there’s Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), the aspiring actor and naive new recruit who’s at the center of the show’s sting operations. His youthful, freckle-faced appearance and golly-gee manner are considered perfect for a twenty-three-year-old actor who needs to play an eager thirteen-year-old boy inviting pedophiles over to his house for sex while his parents are away. Dan Plum really wants a professional credit that’ll get him a Screen Actors’ Guild card. What he’ll actually get is something far more unsettling.In Primetime, a lurid color scheme dominated by nasty shades of red, green, and blue that are often clashing with each other makes characters’ faces emerge out of surroundings that seem disgustingly tainted. (A24)But he stays on To Catch a Predator — even after giving that first ad-libbed “performance” that gets a little too real as he registers shock and fear at the sudden display of whipped-cream-slathered genitals by a young male predator in a hurry. He stays on the show partly because of hero-worship, as he’s lured in by the phony mentoring offered by Chris Hansen. Hansen cynically nicknames him “Decoy Dan” and persuades him that his awesome acting skills are doing the Lord’s work, saving innocent children.Meanwhile, Hansen’s marriage is unraveling. He’s giving his wife Mary Joan Hansen (Anna Faris) extravagant promises to reform even as he’s doubling down on his career and cheating on her with another woman. A National Enquirer photographer snaps a compromising photo of Hansen and the girlfriend even as she’s becoming an ex-girlfriend, and the blackmailing threats kick in as soon as To Catch a Predator gets abruptly moved into prime time by a network executive who smells an opportunity. This sudden white-hot chance to achieve mainstream success, which is immediately imperiled, pushes Hansen, producer Andie Bender, and Dan Plum over the edge into very dark terrain.Robert Pattinson is not just the star of Primetime, he’s also a producer on the movie and was the one to bring the Ajon Singh script, based on the 2009 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” to Oppenheim. Though his performance is divisive, it’s so startling and so dominates the film, that he’s considered a leading contender for essentially every award nomination this season.Pattinson’s Talent and Star PowerPersonally, I love the way Pattinson is going for more extreme and stylized effects reminiscent of old-time Hollywood actors.My podcasting partner noted that Pattinson’s waspish performance of villainy in The Odyssey, as the most malevolent of the suitors bedeviling Penelope, shows him moving into “Roddy McDowall mode.” McDowall, a brilliantly gifted child star in the golden age of the studio system, became a character actor as an adult and created a memorable rogues’ gallery of amusingly twisted and sinister figures, all colorfully portrayed right to the edge of camp and occasionally well over it.Today, giving such a performance is a high-risk move to make in any modern “prestige” film offering, all due to an infatuation with method acting that began back in the 1950s. It was in this era that “going method” first convinced critics and audiences that there’s no other way to give a good performance than in this one style, generally termed the most “realistic.” There are, of course, many acting styles — Delsarte, Brechtian, Expressionistic, etc. — but the critical knives are out for anything but the Americanized, Konstantin Stanislavsky–influenced “method” performances that took over most acting schools generations ago.The most famous example of a divisive non-method performance is probably Jack Nicholson’s harrowing, ultrastylized tour de force in The Shining (1980), which director Stanley Kubrick intended as an opposing force to Shelley Duvall’s wrung-out naturalism. As Nicholson put it, actors shouldn’t have just “one set of theories.” For him, it all depended on the film in question. “You can go for years saying, ‘I’m gonna get this thing real because they really haven’t seen it real’ [. . . . ] and then you come up against someone like Stanley [Kubrick] who says, ‘Yeah, it’s real, but it’s not interesting.’”Say what you will, Pattinson is definitely interesting here, going for effects that wouldn’t be out of place in an old-school gothic horror film. But he’s entirely in key with the sensational punch Oppenheim is going for: redefining the possibilities of the biopic genre with this “fever dream” that captures “an emotional truth.” As Oppenheim puts it, “When you spend a lot of time doing reportage on an extremely dark subject, it must rub off on you. Rob [Pattinson] and I watched [Chris Hansen] on Theo Von’s podcast, and Theo asked how he deals with all the darkness. He said, ‘I just bury it deep down inside.’ That was a really telling answer.”While Primetime is playing in theaters, the real-life Chris Hansen is making the rounds to express his criticisms of the film, which he claims is “a hit piece” that’s “98% . . . pure fiction.” On the Fox News show Jesse Watters Primetime, Hansen presented footage of himself actually attending the film in a Times Square theater in New York City. On his way in, he notes that Lance Oppenheim contacted him late in production and told him the film was “a love letter to Chris Hansen,” giving Hansen the perfect setup for his punch line, “If that was a love letter, I’d hate to get a poison pen letter.” After seeing the film, Hansen — ever the showman — interviewed other audience members emerging from the theater who express support for Hansen as well as Hansen’s own view of his show To Catch a Predator’s legacy: “All we do is expose bad human beings who try to hurt children.”Of course, Oppenheim is positively gleeful about Hansen’s response to Primetime:His reaction to the film right now is exactly what the film is about. I was a fan of Chris Hansen, and I still am. That’s why I wanted to make this film. Yes, he’s a journalist. Yes, he’s an entertainer. But he’s also an artist. He made this hall of mirrors, with adult actors pretending to be children and sets that look like something out of Blue Velvet. . . . To me, he’s a hero, a complicated hero. . . . He’s a human with flaws setting out to do something noble, and the effects of capitalism and commercialism make for a confusing experience for him.Somewhat incredibly, Oppenheim insists that he has no intention of villainizing Hansen, even as he explores the sadistic thrills built into “performative justice,” updated for the mass media and the always-online age. There are other kinds of predation involved here, dating back to the days of “the whipping post, the pillory, the town whipper that would show up and publicly lash a criminal and thousands of people in the town square would turn up to watch. Chris Hansen is the new version of that guy.”If the film has a message, it’s not a complicated one — the point is that certain terrible things shouldn’t be staged, marketed, and exhibited for public entertainment, because that process has a dark and degrading effect on everyone involved. We don’t have public hangings anymore for a reason. Yet it’s remarkable how, in interviews with Hansen expressing his utter inability to comprehend what Oppenheim thinks he’s doing in Primetime — even after quoting Oppenheim’s own explanations — he’s got that same wide-eyed, unblinking, uncomprehending expression of blank-faced innocence as Elizabeth Holmes.With Primetime and — very soon — the much anticipated Holmes documentary, Oppenheim is undeniably an artist for our times.

In 1872, British courts prosecuted more than seventeen thousand workers for a single offense: leaving their jobs. Under the Master and Servants Acts, wage laborers who quit before the end of an agreed term, or who merely refused to show up to work, could be sentenced to three months of hard labor.Employers who violated the same rule, by withholding wages or firing someone without notice, owed just a civil debt. Across the 1860s and early 1870s, as the labor market tightened and approached full employment, the number of prosecutions rose.Even before the eight-hour day became one of organized labor’s defining demands, one of the British trade union movement’s earliest sustained legislative campaigns was to end the criminal punishment of workers who left their jobs. They finally won that right in 1875, when workers were finally allowed to sell their time and withdraw at will, coerced though they still were by the mute compulsion of economic relations.Today even socialist critics of capitalism count the freedom to leave a job as one of the basic liberties that separates a wage earner from a serf. But we need to demand more. Decisions about labor discipline, the pace of work, shift length, and how the proceeds are divvied up belong unambiguously to workers.While past struggles secured us the freedom of exit, the freedom to not be jailed for simply walking out of our workplaces, it left untouched the question of who rules within them when we have no choice but to stay.The Realities of Capitalist Labor MarketsAt the site of extraction, the boss rules like a dictator. Labor unions and the regulatory state sanded off some of the roughest edges of workplace tyranny, but the forces of capitalist innovation generate creative ways to restore those edges every day. There’s a reason why workers at Amazon warehouses race to fulfill their quotas in an atmosphere of electronic surveillance and skip bathroom breaks for fear of falling behind.Short of disrupting the system through collective action, the only shred of control workers have under capitalism is the power of exit. Even when workers are in a position to exercise it, though, the power of exit has serious limitations.For one thing, workers can’t exercise this leverage often — your future job prospects suffer if there are too many gaps in your employment history. For another, in most cases, it’s far easier for a company to replace one of its workers than for the worker to replace the source of their livelihood. Things are a bit different for those workers whose skills are particularly desired by employers, but supply and demand work much the same way in the labor market as they do in any other market — rare skills confer more bargaining power precisely because they are rare. For most workers, most of the time, wage labor in what we can think of as its “natural state” is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Workers whose only freedom is the freedom of exit can decide which particular capitalist dominates them, but they still can’t fully control their own lives.Labor contracts cannot provide a fully enforceable promise of what employers want to pay for. The contract is for time spent under the direction of the employer. The wage pays for time, but the employer is ultimately interested in the results of an employee’s work, which depend also on the employee’s ability and effort over the time for which they are employed. But usually neither effort nor ability is fully observable; monitoring them is costly, and the firm cannot rely on external legal enforcement.This makes employment a contested exchange, as economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis put it. For various reasons, the results of employment cannot be contracted for explicitly, especially because much production is done by teams, often involving heterogeneous tasks, and it is difficult to identify the contribution of individuals. (Piecework and independent contracting are exceptions, but these arrangements are impossible in many fields.) Level of effort cannot be contracted for in an enforceable way either — it is even more difficult to observe. What can be contracted for is time at work, under the direction of the employer, within the parameters of a job description.This matters to the question of whether workers can effectively express their preferences about working conditions on the labor market. It means that much about work is not determined, and so not fully priced, at the point of transaction. It is bargained for among parties already in a contractual relationship — sometimes formally, but more often informally and from day to day. It plays out in employer decisions about how to monitor, discipline, and motivate employees as well as employee decisions about how to work in response.Terminating the contract is a move both can play in this game, and the possibility hangs over the bargain. This brings the state of the labor market back into the picture: general conditions of supply and demand for labor affect people’s willingness to take the exit option. But crucially, the labor market generally does not clear, and labor is usually on the long side of the market — that is, supply of labor typically exceeds demand at going rates of pay. Unemployment is a perennial feature of capitalism. If a worker can expect to quickly find an equivalent job at their current salary and conditions, the risk of job loss does not have much sting. But workers usually face much more uncertainty than that. Many may be reasonably confident about being able to find some work while being very nervous about finding a job that matches their current pay and conditions. This makes the exit option costly and gives management an upper hand in negotiations about how work is to be done.How employers use this advantage varies across jobs. They have to deal with the fact that they have paid for people’s time, and that those people are not robots or tools. Employees still have to be motivated to work. In some jobs, a monitor-and-discipline approach works. The employer keeps tight surveillance over the production process or its results and threatens dismissal if the worker does not meet the benchmarks. Amazon warehouse and delivery tracking systems are a pure example, but this strategy has a long history in factories everywhere.Many jobs, however, are not as easy to monitor. Here employers depend on some amount of internal worker motivation, which tends to be undermined by aggressive surveillance and discipline. High employee turnover is costly to employers too — it takes time to train new workers and replace lost experience. Employers are especially loath to lose their most productive employees, even if it is not always easy to identify who they are. Since it is exactly these employees that are most likely to feel confident about finding work elsewhere, employers try to make sure they have something to lose. Most employers therefore use some combination of carrot and stick, the arts of the human resources department: performance reviews with the possibility of both promotion ladders and disciplinary measures.We Need Workplace DemocracyWorkplace democracy is not in itself an alternative to the labor market; it supplements the right of exit with a voice within the firm. Exit is not enough, not only because of the limited practical freedom people often have to leave a job or to be picky about job offers but also because the cooperative nature of production makes colleagues’ preferences about work highly interdependent with one another. They cannot be accommodated in the same way as individual consumer preferences. Cooperative work needs to be coordinated: for example, in many jobs people have to be on shift at the same time.Someone must coordinate a team process. But without an effective way for workers to voice their preferences and have those preferences be taken into account, the coordination will happen on the employer’s terms. Workers can only express objections in negative ways: by leaving, by quietly not cooperating, by working less diligently and energetically than they might. At best, collective bargaining through a union gives workers a seat at the table, but they are still usually restricted to responding defensively to employer initiative. In contrast, in a democratic workplace, administrators are accountable to their colleagues. Not only must worker preferences be taken into account, but they must be actively sought. Those preferences can now be expressed positively, with those working together also working out together how best to do the job.Liberal philosophy typically excludes the workplace from its arguments for democracy on the grounds that it is part of a zone of voluntary exchange in which individuals are best able to freely pursue their own interests. But, as discussed above, because of unemployment, the boss finds any individual worker replaceable, whereas the individual worker cannot be sure of finding an alternative buyer for their labor power at the going wage at will. And even in conditions of full employment, a worker switching jobs is still incurring far more dislocation and inconvenience than a consumer changing purchasing habits. Because there is a relation of power rather than a relation of free and equal exchange, even considerations of liberal political justice can be used to argue that the power should be accountable to those over whom it is exercised. Workers are not inert “inputs” but agents with wills of their own, conscious subjects whose experiences and wishes should be taken into account. Liberal arguments for democracy in the political sphere apply also to the firm.Bowles and Gintis draw on political theorist Robert Dahl’s observation that “exit” from a firm is often so costly that membership is, for all practical purposes, compulsory. When leaving one’s job entails serious loss of income and stability, the government of a firm begins to resemble the government of a state: because exit is costly, membership is not significantly more voluntary than citizenship in a country. In that sense, the same democratic principles that justify accountability in political life can be extended to economic life as well.How Would Workplace Democracy Actually Work?In a socialist economic order where democracy had been extended to the workplace, there could be a wide plurality of specific firm constitutions, but the standard for a midsize to large firm would involve representative democracy, with elected directors appointing and monitoring administrators who would be responsible for day-to-day management. This could be supplemented by committees and referenda as needed, but routine administration is best handled by specialist professional workers with expertise in accounting, logistics, and so on. Democracy does its job by making sure the administrators are ultimately answerable to their colleagues and that working conditions and broad questions of strategy have general approval.In a fundamental way, democratic firms are very different from capitalist ones. Capitalist firms are ultimately controlled by their owners, who are also the claimants to the residual income left after suppliers, workers, and creditors have been paid. Labor-managed firms, on the other hand, are ultimately controlled by their workers.Worker-members receive two forms of income from their firms. They earn a regular wage, fixed in advance, and a periodic dividend, their share of the firm’s profit.There is no way of efficiently maintaining a complex division of labor that would guarantee everyone their dream job. In a democratic firm, membership in a workplace and appointment to specific roles both involve agreement of the worker and the democratic organization itself. Worker-members are free to leave but not to be automatically accepted in a role elsewhere.Democracy at work would have to be, and we’re confident it will be, economically viable too. People would have little reason to embrace a system that gave them more say but left them unable to meet their needs.Efficiency in the economic sense is broader than technical efficiency in turning inputs into outputs. It is not necessary for our argument that cooperative firms outperform nondemocratic firms in productivity. Other advantages may make up for some deficiencies in productivity. Workers may prefer less pressure on the job to higher income but be unable to effectively express such preferences in capitalist conditions. However, it is important that labor-managed firms are at least reasonably productive. If workplace democracy came at too high a price in terms of real income, the claim for economic efficiency in the broader sense would be shakier.Empirical evidence offers little support for the idea that democratic workplaces are inherently inefficient. Cooperative firms perform at least as well as conventional ones in productivity and survival, and often better. As economist Gregory Dow notes, real labor-managed firms do not conform to the familiar caricature of chaos: Their members generally do not shirk work, fight over wages, or rebel against supervisors, nor do such firms quickly collapse or drift back into capitalist control. They manage to coordinate production and maintain discipline without replicating the coercion of capitalist management. Of course, we should be cautious about generalizing too far from these findings, since they come from cooperatives operating within capitalist markets. Even so, the evidence sharply undermines the intuition that only authoritarian management can make production work.The intuition that democratic firms must be less disciplined than their traditional peers rests on the idea that participation will weaken managerial authority and lower effort. Bowles and Gintis point instead to several mechanisms that can raise productivity. Democracy obliges management to consider the social costs of supervision and the pace of work. While democratic firms still rely on monitoring and incentives, these must win broad consent and so tend to be less arbitrary and more legitimate. Legitimacy makes work less alienating and morale higher — conditions usually associated with better performance.Workers are also better placed than managers to gauge one another’s effort. Peer pressure and pride in shared achievement can do more to sustain discipline than orders from above, since slacking off harms colleagues rather than distant owners. Profit sharing adds another spur: when returns go to the workforce, each member has a tangible stake in the firm’s results. The effect weakens as enterprises grow larger, but even then measures to improve efficiency are easier to support when their benefits flow to workers themselves rather than to external shareholders.A further source of strength lies in workers’ practical knowledge of the labor process. Democratic firms give them both the means and the incentive to use that expertise to refine techniques and reorganize work. Innovations adopted through open deliberation gain legitimacy, and the direction of technological change is more likely to reflect workers’ interests than the capitalist bias toward control.But productivity alone cannot tell us whether work is well organized. Workers also care about the time and security they have outside the workplace and about how they are treated inside it. Those interests belong in any serious accounting of economic efficiency.Economic efficiency, properly defined, treats people’s preferences about the production process, working conditions, workload, job security, and more, on the same level as their consumption preferences. It is not necessarily an efficiency gain if a diner is able to provide coffee and lunch more cheaply while making its workers’ lives more precarious by quickly adjusting shifts according to demand. The gain to the customers comes at the expense of the security and income of the workers.There is, however, a tension between worker preferences and consumer preferences. In many cases, better satisfying worker preferences increases the cost of production or makes it harder for firms to adjust when demand changes. And though almost everyone is both a producer and consumer, the things we produce at work are only a tiny proportion of our own consumer basket. As a consumer, other people’s working conditions affect what we can afford. Other things (like quality) being equal, we normally choose a lower-priced product over a higher one, and even if we care about the conditions of production, we usually do not have much information about them. The increased flexibility of employment at the café benefits us directly, even if we would be much worse off if the same conditions prevailed in our own workplace.Workplace democracy structures people’s choices in ways that make it easier to reach a balance between our producer and consumer interests. It does this by democratizing decisions about work and pay. Unlike many consumption decisions, these are choices that are properly collective. In production, there are so many interdependencies between people’s preferences and formidable collective action problems in reaching generally preferred positions on the basis of individual bargaining. Because workers are also the residual claimants on firm profits, they can directly make decisions about any trade-offs between income and working conditions. To the extent that superior positions can be reached, with higher income and better conditions, democratic workplaces are better equipped to find them, given their advantages in morale, mutual monitoring, and likelihood of revealing information about labor processes in an environment of trust.Democratic firm management would not mean that producer preferences override everything else, because in a market socialist system firms must still take into account the preferences of their customers and generate enough revenue to cover their costs. Competing firms may make different choices about the pace of work, but they sell into the same markets, and no firm can charge higher prices simply to cover higher costs. The trade-off between higher income and a more leisurely pace of work is put directly to the workers in each workplace.For workers to exercise these choices, democratic firms need institutions that support them. If competition simply forces every workforce to cut its own pay and intensify its labor, formal control will offer too little freedom in practice. A national labor board could set wage and working-condition benchmarks, giving firms a common floor beneath which they could not compete.These benchmarks also help to spread gains from productivity growth to workers across the economy. Some sectors, especially in manufacturing, are more prone to labor-augmenting technological change than others, such as personal services. Central benchmarks help to make sure that the incomes of daycare workers, teachers, and hairdressers are not left lagging because gains from technological improvements are captured in industry.Investment would also need to be organized on different terms. Public banks could finance productive assets in partnership with democratic firms, so worker control would not depend on a workforce’s ability to buy out an owner with its own savings. Even many workers under capitalism who could pool together their savings in this way rationally choose not to do so, because it’s irrational to put all their financial eggs in the basket of a precarious new business venture. While defenders of capitalism might conclude that this makes capitalist labor contracts a mutually beneficial arrangement, we think no one should have to choose between economic insecurity and workplace despotism. Public banks can control enough eggs to spread them in a rational way throughout a number of baskets. Poorly performing firms will still be allowed to go under, but workers won’t lose their life savings when that happens.The democratic firm does not need to be an isolated cooperative struggling to survive in a hostile environment. It can be a basic cell of a larger, coherent system — one where social ownership, public banking, and market coordination work together to organize production efficiently and on democratic terms.When the Employers and Workmen Act passed in 1875, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli claimed that for the first time in the country’s history, employer and employed “sit under equal laws.” Formally, that was true. Equality before the law meant that neither party could be jailed for breaking a civil contract. But it meant little else in a system where one class owned the means of production and the other was forced to work for them to survive.Today that most fundamental question of politics — that of self-determination and survival — remains unresolved. Workers already bear the consequences of decisions about production, investment, and the distribution of income. They deserve more than the freedom to protest those decisions. They deserve to be the ones to make them.

The American empire has never needed a propaganda ministry to justify itself to its subjects. For that, it has the world’s largest culture industry. From Hollywood to hip-hop, it has made millions around the world dream of being American, even those who hate its politics and economics.But American cultural imperialism comes into focus only when examined against its immediate precursor. For all the British Empire spread — constitutional monarchies, tea drinking, bleakly Protestant Christianity, and ruthless, amoral capitalism — it never made its victims aspire to be British in quite the same way as its American offshoot has. As for justifying itself at home: Who needs state propaganda campaigns when you have Call of Duty and Top Gun?By contrast, in the twilight of their own imperial phase, the British set up a whole government body to sell their empire to consumers back home and to any unconvinced subjects abroad. It was called the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), a name that sounds hilariously quotidian to any English person of a certain age. While twentieth-century Britain also saw fit to establish state marketing boards for wool and milk, here the product was imperialism itself.The British Empire was once described by the liberal imperialist John Robert Seeley, in his 1883 bestseller The Expansion of England, as being the consequence of a series of what British liberals like to call “cock-ups.” He wrote, “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Of course, even an apologist like Seeley didn’t believe that the wars, racial laws, and annexations that built the largest formal empire in history were accidental as such.What he meant was that the British Empire was disorganized. It was never, in fact, a unified state, politically or economically. But Seeley believed that it should be, so it could compete with the streamlined, industrialized, active United States and the German Empire, whose colonies were mostly contiguous and governed under the same laws (though here there were exceptions too, like Namibia and the Philippines). The British Empire, according to Seeley, needed to be unified through tariffs and state planning. In the 1920s, this idea of an economically planned empire was briefly put into tentative practice by Britain’s Conservative governments, and the EMB was there to popularize it.The EMB produced posters, advertising campaigns, exhibitions, and documentary films. It was an unusual attempt to fuse two new trends in the interwar years: intensive advertising based on the American model and the propaganda of the Communist International. Its leading figure was an English bureaucrat, Sir Stephen Tallents, who had been convinced of the importance of art, cinema, and aesthetics after his time in Russia during its civil war. The British Empire sent troops to the Caucasus and the Baltic to help crush revolutionary socialism, and, in this capacity, the civil servant Tallents found himself the governor of Riga, the capital of Latvia and formerly a stronghold of Bolshevism. Looking at the agit-trains, kino tracts, and posters of the departed Soviets, Tallents realized that Britain was trailing far behind this powerful machine of persuasion.When Stanley Baldwin’s Tory government set up the EMB, Tallents was placed at its head. He in turn appointed as head of publicity one Frank Pick, the deputy director of the Underground Group, a private conglomerate that ran much of the capital’s public transportation network. A Fabian socialist who welcomed the London Underground’s nationalization in 1933 and a keen enthusiast for modern art, Pick subsequently brought in many of the artists he had worked with at the Underground.A good example is the 1926 poster by the British American artist E. McKnight Kauffer known as “Jungles Today Are Gold Mines Tomorrow,” referring to the slogan written at the top. The poster deployed the same bright, fauvist style Kauffer used elsewhere to convince London commuters to buy season tickets or move to the suburbs. It features two African figures, one male and one female, the woman in a traditional headdress holding aloft a pineapple, the man carrying a shield and staff; both have stylized features drawn in a manner that now looks distinctly racist. Between the two bodies is a ship and two columns of figures in pounds (goods sold and goods received, with the former mostly higher), indicating the increase in trade between Britain and its African colonies between 1895 — the start of the “Scramble for Africa” — and 1925.Other posters offered simple messages, presented in the neat serif fonts recently used in World War I propaganda. The most straightforward series asks you to buy the products of various colonies and white-settler dominions. BUY SOUTH AFRICAN ORANGES is emblazoned over a painting of gazelles, BUY CANADIAN HAMS AND BACON over one of a bison, and, more strangely, BUY BRITISH WEST INDIAN ST VINCENT ARROWROOT over an image of a turtle. Another campaign consisted of two posters, EAST AFRICAN TRANSPORT — OLD STYLE and EAST AFRICAN TRANSPORT — NEW STYLE. In the former, a group of Africans are marching with their livestock across the orange grass of a fauvist savannah. By contrast, the “new style” poster shows those same East Africans trading with a benevolent white man in a white shirt who occupies the high ground at the front of the scene.All of these designs expressed, queasily, Pick and Tallents’s idea of the empire as at once a modern network, linked by international transport, industry, and communications, and a warm, inclusive family in which everyone knows and works for one another, even the members in faraway parts of the globe (who are, of course, to be raised to full “adulthood” by the senior relations).EMB posters are seldom displayed today, for obvious reasons. But if it is largely forgotten in poster and industrial design, the board is much more significant in the history of British cinema. That’s because Tallents hired the Scottish sociologist, critic, and filmmaker John Grierson to head a specialized EMB Film Unit. The films Grierson produced, under the influence of Soviet directors like Dziga Vertov, are still considered classics, though their imperial provenance is not always emphasized.Many of the works of the British Documentary Film Movement that emerged in the late 1920s, such as Robert Flaherty’s Industrial Britain (1931), Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1934), and Grierson’s own Drifters (1929), were all made for the EMB. It’s still possible to watch and enjoy The Song of Ceylon, a graceful, careful film that was intended to convince British filmgoers to drink Sri Lankan tea. The propaganda is subtle: the message that the balletic, elegant, rhythmic labor of the plantation workers resulted from the benevolence of empire is merely implicit.The Empire Marketing Board eventually came to an end not because it failed as propaganda but because the Tory government of the time was only partly committed to the project of imperial union. The notion of a unified trade bloc was fiercely opposed by the banks of London. The reason for this was that much of the formal empire, often acquired for military rather than economic reasons, was not particularly lucrative. On the other hand, the informal empire that would be placed on the other side of tariff walls — heavily British-influenced but officially nonimperial countries like Portugal, Iran, and Argentina — was extremely profitable. It may have fallen by the wayside, but perhaps some aspects of the EMB were unconsciously emulated in that vast, informal US empire after 1945 — not least a stress on the inestimable persuasive impact of cinema.What the EMB does offer, certainly, is a parallel. The project was created by an empire that knew it was under threat. Having grown rich and powerful on free trade, it now opted for tariffs, controlled markets under British supervision, and a planned industrial policy in order to beat its more technologically innovative competitors. These tactics didn’t work for Britain, and they seem unlikely to work for the declining United States now.

Donald Trump recently concluded an agreement with the governments of Greenland and Denmark over the status of the Arctic island. Trump presented it as a big victory for his efforts, claiming that it granted the United States “permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many US concerns.”The substance of the agreement told a different story. After doing lasting damage to the relationship between the United States and Europe, the Trump administration got more or less the same deal it could have obtained by asking politely. Trump’s repeatedly stated plan to acquire Greenland has been put on the back burner.End of the Saga?“Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders — it cannot be taken from us,” Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens Frederik Nielsen proclaimed in a Facebook post that showed him grinning contentedly. A saga that has brought hitherto unprecedented attention to his country seemed to be coming to an end.The deal, signed by the leaders of Greenland, Denmark, and the United States at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, permits the US to open two bases in Greenland, Mestersvig in the east and Narsarsuaq in the south. Mestersvig is a base for the Sirius Patrol, a dogsled unit of the Danish military operating in the remote Northeast Greenland National Park. Narsarsuaq is an airfield that was constructed during the World War II as a US airbase and that closed as an international airport earlier this year.A recent investigation by the Danish newspaper Politiken found that when the Americans left most of their Greenlandic bases after finding Cold War replacements for them, they abandoned “several thousand tons of hazardous or contaminated waste.” At Narsarsuaq, this waste material included oil drums and asbestos sheets scattered around the old base.The Trump administration has presented this outcome as a vindication of its strategy. But the United States has long been able to construct new facilities in Greenland if it has the consent of the other parties.The 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement, reached after the US had taken responsibility for Greenland’s security during Denmark’s wartime occupation, established this principle. The negotiations that have proceeded in earnest since the start of 2026 could have happened without any US threats to take control of the island.“Sensitive Sectors”However, the new agreement does contain several changes in other areas. Whereas the 1951 agreement was valid for as long as NATO existed, the new version, officially intending to “amend and supplement” the old one, stresses its permanence and includes provisions for a future independent Greenland.At the same time, it requires that an independent Greenland “agree to remain in NATO, including by applying to become a member if necessary.” This suggests that some commentary inspired by the absence of any reference to NATO in Trump’s post was slightly overblown.In other respects, the deal formalizes an unwritten understanding that investment in “sensitive sectors or activities” by non-NATO states is unwelcome. This understanding was already clear during the first Trump administration, when Denmark provided funding for Greenlandic airport upgrades to avoid a hostile US reaction over potential Chinese investment in the project.Back in 2016, Denmark rejected a Chinese bid to take over the Kangilinnguit naval base due to “security concerns.” China’s much-vaunted Arctic ambitions have been constrained in recent years. While the exact meaning of the term “sensitive” is open to debate, the US seems to have obtained an effective veto over any future Russian or Chinese presence in Greenland.Questions also remain elsewhere: the agreement does not address the question of resource extraction in Greenland (apart from a clause that prohibits “control” or “strong influence” by non-NATO states and investors, unless the parties agree that their activities “would not constitute a threat to national security or public order”). Trump’s threats prompted the formation of a unity government after the last election, with four of the five parties in the Greenlandic parliament taking part before one withdrew earlier this year. This means that policy differences between its constituent parties over this question have been left unresolved.Demokraatit, the party of Greenland’s prime minister, Jens Frederik Nielsen, is in favor of extraction, while Inuit Ataqatigiit, the party of his foreign minister, Múte Egede, takes a different stance. It won the 2021 Greenlandic election on a platform of opposition to a uranium and rare earth mining project in the country’s south.Disputes between the Greenlandic government and a US oil firm with links to Trump have sporadically flared up over the question of which licenses it needs and whether the licenses it already has access to are valid. If these disputes drag on into next summer, and Trump-friendly figures within Greenland Energy get the president’s ear, things could erupt again. An agreement on security does not preclude a later dispute on other issues, especially where there is money to be made.White Gold RushAlthough some elements of the deal could prove consequential, its most significant part may well be the opening preamble. For the first time in the relationship between Greenland and the United States, this is an agreement negotiated from the outset by a Greenlandic government.In January 2026, two Inuit scholars released a briefing paper on the ongoing impact of colonization on Greenland. Vivi Vold and Kunuk (Sandra) Inutiq highlighted Washington’s “imperialist and colonialist” rhetoric but stressed that Denmark could not “demand silence” on other topics in the name of unity against the United States. Two of the cases that they mentioned bear repeating here.First, disgraceful episodes such as the implantation of IUDs into thousands of Inuit women and girls between the 1960s and the 1980s, many of whom did not give their consent, remain unresolved. Rival reports were released in August this year, after a group of four experts could not agree on a verdict.The report released by the Greenlandic government suggested that the term “genocide,” which Múte Egede had used during his time as prime minister, could not be ruled out. The other report, produced by two of the experts who split from the government-backed group, reached a less strident conclusion. Neither report had a Greenlandic Inuit coauthor.Second, mining of the mineral cryolite, which is important for the production of aluminium, generated vast amounts of wealth for Denmark in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As it happens, the naval base China unsuccessfully sought to purchase in 2016 was originally constructed by the US Navy to protect the very same cryolite mine. In Greenland, American influence is never far away.There was a fierce controversy in Denmark after the public service broadcaster DR released a documentary called Greenland’s White Gold in the buildup to the 2025 Greenlandic election. The documentary attempted to calculate the scale of this windfall and suggested that it may have amounted to 400 billion kroner in today’s money.By making this calculation, the program makers sought to push back against a persistent Danish idea that Denmark’s contribution to the Greenlandic government budget is akin to a generous gift. An economist who had appeared in the documentary questioned one of its core calculations, and the Danish culture minister strongly criticized it. After initially standing by the program, DR pulled it from its streaming service, and a senior editor resigned.The fact that an issue like this could flare up at the height of the “Greenland crisis” reveals the deep feelings that persist within what many still view as a colonial relationship. US posturing has disrupted Denmark’s gradual acknowledgment of its history with Greenland, allowing the former colonizer to portray itself as a protective elder sibling.No Good ColonizersThe standoff has also diverted attention from other domestic issues. In May 2025, local hotel owner Mike Nicolaisen organized a protest against the lack of investment in Tasiilaq, the largest settlement on Greenland’s east coast. Six hundred people — one-third of the town’s population and nearly a sixth of the entire region’s inhabitants — showed up.Nicolaisen and his wife, Anette, subsequently announced the formation of a new “Party for an Independent East Greenland.” In an interview with KNR, Greenland’s national broadcaster, he described the protest as a “cry for help” and said that the aspirant party was necessary to bring attention to his region: “The only time we’re remembered is when it’s about suicide, misery, and alcohol.”Decades of underinvestment in the regions and a lack of employment opportunities has drawn people to move either to the capital, Nuuk, or to Copenhagen. Population growth in Nuuk has kept house prices extremely high, combined with slow construction rates and the difficulty of finding empty land on the rocky peninsula upon which the city is situated. There is also a significant problem of homelessness.The Greenlandic government cannot trust that this new deal will permanently satisfy the United States. But skilful negotiation by the Danish and Greenlandic governments has avoided a doomsday scenario. Trump is now claiming a win at little cost to his negotiating partners, and arguments over resource extraction have been deferred.Now that the specter of Greenland’s potential seizure by force has been put to bed for the time being, there is more space for reckoning with the ongoing legacies of colonization, which can help prevent the formation of new relationships based on similar premises. Trump may have brought Denmark and Greenland closer together, but there is still no such thing as a better colonizer.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, we should start with the problem in its purest form: The world as we know it cannot go on. Something’s got to give. Ideally, that would be capitalism, but we don’t have enough time to pull that off before the planet catches fire. The planet is already catching fire. What to do, then? Everything — supply chains, information systems, labor practices, policy decisions, economic structures­ — is so inextricably linked that it feels impossible to know where to start chipping away. Recently a friend asked, hypothetically, why it would be worthwhile to make an ethical decision in one’s own personal life if the larger entities that structure that life certainly aren’t making ethical decisions. Isn’t their impact much larger than our own? It’s hard to argue with that.In the design world, the responses to what I’ve come to think of as “scalar overwhelm” (often accompanied by a sense of nihilism) have ranged from cynical surrender — if you can’t beat them, join them: design for developers, make some money, and call it a day — to fantastical idealism: draw up “solutions” to the crises we face that will be hard to build and even harder to finance. Architects and designers are often left out of the funding and policy decision-making processes that structure and condition their work, meaning that the work they do is often reactive rather than proactive. More often than not, an architect’s job is to design to minimize up-front costs and maximize return on investment for developers.When that’s your everyday task, it’s difficult to imagine how you might participate in ameliorating global warming, a crisis to which your job directly contributes — buildings and their construction account for about 40 percent of all greenhouse gases globally — but cannot directly solve. It’s not exactly up to you how the concrete panels you specified in your design plan are manufactured, what fuel the truck that transports wood to the job site uses, or whether the grid your building connects to runs on fossil fuels.Fortunately, Damian White and Nicholas Pevzner have written a book that will help almost anyone — primarily but not solely architects and designers — put some detail on the source of their scalar overwhelm and thereby make it more approachable. Designing the Just Transition is not a blueprint; it is a topographical map of the way designers and design thinkers have tried to address our warming planet and the factors that might facilitate (or make difficult) the collective creation of a new world.Ambitious! And why shouldn’t it be? In Designing’s lengthy introduction, White and Pevzner lay out the stakes: the world is not only warming, it is unstable and unlikely to stabilize any time soon. And yet it is still imperative that we do something to improve life upon it.Within this fractious context, White and Pevzner attempt to “consider what opening might exist for a design- and labor-friendly politics of transition that can revitalize the public imagination and the public realm.” For them, a “just transition” is not merely a set of policies: it is a “demand for a future that ties the social question and the ecology question together.” In order to find an opening for it, White and Pevzner look both backward and forward.The first three chapters situate us in design and labor histories, tracing, respectively, the often contentious relationship between the labor and environmental movements; the history of environmental, ecological, and “nature-inspired” design; and the ways the architecture and planning industries have interacted (or not) with the concept of green design. To those versed in labor or design histories, much of the content of these chapters will be familiar. White and Pevzner’s contribution in this first half of the book is to bring all of these histories together under a singular frame. To those not so versed in these topics, Designing’s first three chapters will serve as a crash course, helpfully focused by the book’s political orientation and aims.In its fourth chapter, Designing begins to look toward the future. The question mark that punctuates its title, “Labor-Centered and Worker-Centered Design for Just Transitions?”, implies doubt: Is this quest even possible? White and Pevzner suggest that it might be, first by surfacing histories of design initiatives that brought together environmental and labor concerns, and then by visiting contemporary currents of design doing the same.This dual endeavor marks the book’s pivot point. From here on, it’s all about the hereafter. Chapters five, six, and seven consider, respectively, the role of noncredentialed designers in cocreating the future, exploring the contributions and limitations of the field of critical design studies; the role of the Green New Deal in advancing conversations about design, labor, and decarbonization; and the possibilities modeled, proposed, and speculated upon in “political theory, [climate fiction], speculative design futuring, and contemporary design practice.”The mere act of considering these questions is one of optimism, but White and Pevzner aren’t prescriptive. They are at their best when laying out the stakes and illuminating some of the stones that might pave a path forward, as in this passage:The core position here . . . is that life on a hotter, more turbulent, and more dynamic planet will require design interventions that will have to be iterative and inventive, taking place again and again and again in climate-challenged worlds. The general proposition that design would do well to orientate itself toward a dynamic future “coming at us” has much greater alignment with more recent developments in non-equilibrium ecology, climate science, and complexity theory than a great deal of equilibrium orientated ecological design of the past.This orientation toward the world’s inherent instability runs through Designing and is perhaps the book’s guiding principle: that it is the task of those demanding a just transition to imagine adaptation as an ongoing process that necessarily accommodates perpetual change. In that process, design can neither be dismissed as inert nor centered as the only way toward a solution; labor must be considered and accounted for; and sustainability must be a goal but not the goal, rather part of a constellation of characteristics of a fairer society that also include “meaningful work, labor, wellbeing, economic security, and shared prosperity.”Despite their optimism, or maybe because of it, White and Pevzner end Designing by addressing the disenchanted quality of our current moment: the pervasive scalar nihilism. They write:The just transition irreducibly raises questions about the extent to which we can plan, design, redesign, imagine, and materialize worlds that are very different to business as usual or the extent to which the forces of the status quo will lock us into fossil capitalism and life on a much warmer, more turbulent planet.In the face of these questions, it would be easy to shrug, cowed by their magnitude into inaction. The merit of White and Pevzner’s book is in expanding upon, elucidating, and contextualizing these questions, engaging with the many thinkers, academics, theorists, and writers that have asked or anticipated them. If Designing the Just Transition is a topographical map, then after reading it, we might not know when the next earthquake is coming, but we will know where the fault lines are — and where we might find the footholds necessary to climb a seemingly unscalable mountain.

On September 21, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government introducedlegislation that could amount to one of the most significant rollbacks of workers’ rights in Canada since the creation of the postwar industrial relations system. Tucked inside the sprawling 232-page Bill C-39 are amendments to the Canada Labour Code that would give the federal labor minister explicit authority to terminate lawful strikes and impose binding dispute resolution when the minister decides a work stoppage threatens the “national interest.”The legislation would also create a new “special mediator,” adding an additional state-directed phase to collective bargaining. Before workers can strike, the mediator would produce a report on bargaining disputes, which the minister would make public if the parties fail to reach an agreement. The new process would create a new perquisite for eventual government intervention under the controversial Section 107 of the Labour Code.The government describes these provisions as “guardrails” constraining ministerial power. But they are anything but. The legislation instead doubles down on what has become a pattern of strikebreaking from the Liberals. These proposed changes to labor law fit within Carney’s broader corporate remodeling of Canada.In response to Donald Trump’s trade war, the Liberals are attempting to attract domestic and international capital through lower investment taxes, accelerated project approvals, privatization, and a political commitment to ensuring that infrastructure gets built quickly.Workers’ capacity to disrupt the movement of goods and capital poses an obvious complication for such a project. Bill C-39 is the government’s answer.From Section 107 to the “National Interest”The attack on the right to strike did not begin with Bill C-39.Over the past two years, Liberal labor ministers have repeatedly used Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to terminate strikes or lockouts and send disputes to the Canada Industrial Relations Board, often resulting in binding arbitration. The provision has been deployed in disputes involving railworkers at Canadian National Railway Company and Canadian Pacific Kansas City, West Coast and Quebec port workers, Canada Post employees, WestJet mechanics, and Air Canada flight attendants.The result has been a creeping normalization of extraordinary government intervention into union negotiations.Section 107 itself says little more than that the minister may take measures deemed necessary to “maintain or secure industrial peace.” Until recently, the provision was not generally understood as a standing power allowing a minister to effectively accomplish by executive order what governments historically required back-to-work legislation to achieve.Unions have responded with constitutional challenges. Teamsters Canada challenged the government’s intervention in the 2024 railway dispute; the Canadian Union of Postal Workers challenged the intervention that suspended its 2024 strike; and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has contested Ottawa’s use of Section 107 against Air Canada flight attendants in 2025.Instead of retreating from this experiment, the government launched a truncated review of the Labour Code seemingly meant to supercharge its recent interventionism.The process quickly raised alarms among unions. The first consultation ran from April 17 to May 25 of this year and canvassed dozens of potentially consequential changes to federal labor law. A second consultation, focused partly on Section 107, ran from July 3 until August 2.Unifor complained that the exercise gave unions only limited time to respond to a broad range of questions concerning fundamental changes to collective bargaining law. In its second submission, the union again warned that the abbreviated process was particularly troubling when Charter-protected bargaining and strike rights were at stake.Bill C-39 shows why those concerns were justified.The bill creates a special mediation process for certain difficult bargaining relationships. The mediator would attempt to secure an agreement before a strike or lockout begins. Failing that, they would issue a report outlining the issues, the parties’ positions, and recommendations. That report would become public, ostensibly to put pressure on unions to concede.But the mediator has another significance. Everyone at the bargaining table will know that the next step is binding arbitration.The rewritten Section 107 would expressly permit the minister, once a strike or lockout begins, to direct the Canada Industrial Relations Board to restore operations, extend a collective agreement, or impose binding arbitration if the minister believes the dispute “adversely affects or may adversely affect the national interest.”“National interest” is an enormously elastic concept. The legislation identifies economic effects and serious social disruption as considerations, alongside freedom of association, but ultimately leaves the decision solely with the minister.The danger this poses extends well beyond strikes that get terminated. Employers bargain differently when they believe the state will eventually rescue them from the economic consequences of job action. The threat of intervention therefore tips the bargaining balance in favor of employers before workers even erect a picket line.Teamsters Canada says this is precisely what happened during the 2024 railway dispute. “The government has created an environment that will no longer provide employers with the incentive to bargain in good faith,” Teamsters Canada President François Laporte said after Bill C-39 was introduced.Making Canada Safe for InvestmentBill C-39 makes considerably more sense when viewed alongside Carney’s wider economic program.The Trump administration’s escalating trade war has thrown Canada’s economic model into crisis. For decades, Canadian governments pursued ever-deeper integration with the United States. Carney’s response to the breakdown of that relationship has been to promise that Canada can reinvent itself as a destination for global investment while rapidly expanding energy, mining, transportation, defense, and artificial intelligence infrastructure.Central to that project is the government’s Major Projects Office, established in 2025 to accelerate what Ottawa calls “nation-building” projects. Bill C-39 extends this agenda by seeking a “one project, one review, one year” standard for federal approvals. The government argues that faster decisions can coexist with environmental protections and indigenous rights.Critics, however, have questioned whether compressing approval processes can preserve meaningful democratic participation.Environmental reviews, indigenous consultations, regulatory hearings, and collective bargaining all take time. Strikes can halt ports, railways, airlines, and other infrastructure through which commodities and capital circulate. For a government promising investors “speed, certainty, and predictability,” these democratic and collective processes are obstacles.Carney made the government’s priorities remarkably explicit at this month’s Canada Investment Summit in Toronto. The event brought together investors from nearly thirty countries managing more than $100 trillion in assets. Ottawa says the summit produced commitments approaching $500 billion and is part of a strategy to catalyze $1 trillion in investment over five years.Carney told investors that his government was pursuing some of Canada’s most significant regulatory reforms in generations and promised that “when Canada says it wants something built, Canada will get it built.” He also announced a major expansion of business investment deductions that the government says will reduce Canada’s marginal effective tax rate on new investment from roughly 13 percent to 6.4 percent.And then there is privatization.At the same summit, Carney announced plans to solicit private investment through long-term concessions to operate Canada’s four largest airports — Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary.Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Senior Economist David Macdonald has warned that airport privatization converts public, nonprofit infrastructure into a vehicle for extracting returns.Because airports possess considerable monopoly power, he argues, private operators can generate profits through higher charges, reduced service quality, contracting out, layoffs, and downward pressure on wages.Seen in this context, Bill C-39 is not an isolated labor law reform.It belongs to a larger political-economic project aimed at reorganizing Canada around corporate priorities. The government is offering investors lower taxes, fewer regulations, new infrastructure opportunities, and access to formerly nonprofit public assets. It is simultaneously proposing greater state power over workers capable of disrupting the transportation networks on which that investment strategy depends.Canadian business organizations have long complained about strikes at ports, railways and airlines. Bill C-39 translates that concern with “certainty” into regressive labor law reform. The state now reserves the authority to decide when workers’ economic power has become inconsistent with the “national interest.”Is Canadian Labor Up for the Fight?Unions have reacted angrily. The Canadian Labour Congress, Unifor, Teamsters Canada, and provincial labor federations have all condemned the proposed restrictions.The Canadian Union of Public Employees has gone furthest. On September 23, its national executive board unanimously resolved that the union would defy Bill C-39's strike restrictions if Parliament passes the legislation unamended.That threat could prove consequential. Air Canada flight attendants represented by CUPE refused to immediately return to work after the government used Section 107 against their strike in August 2025, continuing their walkout even after the labor board declared it unlawful. Whether the broader labor movement is willing to commit to bold action remains to be seen.The stakes are high. The postwar system of industrial legality is being fundamentally challenged by employers and governments alike. Labor rights that governments can suspend whenever they become economically disruptive risk becoming no rights at all.Bill C-39 therefore poses a strategic challenge for organized labor. Statements, lobbying, and constitutional litigation can all shape what happens next. But the history of union struggles in Canada and beyond shows that the effectiveness of labor rights depends heavily on workers’ capacity to exercise collective power.The Carney government is attempting to build a political economy organized around reassuring investors that Canada will be fast, predictable, and profitable. Whether workers’ right to withdraw their labor remains an effective counterweight will depend substantially on how unions respond.

Since the 2016 combination of Donald Trump’s election and Bernie Sanders’s breakthrough campaign, efforts to synergize grassroots organizing with electoral engagement have become a priority for both long-standing and new radical formations. The dominant strategy is for socialists and progressives to run as Democrats aiming to both block MAGA’s drive toward US-style fascism and to win a measure of Left “governing power.”In the last year, such efforts have yielded impressive results. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is mayor of the nation’s largest city. Abdul El-Sayed, an outspoken advocate for Medicare for All and Palestinian rights, won the Democratic nomination for US senator in Michigan. More than a dozen sitting congressmembers are champions of Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party (WFP), or the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and their number is likely to grow following the midterms. A serious conversation is underway about the broad Left rallying behind a movement-identified candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. That person (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most-talked about choice) would run not just to promote radical ideas or influence the eventual nominee but to win.It’s a promising start, and prospects are good for its momentum to continue. But it will take orders of magnitude more wins for this radical insurgency to match the strength of either MAGA or the long-standing Democratic Party leadership, much less exceed it.Portions of the Left think this is a mistaken path. Some critics think electoral engagement is worthless. Others believe that fighting on Democratic Party terrain for any goal other than breaking off to form a workers’ party as soon as possible inevitably leads to compromises that undermine the working-class movement.But these critics are on the defensive. Insurgent campaigns in Democratic primaries have clearly contributed to the spread of anti-capitalist ideas and the growth of radical and socialist organizations. Left-wing electeds — Mamdani in particular — have produced gains for (and mitigated harms against) workers and the popular majority while promoting immigrant rights, anti-racism, and opposition to US support for Israel’s Gaza genocide.In contrast, electoral abstentionism and third-party-ism have failed historically and currently to gain mass traction or provide a practical way of getting MAGA out of power. The critics therefore lack an attractive alternative to offer.Still, there is unease about pursuing a “governing power” strategy among some whose practical work meshes with it. For activists who have decided that only replacing capitalism with socialism can bring about a world of peace and justice, the recent hard-won electoral wins are gratifying but leave unanswered questions. For good reason, there is doubt that electoral victories, even when backed by powerful grassroots-based organizations, will get us to socialism. Isn’t the very structure of the capitalist state a barrier against working-class power? Don’t we need to dismantle, rather than govern, the US state? How does what we are doing today give us a North Star we can follow to a socialist horizon?There are no ready-made answers to these questions. For more than a century, dedicated revolutionaries have grappled theoretically and practically with how to get to socialism in a capitalist country with a developed economy and electoral system. No one has succeeded. Anyone who says “this is the way” is overpromising.Still, much has been learned about which approaches hold the most potential. There is overwhelming evidence that the fight for governing power within capitalism is a stage of struggle that cannot be skipped. Rather, it is necessary to develop a working-class-led movement broad enough, rooted enough, savvy enough, and positioned well enough to bring about a “revolutionary rupture” that dismantles the capitalist state if and when conditions to do so (a “revolutionary situation”) arise.I make a case here for that perspective and point toward some resources that help us both navigate this stage and gain a clearer sense of what we will confront in the next one.An Underlying ContradictionThe first step in making this argument is squarely facing the complicated dilemma that faces those of us pursuing a “governing power” strategy, even if we are only beginning to experience its concrete manifestations.That dilemma is aptly characterized in a recent Jacobin article by Peter Frase, “Zohran Mamdani and the Contradiction of Democratic Socialism.” Frase points out that there is a contradiction “between Mamdani as a product of DSA, an organization at least nominally aiming to overturn the capitalist mode of production, and Mamdani as a politician attempting to operate the machinery of the capitalist state apparatus.”The piece describes different left approaches to navigating the Mamdani-in-office terrain. These vary from activists “who see the task of DSA as defending Mamdani’s policy agenda and building the base of popular support for it . . . [to] those more concerned with calling out compromises or betrayals that separate the new mayor’s actions in power from the principles of a democratic socialist organization.” The debate between these poles persists because, as Frase points out, it is rooted in a contradiction that must be understood in “a Marxist sense: an antagonism that cannot be resolved without overcoming the larger system that gives rise to it, such as that between capital and labor.”Given the messiness of that debate and, more fundamentally, the inherent problem of uncomfortable compromises, alliances, and governing policy dilemmas it reflects, there is an understandable desire to bypass the problem by refraining from participation within any component part of the capitalist state. But giving in to that temptation in a country with even a relatively weak electoral system (much less a rooted one like the United States) is self-marginalizing.The modern state is an instrument of class rule, but it is simultaneously a terrain of class struggle. Messy as it is, the Left must find a way to navigate the contradictions built into fighting for and winning a measure of governing power — including at the federal level, where the contradiction is especially sharp, since the US state remains an anchor of an imperialist system even in its period of decline.With the State, Against the State, Beyond the StateA core component of this argument is that the fight for and deployment of governing power includes but is broader than contesting elections and winning office. It is a full-spectrum struggle that must include battle on the economic, cultural, institution-building, and narrative (ideological) fronts to build sufficient strength of the popular classes outside the state to drive the process.The components of a comprehensive governing power strategy can be captured in a phrase taken from the South African left: “With the state, against the state, beyond the state”:With the state: Contest elections. Become a force in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government at the local, state, and federal levels. Pursue a “co-governance” approach to create an ongoing and generative dynamic between elected officials and the social base that put them in office. By wielding accumulated strength inside and outside the state, deliver material gains, expand democratic space, minimize harm, and gain a deep understanding of what policies work in a complex society with a tremendously diverse working class.Against the state: Continue to make demands on the state and fight for them, which sometimes will mean pushing officials we support and sometimes opposing them.Beyond the state: This component has a double meaning. First, it means that building the organized, institutional strength of workers and all the oppressed outside the state (trade unions, community organizations, a media apparatus, narrative and cultural power, etc.) is indispensable. Second, it means that the most conscious portion of the popular insurgency understands that holding governing power in a capitalist state creates a contradictory and unstable situation. At some point, it will be resolved either by the progressives and socialists being driven back or by a radical rupture that dismantles the existing state structure and puts a new structure in place.A corollary to both of these meanings is that every possible step is taken to weaken the state structures that are most tied to maintaining capitalism, whatever amount of governing power the Left holds at a given time.Purely Outside Will Not WorkThe above is a bare-bones outline that needs a great deal of fleshing out as the Left gains experience in its practical application. At the moment, fighting for left governing power in ways that facilitate building a front broad and strong enough to oust MAGA is a prime concern. If we succeed in pushing US fascism back, the challenges of fighting for and deploying governing power in a period more favorable for left advance will come to the fore.We need to expect setbacks. But there are several reasons to pursue this course even at moments when we are confronted with how difficult it is.The first is that attempting to overturn a developed capitalist state solely by acting outside the state is extremely unlikely to work. That course has been tried by substantial portions of the Left in the US and elsewhere over the last one hundred years and never came anywhere near success. Such efforts have never gained as much strength as projects that have fought for influence inside as well as outside the capitalist state.There is a structural reason for this: the effect that substantial electoral systems have on the dynamics of mass politics. These systems offer a route to changing the conditions of life and expanding the democratic rights of workers and the oppressed. That is why movements for workers and oppressed peoples have fought for universal suffrage and fair elections since Karl Marx’s time. In the United States, the fight for black voting rights in the arc from abolitionism to Reconstruction and then, in the 1950s–’60s, the Second Reconstruction, has been among the most bitter, violent, and consequential in the nation’s history.Most socialists, while participating in these fights, have concluded from their theoretical reflection and historical analysis that socialism will not be achieved via elections. But the mass of the working class and its allies learn that lesson through their own experience; that is, through traveling the electoral route and pushing it to its limits. Left propaganda plays an important role in driving home the point, but that role is secondary to the direct experience of millions in struggle.This stage of mass engagement may be long or short, and it is possible that a moment of decisive confrontation with capital may come before the popular bloc attains all the governing power within capitalism that it aims for. But the point is, this stage of struggle cannot be skipped.Social Welfare Programs via the StateAn additional factor that pulls mass struggles into the quest for governing power is the evolution of the capitalist state since the debates over works such as Vladimir Lenin’s The State and Revolution shaped the modern socialist movement. At that time, the operational components of capitalist states overwhelmingly if not exclusively consisted of the military, the police, and a bureaucracy for tax collection.The modern state has expanded with many additional functions, including large-scale oversight and delivery of “welfare state” programs. Such programs are taken on by the state because it is pressed to do so by the struggles of workers and their allies. These struggles are ongoing; working-class movements almost universally demand the protection and expansion of such programs and introduction of new ones. This is a way for the mass of workers and the poor to win benefits that, even if they could be gained from specific employers, would only accrue to a limited number.For example, today one of the most popular demands of the progressive movement is Medicare for All. To win Medicare for All as well as protect existing programs whose budgets are on the Right’s chopping block, there is a groundswell of energy going into electing its advocates to Congress. The drive to gain and protect social welfare programs (or to have a pro-union National Labor Relations Board, an Environmental Protection Agency actually concerned about climate change, a Justice Department that enforces civil rights, regulatory agencies that check untrammeled corporate power, etc.) exerts a strong pull toward contending for power within the state as well as building mass protest outside of it. What is the logic of demanding Medicare for All but refusing to fight for advocates of that program who can lead its implementation?We Need Orders of Magnitude More PowerAll versions of capitalism rest on exploitation. But they vary considerably regarding the conditions of life and levels of democratic rights of the subaltern classes. And what gains can be won within a capitalist system does not depend only on outside-the-state pressure; the capacity to battle inside the state is a major factor as well.Having champions in legislative bodies, from city councils throughs state legislatures to Congress, makes a difference. An even larger difference can be made if progressives or socialists can capture the executive. On the local level, the experience of the Harold Washington mayoralty in Chicago and what Mamdani has been able to deliver in just a few months illustrate this point.A governing power strategy aims to take this process as far as it can go. A particular change high on the agenda is eliminating the many undemocratic features of the US electoral system. That means restoring the Voting Rights Act and then going further to abolish the Electoral College, prohibit both racial and partisan gerrymandering, and mandate multimember districts with proportional representation. Winning even some of these requires changes in the political complexion of all three branches of the federal government; that is, as WFP National Director Maurice Mitchell puts it, “to get enough power inside a rigged system to unrig it.” We have a long way to go before achieving that level of “inside” power.Police, Prisons, and the Military-Industrial ComplexEven as the functions of the capitalist state have expanded, it remains true that “a standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power.” Dealing with the repressive arms of that state — the police, prisons, prosecutorial bodies, and the military-industrial complex that enforces Washington‘s will abroad — is where insurgent electeds face their biggest challenge.And our problems on this battlefront are not limited to our relative lack of political power. The progressive movement lacks a compelling platform speaking to the working class’s concerns about public and personal safety.There is all-but-universal agreement on the Left that the US justice system is permeated by racism, human rights abuses, and an obscene level of incarceration. But that understanding does not automatically translate into a set of policies concerning law, law enforcement, crime, and prisons that actually benefit, and can gain the durable support of, the multiracial US working class along the way. Formulating, implementing, and building support for such policies is both important in itself and indispensable for eroding the current strength of police unions, “law-and-order” demagogues, and the racist right in general. (The same we-must-learn-more approach applies to numerous other policy areas.)The US left is at an early stage of learning how to navigate these challenges. But there is experience to draw upon for lessons, from that of the Harold Washington and Zohran Mamdani administrations and from the still-young national effort to elect district attorneys who advocate deepgoing reforms (such as Larry Krasner in Philadelphia). Another source of lessons is the experience of black communities after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which led to the first election of a black sheriff in the South since Reconstruction and a substantial drop in racially biased arrests nationwide. And there are radicals exploring new frameworks for a public safety platform such as “law of the weakest” and “carceral minimalism.”Further, anti-capitalists who have captured substantial governing power at the local or state level will almost certainly face situations where the government they lead takes repressive measures against the social forces that they represent. But this road must be traveled because two other things are simultaneously true: One, it is more possible to erode the power of these bodies if a radical movement has champions within the state as well as outside of it; and two, every step to weaken the repressive apparatus contributes to harm reduction and to increasing the space available for insurgent movements to organize for power.Empire and the Military-Industrial ComplexDealing with the military-industrial complex and the related components of the capitalist state that enforce Washington’s goals abroad is similarly complex. But the extent of policy differences even between administrations that are not progressive shows how much room exists for an internationalist force with strength on both the inside and outside to make a difference in the conditions faced by peoples around the world. Cases in point: the difference between a period when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear weapons deal negotiated during the Obama administration was in force vs. one where Trump has torn up the deal, or between an administration expanding use of fossil fuels vs. one making even inadequate efforts to fight climate change.There will be no easy victories on this battlefront. But every bit of progress we do make can alleviate the main source of economic bullying and threats of violence that currently afflict the nations of the Global South. And the outpouring of bottom-up resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the unprecedented upsurge for Palestinian rights, and the unpopularity of the war against Iran has spurred a wider openness to fresh ideas about the US role in the world than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War.Add the growing sophistication of progressive and socialist electoral engagement, and it is possible to envision an administration that would have enough popular backing to abolish ICE, substantially cut the military budget, and take other initiatives that stem from a very different sense of what constitutes genuine security.Vital for the Fight Against FascismPursuing a strategy of fighting both inside and outside the terrain of the state is also vital to stave off the threat of fascism.In the United States today, the main axis of conflict is between a bloc of white Christian nationalists and oligarchs driving toward US-style fascism and a larger but more politically and organizationally fragmented opposition. The central task of the moment is to unite and galvanize the anti-MAGA majority so that it defeats the MAGA bloc and moves the country to terrain more favorable for working-class advance.The elections since 2016, especially the 2024 balloting, demonstrated that it is not possible to do that — or to gain influence for the broad Left within the antifascist front — if we only campaign on opposition to Trump and MAGA. We need to advance a positive vision of what we are for as well as what we are against.It is a governing power strategy that positions the broad Left not only as the most dedicated and combative opponent of MAGA but also as a force offering a positive vision of what a post-MAGA government can deliver. And we cannot limit our “positive platform” to domestic issues while only saying what we oppose in terms of foreign policy. Only a positive vision for a transformed role for the United States in the world will be compelling enough to sustain broad popular support and bind together movements and organizations whose main focus is “domestic” issues with those focused on peace, climate change, and international working-class solidarity.Framing that vision as a Third Reconstruction roots anti-capitalist politics in the particularities of US history, especially the central role of the fight against white supremacy. It also signals that even if we achieve that objective, changing the country will still be a work in progress. As with the First and Second Reconstructions, a new round of gains could be thrown back, or a Third Reconstruction government could be a stepping stone toward the radical rupture needed to overcome capitalism.It is by fighting for consistent democracy and maximum change within the capitalist system (whether we frame it as a Third Reconstruction or not) that the working class and its allies learn that capitalism must be transcended. It is also how the popular majority gains the experience of wielding power and learns how to rule.Fleshing Out the Bare BonesWe are living through the most intense phase of the sixty-year backlash against the gains of the 1960s in which the black-led civil rights movement was the driving force. There is an all-too-real danger of that backlash leading to the consolidation of US-style fascism. But in the upsurge of resistance to MAGA and the longings of millions for a different and better world, there are the seeds of a new cycle of progressive advance.Within this positive motion, a political trend committed to galvanizing a front broad and combative enough to defeat MAGA and to shaping a progressive post-MAGA administration is gaining momentum. It has a growing cohort of elected officials (most prominently Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani), radical organizations powering electoral work (WFP, Justice Democrats, and the growing “mass politics” wing of DSA), grassroots organizations rooted in issue-based and sector-based fights (a section of labor, Indivisible, the national community organizing networks, and much more), and a media ecosystem (ranging from The Nation to explicitly socialist publications and lefty podcasts). Its core organizers look to and are learning from the civil resistance of Minneapolis; the electoral sophistication that led to the recent “Mamdani sweep” in New York; the grassroots organizing that produced the Abdul El-Sayed–Donovan McKinney–Will Lawrence trifecta in Michigan and Angie Nixon’s win in Florida; and the internationalist passion of the pro-Palestine upsurge.As in most early-stage radical awakenings, practical experience and experimentation run ahead of theoretical synthesis. Big-picture clarity is also hard to come by because the rapidly expanding cohort of self-identified socialists are faced with a challenge for which we have no successful models to draw from: how to overturn capitalism in a developed capitalist country with an established electoral system.There is much to be learned from others who have grappled with this at other times and places, for example: from Antonio Gramsci’s thinking about hegemony, a historic bloc, and war of position/war of maneuver; from the practical and theoretical attempts by communists to take Georgi Dmitrov’s advice to “search out forms of transition or approach to the proletarian revolution.” For the US experience, see especially the chapter “Notes on the Revolution and the 1930s” in Al Richmond’s memoir, A Long View from the Left; for a lesson-rich history of the Italian Communist Party, once the most vibrant and deeply rooted CP in Western Europe, see Lucio Magri’s book The Tailor of Ulm. Also valuable is a study of the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s “Meidner Plan” experience in trying to dismantle capitalism; likewise a look at the years Salvador Allende governed as Chile’s elected president and their bloody end at the hands of the Chilean military backed by Washington.All these and more offer insights into how to fight effectively for governing power, what to expect if a measure of it is achieved, and how it can serve as a step on the path to socialism. Yet we are still traveling an uncharted path. We have nowhere near the power needed to usher in a period of radical reform, much less overcome capitalism. But after many years of the US left being marginal, we have become a force to be reckoned with in mass politics. Making further headway will require a great deal of experimentation, and a consistent practice of honest evaluation and refinement — and we will need to harness all the tenacity, flexibility, and broad-mindedness we can muster as we go.

When Britain’s Labour Party met for its annual conference in September 1976, the government headed by its leader, James Callaghan, was confronting a severe economic crisis. This included the combination of high inflation and unemployment (“stagflation”) and a currency crisis that would, by the end of the year, lead the government to arrange a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). IMF assistance came with the requirement of steep budget cuts.In this context, conference delegates passed ambitious resolutions that condemned cuts and called for nationalization of much of the financial sector as well as extensive controls over the movement of capital, imports, and company investment decisions.James Callaghan refused to consider such measures. In a speech that historians often seen as a harbinger of neoliberalism, he told the conference that “the cosy world we were told would go on for ever, where full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the Chancellor’s pen” was now gone for good:We used to think you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists — and insofar as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation.While it does make sense to see this speech as a major moment in the history of economic policy, there is widespread misunderstanding about the reasons for its significance. Considering the speech on its fiftieth anniversary can help us to better understand the meaning of neoliberalism and its relationship to contemporary politics.Callaghan and ThatcherIt is standard to divide Western capitalist policy regimes since 1945 into two eras, with the later 1970s as a hinge period. The first was an era of close government management of national economies, often called the “Keynesian” era. In the most popular practical application of Keynesianism, governments used their fiscal powers to manage aggregate demand and maintain full employment while preventing economies from “overheating.” The second era was the “neoliberal” one, in which such government interventions were viewed with much greater suspicion, and economic policies promoted the continuous expansion of market logics.In most accounts of the transition between the two regimes, a key turning point is the 1979 election defeat of Callaghan’s Labour Party by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, which then embarked upon a radical neoliberal program. Thatcher’s election was indeed a dramatic and historic moment, and there were very important differences between her approach and that of her Labour predecessors.Most importantly, Callaghan’s policies were based on efforts to secure agreements with trade unions on wage restraint, whereas Thatcher’s agenda set out to crush the unions through mass unemployment and the exercise of state power. The differences between them ensured that the scale of privatization and deindustrialization in the UK during the 1980s would be exceptional when compared to its West European neighbors.However, some neoliberal policies had already begun under the 1974–79 Labour governments. This included the prioritization of inflation control over keeping unemployment as low as possible as well as policies to boost profits at the expense of wages and some forms of financial deregulation.Labour often justified these policies as pragmatic adaptations to the economic crisis and the demands of financial markets. But this did not place it outside the neoliberal mainstream. Indeed, such pragmatic justifications generally served as a more typical pathway for neoliberalism, especially in electoral democracies in the Global North, than the overtly ideological arguments associated with Thatcherism.However, many interpretations of Callaghan’s speech still present neoliberalism as a quite specific ideological project. The speech’s own framing contributes to this, which could be connected to the fact that it was partly drafted by Callaghan’s son-in-law, the Times economics editor Peter Jay, whom he later appointed as British ambassador to Washington.The most famous sections were effectively a summary of “monetarism,” the fashionable economic doctrine for which Jay had become a prominent enthusiast. Monetarists argued that inflation was a symptom of excessive increases to the supply of money in the economy as a result of various factors, including Keynesian fiscal policies. In their view, which Callaghan echoed in the speech, this simply increased inflation and the “natural rate of unemployment” that was needed to control inflation.Monetarism would go on to provide a central economic argument for Thatcherism and neoliberal policies in general. Here, it was already being embraced by a Labour government.Rethinking the SpeechHowever, there is often a tendency to exaggerate the nature of the doctrinal shift that the speech implied. For one thing, it did not announce a new policy direction. The government had begun spending cuts a year earlier and already implicitly prioritized control of inflation over unemployment.The extent to which Callaghan and his government really believed in “monetarism” is also questionable. While they adopted some money supply targets and “rules” that monetarists advocated, they primarily saw agreement with the unions to restrain wages as the main way of reducing inflation. They also returned to some reflationary Keynesian policies, under better economic conditions, a year later.The idea that governments previously thought they could guarantee full employment at the “stroke of the Chancellor’s pen” was also a caricature. There were long-established understandings that both international constraints and domestic inflation would create difficulties for the pursuit of this goal. This was considered to be especially true under conditions of “free collective bargaining” that British trade unions favored.For this reason, Labour had come to power in 1974 having already agreed to a “Social Contract” with the union movement, which was then very powerful. Under the terms of this deal, the unions committed to wage restraint in exchange for government measures such as stricter price controls, higher social spending, and new union rights.Since the beginning of the 1970s at least, the Labour left had also been proclaiming that there was a crisis of Keynesianism. The Labour right had embraced Keynesianism more fully than the party’s left tendency, which saw it as an approach that avoided reckoning with capital’s structural power and crisis tendencies.For the left, the internationalization of capital and the experience of stagflation in the 1970s were reducing the room for Keynesian policies. They saw this as an opportunity to argue for wide-ranging extensions of state control through nationalizations and planning agreements.In other words, Callaghan’s speech articulated a doctrine that he did not really believe in, and one that would never guide his government’s policies. Moreover, he presented this doctrine in the guise of a conversion from another set of beliefs that had never really existed. Even so, this was still an important moment in the development of neoliberalism.Power and PrinciplesNeoliberalism was never a consistent economic doctrine. While the early Thatcher government also adopted monetarism as a convenient set of tools, it soon abandoned those tools after they proved ineffective, while continuing to pursue the more fundamental goals of privatization, deregulation, and undermining organized labor.The economic policies of another quintessential neoliberal government, the Reagan administration, also departed from the monetarist template. Enabled by the international status of the US dollar, the practice of Reaganism involved “cutting taxes and boosting government spending” (on the military, in this case) in a way that Callaghan’s speech had declared passé.The more consistent feature of neoliberalism was its orientation toward capital, particularly the international variety, at the expense of other social constituencies. We can therefore identify the greater significance of the speech not in the specifics of what Callaghan said but rather in why he said it.He intended the speech to win over international financial markets, where monetarist ideas had become popular. According to Labour’s Chancellor Denis Healey, the government had to speak the language of “monetarist mumbo-jumbo” (as he called it) because it needed to secure the confidence of the markets. Callaghan also wanted to make a virtue of challenging the left-wing activists who predominated among conference delegates.The Labour government had already used concern about the outlook of international markets to push for a renegotiation of the Social Contract, with stricter limits on wages. These increasingly severe wage restraints eventually led to a wave of strikes in the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978–79. This forced another reversal of government policies but destroyed Labour’s central claim that it would bring about greater economic stability through good relations with the unions.The speech showed that Callaghan was becoming more responsive toward international financial markets than toward unions or party activists. There was still a fragile balance in the 1974–79 government, which switched between some of the most left-wing government policies of the past quarter-century and early forms of neoliberalism. But it was increasingly pulled in the latter direction as it faced waves of financial speculation. Meanwhile, social movements that had pushed it toward greater radicalism suffered from disunity, and the alternatives they put forward were vague.End of an Era?If we understand neoliberalism in these terms, it can also help us as we consider the relationship between neoliberalism and contemporary politics. In recent years, it has become difficult to tell whether and to what extent we are still in a “neoliberal” era, as we see ever more dramatic forms of state intervention.This has included the resurrection of national industrial policies, the rise of trade barriers, and threats to the political independence of central banks, notably in the United States under Donald Trump. When we compare this cluster of developments to the emphasis of neoliberalism on markets and “rules” that are enforced by technocrats rather than politicians, they clearly mark an important shift.However, the shift is less clear-cut when we consider the power configurations that were the more fundamental markers of the shift to neoliberalism. The “post-neoliberalism” of the Trump administration, for example, appears in this light more as an amplification of the tendencies that defined the shift from “Keynesianism” to neoliberalism, led by a fraction of capital that is particularly resistant to compromise with other social groups.On the other hand, the new British government of Andy Burnham may express a stronger rhetorical rejection of Thatcherism than its New Labour predecessors. But the struggles Britain has faced in achieving economic growth, combined with the heightened vulnerability of its governments to pressure from bond markets, mean that the space for social democratic policies is currently more restricted than it was during the era of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.At the same time, the sort of countervailing forces that imposed concrete limits on neoliberalism fifty years ago, such as a strong union movement, are still much weaker than in the past. Until the Left can develop the institutional reforms and social movements that would be necessary to challenge neoliberal power configurations, the most important tendencies that Callaghan’s speech signaled back in 1976 will continue to manifest themselves.

Asylum as we know it is basically dead. The immigration system has been so systematically hollowed out that, for the vast majority of the world’s poor and displaced, it might as well not exist anymore.A brief list of what’s gone wrong:First, asylum approval rates have plummeted to historic lows, falling below 20 percent in 2025, compared to 55.5 percent in 2012.Second, the process is slower than ever before. A backlog of over three million cases frequently forces potential asylees to wait five or more years before finally appearing in court. In 2012, there were only about 300,000 cases on the docket, less than one-tenth of today’s, and wait times of just a year and a half.This backlog has led to a third problem. As asylum seekers are forced to twiddle their thumbs for half a decade, the Trump administration has invented increasingly elaborate ways to deny them a green card. In the meantime, asylum seekers cannot work legally or travel freely in the very country they are seeking protection in. This used to be a common and expedient part of the asylum process, but now asylum seekers must indefinitely put their lives on pause, something most cannot afford to do.Just weeks ago, in fact, the Trump administration moved to block asylum seekers’ right to reside inside the country while they pursue their cases, which, if implemented, could be asylum’s death knell. The once great universal value that every human being on the planet has a right to seek refuge would basically be no more in the United States.There are several reasons for asylum’s disappearance. One is the rise in xenophobic and racist rhetoric among elected leaders. Another is a lame-duck Congress that has been loath to halt the executive office’s attacks on citizens’ rights, let alone its attacks on the rights of poor foreigners who can’t vote or donate to campaigns.There is, however, a third, less obvious reason for the end of asylum in America: the fall of the Soviet Union.Refugees of Communism OnlyThe modern concept of asylum was established in the aftermath of the Holocaust by what is known as the 1951 Refugee Convention. During the rise of the Third Reich, large numbers of Jewish émigrés fled Europe but were turned away by other countries, including the United States. Many later died in concentration camps. After World War II, asylum law was created to ensure that such a thing never happened again; anyone fleeing for their life would be guaranteed the right to seek protection in any other country on earth.Except that’s never how it worked. Instead, the asylum system was driven by Cold War geopolitics to push an anti-communist, pro-capitalist agenda.In fact, the USSR actually declined to sign the 1951 Refugee Convention, stating that it was simply another ideological tool “dictated by Western countries” to discredit socialist states. This was in essence correct. From 1951 to 1979, the US government overwhelmingly granted refugee status to people “from any Communist or Communist-dominated country or area.” This included some seven hundred thousand Cubans, four hundred thousand “Indochinese” (decamping after communist victories in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), another four hundred thousand Eastern Bloc Europeans, eighty thousand Soviet dissidents, and almost no one else.It wasn’t until the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980 that the US asylum system became what we are now accustomed to, with migrants applying individually on a case-by-case basis. Crucially, this new asylum was available to anyone unable to return to their country of origin or the country where they last resided due to “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”Still, throughout the 1980s, asylum approvals heavily favored applicants from communist countries while systematically rejecting those who were fleeing US-backed violence. Whereas refugees from Cuba and the USSR had 70 to 80 percent approval rates, Salvadorans and Guatemalans displaced by massacres and genocides funded by the Reagan administration had less than 3 percent.It’s worth noting that, under Ronald Reagan, the United States resettled more refugees than all other countries in the world combined. Even Reagan’s border enforcement policies look alien compared to contemporary anti-immigrant legislation, with the vast majority of the border left loosely guarded in the 1980s. It was common knowledge at the time that the United States relied on undocumented Mexican seasonal labor to harvest its crops and did not need a hard border to discipline labor’s movement.This likely informed Reagan’s decision to sign a bill that granted approximately 2.9 million migrants mass amnesty instead, the vast majority of them Central Americans and Mexicans. The decision had less to do with helping the victims of his disastrous Latin American policies than normalizing the labor market. While anyone who had entered the country before 1982 was allowed to remain in the country, farmworkers that had been employed for at least ninety days could also be legalized. Many of those amnestied were Salvadorans and Guatemalans who had already been denied asylum. As individuals, they were not worthy of asylum, but as an employable group, they were welcome to stay. The bill also put more money in border militarization initiatives and stricter employment guidelines.Far from an act of kindness, this was again a calculated political one. Having burned much of Central America to the ground in the name of fighting communism, Reagan had no choice but to accept some of the people he had displaced.At its core, then, the US asylum system has always been an ideological tool. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and with it the gradual demise of the communist threat, the United States has been slowly dismantling it. Unlike the immigration system writ large, there is no serious material interest for capital in maintaining asylum.Without the threat of socialism’s Second World, the capitalists of the First World no longer had to buy off supporters in the Third. And now that capitalism has no overt global competitor, and the United States has abandoned any effort to legitimize its role in the world, it no longer needs to respect the human rights it previously claimed to be protecting on behalf of the so-called free world.Asylum’s Thirty-Year DeclineThe great unwinding of asylum did not happen immediately. In fact, asylum approval rates actually grew from 1991 to 2012. At the beginning of this period, the system was working at full capacity in order to put ideological pressure on a faltering USSR, whose migrants, fleeing the last gasps of the Soviet Bloc and the steep decline in living standards accompanying its transition to capitalism, were met with open arms.Indeed, rising rates of asylum seekers accompanied the growing instability of a freshly capitalist-dominated world. After 1991, there was a steady increase in globally displaced persons due to “persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.” By 2013, there were over fifty million displaced people worldwide, many of whom were forced to flee due to proxy wars started by the United States. In 2025, that number had climbed to nearly 120 million, reflecting a level of worldwide conflict not seen since World War II. And that doesn’t even account for the millions of people displaced by climate change, driven largely by Western extraction and consumption.In response, there has been a bipartisan effort across five presidencies — those of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump — to keep out the people displaced by failed neoliberal policy and US intervention abroad. Each did so not by eliminating asylum outright but by slowly eroding the rights that asylum is supposed to grant.One of the first blows to asylum came in 1996, under Clinton, when Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). Whereas migrants were previously guaranteed the right to ask for asylum at any time, they were now made to file for asylum within one year of arriving in the country. After that, their universal and enduring right to seek refuge from persecution would, paradoxically, expire. It was a wholly artificial barrier that served no purpose except to limit asylum protections. Clinton signed the law without hesitation.A decade later, in 2005, Congress passed the REAL ID Act. Under the auspices of preventing “terrorists from abusing the asylum laws of the United States,” the act demanded that asylum seekers provide concrete documentation of persecution in their home countries. The problem, of course, is that people fleeing for their lives across thousands of miles are often unable to maintain such documents. Nor do murderers normally warn their victims in writing that they are about to kill them.Though there was no evidence that terrorists had ever abused US asylum in the first place (none of the men involved in the 9/11 attacks were asylum seekers), the Bush-era policy set a precedent that asylum law was now a threat to national security. No longer needed to bludgeon communists, asylum was weakened to advance a new ideological war, and refugees became potential terrorists.But asylum really began to weaken under Barack Obama. After asylum rates hit all-time highs in 2012, Republicans ramped up pressure on Obama’s reelection campaign by falsely claiming that he had created “open border” policies flooding America with undocumented migrants. Rather than stand his ground, Obama capitulated almost immediately, deporting over 407,000 people in 2012 alone and 3.1 million across eight years, more than any other president in history, including Trump.Like Reagan before him, Obama specifically targeted Central Americans following failed US interventions in the region, most notably the Honduran coup supported by then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Under Obama, the court system was increasingly pressured to no longer recognize migrants fleeing gang violence as having a “credible fear” of losing their lives. As a result, gang violence, the main reason the vast majority of Central Americans sought refuge in the United States, no longer counted for asylum.Perhaps Obama’s most insidious innovation, however, was the creation of the Southern Border Program (SBP) in 2014, which paid Mexico to catch and deport migrants before they could ever reach the United States. The logic was brutal in its simplicity: After 1980, in order to apply for asylum, migrants needed to be physically present in the United States. So if they were intercepted in Mexico first, they’d never have a chance to ask. In its first decade, SBP quietly denied millions of migrants the chance to apply, without impacting official asylum statistics.Far from breaking from Obama, Trump continued down the path his predecessor paved. In 2018, Trump-nominated Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that gang violence no longer counted as “credible fear,” codifying what Obama had done out of sight. In 2019, the administration launched Remain in Mexico, which built on the logic of SBP by demanding that migrants had to first “apply to apply” for asylum, so to speak. Migrants would have to declare they wished to apply for asylum while still in Mexico, then wait there indefinitely until they were permitted to enter the United States and apply a second time. For most, waiting in a third country without access to work, social resources, or housing — especially in dangerous border cities — was an impossible demand. What Obama once did quietly, Trump did publicly and with relish.Relatedly, in 2019 the Department of Justice also passed what is known as the “third country bar.” In short, the bar allows the United States to pass the asylum buck onto Mexico by requiring that migrants who travel through a third country (that is, not their home country, and not the United States, but an intermediary between the two) apply for asylum there first. Geography dictates that this almost always means Mexico. Now US immigration judges can immediately deny an asylum claim if they feel that a migrant did not do enough to seek asylum there, even though Mexico is still actively catching and deporting migrants under SBP. This policy continues to implicitly favor those few migrants still fleeing communism — Chinese and Cuban migrants are much more likely to travel directly to the United States by sea and so have no third country requirement.Though liberals celebrated Biden for ending Remain in Mexico in 2022, less attention was paid to the fact that it was functionally replaced with a new phone application known as CBP One, which formalized and expanded the demand that migrants apply to apply for asylum. As soon as migrants entered Mexico, they were expected to download the CBP One application and take a geolocated photo of themselves daily in order to remain in the digital asylum line. Miss a day and they would be sent to the back of that line, which quickly grew to a wait of over six months. Migrants reported that the app frequently malfunctioned and crashed, losing their data and forcing them to start over after months of waiting in the third country.When Trump was reelected in 2024, he immediately closed CBP One without creating a replacement, leaving tens of thousands of migrants stranded indefinitely in Mexico. This was especially heinous because, due to an agreement with the Mexican government, migrants who enrolled in CBP One were granted a one-year visa in Mexico. When CBP One was suddenly cut, everyone was made illegal overnight. There are no available records of how many people have been deported from Mexico as a result.Weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled to allow the United States to functionally eliminate all asylum protections for those fleeing US imperialism and intervention in Latin America. In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the court blessed the government’s use of a new “metering policy.” First invented and employed by the Obama and Biden administrations as another means of sidestepping asylum obligations, the policy permits an arbitrarily low number of migrants to enter the United States. Once that number is reached, the government can then refuse others to enter the country, and Trump can use images of those left behind to bolster his false claims of invasion.The transformation of the refugee program from granting benefits (including labor market access) to denying them has created a pressure cooker at the border, with tens of thousands of people concentrated in Mexican border towns. A key aspect of refugee resettlement was that it strategically distributed refugees to stabilize rural and postindustrial depopulation. Its dismantling was a disaster that set the stage for localized anti-immigrant backlash. The image of the refugee was transformed from a neighbor building a new life next door to a faceless mass clamoring at the border, providing grist for Trumpian immigration panic.Today only migrants from the last vestiges of communism stand a reasonable chance of receiving asylum in the United States. Venezuelans had a 72 percent approval rate in 2025, and Chinese applicants a 58 percent rate. Compare this to Indians’ 18 percent, despite Narendra Modi’s government, which is virulently anti-Muslim, being a key Trump ally.Asylum’s Last GaspIn 1990, as it became increasingly clear that there was serious instability within the Soviet Union, the US Congress created a new legal doctrine known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Unlike asylum, which is an individualized process that guarantees recipients protection for the rest of their lives, TPS, as its name suggests, was meant to provide temporary refuge — six to eighteen months at a time — for people fleeing particular dangers or disasters in their home countries.Once the country’s conditions are determined by the secretary of Homeland Security to have improved, however, the status is revoked and everyone gets sent back. This tool, like asylum before it, has been used as an ideological weapon to attack countries at odds with US foreign policy. For example, in 2021, the Department of Homeland Security granted Venezuelans TPS status, citing the corruption and repression of the Maduro administration. Importantly, US allies long known for human rights abuses — such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar — have never been designated as having sufficiently dangerous conditions. TPS was, in short, a way to sidestep the responsibilities and guarantees that come with asylum while retaining its ideological benefits.Now Trump has done away with even this. In August, the administration suddenly announced it was canceling TPS for Haiti, putting around 350,000 Haitians at risk of detention and deportation.The announcement followed the termination of TPS for twelve other countries, including El Salvador, Honduras, and Afghanistan. The Trump administration rescinded TPS for Venezuelans at the end of 2025, just months before kidnapping its president, Nicolás Maduro, in order to illegally seize control of the country’s oil reserves. Now that the United States is in control, and the communist threat has been vanquished, it is likely that asylum requests from Venezuelans, as with past allies, will plummet.This does not mean that Venezuelans and other migrants will stop trying to come. They will just have to come in a form useful to capital: as undocumented workers.

At one time or another, Sudanese governments have hosted, armed, or tolerated rebels and opposition groups from all of the country’s neighbors, from Egypt and Libya to Uganda and Ethiopia. Sudan’s neighbors have repaid the favor, and a range of outside actors are now involved in the Sudanese civil war.Key supporters of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) include Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and South Sudan. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Eritrea support the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the de facto government. Among all the external actors, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is the most consequential, even though it has the least reason to be involved.Every other external actor has a stake in Sudan that derives from geography, security exposure, or the influx of Sudanese refugees. Even Saudi Arabia, while not a land neighbor, shares the Red Sea coastline with Sudan and has a direct interest in stabilizing its western maritime frontier.The UAE has no security interest, no shared border or river, and no reason to be concerned about refugees reaching Emirati territory. We can only understand its role in Sudan as part of a broader subimperial project that rests on four connected strategic pillars.Four PillarsThe first pillar is economic hegemony. RSF-controlled mines in Darfur feed gold smuggled to Dubai, often routed through South Sudan, Egypt, Chad, or the Central African Republic. This gold can be monetized into hard currency that sustains the war while giving the UAE leverage over Sudan’s economic and political trajectory.Beyond gold, Sudan is also a critical node in the UAE’s continent-wide strategy of port and logistics dominance, part of an investment program now worth more than $110 billion across the continent, with dozens of port concessions, dry ports, and logistics hubs. Controlling Sudan’s ports, land, and mineral wealth is one of the reasons the war serves Abu Dhabi’s interests.The second pillar is political expansion. Sudan is a strategic frontier in the UAE’s broader effort to project political influence across Africa without incurring the costs of formal empire. A subimperial power is not a global imperial force; rather, it acts as an imperial actor within its own regional sphere while aligning its actions with the overarching interests of a global power like the United States. Sudan’s gold, its fertile agricultural land, its Red Sea coastline, and its sheer size make it a central testing ground for that project.The third pillar is the UAE’s desire to counter Islamist political movements and the influence of Iran. Abu Dhabi has been willing to cooperate with Islamist governments, including Omar al-Bashir’s regime in Sudan, whenever doing so served its interests, just as it has long functioned as a conduit for Iran to evade international sanctions. What its leaders actually oppose is not political Islam or Iran as such, but any political force, whether Islamist, secular, socialist, or democratic, that threatens their preferred regional order.The final pillar is a concern with regime survival and fear of democratic contagion. The roots of this concern go back to 2011, when the Arab uprisings confronted the UAE with an existential threat to its own model of governance. It responded by becoming an organized counterrevolutionary force across the region, intervening by different means in different countries.Such interventions included bankrolling the coup that brought Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to power in Egypt and backing the militia of Khalifa Haftar in Libya. In each case, a popular or revolutionary movement threatened a regional order Abu Dhabi wanted to preserve, and Abu Dhabi acted to reverse it.Sudan’s December 2018 revolution set off the same reflex. This was not because Sudan threatened the UAE materially, but rather because a successful democratic transition next door to the Gulf, achieved by ordinary people rather than by elites, might offer a dangerous model to its own population and to the wider region it is working to shape.Regional NetworkMost of the states that serve as the RSF’s enablers are not acting solely out of an independent interest in what happens to Sudan. They are acting, to varying degrees, on the UAE’s behalf, as part of a network that also extends to actors like Rwanda and the Somali semi-autonomous state, Puntland.Over more than a decade, the UAE has built deep financial and diplomatic relationships with the leaderships of these states. Those relationships are based on investment, infrastructure financing, security cooperation, and (in some documented cases) direct influence over individual government officials.The specifics vary from one country to the next. In Libya, the UAE draws on the territory, airspace, and military bases of Khalifa Haftar’s militia to move weapons and fighters into Sudan. In Ethiopia, Reuters has identified a secret UAE-financed camp near the Sudanese border built to train RSF fighters. Reporting has traced further UAE-linked supply routes for the RSF through Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, the Central African Republic, and beyond, as well as facilities established in Chad and South Sudan under humanitarian or medical cover that in practice support weapons transfers and the treatment of wounded RSF fighters.Other PlayersA few other external actors deserve a place in this picture, even if they carry less weight than the UAE. Qatar has historically supported the former Islamist regime and by extension the SAF, but there is no evidence it plays an active role today.Iran and Turkey have positioned themselves as suppliers and facilitators for the SAF, since there is no global arms embargo on Sudan’s national army. Ankara is concerned with trade, diplomatic influence, and defense industry outreach as well as agricultural concessions and port access. For its part, Tehran views the Red Sea corridor through the lens of its competition with Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. Ties in Sudan that complicate things for those rivals carry strategic value.Israel has maintained discreet contacts with both Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the SAF and Hemedti of the RSF as part of its goal of normalization with Arab states and its close alignment with the UAE. Russia began participating in Sudan’s gold economy through the Wagner Group militia, leaned toward the RSF early in the war, then reoriented toward the army to keep open a potential naval foothold on the Red Sea.Western ComplicityNone of the major Western countries is a bystander. The United States, Britain, France, and Canada have perfected the language of expressing concern while prioritizing their relationships with the Gulf states (and in this case, mainly with the UAE).These governments have long known, in detail, what the UAE was doing. Their own intelligence services and officials had access to the information they needed, and organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch published detailed investigations. Media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Le Monde have documented the UAE’s support for the RSF.The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab briefed the US and British governments and the United Nations Security Council repeatedly, warning that a siege of El Fasher by the RSF would trap over a million civilians and that time was running out. Officials in Washington and London knew the RSF was on the verge of capturing El Fasher and that mass atrocities would follow. The United States was hosting talks with representatives of the RSF and the Sudanese government at the very moment El Fasher fell, but it did nothing.France and Canada received reports that the RSF was using French- and Canadian-made weapons supplied to the UAE in Darfur, in direct violation of the UN arms embargo, and took no action. When sanctions did come, they landed on Colombians recruited to fight as mercenaries, but not on the Emirati companies and officials who financed and facilitated that recruitment in the first place.Imposing CostsSudan’s own history of internationally sponsored peace processes offers a clear warning against the temptation to believe that the international community’s proper role is to engineer or force a settlement, whether through negotiations, power sharing, or externally designed transitional arrangements.That approach has been tried repeatedly, from the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur to the framework agreement that preceded this war. It has produced the same result each time: agreements that distribute power and positions among armed factions, promise development that rarely reaches the communities that need it, and leave the perpetrators of mass violence in place to fight again once the incentives shift.The role the international community is actually equipped to play is narrower, and more useful, than the one it keeps attempting to play. It can stop the states that are fueling the war through weapons, finance, and logistics. That would mean naming and imposing real costs on the governments enabling the RSF and first among them, by a significant margin, the UAE.The individuals, companies, and financial channels that move weapons and gold must be sanctioned, not merely the mercenaries recruited at the bottom of the chain. The assets of the UAE and of Emirati-linked companies are traceable and present in the banking systems and real estate markets of every major Western capital. They could be used as leverage instead of being deemed untouchable.The underlying pattern of regional interference has not changed since 2023. What has changed is that one actor with no direct stake and unmatched capability has been able to intervene at almost no cost. The actors who might have imposed a cost, whether we are talking about Saudi Arabia as a regional competitor for the UAE or Western governments with real leverage over it, have either woken up too late or chosen not to act at all.The Western governments in this picture cannot claim they lacked the information. They had the intelligence, the reporting, and the direct warnings, and they chose silence anyway. That is a decision, not a policy failure, made with full knowledge of its consequences. These governments, and the individuals within them who made and upheld that choice, should be held accountable, and investigated, as contributors to the crimes committed in this war.

Almost everyone on the Left seems to have lost faith in the Supreme Court of the United States. This would have been improbable in 1954, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, or in 1973, after Roe v. Wade, or even in 1992, after the court upheld the core holding of Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But after over twenty years of the conservative John Roberts serving as chief justice, including over half a decade of him leading a court with a 6–3 conservative supermajority, liberals and progressives no longer turn to the court with any real hope. If anything, they view it with hostility.Some on the Left — most recently Lisa Graves and Leah Litman — have portrayed the Roberts Court as a wrecking ball that has “rewritten the Constitution” and “dismantled our rights.” Others think that the court has never really protected our rights and that we were deluded to ever trust such an inherently reactionary institution. While these tendencies have overlapped at various junctures, the more radical critiques of the court have generally been confined to the socialist left: the pages of Jacobin, rather than the Harvard Law Review.Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan’s new book, Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People, is an exception to this rule. The authors are not only Harvard law professors but former clerks for two of the most celebrated progressive justices in the history of the Supreme Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. Their book is not a tragic story of how the Roberts Court betrayed the great liberal traditions of Brown and Roe. It aims at something more fundamental: the almost unconscious and unanimous acceptance — by both conservatives and progressives — of the principle that the Supreme Court should be the final arbiter of all constitutional disputes.While Supremacy makes a concise and cogent case for an alternative vision of “democratic constitutionalism,” it misdiagnoses the problem we face. Its image of a Supreme Court constantly determined to aggrandize its own power is based on a selective reading of the historical record. As a result, the book encourages us to attack an institution that is not really responsible for our predicament.We are not cursed with a tyrannical judicial branch but a broken constitutional structure. The heart of this broken structure is the vesting of the preponderance of political power in a legislature that is designed to obstruct and delay rather than act. Our main task, constitutionally speaking, should be — and has been in the Left’s most successful moments — to push Congress to legislate on the most popular and pressing issues in American society. Attacks on the Supreme Court distract from this urgent priority.The Origins of a Strange AllianceThe text of the Constitution is at best ambiguous about what “the judicial power” means. But as Bowie and Renan argue in Supremacy, the norm that seemed to emerge from early conflicts over the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction was that even if the court could and sometimes must hold state laws to be incompatible with federal law or the federal constitution (what the authors call “vertical review”), it had no authority to strike down acts of Congress (what they call “horizontal review”), which embody the will of the nation as a whole. This norm, the authors claim, represents the best balance between two vital democratic values: the empowerment of popular majorities and the defense of minority rights.Today, however, “our country is less a nation of laws enacted by the people than it is a nation governed by the decrees of the Supreme Court,” which has “seized for itself power over the most important decisions a nation could make.” Bowie and Renan call this predicament “judicial supremacy.” They recommend a radical rebalancing: the repudiation or limitation of “horizontal” judicial review of laws passed by Congress, leaving the Supreme Court only able to “vertically” review state laws.Bowie and Renan harbor no illusions about either the feasibility of this idea or the possible consequences of untethering Congress in this way. “It almost goes without saying that the Congress we have today is dysfunctional and unrepresentative,” they concede in the book’s concluding chapter. Their main objective is not to romanticize Congress but to demonstrate that “judicial supremacy has not achieved what its defenders say it has. In its scope and sweep, the Court’s actual practice undermines any claim that judicial supremacy is necessary to protect vulnerable minorities from acts of Congress.” If “judicial supremacy” has protected anyone, they argue throughout the book, it is the rich, the powerful, and the guardians of white supremacy.Bowie and Renan marshal plenty of evidence to make their case. Most of it comes from the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which ruled that formerly enslaved people could never be American citizens, until the end of Reconstruction. Frederick Douglass is a central figure throughout the book — and he ought to be, given his crucial intellectual evolution from the condemnation of the Constitution for its compromises with slavery to the belief in its remaking through popular interpretation. Supremacy also illuminates how Dred Scott initiated an enduring alliance between racial reactionaries and the Supreme Court, leading a Republican-controlled Congress to boldly assert its right to determine the terms of Reconstruction without judicial interference.Supremacy also discusses the early twentieth-century struggle between New Deal progressives and the Supreme Court, which culminated in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s abortive 1937 court-packing scheme. Although Bowie and Renan sympathize with these progressives, they criticize many of them for attacking judicial review writ large rather than distinguishing between horizontal and vertical review. The failure to make this distinction, it is argued, made it difficult for some progressives to justify judicial nullification of state Jim Crow laws.This was evident in Brown v. Board of Education, when the strongly FDR-shaped court “proceeded as if the only question before it was whether the justices in 1954 believed that school segregation was constitutional.” This “conjured the image of a judicial angel hovering over and somehow apart from American politics.” Leftists, determined as they were to eliminate the scourge of segregation from the country, thus found that their traditional enemy — the group of nine unelected men in robes — had become their friend.If this strange alliance was damaged by Richard Nixon’s appointment of four justices to the court in just five and a half years, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision gave progressives and liberals another motive for preserving judicial supremacy. As Bowie and Renan demonstrate, Democrats in Congress even abandoned a campaign to enshrine abortion rights in federal law because they were confident that the Supreme Court could do a good enough job after it (barely) kept Roe intact in 1992 — a perception that was reinforced by the confirmation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the court the same year. Arguably, at least some portion of the Left clung to the “guardian angel” image of the court forged during the Brown era until Roe was finally overturned in 2022.The Source of the Court’s PowerSupremacy’s encouragement of the broad left to decisively bury any lingering hopes about the Supreme Court is uncontroversial. However, the book reaches this conclusion by exaggerating the power and villainy of the court. In Bowie and Renan’s account, the court’s dominant historical tendency is to advance the interests of slaveholders, robber barons, and modern-day oligarchs by usurping power that belongs to Congress. But other scholars have effectively argued that the Supreme Court has had power thrust onto it, largely because the elected branches like it this way: they can pass controversial issues onto the judiciary and blame it for problems that are, at bottom, their fault.When Roe v. Wade was overturned, congressional Democrats didn’t apologize for failing to protect abortion access over the previous fifty years; they accused the Supreme Court of treachery. When Dred Scott infamously invalidated Congress’s effort to limit the spread of slavery through the Missouri Compromise, Republicans rightly assailed the court, but Dred Scott would never have occurred if Congress had actually confronted the slavery question in the first seven decades of the republic instead of constantly deferring and obfuscating it. Moreover, if we are going to criticize the court’s reasoning in Brown, we at least need to acknowledge that a Congress dominated by the Deep South had spent the first half of the twentieth century tolerating the Jim Crow regime while the court was mildly but meaningfully chipping away at it, particularly in the 1940s.There is a larger problem here. Congress was set up to fail by the framers of the Constitution. Even at the best of times, the equal division of legislative power between a House of Representatives elected on majoritarian principles and a Senate elected on minoritarian ones for six-year terms (and initially not elected at all) makes lawmaking a tough task.The British House of Commons recognized the obvious defects of such pure bicameralism by defenestrating the House of Lords in 1911. Likewise, the Australian Constitution draws much of its structure from the American model but gives the prime minister the power to force early “double dissolution” elections to both the House and the Senate if the Senate repeatedly obstructs legislation. This power was crucial to the passage of progressive legislation in 1974, including the seeds of Australia’s first universal health care scheme. No such mechanism existed to force anti-lynching bills through a reactionary US Senate in the 1920s; hence why civil rights activists tried their luck with the courts.Still, it was not inevitable that the Supreme Court would profit from Congress’s design flaws. Supremacy gives us a defensible theory for how it did — namely, by aligning with the forces of racial and economic reaction. But it might be that the court only did this in the late nineteenth century because those forces were dominant in US politics at that time. Then, as the forces of racial reaction in particular lost momentum in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s — buckling under the pressures of accelerating urbanization, the economic and ideological disruptions of World War II, and Communist and Third World condemnations of “racialism” — the court became more liberal.Many political scientists, going back to Robert Dahl in 1957, have observed the Supreme Court’s sensitivity to public opinion and to the politics of the elected branches. This sensitivity is essential to the court’s survival, because it relies on elected institutions to implement and enforce its decisions. As Alexander Hamilton famously put it in Federalist #78, the judicial branch “has no influence over either the sword or the purse.” This makes it “the weakest of the three departments of power. . . . it can never attack with success either of the other two.”None of this literature is discussed in Supremacy, but the implication of the book is that Hamilton had it wrong. Many examples are offered of the Supreme Court attacking Congress, including the court’s nullification of the Missouri Compromise in 1857, the Civil Rights Act in 1883, the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act in 1918, the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1935, and section 4b of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Such examples give the impression of a voracious institution determined to crush progressive legislation whenever it has the chance.The reader gets no sense of the fact that, throughout its history, the Supreme Court has generally been reluctant to invalidate federal laws, striking down 172 as unconstitutional in whole or in part since 1789. It has struck down state and local laws at least five times as frequently. Even the Roberts Court has upheld federal legislation when conservative ideology could have dictated a different result, including the 1968 Gun Control Act, the “individual mandate” of the Affordable Care Act, and the Indian Child Welfare Act. The court declared back in 1819 that its default posture in cases of horizontal review would be to defer to Congress. Most of the time, it has stuck to this position.Addressing the Real ProblemAlthough this doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court is harmless, it does call into question the urgency and value of an attack on horizontal review. Such an attack would only be necessary if the court were consistently obstructing progressive federal legislation. Supremacy does not prove that the Roberts Court is doing this. It contains no dedicated chapter on the Roberts Court and no sustained analysis of its decisions.What kind of threat does the Roberts Court pose? To be sure, in line with Supremacy’s thesis, it has exercised horizontal review in potentially destructive ways, notably in the areas of voting rights and campaign finance. However, this court’s primary target seems to be the administrative state rather than Congress. Moreover, it has demonstrated how vertical review can seriously hurt the Left — a danger that is not raised at all in Supremacy. Notable examples include the court’s decisions preventing states from mandating “agency fees” to unions in public sector workplaces, declaring state laws granting union organizers access to rural workplaces “takings” of private property, and invalidating state gun control laws. Curbing the court’s authority to review acts of Congress won’t help with any of this.The sad reality is that even if the Roberts Court wanted to go on a rampage against progressive federal legislation, it would have trouble finding any. For all his faults, John Roberts is not the reason why we don’t have federally guaranteed universal health care (including reproductive health care), paid parental leave, holiday pay, or a living wage. The basic theory of Supremacy would have us attack the Supreme Court for things it hasn’t done yet and may never do, all while Congress, the branch of government endowed with the greatest constitutional authority, continues its impressively consistent record of either avoiding or exacerbating our nation’s most pressing problems.On rare occasions, however, Congress has served the Left in the past, but only under intense external pressure. Beyond the obviously critical force of the labor movement, two institutional mechanisms have helped build pressure on Congress: the presidency and the states.The presidency’s potential role — activated most notably by the Left when FDR occupied the White House — is fairly direct: the president, though lacking in constitutional powers, heads one of the political parties in Congress, possesses a unique ability to act quickly, and can mobilize public opinion rhetorically. The states’ potential role (articulated in Heather Gerken’s theory of progressive federalism) is more indirect, involving experimentation with progressive policies that begins in one state, spreads to others, and eventually becomes so widespread that Congress follows. Although a conservative Supreme Court might try to thwart such experimentation, it is both a virtue and a vice of our constitutional system that states can find many creative ways to escape the reach of unfriendly federal courts. They only really relent when Congress takes their federal funding away. One virtue of having such powerful subnational political units was evident in the early twentieth century, when states such as New York (not to mention many cities) pioneered the economic and social policies that would later become central to the federal New Deal.Perhaps it is uncomfortable for leftists to talk about activating the presidency while Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office, or to talk about using state power given the often reactionary history of federalism in this country. But uncomfortable conversations about these tools would be much more productive than our seemingly endless lamentations about the Supreme Court. Books like Supremacy, while admirably readable, are ultimately guiding us nowhere particularly useful.

One in twelve people living in Milan is a millionaire. A report by the consultancy Henley & Partners ranks Italy’s second-largest city and financial capital as the world leader for millionaires per resident, well ahead of New York City, where the figure is one in twenty-two. A growing number come from abroad, drawn not just by the vibrancy of Italy’s fashion hub but also generous tax breaks for wealthy newcomers.For everyone else, Milan tells a very different story. The cost of living is soaring, and with rents and house prices spiraling out of control, working people are being pushed to the suburbs. Add to that the fact that the public health system is in crisis, with private health care giants opening clinics across the city.All of this has unfolded under center-left administrations that have governed Milan without interruption since 2011. These trends predate that year, of course. But in the last fifteen years the city’s center left has not merely witnessed the transformation but helped it to thrive.In spring 2027, Milan will elect a successor to Giuseppe Sala, the current mayor, who is barred from running for a third term. The right-wing coalition that leads the national government is staking everything on the claim that the city has become dangerously unsafe — even though police figures show violent crime falling. These parties still haven’t agreed on who should carry that message: Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Forza Italia, founded by the late Milanese tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, have each put forward their own name, leaving the final call to the coalition’s leaders in Rome.The center left hasn’t picked its candidate either. Everything points to a primary, likely early next year. This is where things get interesting. The contest hasn’t even been confirmed yet, but one insurgent contender has been campaigning for months already.Milan’s RevolutionHis name is Lorenzo Pacini. Thirty years old and a law graduate, Pacini serves on the local executive of the district covering Milan’s historic center. He belongs to the Partito Democratico (PD), the largest party in Italy’s center-left coalition, but his politics lie well to the left of the PD mainstream.His campaign is called “La Rivoluzione di Milano” (Milan’s Revolution). Its logo reworks the biscione, the serpent devouring a child that has been a symbol of the city since the Middle Ages, when the ruling Visconti family adopted it as its emblem. Centuries later, Berlusconi borrowed it for his business empire. In Pacini’s version, however, the serpent is swallowing a portly billionaire in a top hat. The goal of his campaign? What he calls “municipal socialism.”Pacini’s language is plain, direct, and concrete, far from the highbrow register that has come to mark parts of the contemporary Left, in Italy as elsewhere. Yet it is densely political. He talks about “socialism,” “the working class,” and “class struggle” — all terms that Italy’s mainstream left largely abandoned decades ago, and he uses them everywhere: in Milan’s streets, on social media, and on right-leaning TV and radio talk shows, sparring with hosts and other guests. He has more than a hundred thousand followers on Instagram, and several of his videos praising workers or talking about work have passed a million views. He also found himself at the center of a national controversy after appearing on a popular right-wing radio show, La Zanzara, where, in a heated exchange, he said that, if need be, fascists should be fought “with rifles,” as the partisans once did. His point was that branding the entire Right as fascist makes no sense, and that the Italian Republic was officially founded on the armed antifascist resistance. But the governing right, apparently recognizing itself in the label, kicked up a storm. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni weighed in personally, and PD leaders duly distanced the party from his words.This past summer, as a prolonged heat wave hit Italy and much of Europe, Pacini took his campaign into the neighborhoods with what he calls anguriate, meaning watermelon parties. These are open-air gatherings where he presents his ideas, listens to residents’ complaints, collects proposals, and hands out slices of fresh watermelon. The gatherings were initially modest in size, but they grew over the summer, and the themes he keeps returning to — housing costs, public services, taxing the rich — have begun to filter into the city’s political debate. He has also launched MiDecido, an online platform where Milanese can submit and vote on policy proposals: a way, in the campaign’s words, to “build municipal socialism together.”Pacini describes his family background as rich in cultural capital but short on money and says he worked his way through university as a dishwasher and a fruit seller, among other jobs. Asked who inspires him, he often names three figures. The first is Emilio Caldara, Milan’s first Socialist (PSI) mayor, elected in 1914, who, as Pacini told Vanity Fair, “taxed the rich and built the public services we still enjoy today,” including the city’s public transport company. The second is his grandmother, a member of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) who taught in the party’s evening schools for workers. The third is Ho Chi Minh, whom he described as “a great revolutionary, a great patriot, a man who managed to free his country first from the French and then from the Americans, with an enviable political and strategic skill that should serve as an example.” There is a Milanese thread to this unusual last choice: the Vietnamese leader appears to have lived in the city in the 1930s, incognito under Benito Mussolini’s regime, working as a cook — a chapter of his life about which little is known.All this sits awkwardly with the PD. Even under the new secretary Elly Schlein, who has pulled it somewhat to the left, it remains a party of Italy’s liberal, moderate establishment, and all the more so in Milan, where it governs, and where the national leadership’s modest leftward shift has made little concrete difference. Pacini, however, doesn’t believe he’s the one who should feel out of place. “It’s those who still push essentially centrist ideas,” he told major Italian weekly L’Espresso, who shouldn’t feel at home in a left party.”An Uphill PrimaryWinning the center-left coalition primary won’t be easy. The favorite of the city’s establishment is Mario Calabresi, a centrist and a leading figure in Italy’s media world, former editor of two of the country’s biggest newspapers, La Stampa and then La Repubblica, who is backed by a sizeable part of the PD itself. On his own flank, Pacini will likely face Pierfrancesco Majorino, the PD’s group leader in the Lombardy regional council and a close ally of party leader Schlein. Other candidates from the coalition’s left have also declared or are weighing a run, further crowding his side of the field.In a hypothetical primary poll conducted in early August, Pacini stood at just 7 percent. For a candidate with no party machine behind him and a campaign run by young volunteers, that is not nothing, but it makes him a long shot. Still, it is worth recalling that Zohran Mamdani was at 1 percent in the first poll for New York’s Democratic primary in February 2025, and that well into the campaign most observers doubted he would get far.Given his talk of “municipal socialism,” the Italian press has often compared Pacini to Mamdani. The candidate himself, however, does not encourage the comparison, and has played it down whenever interviewers have raised it. He grants that Mamdani’s story has plenty to teach but insists that every city has its own particularities and that copy-pasting models from abroad rarely works. When I spoke with him and brought up the case of Molfetta, the southern town that recently elected a communist mayor, he joked: “I think there are more people from Molfetta in Milan than New Yorkers — so maybe we should listen to them a bit more.” It was a nod to the generations of southern Italians who built Milan’s working class.He has a point, in any case. When it comes to municipal socialism, Italy hardly needs to import models. Before fascism, the Socialists governed Milan, Bologna, and hundreds of smaller towns, and the phrase itself was already current in Italian politics: it was the socialists’ name for what they were doing. After 1945, the Communists ran cities across Italy — Bologna above all, for half a century — building a distinctive local socialism of cooperatives, public nurseries, urban planning, and welfare that was, for decades, one of the party’s most persuasive arguments for its fitness to govern.Pacini, in other words, is reaching back into a tradition that his own party, now far from its roots in the workers’ movement, spent the last thirty years trying to forget. Whether Milan’s voters are ready to embrace it again, after decades in which that tradition was dismissed and demonized, remains to be seen. But deteriorating material conditions are sharpening the appetite for change. In a survey published this month, 95 percent of Milanese said the way the city is run needs to change, and 54 percent said the change should be “radical.”Pacini wants to prove that left-wing politics is not the pastime of a radical-chic cultural elite, as the Italian right loves to caricature it. If he can convince Milan’s population that municipal socialism is a concrete answer to their problems, rooted in the best of Italy’s own history, he may stand a chance.

Workers who make some of the world’s most popular video games, including World of Warcraft and Diablo, won their first union contracts in early September, in an important step forward for organizing in the tech industry.The 1,900 workers are employed by Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2023 in the largest deal ever in the video game industry.Their new Communications Workers (CWA) contracts include recall rights and guaranteed severance packages for laid-off workers — significant wins, since tech and video game workers have seen waves of layoffs in the last few years.Workers on various Activision Blizzard teams have voted to join CWA since 2022. It started with quality assurance testers at Raven Software — when Raven abruptly laid off a dozen testers in December 2021, they went on strike and launched a union drive.Soon after the Raven workers voted the union in, Microsoft signed a neutrality agreement with CWA, pledging to remain neutral in organizing campaigns and to allow workers and union representatives to communicate openly. In exchange, the union agreed to support the software giant’s purchase of Activision Blizzard, which was facing antitrust scrutiny.Activision Blizzard had also faced employee walkouts and a lawsuit by the California Civil Rights Department in 2021 over claims of misconduct and discrimination against women and a “frat boy” company culture.Next to unionize were quality assurance testers at Blizzard’s offices in Albany, New York, and Austin, Texas. A wall-to-wall unit of five hundred World of Warcraft workers unionized in 2024, followed by units of two hundred game developers at Overwatch, 160 members of Blizzard’s story and franchise team, and 450 Diablo designers, engineers, artists, and support staff in 2025.Recall RightsBlizzard workers won the right to be recalled for fourteen months after being laid off. This right extends to any open positions they are qualified for across the 1,900-worker Blizzard bargaining units. The contracts have separate expiration dates but the same terms across all these units. (The Raven workers, who are part of Activision, already bargained a separate contract.)“We know we are at the start of a labor movement in video games and tech at large,” said Mahreen Fatima, a senior environment artist on Diablo. “So it weighed heavily on us to make sure we set a strong precedent.”CWA has organized four thousand video game workers at Microsoft, and has another 550 members in its industry-wide United Video Game Workers affiliate. The latter is a pre-majority union: it allows video game workers to directly join before winning a union election, a model CWA has employed in organizing public sector and higher education workers in Southern states. Another one hundred game developers behind Magic: The Gathering Arena voted to join CWA in June.In a survey of US video game workers by the Game Developers Conference early this year, 82 percent of respondents supported unionizing. Organizers hope that the protections and job security provisions won at Blizzard will convince more game workers to organize.At Blizzard, laid-off workers will get a minimum of four weeks’ severance plus an additional week for every six months’ tenure, up to thirty-nine weeks. The contract also includes just cause protections, a grievance procedure, and a three-day in-office hybrid workweek. And the union fought hard to put other existing benefits and policies in writing, from weather-related policies to money Blizzard workers are given to spend on the company’s games — all now enforceable through the contract.Blizzard workers also won language that requires the company to discuss, evaluate, and bargain over the impact of artificial intelligence on their work. “Now we have a seat at the table to be part of the conversation when it comes to AI implementation,” said Fatima. “The contract gives us the ability to critically think about how it’s going to impact our workflow, our skill sets, the quality of our product, our teams.”The union won a guarantee that existing remote workers, like Fatima, can continue working remotely, which prevents them from being forced to potentially move across the country to keep their job. Remote workers make up around one-fourth of the workforce covered under the new contract.The contract also includes protections against outsourcing — a Blizzard worker can’t be laid off unless the company has let go any contractor hired in the last year doing a similar job, and a laid-off Blizzard worker can’t be replaced by a contractor for another year. Successorship language in the agreement requires a purchasing company to recognize the union contract if Microsoft decides to sell off the unionized Blizzard units.And in a win that links a new group of workers to one of the labor movement’s oldest traditions, the Blizzard contract includes a paid holiday on May 1, International Workers’ Day.Job Security a Top IssueJob security is a major issue for workers throughout the tech industry. Shortly after Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for $75 billion in 2023, it announced in January 2024 that it was laying off 1,900 workers in its gaming division — 9 percent of the workforce.This July, Microsoft announced it would be laying off another 3,200 workers in gaming. Half of the layoffs were immediate, including hundreds of CWA members at Bethesda, ZeniMax, and other studios. In August,workers and allies held “Save Our Devs” rallies across the US and Canada to protest the layoffs and demand fair first contracts for Microsoft video game workers. CWA and Microsoft are now bargaining over the effects of these layoffs. The other 1,600 layoffs are expected by the end of 2027.The sense that Blizzard workers were now a part of a bigger company with a more ruthless economic logic was one motivation behind the union effort. “Being in a union stops you from being treated like a line in an Excel sheet,” said Paul Cox, a senior content designer at World of Warcraft who’s been with Blizzard for nineteen years. “We are in a giant corporation, and there is no way that anybody who makes decisions knows everybody in the company.”After years of robust hiring, the entire tech sector has been hit with waves of mass layoffs since 2022. The tracker website layoffs.fyi estimates that tech companies have announced one hundred thousand layoffs in 2026 alone.For years, tech workers were in such demand that employers vied to offer the most appealing benefits and work environment. However, “these days, a position in tech looks like a regular job,” wrote the Wall Street Journal last year. “Workers are contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours, and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay.” The rapid development of artificial intelligence has only intensified workers’ concerns about being replaced.At Google, 4,700 workers have signed a petition supporting guaranteed severance packages and buyouts before involuntary layoffs. The Alphabet Workers Union, another CWA affiliate, has also organized T-shirt days and mass email actions as part of its “Googlers for Job Security” campaign, launched last year in response to rounds of mass layoffs even as the company remains immensely profitable.The campaign takes credit for Google’s offer of voluntary exit packages to seventy thousand employees — something no other big tech company has done — and is pushing for these buyouts to be offered across the company.Red Shirt DaysBlizzard has four US offices, in Austin, Boston, Irvine, and Albany, New York, each with hundreds of workers. The neutrality agreement gave the union access to the facilities.“Because of the neutrality agreement, we were able to set up tables in the courtyard,” said Alison Veneto, a senior editor on the Blizzard story and franchise team who works in the Irvine office. “Everybody moves through there to go from one building to the other, or to go to lunch. So the union was always quite visible.”Blizzard workers embraced the CWA tradition of wearing red on Thursdays, adopted in memory of a striking telephone company worker killed on a picket line in 1989. “The cafeteria would be a sea of red T-shirts,” said Veneto. “You would go into in-person meetings with management and everyone would be wearing their red shirts.”Since these video game workers spend much of their time in front of computer screens, workers showed their support digitally by changing their Zoom backgrounds and Slack profile photos to echo the union’s message.While the workers at Blizzard are on separate teams, they’re all in a large general chat on Slack, a communications platform used to coordinate work within and across teams. There they could post messages of support for the union and the bargaining team en masse.“People would put forward in company chats why unionizing mattered to them,” said Veneto. “That’s why it felt personal — the union doesn’t feel like a third-person entity.”These tactics also helped engage remote workers. “We tried to make as many avenues as possible to include remote workers — we don’t want them to feel excluded,” said Fatima, who works remotely from Seattle. The organizing committee arranged union info sessions for remote workers, and put Outlook invites onto everyone’s work calendar so they couldn’t miss it.Pattern BargainingAt first the different Blizzard bargaining units were negotiating separately with Microsoft, although the bargaining committees were in communication with each other.As they pushed for first contracts, workers organized numerous marches across Blizzard’s Irvine campus with members from all the bargaining units. They held sign-making parties in view of executive offices, and a sit-in on the executive floor.But gradually, workers recognized that the World of Warcraft unit, the largest, would set the standard — so the union started to focus its mobilization efforts there. In the end, Microsoft agreed to a union proposal to extend the terms it had agreed to with the World of Warcraft unit to other Blizzard workers.One factor that likely weighed on management was the possibility of disruptive action at BlizzCon — the annual convention to promote Blizzard’s games, which draws forty thousand attendees to the Anaheim Convention Center. This year’s convention was held September 11–13, just days after the union agreement was reached.

Socialism is more popular than it’s been for a long time, both socialism and its most well-known adherents appeal to a surprisingly diverse voter base, and most people still have no idea who Hasan Piker is.Those are just a few of the takeaways from a crop of polls conducted over the past month or so, which together suggest the radicalized, antiestablishment zeal that’s taken over the Democratic electorate and opened the door for a rising socialist insurgency is still going strong, with a few surprises in tow. And they come at a potentially crucial time, as socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighs whether to make a run for president in 2028, a campaign that many socialists view as pivotal to the future prospects of their movement as a whole.We should obviously be careful with polls, which are not actual elections and only give us an imperfect snapshot of public opinion at any point in time. Still, while they may not exactly reflect hard numbers, they do often reflect real trends, especially when put alongside other poll results. And as such, these recent ones offer several takeaways.Socialism Is Surprisingly Popular . . . A new Gallup poll conducted over the month of August puts socialism at its highest positive rating, 43 percent, since the polling firm started asking Americans in 2010. Socialism has hovered just under the 40 point mark every year since, until experiencing a pronounced uptick since last year.Maybe more significant is the reason for this uptick, which according to Gallup isn’t to do with the attitudes of Democrats — their roughly two-thirds positive view has effectively stayed flat since last year — but thanks to independents, whose positive views of socialism have gone 8 points up to 45 percent.To be clear, socialism still has a way to go. The same Gallup poll found that capitalism is viewed significantly more positively at 55 percent, effectively unchanged from last year, as is “free enterprise” at 77 percent — which, somewhat confusingly, fell 4 points since last year, part of a more gradual downward slide it’s experienced since 2019. On the other hand, “big business” is in the doldrums, hitting a new low of 35 percent this year.And socialism’s appeal remains geographically specific. According to a recent New York Times/Siena University poll of likely voters nationwide, socialism’s favorability is underwater in all four regions polled but is strongest in the West (-8), and weakest in the South (-27). In a Times/Siena poll of Michigan specifically later this month, Detroit was the only region where it was close to breaking even (-1).Nevertheless, though 43 percent isn’t a majority, recent history shows that may not matter. Less than a quarter (24 percent) of Americans viewed the MAGA movement positively in April 2023, a year and a half before Donald Trump and MAGA routed the Democrats and took total control of the federal government. The Gallup results here track with several other recent polls that show voters are significantly more open to voting for a socialist candidate than a MAGA politician. . . . and Popular With a Surprising CoalitionThe general narrative is that socialism is mostly popular with young, well-off, and highly educated white progressives. This recent wave of survey results does continue to show there’s a marked generational divide in socialist support. But other than that, this narrative about socialism being confined to a particular demographic slice isn’t really supported by the data.In the Gallup poll, socialism has more support from people of color and those earning less than $100,000 than from white adults and those earning more than that figure. And its support is about the same whether someone went to college or not. In fact, other than adults aged thirty-four and younger, people of color are the only group that views socialism more positively than capitalism.We saw a similar result in the Times/Siena nationwide poll, in which white voters had the least favorable view of socialism (-26), followed by the “other non-white” category (-18), while black and Latino voters viewed it most favorably (+4 for each).Interestingly, that poll does show an educational divide, but one that breaks down along race: while white voters of any educational level hold a very dim view of socialism (a net negative in the double digits), non-white voters both with college degrees (-4) and without (0) hold much more positive views. Bear in mind that only 18 percent of the voters surveyed in that poll self-identified as democratic socialists, with the highest proportion of those that did (33 percent) being non-white, non-college-educated voters.AOC and Zohran Have Different CoalitionsThe data is particularly interesting when we move away from socialism writ large and look at specific socialists, especially two of the most high-profile socialist politicians: possible 2028 presidential contender Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.Both are wildly popular with what have come to be termed “normie” Democrats. The Liberal Currents survey found that the pair, as well as fellow socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, officially an independent, are three of the most popular figures in the Democratic Party, behind names like Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Gavin Newsom. Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization that counts both Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani as members and that has been involved in many of the left-insurgent victories this past year — holds a net +53 positive rating, with its strongest favorability (+45) coming from black voters.But when it comes to views of Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, there seems to be a divide between Democratic and all other voters. Comparing the Liberal Currents and Times/Siena poll, we can summarize some of the takeaways as follows:Ocasio-Cortez is viewed slightly more favorably than Mamdani by Democratic voters, while Mamdani is viewed substantially more favorably than Ocasio-Cortez by all likely voters (Ocasio-Cortez has an overall -11 rating from the latter).In both cases, Ocasio-Cortez substantially lags Mamdani in terms of her support from younger voters, meaning those aged under forty-five.Mamdani has a stronger favorability with independents and nonvoters (+14 with each), raising the question of whether the New York mayor’s rise helps explain independents’ growing friendliness to socialism since last year.As with socialism more generally, when it comes to all likely voters, both get their strongest support from voters of color and especially black voters, college-educated and not. Ocasio-Cortez is significantly stronger with Latino voters, while Mamdani is stronger with the “other, non-white” category, maybe related to his campaign’s unprecedented mobilization of South Asian voters.These demographic coalitions look very different when it comes to just Democratic voters: there Ocasio-Cortez has her highest favorability with white voters and also beats Mamdani with black voters, but significantly lags him among Latino voters. (By contrast, Sanders registers a stronger rating than the pair among all three voter groups.)Put aside these details, and the broader takeaway is that the country’s most well-known socialists derive their strongest support from non-white voters and have significant appeal to those among them without a college education. By contrast, DSA, the nation’s largest socialist organization, is according to its most recent internal polling 60 percent white — down from 85 percent five years ago — as well as 9 percent black and 14 percent Latino. In older surveys, a substantial share of its members had or worked in fields that required higher education degrees, though like the racial demographics, that has likely changed in the years since.Still, these poll results suggest the organization’s struggle to diversify its membership is not due to some inherent aversion to socialism by non-white and non-college-educated Americans. It suggests these efforts may bear further fruit — but that it may also require changes within its own recruitment practices and internal culture.The Democratic Party Has Been Ideologically TransformedWe are a long way away from the pre-2016 era, when Democrats largely didn’t think about politics in ideological terms. These poll results show that not only have Sanders’s two presidential runs and the Democratic establishment’s series of failures transformed and radicalized the Democratic electorate, but that they’ve done so in a way that leaves a socialist candidate with the strongest pitch to make them.The Liberal Currents survey confirms what countless polls have told us over the past nearly two years, namely that Democratic voters have had it with their own leadership. Senate leader Chuck Schumer has only a +3 net positive rating from Democrats, while possible future House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries is disliked by 22 percent of them. These voters agree with the statement that “criticizing the Democratic Party establishment makes you more likely to support a candidate” by a +19 margin.On a policy level, the survey shows Democratic voters are strongly in favor of positions that socialist politicians have long taken: expanding the Supreme Court, abolishing the filibuster, zoning reform to build more housing (an issue socialists have long led on), holding the line on trans rights, and taxing billionaires out of existence, with Democratic voters believing billionaires shouldn’t exist by a 6 point margin.Note that not all of this newly radicalized electorate’s views necessarily line up with what might be socialist priorities: these voters are overwhelmingly friendly toward the idea of a military coup against Trump and double the share of self-described liberal voters want Trump officials prosecuted by the next administration as socialist or progressive ones do.In any case, whether or not she decides to run, Ocasio-Cortez is the socialist politician best positioned to capitalize on this transformation and not just because numerous polls show she’s now one of the party’s leading figures. Not only does the Liberal Currents survey show she has strong support from young voters when matched up head-to-head with the rest of the potential field, but crucially, she retains high favorables (+52) with voters over forty-five and white voters (+54) — a demographic that votes heavily in primaries, and whose skepticism of Sanders sunk both of his presidential campaigns. The next most progressive likely 2028 contender, California Democrat Ro Khanna, lags behind her with all these demographics and has far lower name recognition.To deflect against the inevitable electability arguments, Ocasio-Cortez will be able to point out that her positions are broadly popular with the electorate. Voters nationwide, in Michigan, and in other battleground states all prefer candidates who oppose military aid to Israel. In Michigan, voters prefer a pro–Medicare for All candidate by 29 points. These voters also hate data centers and want them limited and heavily regulated. Other polls show even self-described moderate voters holding stridently anti-billionaire views, and swing voters being more likely to back a candidate who wants to tax the rich, pass Medicare for All, and raise the minimum wage.Especially significant is that more than 81 percent of Democratic voters believe a candidate’s foreign policy views are important. This doesn’t just mean the matter of Israel-Palestine, which socialists have led on. The same poll found these voters oppose a US war with China over Taiwan by a 16 point margin, part of a wider trend in US public opinion that views China less negatively and is less predisposed to conflict with the country.“The Discourse” Is Not (Always) Real LifeFinally, there’s long been a lot of talk about how the pet obsessions of the press and social media commentators don’t really reflect what most average people are thinking about. This has always veered into overstatement — there is every sign that people are thinking and worrying about artificial intelligence to a similar degree as pundits and online chatterers, for instance. But it is definitely true when it comes to some of the leading controversies of this election season.Take Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who, despite holding no elected office or any formal power at all, has become a media fixation. One aggregator found that news outlets had published 327 stories about Piker over the last three months, or more than three stories per day, the vast majority of it in national coverage.Yet polls show most voters still have no idea who he is. Fifty-one percent of Democratic voters have never heard of him, even though centrist Democrats have worked to put him at the center of both primary and now general election contests. More astoundingly, 54 percent of specifically Michigan voters haven’t heard of him, even though you would assume from media coverage he’s the most important issue in that race. For that matter, 69 percent of Democratic voters have never heard of DSA national Cochair Megan Romer, whose recent interview missteps were a big story among the commentariat last month but don’t appear to have resonated elsewhere.It’s hard to know exactly what to make of this, but one explanation could be that it signals the waning power of traditional news. Cable news networks saw their ratings nosedive last year, and things haven’t been much better a year later, part of a longer-term decline that ticked up after Trump’s 2025 win. It goes beyond viewership: trust in traditional forms of media fell last year to an all-time low. Given the role corporate and legacy news outlets have played in tilting previous election results, including presidential ones, this could prove advantageous for left insurgents and other outsider candidates.An Altered LandscapeSo, to recap: socialism and socialists are slowly but surely growing in mainstream approval, that approval is often strongest among people of color and isn’t limited to college graduates, and the Democratic and general voter electorate have been transformed in ways that have flung the doors open to socialist ideas and organizing wider than they’ve been in a very long time.Oh, and constantly bringing up Hasan Piker does not seem to be the political silver bullet that Republicans and corporate Democrats want it to be.There’s a long way to go before 2028, and all of this could look different in the wake of whatever happens in November, not to mention after whatever potential wild card a Trump who no longer cares about elections ends up playing. Still, it’s clear the past ten years of socialist organizing have slowly, unevenly reshaped the US political landscape — and that landscape in turn is changing the fortunes for socialist organizing.

Approximately two years ago, a bizarre new genre of AI-generated content began to emerge online. Suddenly social media was filled with short-form videos depicting hypersexual anthropomorphic fruit, embroiled in increasingly far-fetched and soapy plot lines. In one video, a voluptuous strawberry cheats on her watermelon husband, and gives birth to two wolf cubs. In another, an emasculated orange takes revenge on a womanizing banana who has stolen his girlfriend. In a particularly violent iteration, a young tangerine is bullied by his homophobic father and ends up juicing his whole family.It is easy to dismiss these shlocky and incoherent narratives as mere “AI slop.” But they are also endemic to a broader culture. In 2026, the average American spends at least two hours a day doomscrolling — significantly more time than Asians and Europeans, whose social media use is in decline. On their phones, shirtless celebrities, videos of bears chasing cyclists, or children buried under the rubble of their family home are all part of an undifferentiated stream. Faced with this endless churn of content, the human attention span has become increasingly fragmented. Our ability to register nuance and complexity has also taken a hit. So it is that millions find themselves engaging with mindless dross from Baby Shark for toddlers to Fruit Love Island for adults.What, one might ask, is the cost of this new form of consumption? The answer, argues British journalist James Marriott in The New Dark Ages, is human literacy. Marriott describes his book as an “impassioned attack on the trivial and meaningless culture of the screen and a defence of the written word.” There can be no doubt that Marriott has picked a hot-button topic. Evidence of declining literacy rates is stark. In 2004, almost 30 percent of Americans read for pleasure; by 2023, that figure had fallen to just 16 percent. Books are getting shorter, comprehension of long words is in decline, and many young people now source their politics from TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.Of course, warnings about mass media consumption are nothing new; experts have been issuing warnings since the dawn of television in the 1950s. To his credit, Marriott attempts to look beyond headline figures by situating the current crisis of literacy within a broader history and asking whether the rejection of printed media is a form of cultural evolution — a turn to what some have called “secondary literacy” — or a more concerning indication of civilizational decline. Too often, however, The New Dark Ages shies away from big ideas; Marriott himself seems more comfortable reproducing aggregate statistics than offering granular analysis. The result is a frustrating and often shortsighted work: a defense of elite culture that has very little to say about the economic or political forces that have produced the current crisis in literacy or those that might help to resolve it.The Democratization of LiteracyThe New Dark Ages starts by taking us back more than three thousand years to the first recorded instances of written language in ancient Mesopotamia. “Reading was by no means inevitable,” he observes. This is something of an understatement. Even today there remains no evidence to suggest that humans were ever cognitively programmed to understand the patterns of signs and symbols that we have come to call language. To develop these advanced linguistic abilities, we had to retrain our brains: an immensely difficult and time-consuming process that ensured that reading and writing remained the preserve of a specialized elite for over three millennia.There is evidence to suggest that literacy rates increased during the more prosperous centuries of the Roman Empire. By some measures, approximately 10 to 15 percent of the population could read. However, these numbers would stagnate for much of the Middle Ages. In Europe, it was not until the invention of the modern movable-type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 that mass literacy was even remotely conceivable, although even then its growth was gradual. In the words of the sixteenth-century essayist Francis Bacon, Gutenberg’s invention (alongside gunpowder and the compass) had “changed the appearance and state of the world” by disseminating print culture throughout Europe. No doubt this process was helped by the spread of Lutheran Protestant ideas that offered a cultural argument for literacy as a tool of social emancipation.So began an era of mass “democratization.” Marriott — a self-described “Enlightenment bro” — pays particularly close attention to the eighteenth century, an era in which the growth of literacy helped many to challenge existing forms of religious and political authority, remaking the world according to new modes of rationalism. Books, journals, newspapers, and pamphlets spread information that might previously have been accessible only by the elite but that could now be turned against them. Marriott has little patience for the strand of Enlightenment skepticism one finds among the likes of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. For those thinkers, the rationalistic quantification and measurement of social reality allowed humans to dominate one another in ways previously unimaginable. Marriott contents himself with cheering Voltaire — a man who “dared to know” — and the democratic energy, as opposed to economic and social forces, that led to the first French Revolution.The cult of the written word continued to grow until the middle of the twentieth century, when television challenged the novel’s place as the main means of imagining a shared cultural community. In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death sought to explain this drastic cultural shift. For him, TV’s tendency toward triviality, spectacle, and celebrity had hijacked the attention of its consumers and eroded the calmer and more rational forms of thought that reading promoted. Postman was particularly dismissive of the phrase “Now. . . . this,” which in TV-speak tied one form of entertainment to another. This uniquely modern idiom, he remarked, served to highlight how disjointed and banal TV programming had become; the new medium encouraged viewers to passively absorb the diffuse fragments of information that were being beamed into their households.Postman’s analysis of the “Now. . . . this” paradigm seems particularly relevant today. If TV crowded out the time needed to pick up a book, the invention of the desktop computer and, later, the smartphone has dealt a near-fatal blow to the culture of reading. Suddenly the options for entertainment are infinite, and all accessible literally at our fingertips. On TikTok, users are able to skip through 260 videos in under thirty-five minutes. Meanwhile the latest developments in phone software encourage “dual screening” or “in-picture watching” — marketing jargon for being able to text, call, or browse while watching films on devices. Producers at Netflix have even encouraged their filmmakers to insert plot refreshers into dialogue throughout any production, better for those not paying attention to catch up easily.A Cultural Crisis?The New Dark Ages is at its best when describing the dangerous effects that these new behaviors might have on our ability to think critically. When we read, Marriott observes, we can engage in a number of sophisticated cognitive processes: drawing inferences, assessing truth value, considering multiple perspectives, and integrating everything into a broader analysis that allows us to interpret meaning and make judgements of aesthetic quality. Unlike short-form videos, books exercise the human attention span. They challenge us to follow a line of thought to its logical conclusions, for instance. This makes writing a particularly subtle form of expression, capable of holding nuance and contradiction unlike more visual media.As greater numbers of people turn to digital entertainment, however, these cognitive skills are under threat. Consider again the phenomenon of AI fruit videos. They pander to the shallowest human desires: providing an emotionally saturated spectacle, complete with bright colors, unexpected narrative twists, and thinly veiled forms of sexual taboo. A similar degeneration is evident in our politics. Data shows that political speeches given in parliaments across the West are getting shorter. However, they are also getting louder, using quasi-hysterical appeals to a public that is no longer able to process or participate in any other form of rational debate. As Marriott rightly observes, this highly affective politics is embodied by President Donald Trump who, by no coincidence, refuses to read memos or policy briefs on principle.It is hard to disagree with Marriott, even if he at points seems to offer an unintended example of the declining literary culture he is mourning. His sentences are often clipped and written in simple journalistic prose, appropriate for a seven-hundred-word column but not a serious study of the decline in literacy. The New Dark Age is brisk, concise, and peppered with personal anecdotes — perfectly suited to our almost postliterate era. There is also a talking-you-off-the-cliff-edge reasonableness that pervades The New Dark Age. Constantly, we are told that its author has no desire to be “apocalyptic” or “virtuous”; every description of structural crises is followed by evenhanded qualification. “This is not to say” is a common refrain.The this-but-also-that quality of The New Dark Age is attributable to the author’s political outlook. Marriott is a journalist at the right-wing Times newspaper, incapable of thinking seriously about class. One searches the book in vain for any discussion of the relationship between inequality and the crisis of literacy. Studies conducted by Ofcom, a UK media regulator, have shown that low-income families watch twice as much TV and spend significantly longer on social media each day than their wealthier counterparts. Why is this? As many parents have pointed out in response to social media bans in both the UK and Australia, screen time is a begrudged substitute for twenty-four-hour childcare. The growth of the screen-free childhood movement, adopted disproportionately by wealthier parents, has only worsened the disparities between children from different class backgrounds. Childhood is increasingly two-tiered. Some kids spend hours on social media every day, while others have parents who are happy to read them the classics, in some cases even while they are still in the womb.Unsurprisingly, Marriott pulls his punches when it comes to apportioning responsibility for the current crisis in literacy. It is now widely understood that capturing users’ attention — and refusing to let go — is part of the business model of tech billionaires. The longer we spend looking at our phones, the more ads we are exposed to and the more metadata we hand over to internet companies. This means that there is a clear financial incentive to use the algorithm to keep us looking, liking, tapping, and scrolling. As the Google whistleblower Tristan Harris has ominously observed, “you can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.” Declining rates of literacy ultimately help Big Tech companies to continue exploiting their consumers without requiring their consent.Instead of identifying and criticizing these trends, Marriott is keener to extol the virtues of Western literature. “We face the serious possibility that writers like Shakespeare, John Milton, and Jane Austen. . . . are not going to reach the next generation of readers,” he writes with glib sanctimony. This seems unlikely. The elite culture that Marriott feels so protective of is not going anywhere; we will always live in a world in which there are places to read the classics — at least for some. What is at stake is the existence of the mass culture, a unique historical development that came into existence only within the last hundred years, when working class people, women, and non-Westerners shaped global politics collectively for the first time. From the Nobel Prize–winning poetry of Rabindranath Tagore to the revolutions that humiliated European imperialism in nations as distinct as Algeria and China, the culture to which mass literacy gave rise was always a by-product of the struggle for, and achievements of, mass democracy. It was and remains the only successful challenge to Western chauvinism and the navel-gazing court culture that has flourished everywhere in the absence of inspiration from the popular classes. Without a renewal of the fight for democracy, we are unlikely to see a return to the culture of informed engagement with the world. If this happens, the end of literacy may be the least of our worries.

It’s hard to believe that just twenty-five years ago, the global justice movement had to defend itself against the charge of parochial, narrow-minded nationalism. This was the accusation made by respectable, supposedly forward-looking outlets like The Economist and The New Republic. The protesters in Seattle and Genoa stressed that they had no problem with the idea of an interconnected world. What they objected to was the pressure to liberalize and privatize national economies. It was that particular form of globalization — the one being promoted through the World Trade Organization and the summits of the G8 powers — that they opposed.Today the capitalist internationalism of the early 2000s is in headlong retreat. Members of the billionaire class who zoom around the world in private jets are embracing the nativist politics of the far right while the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to the idea of free trade. In these circles, “globalism” has become a dirty word, but capitalism is still beyond question. The Washington Consensus once stigmatized tariffs and trade unions as anachronistic barriers to the free movement of capital. Now tariffs are in vogue, while unions still face an uphill battle merely to survive.At the same time, the US power elite has increasingly dropped the cosmopolitan rhetoric of nation-building and humanitarian intervention as it continues to wage war around the world. The rollback of globalization doesn’t mean a retreat from empire. On the contrary, it involves crude displays of imperial aggression without so much as a rhetorical fig leaf to conceal their naked rapacity. The “rules-based international order” was always a nice way for Washington to dress up the fact that it both made the rules and gave the orders. But even that veneer of multilateralism now seems to be too much of a burden for US leaders.Are there any other geopolitical players trying to cultivate their own brand of internationalism? China long ago abandoned the idea of promoting world revolution. The Soviet Union, by contrast, still presented itself as a bulwark of international socialism right up to the late 1980s, supporting various states and parties around the world in the name of that commitment. But the Communist Party of China kept its focus on building up its own state capacity and economic infrastructure — one reason it’s still standing today, decades after the USSR collapsed.After a long period of domestic development, China’s rulers have grown more confident about asserting their role in global affairs. The confrontational turn of the US political class — a bipartisan policy that has extended from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and back to Trump again — gives them a powerful incentive to strengthen their geopolitical muscles. Chinese government officials have taken the opportunity to present themselves as the true defenders of multilateral institutions. But there’s little indication so far that Beijing can build a new international order around itself in the way Washington did after 1945.For their part, European leaders combine rhetorical feints toward greater independence from the United States with practical steps to increase their subservience. Back in 2003, at the apex of American “hyperpower,” France and Germany took a stand against the invasion of Iraq at the UN Security Council, brushing aside the carefully framed arguments of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Today the major European states have collectively bowed their heads as Trump launches another Middle Eastern war that will hurt their economies far more than that of the energy-independent United States.European elites market their plans for rearmament by telling their citizens how important it is to achieve strategic autonomy from the Americans, so that Europe can fight its own battles and defend its own borders. In reality, the massive hikes in military expenditures amount to a payoff to the Trump administration from governments committed to a policy of appeasement. The strongest resistance to the bloating of defense budgets has come from the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, who is also the most forceful critic among his peers of Trump’s war on Iran and Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza. In general, however, Europe clings all the more tightly to the comforting illusion of a transatlantic partnership, as their would-be ally persecutes judges from the International Criminal Court and threatens to annex Greenland.Latin America is another region where the apparent decline of US power has narrowed the space for independent action. If Washington can no longer impose its will as broadly as it did two decades ago, this makes it all the more determined to keep hold of what it considers to be core territories. Heavy-handed election interference has boosted the fortunes of Latin America’s eagerly collaborationist far right, and the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president showed that nothing was off-limits in the pursuit of hemispheric domination. The governments of Mexico and Brazil are the most important ones standing against the tide of Trumpian slop, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to hold out against coercive pressure from the most powerful state in the Americas.This recharged form of imperialism, it should be said, doesn’t have a strong popular base at home. It’s easy to forget that there was widespread backing for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from people who bought one of the various arguments that the George W. Bush administration used to build consent. It wasn’t until those wars had resulted in chaos and carnage that the balance of opinion began to shift decisively. Today Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth can barely manage to articulate what their war against Iran is meant to achieve, let alone forge a broad consensus in support of their goals.The citizens of other NATO member states are even less enthusiastic about the attempts to shore up US power. But their leaders are incapable of imagining an alternative to reliance on American weapons, technology, and financial infrastructure. The end of globalization in its classical, high-Davos form won’t lead to a resurgence of national self-sufficiency so long as the US tech giants monopolize the commanding heights of digital capitalism.Faced with this concentration of power, the internationalism of the global justice movement may seem like a fading dream, too weak to challenge the Washington Consensus at its high point or to take advantage of its demise today. But the last quarter century has seen many other forms of progressive internationalism, from the worldwide mobilization against the Iraq War to the left-wing projects in Latin America that showed what can be done with state power and transnational cooperation.The Arab uprisings of 2011 and the European movements against austerity, the climate strikes and the marches in solidarity with Palestine — they all represent different facets of an internationalist spirit that cuts against the logic of neoliberal globalization just as it cuts against that of postliberal deglobalization. Trusting in that spirit may seem wildly ambitious or even utopian. But it’s more realistic than expecting stability or prosperity to come from the erratic, destructive lurches of an empire on the downslope.

For over seven years after it entered parliament in May 2012, Golden Dawn was at the heart of Greece’s political life. Its rise was accompanied by scenes that should have made its character unmistakable. During the June 2012 election campaign, MP Ilias Kasidiaris assaulted two female left-wing politicians live on TV, while numerous other key members were documented openly expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler.Beyond parliament, something far darker was taking place. Golden Dawn was not simply an extremist political party but, a Greek court would later establish, a criminal organization orchestrating a web of violence. Its notorious assault squads terrorized migrants and political opponents across Athens, and its members were implicated in some of the most infamous killings of the period, including the murders of antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and Pakistani migrant worker Shahzad Luqman.The judicial crackdown that followed in September 2013 led to one of the most consequential political trials in modern Greek history. Beginning in April 2015, the proceedings dragged on for more than five years before, in October 2020, Golden Dawn was found to have operated as a criminal organization. Most of its senior leadership received prison sentences of around thirteen years.Kasidiaris is returning to a very different Greece from the one in which Golden Dawn first surged in 2012. Some of the ideas that once marked his party as an extremist outlier have since entered the political mainstream. Golden Dawn may not have an active political presence anymore, but the soil that allowed it to take root is still there.The Trial and Its AftermathGolden Dawn always cast its leaders as political prisoners, and portrayed the trial as a politically motivated witch hunt. Nikos Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn’s founder, was allowed to leave prison for house arrest on health grounds in September last year, less than five years after his jailing following the verdict. Last Tuesday, Kasidiaris walked free too, less than six years after receiving a thirteen-and-a-half-year sentence for directing a criminal organization.In the past six years, Kasidiaris has been very busy. After his own party “Hellenes” was barred from the 2023 election, he backed the previously unknown Spartans, propelling them instantly into parliament with just one viral tweet. In 2025, Greece’s Special Highest Court ruled that he had effectively acted as the party’s concealed leader. But when he was considered for release, this political activity apparently did not count as a disciplinary violation, raising serious questions about how such conduct was treated by judicial authorities.The differences between Golden Dawn and Kasidiaris’s later political vehicles are deliberate. He has largely abandoned overt Nazi symbolism, despite his documented neo-Nazi past and swastika tattoo, instead repackaging his politics in the language of ultranationalism. Hellenes, for example, called themselves defenders of Greek national sovereignty, while the Spartans avoided explicit identification with Golden Dawn — although several of their 2023 candidates and MPs had previous ties to that party.Last Tuesday, Kasidiaris walked out of Domokos Prison to cheers from dozens of male supporters, posing for photographs and selfies before announcing his return to the “front line” of Greek politics. Wearing a black Fred Perry shirt — a brand whose black-and-yellow polo was notoriously appropriated by the Proud Boys — he promised the emergence of a new “powerful national party.”That return may already command considerably more support than the published polling suggests. I have confidentially reviewed the raw datasets of two separate polls privately conducted by major Greek polling companies over the past month, both of which tested support for a hypothetical Kasidiaris-linked party. One poll put the figure at around 6 percent, the other at 8 percent. Neither appeared in the companies’ published results, however, with both effectively buried within vaguely defined “other” categories. However, a smaller polling firm released its findings on September 21, suggesting that Kasidiaris could secure up to 17 percent of the vote.Withholding figures of that magnitude from public-facing polling risks obscuring politically important information. A convicted neo-Nazi is returning from prison with an electoral constituency potentially large enough to reshape Greek far-right politics and revive a movement many believed had been defeated.Fertile GroundThirteen years ago, as Golden Dawn was establishing its position during the height of the crisis period, sections of the Greek commentariat openly wondered whether the country needed a “more serious” version of the neo-Nazi party. In September 2013, journalist Babis Papadimitriou — who would later become a New Democracy MP — publicly asked why a “more serious Golden Dawn” could not support a conservative governing coalition.In many ways, that wish has since been realized. Successive governments under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his right-wing New Democracy have elevated politicians who passed through the far-right ultraorthodox LAOS party into some of the most powerful positions in the state. Adonis Georgiadis, once a LAOS MP, is today both health minister and a vice president of New Democracy. Thanos Plevris, another former LAOS politician, has been Greece’s minister for migration and asylum since 2025.Plevris is also the son of Konstantinos Plevris, one of the most notorious figures of Greece’s postwar far right, a Holocaust denier who has openly described himself as a Nazi and fascist. Thanos’s own record on migration is grim. In 2011, he argued that border protection could not exist without deaths. In the same speech, he advocated denying undocumented migrants food, water, health care, and social assistance, with the explicit aim of making life in Greece so unbearable that it would deter others from coming. Plevris also announced a doctrine of “prison or return” for people without a right to remain and described arrivals from North Africa as an “invasion.”These are precisely the kinds of ideas that once distinguished Golden Dawn from Greece’s conventional right. Golden Dawn’s migration politics rested on deterrence through dehumanization of migrants as an existential threat to the nation. What was politically radioactive in 2012 can now be spoken from inside a government ministry almost without consequence, a sign of how much of Golden Dawn’s political language has seeped into the state itself.Seen against the broader European mainstreaming of the far right, Greece is far from the exception it is sometimes portrayed as being by media outlets broadly sympathetic to the government. Golden Dawn disappeared, but the far-right political space became very populated. Greek Solution and the ultraconservative Niki are still represented in the Greek Parliament and Voice of Reason in the European Parliament. MPs elected for Spartans are still sitting as independents after the party’s group collapsed following the ruling by the Special Highest Court.The far-right field may soon become more crowded still. Right-wing former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has spent much of this year teasing the prospect of yet another party, recasting himself as the aggrieved guardian of the nation. His speeches increasingly revolve around denunciations of the “woke agenda,” delivered with the theatrical indignation of a politician apparently determined to present yesterday’s culture-war slogans as an urgent national emergency.A Trojan HorseIn August, Kasidiaris’s brother Alexandros, himself a former Golden Dawn member, filed a declaration with Greece’s Supreme Court establishing a new party. It was formally unveiled on September 21 as the Alliance of Greeks. Little is known so far beyond the identities of a handful of leadership figures and prospective candidates, while Ilias Kasidiaris has yet to clarify what role, if any, he will play.Under the electoral framework introduced in 2023, constitutional experts argue that he cannot formally lead a party until 2033. Nor is simply installing somebody else as leader necessarily enough, as the Supreme Court can examine a party’s real leadership and disqualify it if Kasidiaris is found to be directing it from behind the scenes.But perhaps much of the damage has already been done. Kasidiaris has repeatedly demonstrated how insufficient these restrictions can be. Could a convicted neo-Nazi continue conducting politics from prison? He did. Could his statements circulate through social media while he remained incarcerated? They did. Could he boost another party into parliament while formally remaining outside its leadership? The Spartans provided that experiment. Even Elon Musk entered the story in July, publicly criticizing Kasidiaris’s continued imprisonment.In 2023, writing in the Greek left-wing newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton, I argued that the Greek state was living under the illusion that legal restrictions alone could prevent Golden Dawn’s political return. One of the main government figures defending the 2023 legislation designed to block Kasidiaris was Makis Voridis, then interior minister. Decades earlier, Voridis had led the youth wing of EPEN, the far-right party founded from prison by former dictator Georgios Papadopoulos — taking over a position previously held by Golden Dawn founder Nikos Michaloliakos. The man helping construct the legal firewall against Greece’s neo-Nazis thus came from a political tradition with deep roots in the country’s junta and its successors.The conditions that allowed Golden Dawn to enter parliament in 2012 did not disappear when its leaders entered prison. Greece has spent years treating neo-Nazism as though it were principally a legal problem. Yet Kasidiaris’s journey exposes the limits of that approach. Parties can disappear while their networks survive.Greece is a country with a remarkable history of resistance to fascism but also an extraordinary capacity for forgetting how deeply Nazism has remained embedded within its political life. Kasidiaris’s return shows that the political environment around Golden Dawn changed sufficiently that many ideas once associated with a neo-Nazi organization no longer sound as politically alien as they did fourteen years ago.Legal barriers may still prevent Kasidiaris himself from appearing on a ballot. However, they cannot dismantle the political and social constituency waiting for him outside the prison gates.

Over the past few weeks, Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, also known as the Huthis, has launched an offensive and made big territorial gains. The latest turn in the Yemeni civil war could have major implications for the world economy, as it involves one of its most important trade routes through the Red Sea. It certainly poses a big challenge for Yemen’s neighbor Saudi Arabia.Helen Lackner is a leading expert on the politics of Yemen and the author of several books about the country. She spoke to Jacobin about the background to the latest developments and what is likely to happen next. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.Daniel FinnWhat was the impact of the military campaign against Ansar Allah by the United States and Israel, along with the other steps taken by the Trump administration to impose new sanctions on Yemen?Helen LacknerThe US bombing of Yemen was concentrated in the period between March and early May 2025. There was a fifty-two-day bombing campaign targeting the Huthi-ruled areas. Its main impact was to degrade, at least to some extent, the Huthi capacity to launch missiles. But it did not by any means destroy that capacity, as has been demonstrated since then.One important element to talk about in relation to the Trump policy, which has had a much more lasting effect than the bombings, is the designation of Ansar Allah as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” in March 2025. That kind of move doesn’t have instant results, but it has gradually worsened the living conditions in Huthi-controlled territory and even come close to paralyzing economic activity.Most banks that were previously based in Sanaa, the capital, have now moved their headquarters to the interim capital of Aden. International transactions, which were already very difficult, have become much harder to conduct. That’s relevant first of all in relation to the import of basic goods. Ninety percent of basic staples in Yemen are imported: wheat, rice, tea, etc.The second major impact has been on remittances, which have been the biggest source of income for many Yemenis for a long time. Making the transfer of remittances more difficult is something that affects ordinary Yemenis. The Yemenis living under Huthi control already accounted for two-thirds of the population before the latest offensive. We’re talking about twenty to twenty-five million people.Coming to the Israelis, they launched a number of air strikes in 2025. The most notable one was in August that year, when they managed to kill the prime minister and nine other ministers, plus a number of other senior officials at a meeting. This demonstrated that they now had access to intelligence, something that they previously lacked because Yemen hadn’t been a priority for them.But it also demonstrated that the formal government under the Huthis is not the decision-making entity. The bombing happened last August, more than thirteen months ago now, but the Huthis haven’t yet appointed a new prime minister or any replacements for the ministers and the other officials who were killed.Daniel FinnDuring the period when Ansar Allah was at war with Israel and the United States, how did that affect the protracted efforts that had been going on to negotiate a formal end to the internal conflict in Yemen, which obviously involves outside actors (notably Saudi Arabia) as well?Helen LacknerThere are two elements that need to be looked at. The first is the UN track. We’ve had a UN special envoy since 2011, with the current envoy having been in the role for more than five years now. But the last meeting between the Huthis and the internationally recognized government (IRG) was in 2018, and the UN process has come to a complete standstill.The second element is the direct negotiations between the Saudis and the Huthis that were taking place, to some extent with Omani mediation. If they had been finalized, there would have been an agreement whereby the Huthis would no longer attack Saudi Arabia in any shape or form, while on the other hand, the Huthis would receive compensation for a lot of the war damage between 2015 and 2022 as well as salaries for their staff. The siege on the ports and airports would be lifted, and the Huthis would get a good share of the oil revenues.The deal would not have been a signed and sealed agreement between the Saudis and the Huthis. It would have formally been a deal between the IRG and the Huthis, endorsed by the Saudis. This process was widely believed to have more or less been settled and agreed when the Gaza genocide started. But the Huthis then became involved in supporting the Palestinians and the deal was put on hold.Daniel FinnAt the end of last year, there was a short-lived attempt to form a breakaway statelet in southern Yemen. What was the background to that attempt, and why did it unravel so quickly? Was it primarily driven by internal factors or by the Saudi–Emirati rivalry?Helen LacknerIt was a bit of both. The anti-Huthi front is officially the IRG, which itself has been badly divided since the war started in 2015. One of the major divisions arises from the southern separatists, who want to return to the situation before 1990, when there were two separate states, the Yemen Arab Republic (in the northwest) and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (in the south and east).The southern separatists themselves come in a multiplicity of forms. But the strongest force among them is a group called the Southern Transitional Council (STC), which the Emiratis had been supporting very heavily since its foundation in 2017. It has been the most active element in undermining the IRG.The Emiratis certainly colluded with, and possibly encouraged, the STC in its bid to take over Hadhramaut and al-Mahra, the far eastern governorates of Yemen. Those governorates had been primarily under the control of the IRG — at least its anti-STC elements — except for the coastal area in Hadhramaut. The STC then mounted a blitzkrieg that in a way resembled what the Huthis have done more recently, and its forces took over the whole of those two governorates within a matter of days in December 2025The IRG and the Saudis called for them to “withdraw to your previous positions.” Instead they continued their offensive, moving closer and closer to the Saudi border. At that point, the Saudis intervened, bombing a couple of Emirati ships that were bringing in military supplies for the STC in Mukalla, the regional capital, and the port of Hadhramaut. At the same time, the IRG broke its official support agreement with the UAE and demanded that it immediately withdraw its forces, which it did.This was followed by an offensive by the non-STC elements, supported by the Saudis, who pushed back the STC and effectively closed it down throughout the country. The STC itself split into factions. The bigger one joined the IRG and went to Riyadh to prepare for a South–South dialogue that the IRG had announced. They officially dissolved the STC — some say they were forced the make the decision.But another branch of the STC, supported by the Emiratis, continues to exist today. Its leader is believed by everyone to be in the UAE, although he hasn’t made any public appearances. The Emiratis have continued to support this faction in an underhand way.There are also still elements of the STC who remain active and who are objectively now allies with the Huthis, as they have said they won’t fight them. There are widespread reports that they have been selling weapons to the Huthis, and the Huthis have also said that they will not attack them.Basically, you have a situation where this particular group of southern separatists has now split into two. One group is now with the IRG and the other one is more or less underground but claims to be involved in civilian demonstrations and the like.When it comes to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, there has been a tendency to assume that they are great allies, but if you look at history, this is simply not the case. Most of the time they have been rivals. There was a brief moment when they were very close to each other after King Salman came to power in Saudi Arabia with his son, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), as minister of defense.MBS wanted to become crown prince, and his father also wanted this. He has since achieved this ambition, with a lot of help from the Emiratis. The United States favored his cousin Muhammad bin Nayef, who had long been cooperating with their intelligence agencies, for the role of crown prince. But he was supplanted by MBS, and the UAE’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba, played a very important role in that outcome.But even back in 2017, there were divisions opening up between Saudi Arabia and the UAE over Yemen. They had started the war in Yemen together in 2015, but by 2017, there were already significant differences between them. Those differences are now apparent in several other countries, including Sudan, Somalia, and Libya, without even mentioning the economic competition between the two states, which is also very important.The situation with the STC and what happened in December last year reflected a combination of internal and external factors, and it would be difficult to determine which aspect was more important than the other. But the Saudi–Emirati divisions will remain an important problem, and Yemen will remain one of the main sites where you can observe the extent of those divisions.Daniel FinnWestern politicians and diplomats generally refer to the IRG as if it were the legitimate authority in the country and the Huthis were simply a rebel movement. But what power does that government actually exercise inside Yemen?Helen LacknerThis is a very important question that has become all the more important in the light of recent events. The IRG officially controlled about two-thirds of Yemen’s territory before the Huthi advances. But if you look at the map of the country, you will see that much of the area it controlled was desert. The share of the Yemeni population under the IRG’s control was estimated to be about one-third — a maximum of ten million people.Until the war started in 2015, the IRG was simply known as the Yemeni government. Then it was forced out of Sanaa and officially moved to Aden; since then, there have been all kinds of internal conflicts and divisions inside the IRG. It isn’t a cohesive entity.There are different military units, many of which were previously supported by the Emiratis and are under different commanders. For example, the main force on the west coast that has recently been defeated was under the command of Tareq Saleh, the nephew of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. He has worked with the IRG, but he has never considered himself to be a member of it, although he is a member of the Presidential Leadership Council.The presidency of the IRG is currently an eight-man body with one president and seven vice presidents. The majority of the seven vice presidents are men who control large military units. I hesitate to use the word “warlord,” but it is close to being accurate for some of them.At the civilian level, you have a set of ministers and administrations in the different governorates, but their fundamental problem is finance and the quality of governance. Since November 2022, when the Huthis bombed the ports exporting Yemeni oil on the southern coast, the IRG’s income has more or less disappeared, and it has become almost totally dependent on Saudi financing, international aid, and a very small amount of money raised from taxes. The majority of civil servants have not been paid regularly in any part of Yemen for many years.Although the majority of ministers are actually in Aden, the president has only been there occasionally. He is in Saudi Arabia most of the time. The IRG’s degree of control is minimal and varies from one area to the next. It is more effective in governorates where the local administration has some oil and gas and has been able to keep some of the income and use it to finance services.Even after the collapse of the STC, the IRG remained badly divided. There have been efforts to reorganize the military forces and create some kind of centralized command structure. But what has happened over the last few weeks demonstrated that they were nowhere close to achieving this. The IRG forces disbanded very rapidly and suffered heavy losses.Daniel FinnWhat impact has the ongoing US war on Iran had on Yemen? To what extent do the Huthis coordinate their actions with Iran and its other allies in the region?Helen LacknerInitially, it had much less impact than anybody expected. Outside observers were expecting the Huthis to take action in support of Iran right from the start, but they did nothing. Although they issued many statements supporting Iran, there was no action. At the end of March, they launched a number of missiles at Israel, but apart from that, they just stated that they could close the Bab al-Mandab Strait if they chose to do so, which would obviously have had a major impact on the world oil market.In a way, this demonstrates that the US bombing campaign of 2025 was probably more effective than many thought at the time, because the Huthis clearly saw it as a priority to discourage Donald Trump from renewing the air strikes. Today, when the Saudis are desperately asking for US support, the Huthis have been talking to US officials, asking them not to start again. Having spent years calling the United States the first and greatest enemy, they have also said that all ships can pass through the Bab el-Mandab except Saudi ones.Another element that’s always worth remembering is the fact that the Huthis are not Iranian proxies. They have their own plans and objectives. Right now, their objective is to strike a blow against Saudi Arabia. Stopping Saudi oil being exported via the Bab al-Mandab and via the East–West pipeline is part of that.It’s convenient for them that this move also supports Iranian efforts to put pressure on the United States by reducing supplies for the world oil market. The Saudis had been exporting about four to five million barrels a day, but that has now been interrupted. Iran and the Huthis are allies; they work together when it suits both sides; but neither is taking orders from the other.There has also been military coordination, even though less military equipment for the Huthis has been arriving, because efforts to stop smuggling on land and by sea have become more effective. The Huthis manufacture most of their equipment themselves, but they do need to import some very sophisticated technical elements. They’re now buying a lot of that material directly on the world market instead of receiving it from Iran.There is plenty of evidence that Iranian and Lebanese military advisers have been helping the Huthis, but they could easily survive without them. They might be slightly less sophisticated, but they could survive without the equipment and the advice. The Huthis have been involved in military activities for more than twenty years now. If they had limited capacities at the beginning, they’ve clearly developed those capacities much further over the years, including some advanced forms of technology.Daniel FinnWhat was the state of play when the Huthis launched their most recent offensive? Was the offensive something that was widely anticipated in advance?Helen LacknerIt was anticipated by some, I would say, but not widely. If you look at what happened in the last three or four months, it seemed to me that the Huthis were likely to launch an offensive within the current period, for several reasons.For one thing, the impact of the terrorist designation had begun having a major effect on daily life in Huthi-controlled areas. The economic situation has greatly worsened and is continuously deteriorating. The World Food Programme, which is the main source of food aid, reduced its contribution dramatically over the last two years, then stopped it altogether last September.This was partly because the Huthis had arrested UN and NGO staff members who were involved in aid distribution but also for political reasons. Of course, the fact that United States Agency for International Development funding completely stopped for Yemen after the early months of 2025 has also had a big impact. You have increased popular dissatisfaction throughout the region, and not just dissatisfaction — people are starving.A second element of concern for the Huthis was what appeared to be a distinct strengthening of the IRG after February this year. As I mentioned, the IRG leaders were reorganizing the military and shifting people between areas. They claimed a few months ago that they had restructured up to 80 percent of their forces and that they were battle-ready. Events clearly proved that this assessment was premature.The third element, of course, is that the Saudis are the main supporters of the IRG after the UAE’s political exit. For the Huthis, the question was, “are the Saudis going to come and make the deal with us, or are they going to go with the IRG and fight us?” The way things were going, with the Iran war and other aspects of the situation, they were concerned that the Saudis would no longer seek to negotiate with them.To attack Saudi Arabia makes a lot of sense from their perspective because there is a baseline of popular support, whereas acting directly in support of Iran is something that has no resonance among Yemenis. Yemenis generally have no sympathy for Iran.The pretext for taking action was the Saudi bombing of the runway at Sanaa airport, when a Huthi delegation was returning on an Iranian flight from Ali Khamenei’s funeral. But this was more of an inconvenience than anything else, since they did not bomb the runway of Hodeidah airport and the delegation was able to land. It was a pretext rather than the main reason.Daniel FinnHow significant are the gains that the Huthis have made over the past few weeks? Does it represent a decisive shift in the balance of forces, and what implications might it have for the Saudis?Helen LacknerThe big question is whether the gains are reversible or not. If they prove to be irreversible, then they’re very significant.There has been a lot of talk about Huthi control of the Bab al-Mandab. In fact, they already controlled the Red Sea. The big difference now is that if they sit at the bottom of the peninsula, or on Perim Island, they can shoot at anything that comes by with fairly unsophisticated weaponry.Obviously, the fact that they are preventing Saudi ships from going through, exporting oil and bringing back imports, is important. For imports, the Suez Canal is a reasonable substitute. For exports, the Iraqi drone attack on the pipeline last week is more significant, because it is preventing oil from reaching Yanbu, the Saudi port on the Red Sea coast.The Saudis can still export up to two million barrels a day. But by going through the Bab al-Mandab, they had been exporting between four and five million barrels a day over the last few months. Going through the Suez Canal is much less convenient because the large oil carriers, known as VLCCs, cannot go through the canal fully loaded.The oil has to be taken to the bottom of the canal and either transferred to smaller ships or through a small pipeline and then reloaded when it reaches the Mediterranean Sea. Eighty percent of Saudi exports go to East Asia, so after arriving in the Mediterranean, they have to go all the way past Gibraltar, around Africa, and back up to Asia. This route is much less convenient and much more expensive.The balance of forces between the Huthis and the anti-Huthi elements will depend on what happens next and whether the latter can reorganize themselves and receive the air support and other forms of support they need from the Saudis or other players. But air strikes do not win wars without land forces, so unless the Yemeni land forces are reorganized so they can be more effective, there will not be any reversal.I wouldn’t like to say that the change in the balance of forces will prove decisive in the long term. My perception when this fighting started in August was that we were back more or less where we were in 2015, at the beginning of a long and nasty war. At the moment, unfortunately, I see no reason to change my mind on that, although I hope that I’m wrong.Daniel FinnWhat are the social and humanitarian conditions facing the people of Yemen after the latest turn of the war, and how are they likely to develop in the coming months?Helen LacknerIt’s very important to remember that the humanitarian situation is disastrous, regardless of what happens for the country’s leaders. Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for a number of years. It lost that title, not because anything improved in Yemen but because things got so much worse in Sudan and other places.Starvation is becoming a major issue throughout the country. As I mentioned earlier, the situation is even worse in the Huthi-controlled area, for two-thirds or more of the population, than it is in the IRG area. But in both areas, it is very bad.The UN’s humanitarian aid appeal for this year, which is smaller than last year’s, has only been financed at 23 percent by the end of September. This is very low, even compared to last year, which was already very bad. People were suffering enormously even before the latest turn of events.Now, with the developments in the southwest of the country and the military activity, about 150,000 people have been displaced at the latest count, on top of the four to five million people displaced over the last ten years. Given the shortage of aid, it’s even more difficult for them to find places to stay, whether temporarily or permanently.So many people have been interviewed saying that they’ve just run with the clothes on their backs and bullets flying overhead, and the number of displaced people is likely to increase. Those who are still in their villages but have been caught up in the fighting are going to try and escape if they possibly can, so long as you have these active military fronts.

I used to pass the biscuit factory in Soba without going in. People I knew went in for a twelve-hour shift on a line that smelled of sugar and oil. In 2021, the number that stuck was 1,500 pounds for the shift.In Haj Yousif, where Iqbal lived, the rent for a single room was 30,000 pounds a month. You had to work twenty factory days just to cover rent. Meanwhile, the Rapid Support Forces were offering people 15,000 a day, a uniform, and a phone.Those three numbers explain more about Sudan’s war than any map I have been shown since. What happened in Sudan was not primarily a story of people choosing violence. It was a story of people choosing the wage that was available.A Bus That Does Not ComeIqbal sold tea in front of the medical campus at the University of Khartoum, setting up with three low stools, a few plastic chairs that did not match, a kettle that was black at the bottom, and a sugar jar with a spoon that was always wet. She kept her coins in a small tin.She lived in Haj Yousif. Traveling to the university from her home involved hours on buses, not to mention the time spent walking and standing in the heat for a bus that does not come. She did it every day.Her husband had run away — her choice of words — to fight with Abdelaziz al-Hilu in South Kordofan. I do not know the full story of what took him. What I know is that the farm outside the city had stopped paying for a life inside it, and that a rifle and a cause offer the kind of wage a collapsing farm cannot.Iqbal stayed with their four children, who would be fed or not fed depending on how the day went. Around her, on the same stretch of pavement, Asyaa ran two kettles at once, while Fatouma sold tea and roasted nuts and knew which patients in Shar al-Hawadith had not eaten.The women had come in numbers when the farms stopped paying. Men left for the mines or the militias. Khartoum needed cheap food, cheap warmth, and cheap care for students who could not afford a meal or companions waiting a week in a hospital corridor. The city got what it needed, but the women who provided it were deemed illegal.The local authority sent a pickup with two or three men in uniforms that never looked fully clean. They seized the chairs, the kettle, the sugar, sometimes the gas cylinder, too. You had to go to their office and pay to get your own things back. We called the practice kasha.The state had decided that Iqbal’s labor was not a business. It was an obstruction — and what it could not ignore, it taxed. When we saw the truck turn the corner, we hid her stools behind the labs.A different truck offered her neighbor 15,000 pounds a day and a story he could tell his family. Two days of that wage was a month of rent on her street. You did not need a lecture on identity to explain why a boy answered the recruitment call. In a city where the state had made survival illegal and a collapsing currency had made the factory irrelevant, a soldier’s wage was the only thing that replaced the state.In 2018, a man sat at her stall like any customer. He noticed her phone, which was basic and worn at the edges. Over the course of several visits, the talk moved toward money, and he offered her a new phone and weekly payments of real money. He wanted her to sit among us and report what the students said: who was organizing, who came and went.She refused the offer. She did not tell us at the time and carried that refusal alone until the regime fell. When she finally mentioned it, I asked why she had never said. She said she did not want us to worry or do something stupid. Mostly — and this is the sentence that has not left me — she did not want fear to change what we were doing at the gate.There was a small room in the pharmacy faculty where leftover donated drugs went to patients from the hospital next door. The tea women brought their children. A registrar looked at a sick child on a stool, and a pharmacist walked out with the medicine. There were no forms, and nobody paid 15,000 a day for any of it.Guns and GoldI sat with a miner from Jebel Amer whose hands were burned from mercury during the sit-in in May 2019, in the place we called Kolombia, the open ground behind the railway tracks. He said the RSF took 30 percent of everything.The mine had closed after fighting with Musa Hilal’s men, and he had come to Khartoum with nothing. He joined the sit-in. He said if the RSF came, he would fight. On June 3, he disappeared, and I never found him afterward.After clashes with Hilal, the RSF took Jebel Amer. At the peak, they were extracting something like forty kilograms a day. The metal was processed with mercury, then flown from Khartoum airport to Dubai — sometimes a hundred kilograms a flight, once a week — with no customs paperwork on the Sudanese side. From Dubai, it entered the global gold market, occasionally passing through European refineries that did not ask where it came from. Investigators later put the annual take at more than a billion US dollars.From 2015, the same force was sending men to Yemen for Saudi and Emirati pay. The UAE had been cultivating Sudanese military figures since the early 2010s; when the Yemen war needed ground forces composed of men who could move fast and not ask questions, they called the RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. Estimates of the deployment range from 14,000 to 40,000 fighters between 2015 and 2020.The pay was invdollars, which meant you could recruit faster than the army, buy equipment, and build a buffer against any future rupture with Khartoum. Fighters rotated home having been trained in urban combat and logistics. I remember the new trucks in Khartoum that year. I did not know the money was Gulf money, although I knew the men who had burned villages in Darfur were moving through my city as if they owned it.The RSF was not, by this point, a paramilitary force sustained by weapons. It was a mining and logistics operation that maintained an army. The weapons were evidence of its power, which derived from gold.With that gold, Hemedti built an empire that ran parallel to the state instead of through it. Al Junaid, the family conglomerate, became one of the largest mining and construction operations in the country. In October 2019, people in Talodi, South Kordofan, set fire to one of its cyanide plants after the runoff poisoned their water and killed their cattle. Guards opened fire, but the crowd burned it anyway.Investigators at Global Witness later traced RSF payments moving through UAE-based front companies into accounts at the National Bank of Abu Dhabi and documented the purchase of more than 900 Toyota Hilux and Land Cruiser vehicles. There were real estate holdings across the capital, farms in Darfur, and a trucking fleet. The gold bought more than guns — it bought a parallel economy, booked in Dubai.Russia’s Wagner Group arrived around 2017 for the same metal, exchanging military training and equipment for mining concessions in RSF territory. When the US Treasury sanctioned those operations in 2020, the networks reorganized through UAE-based intermediaries. The buyer did not change.Swissaid, reading the UAE’s own trade figures for 2024, found that Dubai imported twenty-nine metric tons of gold from Sudan that year, a big increase from seventeen metric tons the year before. According to the same figures, eighteen additional metric tons came from Chad and nine from Libya, two countries that are not famous for their gold mines but serve as transit routes for metal moved out of RSF territory.Supply and DemandIn September this year, Michael Waltz and Massad Boulos argued in Foreign Policy that peace in Sudan can only come after a weapons embargo, extending the old Darfur ban of 2005 across the whole country. Drones, they write, do not stop at Darfur’s border, and they are right about the geography. On September 11, the United Nations Security Council extended existing measures for one month, until October 9. Washington has been pushing for a nationwide ban, while Moscow opposes any expansion.Waltz and Boulos frame the problem as one of supply: more than a dozen countries are feeding both sides, and an extension of the ban will block them from doing so. Some of that is right. But an arms embargo addresses a supply problem — the flow of weapons — while the political economy of militia recruitment is a problem of demand.The UAE is not just one supplier among others. It is the buyer of last resort for Sudanese gold and the logistics node for the air bridge into Darfur. Dubai’s refineries process the metal, and the same financial infrastructure enables the flights.The profit is not incidental to the war. A force paid from the mine, through Dubai, does better when the country is in pieces.None of this is a defense of the Sudanese army. It has a history of coups, of alliances with Islamists, of violence in the peripheries. But a ruined army still has to pretend it employs people on behalf of a state. It still needs ports, a capital, a population that eats if the flag is going to mean anything.There are steps that could be taken in response. One important move would be to complement the weapons ban with Kimberley-style certification for Sudanese gold at the point when it enters refineries. Another would be to apply sanctions on UAE-based entities that form part of the air bridge and on the front companies and bank accounts that convert the metal into Toyotas.Filling the SilenceIqbal had to leave Haj Yousif when the fighting reached her neighborhood. She went to her sister’s place in Omdurman, not to work but to wait.I called her from Halfa, near the Egyptian border, after I left. The line is always bad, always dropping in the middle of a sentence so you do not know if she heard you. At first, I talked too much, filling the silence the way you do when you are afraid the other person has gone. Then I learned to wait.I kept asking whether she had found a stall. She had not. She said the city was not hers. Her voice came through tired but still the same.I can still do the arithmetic from Soba to Haj Yousif in my head: 1,500 for twelve hours; 30,000 for a room; 15,000 for a day with a gun.The truck paid better. She asked if I was eating anyway.

America’s already threadbare welfare state is on the brink of total collapse. Over the next ten years, national funding for Medicaid, whose benefits 81 million Americans rely upon, will be cut by about $1 trillion. States that expanded Medicaid access under the Affordable Care Act will be hit especially hard. More immediately, in just a few days, on October 1, and again on January 1, various new requirements for Medicaid eligibility will be instituted. This means that receiving and maintaining insurance will suddenly become much more difficult for millions of Americans.The result of all of these changes, enacted by H. R. 1, or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will be to throw states across the country into health and budget crises as their Medicaid funding falls off a cliff, with some of the worst effects of the bill conveniently placed after the midterm elections. There is one state, however, that could avoid that fate, should Proposition 40, or the California Billionaire Tax, pass this November.The Big Beautiful Bill blasted open a $30 billion hole in annual Medicaid coverage for Californians, a program the state calls Medi-Cal. Prop 40 proposes to backfill much of that loss with a onetime 5 percent tax on billionaire wealth raising an estimated $100 billion, most of it earmarked for health care. It’s a percentage so small that, given the current speed at which their wealth is accumulating, most billionaires in California would earn back the total amount of money lost in a matter of months. While much of the discourse around Prop 40 has understandably been devoted to what it means to tax the billionaires, it is saving Medi-Cal — and not some vague notion of “punishing the rich” — that is the central purpose of the initiative.However, rather than support this pragmatic solution to a looming crisis, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California has officially remained neutral on the initiative, which was put forth by one of their own member unions, SEIU United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW). Now investigations commissioned by SEIU California and the international union allege that SEIU-UHW’s president, Dave Regan, the man widely acknowledged as the architect of the tax, has attempted to “extort” support for Prop 40 from them, according to the inflammatory headline in the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong.Coming less than two months before the election in November, the allegations against Regan bear all the hallmarks of a politically timed campaign — an attempt to chip away at Prop 40’s popularity. Now SEIU will have to decide which path to take: save health care coverage for nearly fifteen million Californians, or surrender to the billionaires.The key allegations against Regan are that he attempted to “extort” support for Prop 40 from SEIU California by threatening to investigate governance issues at the state council, and that this action was part of a pattern of “bullying,” directed at women in particular. At issue are Regan’s interactions with SEIU California’s then president, David Huerta, and its executive director, Tia Orr, who claims Regan attempted to “intimidate” her into supporting Prop 40. The most serious allegation is that Regan assaulted one of Orr’s predecessors, Courtni Pugh, in 2009. According to Pugh, Regan kicked open her office door, cornering her against the wall, and pressed his fingers to her chest, swearing at her. “I told my colleagues and organization leaders when it occurred,” Pugh said in a statement. “I was asked to participate in the later investigation because so many people had heard about the 2009 incident over the years.”Regan, in turn, claims that both are “complete fabrications.”Regan and SEIU-UHW’s conflicts with SEIU California are long-standing. According to SEIU-UHW, in 2019 when SEIU California allegedly attempted to broker a deal with Uber that would have traded away rideshare drivers’ labor rights for a weak form of sectoral bargaining, Regan and SEIU-UHW threatened to publicly oppose the proposal. The governance challenge goes back to the 2021 resignation of Orr’s predecessor, Alma Hernandez, who stepped down after being charged with fraud, later pleading guilty to felony counts of embezzlement and tax fraud. Regan admits to having concerns over the “shortcomings in the state council’s governance structure in the wake of [this] corruption scandal” but denies having threatened any action over these concerns.Since Prop 40’s conception, Governor Gavin Newsom — no doubt with his eyes on the White House — has vowed to defeat the measure. Should it pass, it would be a major blow to his presidential ambitions. In July, SEIU California leaders surrounded Newsom as he signed the Fair Share from Big Corporations Act, which claimed to “ensure corporations pay their fair share, protecting vital services for Californians.” What the bill actually does is punt the measure to next year, when a new governor takes office. By touting this delay tactic as a win and in remaining neutral on Prop 40, SEIU California has proven itself even more loyal to the Democratic Party machine than the California Democratic Party, which in fact bucked Newsom and endorsed the Billionaire Tax.Orr, who counts many friends in the governor’s office, has worked with Newsom on a string of labor-related bills that, while hailed as “historic” and “landmark” victories, involved major concessions to employers: dropping the joint-liability provision from the bill that established California’s Fast Food Council and trading sectoral bargaining for rideshare drivers for lower minimum insurance requirements for Uber and Lyft.Pugh’s allegations of physical intimidation revolve around events not from a few months ago but from seventeen years prior. And while the Los Angeles Times noted that Pugh, now a political consultant, has worked against Prop 40, it failed to mention that she is a longtime member of Newsom’s inner campaign circle, having worked as his political director fighting the 2021 recall effort. In November 2024, Newsom appointed Pugh to the Exposition Park and California Science Center Board of Directors. Currently, Pugh is also a partner at Hilltop Public Solutions, a consulting firm working against Prop 40.SEIU California filed formal charges with the international union in February; the investigations found several of the accusations against Regan to be credible. SEIU-UHW, in turn, claims that this internal report was leaked to the LA Times by SEIU California attorney Glenn Rothner (whose resignation Regan has long called for), and that it has its own charges filed against SEIU California working their way through the international union. This is a clear case of an internal union spat, which — without Prop 40 at stake — would have found no reason to surface in the pages of a billionaire-owned newspaper less than two months before voters decide on the Billionaire Tax.The “Extreme Center” and Their Attacks on the Rising Left Are a Growing ProblemTo be clear: the accusations against Regan are serious and demand serious inquiry. But the context in which they have been made renders them entirely unserious. Intimidation and harassment in progressive circles, and particularly in unions, is a real problem that must be stamped out. What is so frustrating about this politicized use of such allegations, turning justified revulsion against such behavior into a campaign smear, is that it makes real offenders much harder to punish. People see examples of accusations like these surfacing at such times and conclude that it’s all election-season theater. It’s not — or, at least, it shouldn’t be — but the release of these findings weeks before an extremely contentious election will certainly muddy the waters. This is all the more shameful given that it has been deployed to sink the one initiative standing in the way of the dismantling of Medicaid in California.Many progressives and unionists have condemned Regan and SEIU-UHW, without first questioning who is making these accusations, when, and for what purpose. That includes the California Nurses Association, a Prop 40 supporter that has called on Regan to resign.But others in the labor movement have been more careful. Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation, which has endorsed Prop 40, pointed out to the Los Angeles Times that the members of Regan’s union, overwhelmingly women and women of color, just reelected him. “Ultimately they have the ability to make this determination of whether he’s an appropriate leader, which they just made again,” she said. “What’s most important is that we have to keep our eyes on the fact that Medi-Cal is being cut and we have no solution but the billionaire’s tax to fill that cut.” By all means, after this election season, this internal SEIU squabble ought to be sorted through. But if you’re making a big show of this now, and you are also not doing everything in your power to see that Prop 40 passes with flying colors this November — ensuring that nearly 15 million Californians keep their healthcare coverage — it simply means that you are carrying water for the billionaires.With the rise of left-wing politics in America, the political writer Tariq Ali has warned of the machinations of the “extreme center” and how centrist Democrat types have grown much more radical in their methods with the increasing polarization between left-wing social democracy and right-wing authoritarianism. The Left should be on guard against such methods, which will only grow more insidious and grotesque as the center’s base evaporates. It will do everything it can to cling to power, including smear campaigns that rely upon identity-based oppression, and a Left worthy of the name will be able to distinguish between a legitimate misdeed and partisan mudslinging.In this particular case, the political question could not be more urgent. As a therapist who has worked for many years with low-income patients, many of them already struggling to navigate byzantine Medicaid requirements, I am bracing for the mental health crisis that the H. R. 1 cuts will have in my home state of New York. As bad as the mental health crisis is now, even more horrors are on the horizon: already overbooked clinics will soon be barring their doors, which means countless patients will soon end up on the streets, untreated and unmedicated. Already overburdened emergency rooms will be overrun. The state will be in fiscal crisis. All so that the ultrarich get to pay even less in taxes than they already do.“Tax the Rich” Campaigns Aren’t Just About Expanding Our Threadbare Welfare State but Also Holding On to What We HaveHaving worked on New York City Democratic Socialists of America’s Tax the Rich campaign now for several legislative cycles, I know how long and difficult the fight for progressive taxation is. While much recent media attention has gone to political candidates on the Left, the possibility of taxing the rich in California to fund Medi-Cal might be the most important political opening in this upcoming midterm election. I do not know Dave Regan personally. What I do know is that nothing I could learn about Dave Regan right now — particularly about an interaction he had with someone almost two decades ago — could change my mind about the political and moral necessity of passing the Billionaire Tax in order to save Medi-Cal and keep health care coverage for nearly fifteen million Californians. I only wish we had a similar option in New York.The squabble between SEIU California and Regan now goes up the chain to SEIU President April Verrett. Verrett could suspend Regan while the charges are heard, confirming a common perception of SEIU as a union in the Democratic Party’s back pocket, one already looking to score points with a possible Newsom presidential administration. At this particular moment, when Californians should be focused on saving Medi-Cal from collapse, this would amount to a declaration of unquestioned, unthinking loyalty to the extreme center.But Verrett could also defer this mess, help push Prop 40 over the finish line, and thereby signal that SEIU is ready to be a voice for the working class rather than follow dutifully behind billionaire-backed political candidates.Nothing less than the healthcare of fifteen million Californians — and soon, tens of millions of Americans — hangs in the balance.

Eight hundred workers at a Walmart distribution center in Mississauga, Ontario, succeeded where others have not: they are now working under a two-year contract with North America’s largest logistics giant.The landmark collective bargaining agreement went into effect on July 1, nearly two years after workers won union representation, joining Unifor Local 252, motivated by low wages and unsafe working conditions.As punishment two years ago, Walmart bumped the pay of every logistics worker in Canada — except those who unionized. This was an effective maneuver to halt further union drives.“Walmart gave all the wage increases to all the nonunion folks, and everything fell apart,” said Angela Drew Kimelman, a Unifor organizer who worked on organizing campaigns at multiple warehouses, including one in Cornwall, near Montreal.But now, the new contract prevents Walmart from raising wages at other warehouses without doing the same at this one. The unionized workers have received a matching raise and back pay for the months when other warehouse workers received raises that they didn’t.Unifor has restarted its organizing efforts at other Ontario warehouses.“Quite the Eye-Opener”In past union drives, Walmart has closed facilities rather than deal with a union. So far, no such threat has emerged for this warehouse.Instead, two months into the contract, members are moving forward with contract education and implementation for both workers and the boss.For the first time, the workers have the protections of a contractual disciplinary procedure. “If you’re at another distribution center and they walk you out, you’re pretty much on your own, at the mercy of the employer,” said Rodolfo Pilozo, a thirty-year Walmart worker and member of Unifor’s organizing and negotiations committees.Kathryn Cespite, an eight-year worker at the warehouse, acted as an interim steward with a coworker in the contract’s first week. “That was quite the eye-opener,” she said. A manager tried to discipline a worker without letting him tell his side of the story.Stalling TacticsIt took eighteen months of negotiations to reach a deal. Walmart used stalling tactics, like offering very few dates for negotiations.“I believe they were intentionally trying to drag out the process and frustrate the membership into decertifying us,” said Shayne Fields, Unifor’s lead negotiator. There was a decertification petition, he said, and workers reported that Walmart was covertly supporting it, but it never got much traction.The company also brought in temp workers, implying a threat to replace union workers.“Walmart was feeding people a lot of misinformation,” Cespite said. “I let the union representatives know what was being said in meetings, and then the union was able to counter it.“They were taking advantage of people’s lack of knowledge about what unions are,” she said. “One of the challenges we’re running into is that a lot of the people don’t have any experience with unions and don’t know what it’s all about.”Now that the contract is in place, “we have two years to educate ourselves and others,” said Pilozo. “It’s not just the president of Local 252, or of the national union. It’s us, collectively; we can make changes.”Why Walmart Gave InOntario’s labor laws helped. The law includes a conciliation process for first contracts. First there’s mediation, and then disputes can move to settlement through arbitration. Unifor’s lead negotiator, Fields, filed the paperwork to move that process forward, which started an external clock that pressured Walmart to settle.Geography also helped. Labor scholar Benjamin Fong argues it would be “a huge pain for Walmart” to relocate this regional distribution center, which serves most of Ontario and Quebec, because the area is hemmed in by the Great Lakes and the layout of Toronto. Walmart already closed its distribution centers in Quebec, which has even stronger labor laws.Walmart worker Simon Hayford thinks the company settled because executives were worried about more warehouses joining the union, and they didn’t want to draw more attention to the unionized one. He and Pilozo have been participating in Unifor’s efforts to organize other Walmart warehouses.“I’ve talked with some of the other warehouse guys, and they say ‘We’re making the same money so why would we do it?’” Hayford said. But he anticipates the other benefits the contract provides, like an improved safety committee and protection against unfair terminations, will show the value of the union over time.

For years, Europe’s rising far-right parties have wrapped themselves in the language of sovereignty. Draped in their respective national flags, each has promised to put national interests and national identity above all else. France’s Rassemblement National deploys the slogan “Les Français d’abord,” meaning “the French first,” while Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland follows suit with “Deutschland zuerst.” In her first postelection speech, Giorgia Meloni, leader of Italy’s governing party, Fratelli d’Italia, promised to “start from national interests,” asserting it as a bedrock principle from which all other considerations must flow. The movement’s entire political vocabulary revolves around the claim that only the European far right can defend domestic priorities against pressures from abroad.The genocide in Gaza and the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon have laid bare the hollowness of that rhetoric. In the United States, the new war has once again disproven the notion that Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is less imperial, less militarist, or more committed to peace than the liberal establishment. In Europe, it has revealed that when Washington or Tel Aviv calls, self-proclaimed sovereigntists suddenly lose all interest in national independence.The war on Iran is setting the entire Middle East ablaze, with devastating consequences, and Europe is not immune from the reverberations. A continent already suffering repercussions from the war in Ukraine now faces the fallout from a second major conflict close to home. As energy prices skyrocket, all polling suggests broad public opposition in Europe to the US-Israeli war. If Europe’s far right really believed its own rhetoric about national interest and independence, now would be the moment to prove it. Instead it has fallen obediently into line.In Italy, that subordination has taken a tragicomic form. When the war broke out, Guido Crosetto, the defense minister from Meloni’s pro-Trump party, was in Dubai, reportedly for family reasons. He was unaware that the war was about to begin because, he admitted, the United States had not informed him of the imminent attack. As the airspace closed and Iran began to retaliate, Crosetto was consequently stranded in Dubai.The image was almost too neat: a senior minister of a government obsessed with national strength and prestige caught in the middle of a regional war whose timing and escalation had clearly been decided without any consideration for his input. But even this humiliation did not stop Meloni’s far-right government from authorizing the use of US bases on Italian soil for the war on Iran, even while making vague and largely semantic distinctions about the limits of technical or logistical support. At the same time, the Italian parliament approved a controversial new law equating many criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. Rather than assert national independence, the far right dutifully brought Italy to heel.This acquiescence is especially striking given Italy’s own history. During the second half of the twentieth century, despite the limits imposed by the Cold War, Italy developed a foreign policy based on dialogue and cooperation with the Middle East, including with Palestine and Iran. That approach gave it a degree of sovereignty in foreign policy and a certain standing in the region, both of which have now been forfeited in favor of subservience to the United States and Israel.The same pattern can be seen elsewhere. At the outbreak of the war, in the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders praised Israeli génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu for making the world safer by bombing Tehran — even stating, absurdly, that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize — and attacked the Dutch government for not supporting the United States and Israel with sufficient diligence and immediacy. In Britain, anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of endangering the “special relationship” with Washington by showing some initial hesitancy in his support, warning that without the United States, Britain would be defenseless. In Spain, the ultranationalist Vox party’s Santiago Abascal lamented that the Spanish government had “hindered” the bombings and angered Trump. Again and again, the parties that claim to put nation first have proven the most eager to betray their own people’s interests in order to appease Trump and Netanyahu.In all this, the far right has become more closely aligned with the liberal-conservative establishment that governs the European institutions. The distance between them had been narrowing steadily for years, and this war has made that convergence even more visible. Both parties are all too glad to play their part as subordinates in the global hierarchy.Since the war’s outbreak, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly condemned every Iranian attack in the region as “reckless,” “unjustifiable,” and “indiscriminate.” She airily speaks as though these were not retaliatory acts in response to US-Israeli strikes, which are hardly ever mentioned and never condemned. The moral double standard of the European Union’s institutions is impossible to miss here. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they constantly invoked the language of the attacker and the attacked, along with the sanctity of international law. That posture has now been abandoned entirely, as the establishment rushes to grant Washington and Tel Aviv their every wish and excuse their every action.Yet in this bleak landscape there has been a flicker of a defense of sovereignty. It has come not from the nationalist right but from the Left. Spain’s social democratic government, headed by Pedro Sánchez in coalition with junior partner Sumar, has been outspoken in opposing the war since the first strikes on Tehran. It has denounced the attack on Iran as illegal and unjust, emphasized the severe economic and political costs for Europe, and refused to allow the United States to use Spanish bases on its territory for military operations. It is no surprise that this stance has enraged Trump and, with him, Spain’s own far right.To be fair, there has also been criticism from the left of Sánchez for not drawing all the necessary conclusions from such a pacifist position, above all regarding Spain’s membership in NATO. But we must also understand Spain’s isolated position within Europe on this issue. At a time when almost every major government has lined up behind the war, Spain’s position is a courageous step in the right direction, reminding us what an actual sovereign posture looks like: not theatrical nationalism but the willingness to say no to imperial escalation even under immense pressure.For the Left, sovereignty has never meant militarism, hatred of migrants, or fantasies of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. It means popular sovereignty — and thus upholding European citizens’ preference for peace — as well as state sovereignty, both with regard to one’s own country and others, as a pillar of peace, cooperation, and international law. That is the only sovereignty worthy of the name.

We’re several weeks into a fierce debate over whether artificial intelligence (AI) will kill us all. Triggered by a spate of former workers at major AI firms coming forward to warn that a future superintelligent AI could lead to human extinction, the debate has inspired a kaleidoscopic array of views that don’t break down along neat ideological lines. Some think it’s all hogwash, either the product of ignorant hype or part of a cynical hype campaign by the industry itself. For others, convinced that the tech’s potential capabilities are no joke, they’re warnings that need to be taken deadly seriously.In many ways, though, the debate is besides the point. It’s not that we shouldn’t try to get to the bottom of what exactly happened with the HuggingFace hacking incident, and that we shouldn’t worry about the question of rogue agents or the dangers of a future superintelligent AI that could threaten our continued existence. It’s that what we call AI has already copiously proven it carries profound danger for the human race — and is doing immense harm way before it’s even remotely close to reaching superintelligence.Consider the fact that AI “almost started a war” between the United States and China this past spring, in the words of one source who told CNN about it. A special operations command analyst had used a chatbot to put together a report about the cargo of a Chinese ship sailing in the Middle East, which hallucinated that the vessel was carrying the components of a nuclear weapons program, prompting the US military to mobilize to intercept and board the ship, guns drawn. Military planes had even taken off for this purpose. The operation was called off after officials looked into the report and realized it was AI-generated nonsense.According to CNN, the incident was the result of two overlapping trends: the fact that younger “AI native” analysts tend to rely on and trust the technology to an inordinate degree and the Pentagon’s aggressive adoption of AI under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It’s worth noting that if any direct war were to break out between the United States and China, it would carry grave danger for the entire world, not just because it would likely lead to a global depression, but because any military hostilities between the two have a high chance of going nuclear — something that really could threaten the survival of our species.The incident perfectly distills the very real, currently existing dangers of AI. We’re so fixated on the future catastrophic potential of hypothetical superintelligent AI agents that we’re forgetting AI is already causing real harm and carrying massive risks — not because it’s smarter than us, but because it is flawed, error-ridden technology that we are rushing to shoehorn into seemingly every facet of our lives.That includes war. Long before the incident with the Chinese ship, AI was directly responsible for the horrific, mass loss of innocent human life thanks to being folded into military operations. We saw it most recently with the Trump administration’s murder of scores of Iranian schoolgirls, where the military’s trust in Palantir’s AI tool Maven was a major part of the chain of disastrous decision-making that led to the atrocity.US Central Command personnel reportedly compressed what used to be hours of work involved in choosing targets into a few minutes by feeding the underlying intelligence into Maven, simply assuming the AI tool would catch and highlight any errors. It did not. Before that, we saw AI used in a more apocalyptic way for the purpose of war in Gaza, where AI targeting was at the heart of Israel’s indisciminate flattening of the territory.But this is only the most overtly homicidal use of AI. Many of its social harms have been more insidious.The unleashing of AI onto the public has caused a by now widely documented phenomenon of what Massachusettes Institute of Technology researchers have termed “cognitive surrender” among college students who, struggling with deadlines and the pressure to succeed, have turned en masse to using the technology to write their essays and otherwise do assignments for them. The proportion of students doing this has now reached a depressing 95 percent.The outsourcing of their very thinking to machines has meant that young graduates are not just emerging from their studies without seemingly actually learning their field but with genuinely weaker brain power: a worse memory, an inability to persist with intellectual challenges, and vanishing critical thinking skills. Wall Street firms, normally big boosters of the AI industry, have, when push comes to shove, found themselves less than impressed with the young workers it is producing, underwhelmed at a generation of new hires who prove remarkably shallow thinkers. It’s so bad that the students themselves think the technology is weakening their critical thinking even as they continue to rely on it.Meanwhile, as people have turned to AI for therapy and other help with their personal demons, AI chatbots have been linked to a series of suicides and even murders by troubled individuals, a number of them teenagers. The problem is that the technology — besides not being human or having professional mental health expertise — is designed to flatter, please, and otherwise keep the user engaged as long as possible. As a result, chatbots’ role in these tragedies has ranged from being useless to help users, to feeding their delusions and actively helping them hurt themselves or others.That’s when AI isn’t helping otherwise mentally stable individuals hurt themselves with lethally bad advice: the man hospitalized after ChatGPT likely advised him to replace salt in his diet with an old-fashioned sedative; the stranded hikers who nearly died when Google Gemini advised them to pack far less food and water than they needed; the pastor who nearly died of a pulmonary embolism after ChatGPT advised him not to seek medical help; the elderly neuroscientist who put off cancer treatment because he had come to trust AI hallucinations over his own doctor; and so many more.This is because AI chatbots and other tools often do not know what they’re talking about. One study (from an AI provider, no less) found seventeen large language models (LLMs) only answered two out of five financial questions correctly. Another found they hallucinate legal responses between 58 and 88 percent of the time.AI chatbots sycophantically back a variety of potentially harmful statements from users nearly half (47 percent) of the time, according to another. This is particularly alarming when it comes to medical advice, which a study found AI was accurate about only 76 percent of the time — a passing grade for a college paper but abysmal in the medical context, where being wrong once could mean death or debilitation.But it’s not just chatbots. AI’s rapid integration into a variety of expert fields has led to adverse consequences. Court sanctions are on the rise because lawyers keep filing briefs with AI-made errors. On the other side of the bench, two federal judges allegedly relied on AI to issue error-ridden court orders, a serious concern given the expansive power courts have in the US political system, and because judges are broadly insulated from civil liability. The use of AI for medical devices used in surgeries has caused a spate of injuries, including strokes after surgeons were misdirected by the technology in ways that damaged arteries.A Stanford and Harvard study from earlier this year found the best AI models made “severely harmful clinical recommendations” in medical cases 22 percent of the time, often through omission. In other cases, AI is being used by doctor’s and dentist’s offices to justify hawking expensive treatments that patients don’t actually need.And then there is the way that AI algorithms are being used to exacerbate and justify preexisting corporate malfeasance. An ongoing class-action lawsuit against UnitedHealth alleges that its various companies used an error-prone AI tool to serially deny insurance to patients. A different lawsuit alleges that an AI recruiting software carried out systematic employment discrimination against black applicants and others.In all of these cases, people are being hurt or threatened by AI not because it’s achieved sentience and is smarter than us, but the opposite: because it’s a flawed, at times comically inept technology that humans are actively making choices to deploy in situations where it is most likely to do serious damage, sometimes in ways actively designed to screw over others.In fact, it is arguably the very market-driven hype about AI’s imminent superintelligence that has contributed to all this. Overstating AI’s capabilities has helped encourage its rapid uptake in fields like war or health care depite the fact that it’s not ready for prime time and makes those unfamiliar with or ignorant about the technology more likely to take what it says at face value, even when it’s wrong or hallucinating.The dangers of a hypothetical AI superintelligence should be a concern. But we do not have to determine if this is really our future to be able to call for development of this technology to be urgently paused, for it to be heavily regulated, and to put serious guardrails on it, if not outright banish it from being used for particular purposes. The dumber, mistake-prone AI of today is enough of a risk to humanity as it is.

In his new autobiography, Francis Fukuyama boasts that for decades “students in introductory classes in international relations all over the world were required to read [Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations] alongside The End of History.” The flex is warranted; during my undergrad we were assigned both essays in one of my classes on international law. Many intellectuals dream about reaching this level of notoriety. But for Fukuyama, fame came at a heavy price. Namely, he became the kind of thinker whose ideas everyone has an opinion on even while they resolutely avoid reading him (see 99 percent of recent conservative commentary on Karl Marx and Marxism for an example).For years, Fukuyama’s problematic but provocative thesis about reaching the “end of history” was subjected to a lot of superficial criticism from the Left and the Right. A standard move by critical intellectuals was to hold Fukuyama up as the poster boy for smug triumphalist neoliberalism, resting thoughtlessly on its post–Cold War laurels. This was true even if, as Slavoj Žižek often points out, in practice most leftist intellectuals and parties seem to have accepted the inevitability of capitalist realism. On the other side of the fence, right-wing critics like Huntington chastised Fukuyama with a kind of squishy liberal optimism, hypothesizing that humanity wasn’t quite done clashing with itself yet.A Portrait of the Last Man as a Young ManIn the Realm of the Last Man is an unusual book; an autobiography that pulls triple duty, it ruminates on its subject’s complex life, sets the record straight on past debates and criticisms, and closes by defending liberal democracy against rising competitors on the Left and Right. The book pulls off the first two admirably, though the apologia for liberal democracy highlights some of Fukuyama’s limitations as a commentator.The self-portrait Fukuyama paints is of an intellectually inclined man who has always tempered his speculative impulses while keeping one foot firmly on the ground. Aside from giving himself the occasional and by and large justified pats on the back, Fukuyama comes across as a confident but relatively humble man well aware of what he owes to others. The long sections on how his ethnically Japanese family was interred in concentration camps during World War II are filled with righteous indignation. Honestly describing his complex relationship with his professor father, Fukuyama notes how he “remained a diehard liberal his whole life.”The elder Fukuyama was disappointed when his son gravitated toward moderate conservatism. This rightward shift “pained my father greatly”, we are told. “He didn’t really understand what had changed my thinking; he told his friends that one of my professors had gone to work for the Pentagon and ‘brainwashed’ me after returning to academia.” Fukuyama admits to regretting some of this youthful animosity toward his father and ending up now committed to the kind of progressive liberalism he dismissed as a young man.This transition from left to center-right to center-left critic of radicalism on either side takes up the bulk of Fukuyama’s reflections. Early on, he became fascinated with postmodern critical theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other French philosophers. These were all the rage in the 1970s, and Fukuyama recounts that his “fascination with postmodernism led me to graduate from Cornell early and move to Paris so I could study with the masters.” Unfortunately, this exposure to unfiltered postmodern theory led him to conclude that these ideas were part of a project that was “essentially nihilistic, built on the assertions of the impossibility of reasoned discourse, inference from empirical evidence, and ultimately of philosophy itself. Truth claims simply masked the assertions of power by a dominant social actor at the expense of groups that were marginalized.”The Burdens of HistoryFrustrated by postmodernism’s endless criticism, Fukuyama chose to move in the opposite direction. Before graduating he fell under the influence of Alexandre Kojève, Allan Bloom, and Leo Strauss, among others. Though they differed substantially in their theoretical and political beliefs, they were united in their conviction that philosophy’s pursuit of capital T truth was a noble enterprise.Of particular importance to Fukuyama was the debate between Leo Strauss and the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. In Natural Right and History, Strauss famously repudiated the strong versions of historicism — the view that social values and institutions were entirely the product of historical developments rather than human nature — associated with Edmund Burke, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx. Whether in its more conservative or radical forms, historicism led to the view that what counted as true and good was largely settled by the norms of the time. Strauss was famously guarded about his own philosophical preferences but expressed a qualified admiration for the commitment to discovering timeless truths one saw in ancient philosophy.Kojève, however, famously interpreted Hegel as arguing that human nature developed over time, and with it our ability to more richly understand our relation to truth and to one another. Consequently, the philosopher’s goal wasn’t to understand transcendent truths but rather the process of how our conceptions of truth became richer over time. Kojève gave this idea a political spin, hypothesizing that one day we would reach the “end of history”; there would be no more debates worth having because we will have worked out how to offer meaningful recognition to each and all.Fukuyama describes his own view as “middle ground between the Strauss and Kojève positions, and indeed the middle ground is what I tried to elaborate in The End of History and the Last Man.” He is sympathetic to the view that historical processes shape human convictions, and that changes in politics and society are possible. This includes the prospect of improvement through the cautious application of reason; most radically, this increasingly includes the ability to apply science to alter major features of human biology even prior to conception. The prospect of endless unconstrained change worries Fukuyama, who insists that there is such a thing as human nature. What he means by this is a “core set of faculties and inclinations that ultimately served to limit human autonomy and ensure that there was also continuity in the human experience over time.”One of these core human inclinations is what he, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, calls the thymotic desire for recognition. In his book Identity, Fukuyama describes thymos as the “third part of the soul” alongside desire and reason. Thymos is “the seat of judgements of worth. . . . [individuals driven by thymos] also crave positive judgements about their worth or dignity. Those judgements can come from within. . . . but they are most often made by other people in the society around them who recognize their worth.” Fukuyama thinks that while liberal societies have done much to rationally organize societies to secure many human needs, they have long struggled to offer anything like equal recognition to all their members. This stirs the thymotic yearnings of the soul, leading to resentment of those who are recognized as greater or more valuable.Fukuyama is not usually understood as a thinker interested in human psychology, but this is more a product of a general failure to read more than the title of The End of History and the Last Man. Few familiar with this work ever “ bothered to read the last five chapters of my book, which dealt with the problem of the last man.” The book is a considered rumination on whether liberal capitalism was indeed the last ideology standing at the end of history. At the time Fukuyama hypothesized it might be, left-wing alternatives to liberal capitalism were lifeless — the Soviet Union was still tottering on in 1989 when Fukuyama wrote the essay, “The End of History?”, on which he based his book, but it collapsed two years later, as if to promote his hardcover.The fall of the Soviet Union profoundly discredited communism, while many of the Left’s brightest minds had become enamored with trendy but ultimately “nihilistic” postmodern critical theory of which Fukuyama had always been wary. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, the last chapters of The End of History make the case that many right-of-center personalities will remain driven by “megalothymonia” — a yearning for a sense of superiority and greatness that makes them discontented with merely being the well-paid but bored technocratic managers of docile nations and respectably successful companies. As he put it near the close of The End of History:It is reasonable to wonder whether all people will believe that the kinds of struggles and sacrifices possible in a self-satisfied and prosperous liberal democracy are sufficient to call forth what is highest in man. For are there not indeed reservoirs of idealism that cannot be exhausted — indeed, that are not even touched — if one becomes a developer like Donald Trump, or a mountain climber like Reinhold Messner, or a politician like George Bush? Difficult as it is, in many ways, to be these individuals, and for all the recognition that they receive, their lives are not the most difficult, and the causes they serve are not the most serious or the most just. And as long as they are not, the horizon of human possibilities that they define will not be ultimately satisfying for the most thymotic natures.Fukuyama remains committed in broad strokes to the story he told more than thirty years ago. Liberal democracy provided material affluence and rational government for many. But personalities like Trump did indeed find simply being real estate developers and New York playboys destined for an esteemed place in the Epstein files unsatisfying. They wanted to be Alexandrian men of destiny, but they could only do this by smashing the liberal order and replacing it with one of their own making.Fukuyama shows real insight into the enduring populist appeal of the Right when he notes that liberals failed to recognize how these prejudices concealed a yearning to make moral judgements about the world that were more forceful than what mere toleration seemed to allow. In addition to failing to address the emotional needs of those who had no interest in just being an equal citizen in a society of equal citizens, liberalism failed to recognize the need people have for meaning beyond living day-to-day.These dissatisfied constituencies were primed to listen to megalothymotically driven populists who stoked their anger at being looked down upon by self-righteous liberals that chastised their moral views as so many racist, sexist, homophobic, and nationalist prejudices. What Trump et al. offered them was confirmation of their own moral superiority over those who pretended to be their betters, alongside a sense of cosmic significance in combating the evils of a decaying elite liberal order. For Fukuyama, the January 6 protesters didn’t just riot because they thought the election had been stolen from them. They wanted to “play-act at being armed revolutionaries defending their way of life” against sinister globalists and immigrant baristas making $7.50 an hour alike. The reality was that “they were simply dupes enlisted to soothe the ego of a single narcissistic fraudster.”Liberalism After History RestartedThe end of history ended after about twenty-five years, give or take, and we are very much in an era in which liberal democracy faces pressure on all fronts. Fukuyama has deep insights into the roots of the attack from the Right, which makes a great deal of sense given his early attraction to Strauss, Bloom, and the neoconservative movement — although his understanding of the Left’s impulses is more questionable. Throughout In The Realm of the Last Man he expresses considerable regret for where this early attraction led him. He signed a periodical calling for the United States to invade Iraq and unseat Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s. This of course ended in the death of almost a million Iraqi people and thousands of Americans troops. Fukuyama admits that he was driven to sign the letter more out of group loyalty than hawkishness. “The problem was psychological, and not a matter of policy judgement or moral disagreement. The issue was a mental block against taking a public stand against the views of longtime friends.” When Fukuyama did eventually break with the neoconservatives, it came at a significant cost, though he admits it was “liberating” to abandon right-wing orthodoxy and adopt more social democratic positions.Despite Fukuyama’s journey of maturation to the social democratic left, he still struggles with understanding the instincts and ideas that animate it. His curt dismissal of complex thinkers like Foucault and Derrida is just the tip of the iceberg. Fukuyama rather lazily dismisses the students who set up pro-Palestinian encampments as privileged ne’er-do-wells who “want a break from their lives of steady and unheroic striving” and quips that they are not “similarly outraged at the situation of Ukrainians besieged by Russia or victims of the civil war in Sudan.” The difference — that America’s government isn’t allied to Russia or Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces but is deeply committed to supporting Israel — seems not to register to Fukuyama.Elsewhere in In the Realm of the Last Man, Fukuyama complains that there is “no clear systematic vision on the left for what kind of society should replace liberal democracy, as there once was.” He is deeply wary of the recent tendency of young people to become “more sympathetic to socialism or Communism than previously” since in the past these have led to “nightmares.” This take is wildly out of date. Proposals for everything from “Nordic socialism” to “socialism in the twenty-first century” to “liberal socialism” abound. Moreover, these didn’t come out of a vacuum. Any decent history of socialism would show it is a political and economic tradition that’s as internally diverse as liberalism and conservatism are.A general refusal to draw too deeply on left-wing insights limits major dimensions of Fukuyama’s diagnosis of liberalism’s woes. He’s absolutely correct that the Right has always had a significant constituency made up of people who are dissatisfied with the prospect of being their brother’s equal and keeper. They want to conceive of themselves, and be acknowledged as, “recognizable superiors”, as Friedrich Hayek noted in his thoughtful essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative.” Many of the resentments that appear on the Right are fueled by anxiety around dispossession; that the unworthy, unwashed multitudes of the world are threatening to take away the hard-earned riches of citizens or positions at Ivy League universities. This combination of believing oneself to be simultaneously a superior and also a victim of the weak is very powerful and has given the Right a lot of cultural pull.But Fukuyama’s book doesn’t sufficiently interrogate the social origins of these attitudes, perhaps because its author remains at least somewhat sympathetic to them. He often chimes in to acclaim the importance of meritocracy and even gives one cheer for megalothymia as a “necessary motivator of any kind of human excellence. . . . ” What this doesn’t interrogate is just how the very emphasis liberals place on meritocratic mythologies has contributed to festering social resentments. Given his stated admiration for Michael Sandel, Fukuyama might have engaged with the former’s important book The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel is very critical of how the meritocratic myth that everyone ought to be given a (very unequal) opportunity to succeed while acknowledging that most will not succeed has produced pathological results. We have a vulgar ruling class that increasingly tells itself it owes nothing to anyone, and worse, many poor and lower-middle-class people who are told that if they can’t make it they have no one to blame but themselves. The message for the poor under meritocratic liberal capitalism is simple: save your pennies, cut out the Budweiser, and either go to college or invest early in Bitcoin. It should come as no surprise that a society riven by such toxic ideas would generate mass forms of resentment, and much of the blame must be laid at the feet of liberals who propagated meritocratic mythologies even in the face of mounting evidence showing the immeasurable amount we owe to others for whatever success we are lucky enough to achieve.At the conclusion of the 1989 essay, Fukuyama admitted he could “feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed”. Now history is once again back, the older Fukuyama mainly seems to feel a powerful nostalgia for the post-historical 1990s. He should be careful what he wishes for. It is perhaps appropriate that he would remain, to the last, someone whose political allegiances are stamped by the ideological parameters established back when neoliberal hegemony seemed untouchable. Over time, Fukuyama has steadily moved from the neoliberalism and neoconservatism of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the moderate progressivism of Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. But it was the failure of just these forms of centrism that paved the road to Trumpism — and they will not save us from it.

At the edge of Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, families cluster along the platform, their belongings packed into cloth bundles and plastic sacks. Children lie half asleep in their mothers’ laps as announcements echo overhead. Trains heading toward Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and beyond are full. Over the past few days, railway workers say, the crowds have grown noticeably thicker. Entire families, most of them daily wage laborers, wait with little more than essentials, as if preparing for a longer absence.“Something is wrong,” says Ab Rahman, thirty-four, a porter, or “coolie,” who has spent more than a decade navigating these railway platforms. “For four to five days now, there has been a heavy rush — mostly poor workers. They are going back.”For many, the crisis is not just about wages or rent. It is about something more immediate: the ability to cook a meal.Among those waiting at the platform is twenty-seven-year-old Ramesh Varma, a street vendor from Bihar’s Barwan Kala village. He had returned to Delhi barely fifteen days ago, hoping to rebuild his earnings. Now he is leaving again.“LPG [liquefied petroleum gas] refills were not available on time,” he says, sitting on the platform floor. “We kept waiting, going from one gas agency to another. Even when the gas cylinder comes, the cost is too high.”For many migrant workers, the inability to cook affordably disrupts the fragile economics of city life, where preparing food at home is often the only way to keep daily expenses under control. Varma’s decision to leave Delhi captures a growing reality across India’s working-class neighborhoods: as cooking fuel becomes expensive or inaccessible, survival itself becomes uncertain.Means-Tested LPGAcross India’s cities and industrial belts, the basic act of cooking a meal is becoming increasingly precarious for low-income households. Part of that shock reflects spillovers from the conflict in the Middle East, particularly due to disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit route for crude oil and LPG.India depends heavily on LPG imports, making domestic prices highly sensitive to global energy markets and external supply conditions. Fluctuations in international fuel prices and supply disruptions are increasingly passed on directly to households.Provision of India’s LPG subsidy, which exceeded 400 billion rupees annually in the mid-2010s, fell sharply by 2020–21 before being partially restored in recent years. Government budget data shows LPG subsidy expenditure has fluctuated sharply over the past decade, reflecting a broader shift toward market-linked pricing.Today LPG subsidies have become increasingly targeted rather than universal. In 2025–26, the government allocated around 120 billion rupees to support Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a program that subsidizes cooking gas for low-income households, reflecting a narrower approach to welfare support.For consumers, this translated into a steep rise in refill costs. The price of a standard 14.2-kilogram domestic LPG cylinder, which hovered around 400 to 500 rupees a decade ago, crossed 1,000 rupees in many cities in 2022, before easing slightly to around 850 to 950 rupees. For low-income households, this remains prohibitively expensive.The Numbers Behind the SqueezeWhile subsidies still exist, many households report receiving little meaningful relief. For a daily wage worker earning 300 to 500 rupees, a single refill can consume two to three days’ income, making regular use difficult to sustain. Parliamentary data indicates that PMUY beneficiaries use significantly fewer cylinders annually than other consumers, underscoring the affordability constraint.In Sangam Vihar, one of Delhi’s largest informal settlements, Parveena sits outside her one-room house, an empty LPG cylinder resting beside her like a useless object.“For the past few days, we have been running from one gas agency to another,” she says. “We are not getting refills on time. Without gas, we cannot even cook one meal.”A mother of two and a daily wage worker, Parveena has already begun cutting back. “For two days, my children have slept hungry,” she says. “Prices are rising every day. Even if we find LPG, it is too costly. We are poor; how can we pay so much just to cook food?”While India has expanded LPG access significantly over the past decade, sustained usage among low-income households remains uneven. In recent months, that strain has deepened. Reports from multiple states, including Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, point to refill delays, long waiting times, and rising dependence on alternative fuels.In some areas, households have begun reverting to firewood and kerosene fuels associated with both poverty and long-term health risks.Parveena’s neighbor notes quietly, “We cannot just leave this place. At least the men find some work here. . . . Somehow we survive with that.”In neighborhoods like these, leaving is rarely a real option. Survival depends on staying and adjusting. But adjustment has limits. For women in particular, the burden is immediate and physical. When LPG runs out, it is they who must find alternatives like collecting firewood, managing inefficient stoves, or stretching meals across days.Cooking With Firewood and KeroseneIn working neighborhoods across India, families report reducing the number of meals they cook, delaying refills, and stretching cylinders beyond their normal use. “We adjust” is how several workers describe it.Faheem, thirty-two, a migrant worker from Gujarat currently working in Bengaluru, describes the situation as disturbing.“We can’t get gas here, and now we are being forced to leave our home,” he says. “Cooking has become difficult, sometimes even impossible, and we don’t know how to manage our house and land anymore. Everything has become too hard.”“Sometimes it’s expensive; sometimes it’s not available at all. Life has really become difficult,” he adds.For many households, alternatives remain out of reach. Electric cooking is often presented as the next step in India’s clean energy transition, but it requires up-front investment in appliances and a reliable electricity supply.For precarious urban and rural households, both remain uncertain. As a result, the transition to cleaner energy is unfolding unevenly, shaped as much by income as by infrastructure. On the outskirts of cities, firewood and kerosene are reappearing as fallback options.Chulhas, traditional Indian stoves once replaced in the name of clean energy, are being used again. Health experts have long warned about the consequences of such reversals.Prolonged exposure to smoke from firewood and biomass fuels is linked to respiratory illnesses, particularly among women and children who spend the most time near cooking spaces. What appears as a short-term coping strategy can carry long-term health costs.Anjali, thirty-three, a mother of two and resident of rural Odisha, says, “Since we are not getting refills on time and sometimes have to wait weeks, we are being pushed back to firewood.”“In our village, most homes once switched to LPG, but nearly 30 to 40 percent still burn firewood for cooking, even with connections, especially among poorer families.”“The smoke makes our children cough, and my wife spends hours every day tending the chulha,” Arun Kumar, her husband, adds.As the train begins to depart from Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, Ramesh Varma climbs aboard.“I came here to earn,” he says. “But if I cannot even eat, what is the point?”In homes like Parveena’s, the uncertainty continues. Across India, in thousands of kitchens, the same question lingers.

As the Trump administration stumbles from scandal to scandal and worries over artificial intelligence reach a fever pitch, there seems to be little relief in sight for working-class Americans confronting a stubborn cost-of-living crisis. The failure of both Republicans and Democrats to advance real solutions to the affordability crunch has opened the door to hopeful socialist election victories, including Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in New York last year and several left-wing wins in congressional primaries this summer. Yet organized labor by and large has continued its long retreat, and the prospects of significant national policy change still look remote.Sam Gindin is one of the most exacting and capacious thinkers on the socialist left today. With decades of experience in the labor movement as research director for the Canadian Auto Workers (which merged in 2013 with the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union to form Unifor, today the largest private sector union in Canada), his political orientation is grounded in the reality of the contemporary state of organized labor. His perspective is also informed by a careful study of the current political-economic conjuncture, evident most notably in his important work with Leo Panitch, The Making of Global Capitalism.Damage magazine editor and frequent Jacobin contributor Benjamin Y. Fong recently interviewed Gindin about the current political moment. They discussed the contemporary crisis of capitalism, the privileged position of organized labor among social movements, and the crucial importance of organizing Amazon today.Benjamin Y. FongHow do you understand the contemporary crisis of capitalism? And what do you mean when you say you oppose “crisis-mongering as politics”?Sam GindinThere is a crisis today of the legitimacy of political institutions and a crisis for working families, but not a crisis of American economic decline. People are suffering and insecure, but the US economy is growing, the share of profits is at record levels, overall investment is growing, albeit unevenly, and technology and productivity are advancing. There are conflicts with China, but China has neither the interest nor capacity to take over America’s international role. People are frustrated and angry over what the successes of capitalism have wrought but unable to convert the political delegitimation of the United States into a crisis of capitalism. So it’s not a crisis of capitalism but really a crisis of the labor movement and the Left.Crisis-mongering subordinates serious economic and political analysis to exaggerated warnings of imminent collapse. The hope is that this will spur people into action. It looks to decline to do the heavy lifting for us. This betrays the actual challenges we face and the need for the kind of deep and long-term organizing we actually need. It also fails even as a populist mobilizing tactic; it could just as easily make people feel like, “Well, what’s the point? The world’s going to come to an end soon.” In the end, it undermines the credibility of the Left in repeatedly presenting overblown declarations that don’t come to pass.Benjamin Y. FongThe Left today is very electorally focused, and from one angle, that’s a direct way of intervening in this crisis of legitimacy. But from another, you could see this electoralism without first rebuilding the base as a kind of quick fix too.Sam GindinAbsolutely. Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani deserve credit for affecting political discourse, generating enthusiasm among young people and moving them from protest to politics. But there is a limit to even “left-ish” politics if there is no solid base on the ground. And while social democratic politics can have some impact on that base, the electoral arena is not conducive to building its depth. Elections look for numbers, not the quality of understanding and commitment. They tend to be about quick, door-step exchanges, not the genuine conversations that organizing entails. They also tend to cater to where the polls tell us people are (generally some middle ground) and not to what it might take to change people. It’s the building of a genuine base for social transformation that ultimately makes elections relevant; elections by themselves don’t build the base.Socialism will come from many streams, and whatever helps is welcome. But what’s needed is not just adding up various movements or making social democrats “better.” We need an appreciation of how profound transforming capitalism is, and we also need an organized orientation to building the kind of social force that can eventually replace it. This is especially so because of a polarization of options today. Decades of capitalist restructuring of workplaces, industries, and communities; of globalization, financialization, and neoliberalism — all alongside the stagnation of labor and the Left — have negated middle of the road responses. Capital and the state have made significant reforms near impossible (“There Is No Alternative”), and in this context, radical politics tends to be the only practical politics.The Place of LaborBenjamin Y. FongAndré Gorz once said that the success or failure of a wide variety of progressive causes, from gender equality to immigrant rights, will largely depend on that of the trade union movement. Why does organized labor hold a privileged position here?Sam GindinAbout a dozen years before he said this, Gorz’s book, Farewell to the Working Class, seemed to write off the radical potential of workers. What you’re referencing is his later, changed view, in which he came to realize that most movements simply can’t — unlike labor — sustain themselves over time. For all the weakness of the American labor movement in the United States, it still has some $35 billion in assets and 14 million unionized members. Most movements don’t have those kinds of resources, and they regularly look to unions for financial assistance.In saying this, we should not separate unions from movements that address social needs. Workers obviously have lives outside the workplace and care very much about universal healthcare, affordable shelter, adequate transportation, the environment their kids face, etc. What working-class organizations offer is not just financial resources. They also play a role in uniting the interests of workers as workers and in organizing working people as part of society more broadly.Benjamin Y. FongMany would characterize the key issue here as one of restoring labor’s militancy. Is that the key problem?Sam GindinIn the absence of resistance/militancy, the conditions of workers can’t be advanced. So yes, restoring militancy is fundamental. But it’s not enough to have militancy, and this was graphically demonstrated in the 1960s. When the postwar boom ended, workers stubbornly resisted lowering their monetary expectations and the unilateral authority of managers. This blocked the restoration of the status quo at their expense and was a factor in the downturn of profits and the rise of inflation, both of which threatened the status of the US dollar.The labor movement hung on for nearly a decade after that, but without going beyond workplace-by-workplace militancy to broader politicization along class lines, including demanding the democratization of investment decisions and guaranteed full employment, labor’s ultimate defeat was preordained. The eventual response from the state was an engineered recession (near-20-percent interest rates) that weakened and exhausted the unions. Neoliberalism arrived. Capital’s crisis was solved by way of a greater and longer-lasting crisis for the working class. The message of the ’60s is therefore that workplace militancy is essential but not enough.Benjamin Y. FongYou also emphasize the importance of socialist organization outside of unions.Sam GindinAbsolutely. The kind of politicization I raised above is unlikely without the role of organized socialists with one foot in the workplace and unions and one outside. Unions are particularist organizations, not class organizations: they represent a particular group of workers that happen to be working together. The role of organized socialists is to overcome the fragmentation of workers across workplaces, unions, economic sectors, and communities. It’s also to overcome the separation of individual workers from other dimensions of their lives.This is all the more important today. In the 1950s and ’60s, unionized workers in auto and steel could win a great deal on their own, but that period is largely over. Given capital’s increased power since then, workers can’t win without thinking in larger terms, i.e., in terms of the class as a whole. That means making connections across workplaces, sectors, and communities. Unions are limited in doing this, and that’s where socialist organizations come in. Building the class into a coherent social force is (or should be) their prime focus.I’m not making an ideological point. It’s a practical issue to be clear about who your enemy is. Employers are the face of the enemy, but they are not the enemy. What constrains improvement in working conditions is the threat of competition. Employers defend the pressure they put on workers with the claim that competition forces them to do so to survive. Moreover, competition is asymmetrical. As stronger capitalists devour weaker ones, capital becomes stronger as a class. However, for workers, competition undermines their primary strength — solidarity — and so weakens them.It’s important to raise these points in educational meetings organized by or outside the union. Some people think of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as the place to do this. But DSA is also really fractured.Benjamin Y. FongIt could be that the very fragmentation of DSA is a kind of virtue right now. I don’t think it’ll ever be the party organization that some people hope it will be, but it’s a place to meet people.Sam GindinI think that’s true. There seem to be distinct groups which are in essence mini-parties — each has their own analysis, do their own education, take specific positions. Under the banner of DSA, they meet, discuss, and debate strategy. That’s important because premature mergers, even among socialists, can paper over differences, and then the organization disintegrates.But from afar, I don’t know how sharp the debates are. Sometimes, in the name of unity, the more difficult debates are avoided, but such debates are important for mutual development. It does seem that certain crucial issues like how to relate to the Democratic Party, and at what scale (local/municipal, state, national) electoral contestation should take place, are coming to a head. Splits are likely necessary, but they can be very destructive. It’s worth it, in this context, to examine how Syriza and Momentum went from glory to obliteration, but there’s been too little of such investigations on the Left.The Amazon ProjectBenjamin Y. FongYou’ve said that unions need a “virtual crusade” to make a dramatic leap forward. Why is that the case, and is the struggle to organize Amazon that crusade?Sam GindinIn the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations sparked a breakthrough in industrial unionism. John Lewis of the United Mine Workers grasped that if steel wasn’t also unionized, the miners would be isolated. So he sent one hundred of his organizers out to support the organizing of the steel industry. That kind of sensibility is especially pertinent today given the expanding imbalance of power between capital and labor, the result of massive economic, social, and political changes over decades that can’t be addressed with marginal tactical changes. This imbalance demands the kind of leap forward that brings submerged frustrations to life and transforms working-class expectations, institutional capacities, and confidence. This amounts to a crusade, both organizationally and culturally.There are any number of struggles that could act as the catalyst for such a crusade. Amazon is only one such catalyst-in-waiting, but Amazon’s iconic status — the largest private sector employer in the United States, a leader in high tech and artificial intelligence that links some two million businesses with some 300 million consumers — would make its unionization the most important breakthrough in generations.The labor movement has, however, already lost a step in approaching Amazon as a pie to be split between different unions — warehouses for the Teamsters, Whole Foods for the United Food and Commercial Workers — rather than as a project for the whole labor movement. The catch, of course, is that labor’s extended stagnation has profoundly weakened the very capacities needed to rethink and transform it. It’s still possible for Amazon workers to win significant footholds, and if Amazon continues to stonewall, as it obviously will, then the challenge to the labor movement as a whole will become more pressing. The key test will not only lie in whether labor provides the needed financial support at the requisite moment, but also in the readiness of already unionized workers to disrupt Amazon as needed at ports, in rail and trucking, and in parcel delivery.Benjamin Y. FongTactically, there’s a lot of emphasis today on salting, or taking a job at Amazon and organizing it from the inside. What do you make of this?Sam GindinSalts are critical. Organizing from a base within the workplace is the most successful way to develop relationships with workers, and also to talk to workers about issues beyond the workplace. But salts also need a supportive structure outside the workplace: trained organizers to follow up on contacts, leaflet, generate support for the struggle across Amazon facilities that don’t yet have salts. They also need resources for meeting spaces, socials, sustaining workers laid off or fired, etc. This demands a union that has your back: an institution that can help strengthen confidence and provide staying power among both the organizers and the workers.Benjamin Y. FongCould you say a bit more about how you situate the Amazon organizing project in the present crisis of labor?Sam GindinAmazon has the possibility of being a spur to the revival of the labor movement. What will labor’s role be in this present conjuncture, in the crisis of legitimacy? Amazon is the test that helps us answer this broader question. Will labor stand up to this challenge, which has the potential to revive the movement, or will it remain too particularist to take advantage of it?Contrary to what many union leaders and also many on the Left assert, the labor movement is not — in spite of some impressive and courageous struggles — about to “turn the corner” and become a powerful social force again. Some union supporters reject such assessments as counterproductive; what workers need, they say, is inspiration. However being sober about where things are at is never counterproductive. Inspiration is great, but if it isn’t based on concrete achievements, it ends up as a rhetorical substitute for actual organizing.It’s an interesting moment in terms of language. A lot of language that used to distinguish us is now common language. So when you say we need class formation, everybody nods their heads. We say you have to think in class terms, they nod their heads. When you say that social democracy is limited, they nod their heads. But do they really understand the inevitable rupture when it comes time to govern? If they did, they’d understand that we’re going to need a really deep base. That we’re going to need allies, and that nothing will be easy.So the Amazon organizing project could also be a way of injecting some reality back into conversations about what it means to reckon with the present crisis.Benjamin Y. FongWhat would winning the fight at Amazon mean?Sam GindinA specific aspect of Amazon’s model is that it is regionally rooted. Its massive facilities are concentrated at ports and key transportation hubs, with some regions being of much more strategic importance than others. This regional rootedness means that establishing leverage does not have to wait until all of Amazon is unionized; a strategic number of unionized regional facilities can be effective.Within regions, the company’s fulfillment centers (FCs) are critical. From the perspective of class formation, that’s where most of the workers are. For the company to move these facilities to avoid unions would be difficult, given the high investment costs of FCs.Amazon’s determined resistance to avoid unions demands a revisiting of tactics that have largely been mothballed by organized labor over the years, and at great cost to their dynamism. Their successful rediscovery, along with other creative organizing innovations, is so vital because they can potentially have explosive implications beyond Amazon, challenging union approaches throughout the labor movement.Unannounced disruptive tactics carry a special weight. With Amazon’s powerful logistics network, the traditional strike deadlines declared in advance won’t work. Given advance warning, Amazon would simply reorganize its distribution network to neutralize a dated work stoppage. Disciplined, creative, and sporadic disruption are therefore key for workers. The labor movement was born out of work disruptions (sit-downs, wildcats, health and safety refusals, rejection of production speed-ups), but its trajectory has moved away from those earlier tactics.The revival of the tactic of unannounced disruptions is inseparable from the revival of the labor movement. To take advantage of it, it is also crucial to establish a strong everyday workplace presence, one based on prioritizing work standards, health and safety, and interventions in management authority. This in turn requires not only union majorities but large majorities and deep commitments; a simple majority of union cards is not enough.Benjamin Y. FongAre you optimistic looking ahead?Sam GindinYes, but soberly so. It’s a really difficult thing to commit to and believe in socialism, but there’s no other option. Is this just pie in the sky? I can see someone doing the same analysis as me and writing it off. The chances of it being pulled off are one in one thousand. And I might not disagree about the odds and all the limits. But my response is, “Well, actually, one in one thousand is pretty good. We’ll take those odds.” What else are you going to do with your life?

Bulgaria might not be the first country you associate with the socialist movement. But left-wingers have played an outsize role in the southeastern European country, ever since some twenty activists founded the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers’ Party at a clandestine mountain rendezvous in 1891. After the Russian Revolution, the newly formed Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) launched a failed uprising in 1923, and, after playing a decisive role in the antifascist partisan resistance during World War II, took power with Soviet backing.Lasting from 1944 to 1990 and combining Soviet-style planning with nationalist policies that, over time, grew increasingly hostile toward the country’s Turkish minority, the BCP’s rule nevertheless fundamentally transformed Bulgaria. Starting from an overwhelmingly rural peasant country, its version of socialism built an industrial economy in a matter of years, eliminated illiteracy, provided affordable housing to millions, and carried out vast infrastructure projects that Bulgarians still rely on today. When the winds of change began to blow in 1989, BCP leaders proved more farsighted than many of their Eastern Bloc peers, renaming themselves the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and initiating democratic elections that they then won handily.The BSP alternated between government and opposition for the better part of the next three decades, remaining the country’s only mass-membership party. Yet politically it drifted further to the right — first leading Bulgaria into the European Union and becoming an enthusiastic proponent of neoliberal austerity, and then, in the late 2010s, under leader Korneliya Ninova, morphing into a staunch defender of “traditional Bulgarian values” against Western “gender ideology.” Meanwhile, Bulgaria descended into political dysfunction, with eight parliamentary elections between 2020 and 2026.That all came to an end in April, when what remained of the BSP’s electorate defected to former President Rumen Radev’s new party, Progressive Bulgaria, and ejected the Socialists from parliament for the first time in living memory. The party’s current leader, Krum Zarkov, had only been elected in February on a platform calling for a return to the BSP’s socialist roots. Since then, he published a manifesto entitled “The Socialism of Our Century” and toured the country, seeking to win the membership over to his vision of a renewed and decidedly more socialist BSP.Last month, during the party’s 135th anniversary celebrations at Buzludzha Peak in the Central Balkan Mountains, Zarkov spoke with Jacobin’s Loren Balhorn and Madlen Nikolova about how he hopes to reintroduce socialist ideas into one of Europe’s poorest and most unequal countries.Loren BalhornCould you tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you become a socialist, and what drew you to the Bulgarian Socialist Party specifically?Krum ZarkovTo understand that, you have to understand what the BSP stands for in Bulgarian politics. In 1990, the BSP inherited the legacy of the Bulgarian Communist Party, which emerged from the original Social Democratic Workers’ Party. This series of transformations is quite unique. With the dawn of the so-called end of history in the 1990s, the BSP transformed not only itself but the Bulgarian political system from a one-party regime to a multiparty democracy. During this process, it sought to unite all left-wing currents, from social democratic to communist, in a confederated structure.I was born in 1982. By the time I came of age, the BSP was essentially the only party on the Left. Like many Bulgarians born in the 1980s, I studied abroad, and in France I encountered ideas that drew me to the Left. When I came back to Bulgaria, I knew where I stood. For me, the BSP had a threefold attraction: it was big enough to govern or be the main opposition; it had a vibrant internal life that could not be found anywhere else; and thirdly, I had relatives in the BSP — as did many people in a country of eight million, of whom 1.5 million were BSP supporters at one point.Loren BalhornYou described the BSP as a confederation of left currents. Internationally, the party belongs to mainstream social democracy, but among the base the old Communist traditions are still very much alive. The motto of this weekend’s festivities is “socialism with a future.” So which socialism are you referring to?Krum ZarkovThe BSP’s main strength was to recognize those differences rather than ignore them. Different party leaders have leaned closer to different currents. Sergey Stanishev, the BSP’s leader in the mid-2000s, went on to become the president of the Party of European Socialists. More recently, Korneliya Ninova was much more nationalistic.Communism in Bulgaria was a state-driven, one-party system built around the idea of national exceptionalism. Such “conservative socialists” may be hard to understand in Western Europe; I personally don’t think this current really has a future, but it exists. In this sense, the BSP evolves via its leaders but not in isolation from the national and European context. The BSP’s conservative turn coincided with a conservative wave across Europe. We can learn a lot from that chapter, but it is now closed.I’m now trying to ride another wave, which perhaps came from across the Atlantic but is now arriving here. The end of history has ended. The political crisis in Bulgaria, with fresh elections every six months, is a clear indicator of systemic dysfunction. It cannot be fixed simply by electing less corrupt, more intelligent politicians. Figures like Bernie Sanders have been trying to mainstream this idea for decades, and their efforts are now paying off.Madlen NikolovaReading your manifesto and following party debates, it seems like there’s a recognition that this kind of systemic, structural analysis doesn’t come naturally to people. Do you see the BSP’s role as “educating the masses”?Krum ZarkovA political party has three main tasks. One is to represent, another is to define a legitimate interest to be represented, and the third is pedagogical. The BSP is the only party in Bulgaria with a clear ideology for its membership, but many members find it strange, too — they treat our manifesto like an intellectual exercise, not a pragmatic political move.Today our pedagogical task is to remember what politics are for. We’re forced to remember because the voters expelled us from parliament. For many members, this meant the end of the party. That’s understandable: this party was in power for forty-five years and then the main opposition or the governing party for the next thirty-five years.The people who met at this mountain 135 years ago were neither MPs nor ministers, but we continue to celebrate their ideas. Of course we should modernize — be more flexible, better organized, more present on social media — but we shouldn’t forget why we’re doing it. My internal opponents say, “This new leader does nothing. What we need isn’t a manifesto but a manifestation” [as in “demonstration”]. But against what? I’m saying against capitalism, and for a new type of society.Loren BalhornThe last election saw Rumen Radev’s catchall party, Progressive Bulgaria, win 44 percent of the vote, and the BSP is no longer in parliament. But some MPs had already defected to Radev’s camp even prior to that. Could this be a blessing in disguise, clarifying who was sincere about socialist politics and who used the party as a vehicle for self-advancement?Krum ZarkovWell, that would be the best-case scenario — but there may be another scenario. It was a great blow not to enter parliament. We would have been able to do what we are doing now while also having the tribune of parliament. So, no, it’s not a blessing. But if you ask whether it was unjust for us to be expelled, I would also say no; it was quite logical and could have been expected.Madlen NikolovaAt your presentation yesterday, you said the important question is not how the party went from 7 to 3 percent but from 27 to 7 percent. How do you answer that question?Krum ZarkovIt’s easy to explain why we went from 7 to 3 percent: because we were part of a coalition with oligarchs. When you claim to be socialists and oppose oligarchy but enter a government like that, you get punished worse than the other parties, because the expectations for them are different.The reasons for the BSP’s dramatic long-term decline are more complex, though similar tendencies can be observed across Central and Eastern Europe. Socialist parties in the region inherited the legacy of socialism and were forced to develop a kind of doublespeak. In the 1990s, inside the party we were nostalgic for that period, claiming everything was perfect and insisting we had somehow been robbed. Outside the party, however, we rejected almost everything associated with socialism. Thus we created an expectation that we would fight for the socialist legacy, but once we came to power, we ended up dismantling much of it. This contradiction — in a sense, deception — was ultimately punished by voters.That wasn’t the responsibility of a single party leader or executive committee, it was the zeitgeist. The West, to which the BSP looked for legitimacy, tasked the party with implementing the neoliberal shock doctrine: privatizing, creating markets, and opening the economy to foreign investment. The complete opposite of socialism.At the same time, this historical contradiction made the BSP the only former Eastern Bloc ruling party to survive thirty-five years after the fall of socialism and thus have a chance to transform itself. What I’m proposing is that we anticipate the right moment for this transformation, much as the Communists in the 1980s did by implementing changes they could sense were coming. We may assess these changes positively or negatively in hindsight. But what matters now is that we have an opportunity to emerge from defeat and face up to what the party and Bulgaria have become.Madlen NikolovaThe BSP initially hesitated to implement shock therapy in the 1990s, opting for what it called “capitalism with a human face,” but was ultimately forced to capitulate to market pressures. Do you think that conditions in the country and globally today are more conducive to a progressive shift in Bulgaria?Krum ZarkovWell, yes. I recently read that in Bulgaria, the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is wider than in the United States. Now, the United States is the most unequal society imaginable, but it has a population of 350 million people — the 1 percent and the 99 percent don’t see each other. Bulgaria has a population of 5.5 million — you actually see the 1 percent! How long is the majority going to put up with this? The elites have appropriated all the power, all the capital, they control all foreign investments. What kind of parliamentary democracy can you have under these conditions?The real power structure in Bulgaria is totally divorced from parliament. Before, we had two entities: the state and the mafia. But now they’ve made it official. They’re building their own parties and buying elections, vote by vote! In regions with only one major employer, how do you imagine social dialogue?Bulgarians are becoming more and more aware of the real power structure. I’ll admit, few see the BSP as capable of fighting this structure, but they sense it is necessary to fight. The political struggle is over who gets to lead that fight, and we might stand a chance if we pose the right questions. Since we published the manifesto, journalists have been asking me “What are you talking about? Are you crazy, overcoming capitalism?” They’re astonished!Loren BalhornIt seems like most Bulgarians view politics through the lens of corruption and anti-corruption. They see the rich and politicians as corrupt but don’t seem to think in terms of class or identify themselves with a specific social group, let alone conflict. A bit like where I grew up in the United States, people see themselves not as workers but merely temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Do you think the BSP can break through this mindset and reintroduce socialist ideas?Krum ZarkovYour observation is accurate, but it’s not the people’s fault. They identify problems as they appear in everyday life, such as when they’re asked to pay extra under the table for public services. I am the chairman of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, but I am also a lawyer. I served as minister of justice, and some of my major political fights have been against corruption and for the rule of law. We have to eradicate corruption, it’s a sine qua non for progressive change, but it’s not enough.Our slogan today is “Socialism with a future.” I realize we won’t be in parliament for the next few years, but I’m betting on the future, that we will finally overcome corruption because people are simply unwilling to accept it anymore. If not, we will continue to have this rudimentary dialogue of “honest” versus “corrupt.” A real democratic dialogue requires ideologies or parties that fight for their agendas beyond categories of “good” and “evil.” At the same time, we cannot make a plausible case for democratic socialism in a country where you can bribe your way out of regulations. Socialism needs rules, and rules require the rule of law.In a perfect world, a socialist party would fight corruption while fighting for socialism. But in the Bulgarian context, anti-corruption comes first. At the last elections, citizens mobilized against corruption very clearly and ousted the corrupt parties from power. You can still feel the tension in the air; we’re one scandal away from another eruption of anger. It’s become unbearable.Madlen NikolovaYou speak a lot about challenging corporate power, even if in Bulgaria, as you said yourself, that power is concentrated among five people.Krum ZarkovWell, not five, let’s say fifteen. (Laughs)Madlen NikolovaEither way, opposition politicians who posed less of a threat to corporate power have faced harsh state repression, like the mayor of Varna, Blagomir Kotsev, who was arrested last year. How will you deal with that?Krum ZarkovI speak out against the mafia and I’m not afraid of corporate leaders. I’m not afraid to call out foreign companies either. I identify the real problem: monopolies impacting workers negatively. The free market is supposed to be about competition, but where is the competition? The balance of power between foreign companies and local entrepreneurs is such that there is in fact no free competition. One surrenders to the other.On how to fight inequality: politically speaking, the classic answer is the tax system. That is where corporate interests will be challenged. Bulgaria has the most unequal tax system in Europe, maybe the world. We have a flat tax of 10 percent on individual incomes, but also a corporate tax of 10 percent, and a 5 percent capital gains tax, while value-added tax (VAT) is 20 percent! It’s not even a flat tax, it’s brutally regressive.The BSP is the only party putting this question on the table at a time when the national deficit is exploding. The parties in parliament are not concerned, the only solution they see is neoliberal austerity and cuts to social spending. Currently, the state takes out loans to cover social spending. The big question is: Who will bear the burden of overcoming the deficit? Obviously it won’t be the 1 percent, but the working class.The neoliberal brainwashing machine in Bulgaria propagates that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin. If you’re not an enthusiastic proponent of capitalism, you’re painted as antidemocratic, a communist nostalgic. The flat tax represents modernity and progress, while the progressive tax means raising taxes for everyone. Those are difficult clichés to overcome, and we’ll have to work very hard. Just raising the question, on which there has been a total consensus for fifteen years, represents a small victory.Madlen NikolovaThe new manifesto talks a lot about the climate crisis, an issue that has been practically absent from public debate in Bulgaria since this cycle of instability began. Yet the environmentalist movement was one of the few successful social movements in Bulgaria’s recent history. Have you thought about revisiting its legacy when building alliances around that issue?Krum ZarkovIn fact, those movements spawned the first major dissidents under Communist rule, and some of them joined the BSP after the transition. Our manifesto is built around the understanding that capitalism, now more than ever, is destructive. It destroys the international legal order, it destroys society via inequality, it destroys the planet.You’re right, “green” has taken on a pejorative connotation over the past ten years, it’s now seen as something that harms the majority. The European Green Deal was also viewed, and rightly so, as a bigger problem than climate change itself. The problem with the Green Deal was that it suggested that those suffering should pay for the transformation — if it took place at all. I agree that we need to change the way we consume, live, and interact with our environment. But then comes the classic Marxist question: Who will pay for it? Will it be the polluters or those who suffer from pollution?That said, Bulgaria’s attachment to coal plants is economic, social, and cultural. Their immediate closure would set off a social and economic bomb. The trade unions fighting for coal jobs have reasonable demands, and we need to work with them. European Commission proposals to retrain miners as gardeners are unworkable and unserious. We’re talking about people who are proud of their work and their contribution to the national economy.Loren BalhornIn your speech, you identified three tasks for the party: consolidate, organize, and realize. You also said the party can’t afford to have chapters with more members than voters anymore. Behind that statement is the fact that the BSP has a rigid structure inherited from a one-party state and all of the baggage that entails. How will you go about turning it into a modern socialist organization?Krum ZarkovWell, isn’t that the million-dollar question? But yes, our structure is no longer adequate. The mismatch between the number of party members and voters is due to the perverse incentives in the way representation works. More members means more delegates and hence more influence. If you’re not a particularly honest party activist, you may be inclined to come up with a long list of members for your chapter. Thus our first order of business is to reorganize the party to reflect the fact that it no longer has a million members, but rather a hundred thousand supporters.Secondly, the party should reflect political realities. In democracies, citizens are not only active once every four years at the ballot box. They engage in politics many times per day, even if it’s just online. We need to enter those virtual spaces. The organization should reflect this networked aspect of politics and abandon strictly hierarchical structures in favor of a much more flexible and reactive model.This means being able to say the right things in debates but at the same time being recognized not only as an influencer but as a real structure, something that can be touched. I think this is somewhat easier to do in Bulgaria, not only because we are a smaller society but because, even after the election, there are many people — the nurse at the clinic, the taxi driver — who didn’t vote BSP this time but still identify with us. The question is how to reengage them in some way or another.Why does that prove so difficult? Simply put, party leaders don’t like it because they can’t control it. I will propose changes to the party statutes this fall. To make sure they are sustainable, I will try to include all party members in decisions, as I did with the manifesto, rather than first get approval from our national council. That also means that I take full personal responsibility. If it fails, I leave. I’m all-in.Madlen NikolovaThere’s an oft-quoted saying by Dimitar Blagoev, the founder of Bulgarian socialism, that three-quarters of Bulgarian domestic politics is decided on the world stage. But just like the climate crisis, international politics is practically invisible in Bulgarian politics, except maybe for the war in Ukraine. Do you want to bring world affairs more to the fore? You’re probably the only Bulgarian politician who dares to utter the word imperialism, for example.Krum ZarkovIt’s not a question of whether I want to, it’s coming. The war in Ukraine cannot be frozen: it will either end one way or another, or it will expand. A military confrontation between the European states and Russia would be such a devastating scenario for everyone that the only reasonable political stance is to try and prevent it.The wars in Iran and Gaza are also catalysts for the renewed interest in international politics. Bulgarians are watching what’s happening in Gaza, but they don’t talk about it. There are two possible explanations for that. Bulgarians perhaps understand that the country’s not a decisive factor in those conflicts, which I understand. Another explanation, however, might be that Bulgaria’s membership in NATO and the EU prevents it from acting as a sovereign state — we just follow the will of the stronger states.I argue that Bulgaria has the tools to influence these organizations. We can challenge their official stance, and that’s increasingly what Bulgarians expect from their government. This is new and is a result of the fear surrounding these wars.Loren BalhornYou talked about the antifascist tradition in your speech, and it’s also one of the themes of the manifesto. The far right is on the rise everywhere, but in Bulgaria, it looks relatively insignificant. How would you gauge the fascist threat here today? Is it a big concern for the Left?Krum ZarkovIt is, and it should be. The threat of fascism is manifest not only in the far-right parties but in many forces that promote discrimination, prejudice, and pro-corporate policies. I am not inclined to call everything I disagree with fascist, but I cannot remain blind to the revival of dehumanizing ideologies. The BSP’s historical mission is to fight these.The memory of antifascism can be abused politically, and it requires a lot of honesty and wisdom to separate good-faith antifascism from attempts to deny your opponent legitimacy. Still, we need to wage a real political struggle against fascism — whether in its overt and frightening forms like the annual far-right march in Sofia, where people in black uniforms with Nazi symbols carry torches, or in more insidious ways embedded in society’s denial of others’ right to exist.Madlen NikolovaIt oftentimes feels like our future is imploding under the weight of climate collapse, corporate capture of democratic institutions, and endless wars. What gives you hope that we can still turn things around?Krum ZarkovFor Bulgaria, what gives me hope is that the democratic reflex has really grown inside our society. Bulgarians will not accept losing their freedom — politically, first of all, but eventually, they will see that their freedom is also denied economically. And that’s where we come into play.

Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition did not receive widespread attention after its original publication in 1983. Since 2000, when it was republished with a new preface and an introduction by historian Robin D. G. Kelley, however, the book has enjoyed widespread appeal and influence in the anglophone humanities and social sciences as well as among activists. Robinson’s proposed theory of “racial capitalism” and his framework of a “black radical tradition” have shaped debates about racial inequalities in capitalist societies and Marxism’s potential for anti-racist politics in recent decades.August Nimtz has engaged with the book’s arguments and trajectory, directly or indirectly, since its original publication. The recently published collection, Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique, makes accessible, for the first time, a critique that spans four decades and addresses Robinson’s claims and those made by his followers by putting forth an authentic Marxism as the most reliable method for human liberation in the real world and explaining why it remains the guiding principle for the transracial class struggle today.Constantin BerlinYou recently said that your book has been in the making for over forty years. Indeed, your examination of Robinson’s book began with a critical review, published in 1984. What’s motivated you to have your original review essay of Robinson’s book reprinted, to republish two other related essays, and to write a new review? Why now?August H. NimtzContext — the political moment in which we now live. Virtually all of my writings, beginning with my 2000 Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough, are informed by historical context. They all constitute, in one way or another, a political intervention into the moment in which they are written. When the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe were unraveling and no longer claiming to be Marxist, I thought that it would be an opportune moment to make the case for the real Marxist project, specifically its democratic essence. Great, I said to myself, the Stalinists were no longer pretending to be what they never were. But I had difficulty finding a publisher. The not-so-subtle message from left publishers was “You’re swimming against the tide; the Marxist project is history,” as confirmed, apparently, by what had taken place a decade earlier with the regimes that claimed to be Marxist. After many rejection letters, I finally found a publisher, a mainstream academic one.In contrast, as I’ve since thought about it, Robinson, it appears, had little difficulty in finding a new publisher for his 1983 Black Marxism, which had been largely ignored for more than a decade. He found a receptive audience who also believed that [Karl] Marx’s project was a spent force, a has-been, confined to the proverbial dustbin of history. Robinson’s book, which rejected the real Marx despite its duplicitous title, seemed to offer an explanation: Marx’s supposedly mistaken assumption about the revolutionary potential of the proletariat and his alleged Eurocentrism.My starting point today is that, in the era of [Donald] Trump and what he represents, the last thing progressive forces need is a project that claims to be revolutionary, more revolutionary than what Marx had to offer, but is really a chimera and thus dangerous for that reason. A “wholly original theory of revolution,” according to historian Robin Kelley, with whom I respectfully disagree. Thus the need to critique Robinson, especially now.Constantin BerlinAs you suggest, Robinson’s book is now highly regarded, but you were quite critical of it in your 1984 critique, the first detailed appraisal of a book that did not receive much attention when it was first published. Why was that and what did you find problematic with it?August H. NimtzFirst, a bit of background. For more than a decade, there had been a bitter debate within US black nationalist circles about the relative merits of a cultural nationalist versus a class analytic approach to black politics. I had a front-row seat to those debates and actively participated in them. A few nights ago, in fact, in a Zoom session about Cuba, specifically the revolution’s unfinished business toward racial equality, I was reminded about those debates. The encounter reminded me of the fact that not many of us who participated in them are still alive, and those of us who are have an obligation to correctly recount them, including the views of those with whom we disagreed.In 1984, the editor of the London-based Journal of African Marxists, who I knew from graduate school and who in turn learned that I was a public Marxist, a member of the US Socialist Workers Party (SWP), asked me to review Black Marxism — and produce a political intervention, in other words. The fact that it was the London-based Zed Press that published Black Marxism most likely explains why an also London-based venue knew about its debut. The book, which I soon realized in my reading, constituted a sophisticated defense of the cultural nationalist perspective, one that had been informed, though superficially, by the class point of view.The debates required Robinson to know something about the Marxist perspective. But to claim as he did that three major Black figures, W. E. B. DuBois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright, had to abandon Marxism to find something more liberatory, a “black radical tradition,” flew, as I knew, in the face of the facts. For example, I had the privilege to attend a presentation that James gave in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1976, I believe, in which he praised some of the historic founders of the SWP, which was of importance for me, having recently joined the party.Why would James say something like that? Because St Paul is the sister city of Minneapolis, the site of arguably the high-water mark of the 1930s workers radicalization in the United States, the 1934 Teamsters strike. It was led by a nucleus of communists that James had been affiliated with, Trotskyists, whites to boot. For a still (though less committed) black nationalist to hear someone with James’s credentials give a shout-out to the SWP helped to legitimize the decision I had made.The correctness of that decision was brought home to me a month ago in São Paulo, Brazil, when a young worker, a subway engineer, came up to me after a talk I had just given in which I referenced the 1934 Teamsters strike vis-à-vis the anti–[Immigration and Customs Enforcement] actions that took place in Minneapolis in early 2026. “Oh, yes,” she said, “Minneapolis 1934, the Teamsters strike,” which she had read about. “I hadn’t made the connection.”Robinson’s false claim about individuals like James having broken with Marxism was one of my major criticisms of the book. I knew better.The other major criticism, in hindsight, was more important. Not only had those three historical figures not rejected Marxism, as Robinson contended — certainly DuBois and James — but there were also more contemporary individuals who embraced Marxism, not the least of whom was Maurice Bishop, the leader of a revolution unfolding in real time in Grenada as Robinson was writing his book. I knew enough at the time about the real Marxist project to reject any perspective that claimed to be revolutionary but failed to see a revolutionary project in real time, especially in the black world that Robinson’s book claimed to be the expert on. Instinctively, I knew Black Marxism to be politically deficient.Maurice Bishop (1944–1983), then–prime minister of Grenada, speaks during a 1979 press conference at the United Nations (Chuck Fishman / Getty Images)Not for naught did I end my 1984 critique with inconvenient advice from Bishop in 1983 to African Americans like Robinson: get over your hang-up about working with white workers — the real issue that had divided cultural nationalists from those of us who subscribed to a Marxist perspective. In hindsight, I was too close in real time to appreciate the full significance of Grenada’s absence in Robinson’s narrative — which I’ve tried to rectify in my new review of his book.A few years ago, I learned, accidentally, that Bishop and I were members, at least on paper, of the same organization, the African Liberation Support Committee. Collating my ALSC files in my office to send them off to an invaluable archive at Michigan State University, I happened to read through the list of various affiliates of the organization in 1973 and noticed for the first time, maybe, that the chapter in Grenada was headed by Bishop, a list on which the Minnesota chapter is included, with me as one of the two contact people.Constantin BerlinIn the preface to the new book, you write that you had basically forgotten about your original review until Black Marxism received renewed attention in 2017 through Robin Kelley’s writings. How did this impact your assessment of Robinson’s book?August H. NimtzYes, I was surprised to learn, after an extensive Google Scholar search, how influential Robinson’s book had become — which Kelley’s 2017 Boston Review article spoke to. I couldn’t find my 1984 copy and had to retrieve it through Interlibrary Loan. I later found the copy along with relevant correspondence. More surprising were all the accolades being paid to Robinson, given my largely negative reaction. That explained, I soon surmised, why I was mostly unsuccessful in getting it republished — a challenge to the orthodoxy about the book that now prevailed. Except for a Brazilian republication, the uploading of it to the Academia website and a black-politics-oriented podcast, I had little success in bringing attention to what was in fact, as I began to realize, the first detailed treatment of Robinson’s now highly acclaimed book.It took the second coming of Trump to convince me to wage a bit of a campaign to have the 1984 critique republished along with other things I’ve written and a new review of Black Marxism. Thus I’m forever indebted to Michael Yates at Monthly Review Press, editor at the time, for making that possible. The world’s a more dangerous place since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. It resembles increasingly the lead-up to World War I, a conflagration — the most sanguinary the world had ever seen — that was provoked by capitalist greed,as [Vladimir] Lenin so convincingly argued in the war’s second year in his magisterial Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. And that it’s Trump who’s leading the charge, naked capitalist greed, unlike the monarchs in 1914, the most authentic capitalist to have ever occupied the White House, couldn’t be more instructive. Tariff and other economic wars can become shooting wars, as World War I taught.But capitalist wars, Marx, [Friedrich] Engels, and Lenin argued, were not inevitable if the working classes take power. Therein the danger of Robinson’s influential book, which consciously dismisses, contra Marx, the proletariat. There is only one force on the planet that can prevent history’s most lethal weapons from being employed to begin World War III and thus the likely end to our species as we know it — namely, the US proletariat. Exactly because Robinson dismissed the American working class and viewed politics through the lens of skin color, his apolitical perspective is the last thing that humanity needs at this moment. Only if the US working class unites in all its identities and constructs a revolutionary workers party can the rest of the world be assured that capital’s inevitable march to World War III won’t happen. My book is a conscious intervention to aid and abet that process. Challenging Robinson’s influential claims constitutes an indispensable task in that campaign.Constantin BerlinGiven the other essays in your book, specifically, the 2002 one about the Eurocentric charge regarding Marx’s project, and the 2024 appendix to your coauthored Marx-Douglass comparison, it looks like Robinson has been on your mind for quite some time. Is that accurate?August H. NimtzI agree, both consciously and unconsciously. By the time I completed doing the research and writing of my 2000 Marx-Engels book (Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough), I knew far more about their project than I knew in 1984. Robinson’s Eurocentric charge had been on my mind throughout the process, and I included in the final text the evidence to refute it. When the opportunity presented itself to me to sift out the details into a separate essay, I jumped at the opportunity, and thus the essay in the Cambridge University Press 2002 collection (“The Eurocentric Marx and Engels and Other Related Myths” in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies). The most convincing evidence in my opinion to refute the charge was the detailed attention that Marx and Engels gave to the Russian question, a world beyond “the little corner” of the globe, as Marx once sarcastically described Great Britain and Western Europe. I should say, in general, the entire world was Marx’s and Engels’s theater of operation, as the evidence made all so clear.I also learned along the way about another world beyond Europe that they prioritized, “North America,” as they sometimes called it. The US experience, I argue, figured significantly in Marx’s path to communism, one of the major claims of my 2003 Marx, Tocqueville and Race in America. But it was Marx’s response to the Civil War which instantiated, contrary to the implications of Robinson’s Eurocentric charge, that his European origins in no way handicapped him in expertly making sense of the conflagration on the other side of the Atlantic and thus acting efficaciously to be on the right side of history — the liberation of people of African origin from the bondage of chattel slavery. If Robinson were to be believed, what Marx did should have been impossible. A European?I should say that my not-so-hidden agenda when it comes to Marx is to liberate him, as I sometimes say, half-jokingly, from the embrace of political philosophers — sometimes well-meaning — and to bring him back to the world he consciously chose to join in 1843, the world of politics. All my writings home in on his actions, treating his writings as a political act to advance the cause of the proletariat. That’s what my 2000 book does, still the only book-length treatment of Marx as a political activist. It’s worth noting that I wasn’t trained as a political theorist but rather as a political comparativist, which also informs my approach to Marx, who I claim, beginning with his very first publication, had comparativist sensibilities. Note how he was doing comparative jurisprudence, comparing press censor laws in various countries to draw conclusions — which soon motivated him to critique [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel on the state.Constantin BerlinThis comparative approach also informs your 2024 coauthored book on Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass (The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time), from which the appendix is reprinted in your Black Marxism book. Does the chapter inform your new appraisal of Robinson?August H. NimtzIndeed! The 2024 book is another example of how Robinson was unconsciously on my brain all these years. Though I made no mention of him in the resultant book, Robinson’s Eurocentric charge, as previously mentioned, motivated my first dive into Marx’s Civil War writings. In hindsight, my 2003 Marx, Toqueville, Race book anticipated my 2024 Marx-Douglass comparison.Again, I was trained as a comparativist, not a theorist. That fact is on display in my 2000 Marx-Engels book in which I devoted a chapter to comparing the actions of Marx and Engels on one side of the 1848–49 revolutions and Alexis de Tocqueville on the other side. Making comparisons is arguably the best method we have to test hypotheses in the social sciences. To substantiate my claim that Marx and Engels contributed more than any other figures to the democratic breakthrough in the nineteenth century required some degree of comparison, however minimal. Tocqueville was the best candidate for someone on the other side of the political divide. The evidence revealed that the two communists proved to have had better democratic credentials than the famous author of Democracy in America.In my 2019 book, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-Time Political Analysis, I did the same regarding Marx and John Stuart Mill during the US Civil War; again, Marx’s democratic credentials were superior to those of Mill. But Mill, as someone pointed out, was never the activist Marx was and thus I was comparing apples and oranges. When my former undergraduate student, Kyle Edwards, approached me with questions about the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and how he compared to Marx, the light bulb went on.The result was a 417-page book. Marx’s democratic credentials, we discovered, were as good as Douglass’s during the four years of the Civil War. Afterward, we learned they were in fact superior to those of the now former abolitionist. The reason is that for Marx, unlike Douglass, ending chattel slavery was a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Why? To bring into existence a hereditary proletariat for the first time in America, the only class that not only has a class interest in real democracy but also has the capacity to ensure its realization. And when the US working class went into motion for the first time across racial lines, after the war — as Marx would have predicted — Douglass was missing in action, mostly unsupportive. His liberal defense of private property took priority over anything that might have brought about working-class ascendancy — in other words, real democracy.Little did I know that when Robinson republished his 1983 book in 2000, he wrote a new introduction in which he doubled down on his anti-Marxist charges, adding that Marx ignored the question of slavery in America and didn’t relate at all to the abolitionist movement. Only after we completed the Marx-Douglass book did I discover Robinson’s charges. Claims, one might say, that fell right into my lap. The reason: we had just provided the evidence in our book that thoroughly discredited those charges. When the slave oligarchy fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, Marx dropped almost everything to aid and abet Union victory, one of the reasons why his magnum opus, Capital, was never completed. In other words, the 2024 book allowed me to criticize Black Marxism in a far more informed way than was possible forty years earlier.Constantin BerlinYou said earlier that the most important problem with Robinson’s book was its political deficiency. Could you elaborate on this?August H. NimtzAgain, when Robinson wrote his book, whose subtitle “The Black Radical Tradition” suggested that it would be about the black revolutionary experience, such an example was underway in real time on the Caribbean island of Grenada and he ignored it — prima facie evidence for me that the book was of little political value. That’s also the reason, I argue, why it was largely ignored for more than a decade. From 1979 to 1989, global politics was characterized by revolutionary upheavals and victories, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iran, Zimbabwe, Angola. Nothing in Robinson’s book, mainly about a timeless and classless “black world,” helped its readers to make sense of that moment. Only later, when revisiting Robinson, did I realize why the Grenada revolution was ignored; it was Marxist inspired. The convergence of the black radical tradition with Marxism was an inconvenient fact for Robinson the cultural nationalist.That also explains why someone else is missing in Black Marxism, which I failed to see in my 1984 reading of the book: Malcolm X. The black nationalist, very publicly, was on a convergence course in the last year of his life with the US Socialist Workers Party, a mostly Caucasian Marxist organization. Robinson, who once hosted Malcolm X at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963, no doubt knew about that collaboration. Again, an inconvenient fact for him and thus the unpardonable absence of Malcolm X in a book that claimed to be about the “black radical tradition.” Just as important as Malcolm X was the black revolutionary Robert F. Williams, someone who impacted Malcolm X and someone whom Robinson also once invited to speak at Berkeley. Like Malcolm, not coincidentally, Williams also collaborated with the SWP and thus the reason, I contend, why he’s missing in Black Marxism; another inconvenient fact for a cultural nationalist.Lastly, when Robinson republished his book in 2000, another moment in revolutionary black politics had taken place, the government of Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso between 1983 and 1987. But Sankara’s name is missing in Robinson’s 2000 introduction. The reason? Sankara, like Bishop, was an unapologetic Marxist — ineligible, therefore, for Robinson’s pantheon of black radicals. Not coincidentally, it’s the US Socialist Workers Party that keeps in print, until today, the speeches of all three black figures, which someone who claimed to be an advocate for the black radical tradition should have applauded. But not so in Robinson’s case.What the examples of Malcolm X, Maurice Bishop, and Thomas Sankara all testify to is the potential for the convergence of revolutionary black nationalism with Marxism — authentic Marxism that is. The more than decade-long debate about the merits of Marxism versus nationalism was being answered in the flesh, which Robinson was unwilling to recognize.I would like to reiterate the point I made earlier: The only force on the planet that can assure that the weapons of mass destruction now in the hands of the US ruling class will not be used in capital’s inevitable march to World War III, and thus the likely end to our species as we know it, is the US proletariat. Thus the importance of finding an answer to the race/class question and forming working class unity in the United States. The example of Malcolm X especially demonstrates that there is indeed a solution to that historical conundrum about working class unity in the United States, the place where the future of our species will be decided.Robinson’s book is an obstacle to clarity on the question. I do everything possible, therefore, to dispute his claims. Too much is at stake not to do so. Thus the reason for my book. For the luck of the genes, I’m one of the few people still alive who participated in those debates and see their historical/political significance. I’d be politically derelict not to make the intervention I intend with the book.Constantin BerlinLastly, you begin the book with what you call “fortuitous” biography. How did your upbringing shape your politics and ultimately influence your critical reading of Robinson, and why did you include this in the book?August H. NimtzYes, my social science/comparativist sensibilities are on full display in that chapter. Given the many similarities in mine and Robinson’s backgrounds, I assumed that many readers of my critique of Black Marxism would wonder how to explain the profound differences between the two of us, especially given the nearly sacrosanct status the book has now achieved, one that I’m now challenging. “Who are you to do so?” they might ask. An interesting puzzle, as we sometimes say in the academic world, that requires an explanation. Comparing our backgrounds might offer one. Robinson’s biography, detailed in Robin Kelley’s foreword to the 2000 republication, is available to the public; mine is not, at least, a version that I’ve had the opportunity to curate for the comparison — that’s what the first chapter purports to do.Robinson and I, African Americans, are age cohorts, both affected to one degree or another by the political world of that era, particularly the one that impacted African Americans. We both graduated from college in spring 1963, went to graduate school at about the same time, reading some of the same literature, receiving our doctorate degrees in political science, and publishing our first books in 1980. Yet I think New Orleans, where I grew up, in all its racial/skin and color/class complexities as I describe, was determinant in my case and so different from the two worlds that formed Robinson, namely Oakland, California, and Alabama, through his family. Oakland, specifically, as my Black relatives who moved there in the early ’50s testified, was quite different from New Orleans regarding the black question. Growing up in the Crescent City taught that the white/black binary was insufficient in making sense of social reality, and that class inequalities figured into the equation. The black world in New Orleans was far bigger and more complex than the one that formed Robinson. It taught me from an early age, therefore, that there was not one such world. The city, in other words, primed me to be open to the intersection of race and class when first presented with the opportunity for investigation.Both Robinson and I visited Africa in our academic preparation. He, basically an undergraduate summertime intern in 1962; I, a graduate student for a year and a half in 1969–1970 to do dissertation research. The two visits, I contend, were more determinant than anything in our political trajectories. The main reason being where we fortuitously went. Robinson to colonial Africa, what was then called Southern Rhodesia, while I had the good fortune to go to Tanzania, almost a decade into independence and the headquarters of the Southern African liberation movements. As I point out in the chapter, I was able to verify with my own eyes what Frantz Fanon’s critique of postcolonial Africa, The Wretched of the Earth — a book that many of us of that generation had dutifully read — argued: namely, the replacement of a European colonial class in Africa with a homegrown one, an emergent bourgeoisie — and with all of the negatives that outcome entailed, ones we tragically live with until today. Fanon’s book, to be noted, figured significantly into the debates between cultural nationalists on one side and revolutionary nationalists on the other side. Bobby Seale, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, and at the center of the race versus class debate when it first erupted, confirmed in a conversation with me in 1980 that the book was a mandatory reading for the organization — and informed the Black Panther Party’s class-oriented position in the debate.Our two different destinations in Africa were, again, determinant. Robinson could imagine an ideal Africa after independence. Tanzania revealed, at least for me, that independence was insufficient for bringing about social equality in Africa. And if Tanzania seemed to be the best that African independence had to offer, then something more fundamentally radical was needed to achieve that end. That there was a rich debate in Tanzania about that very issue by individuals who impressed me, not the least of whom was Walter Rodney, a neighbor and age cohort, was also my good luck. Thus, why I sometimes say that I went to Africa as a black nationalist/Pan-Africanist and left in search of communism. Perhaps in 1983, when Black Marxism was published, it was too early for Robinson to have an informed opinion about the reality of independence in Zimbabwe. By 2000, however, when the book was republished, he should have known better. His silence then about the tragic situation in Zimbabwe was telling — an inconvenient fact about the “black radical tradition.”Something I didn’t include in my biographical chapter and only thought about later is the vast distance, epistemologically, between Robinson’s and my first book, both published in 1980 — and a reflection of our different African experiences. My Islam and Politics in East Africa: The Sufi Order in Tanzania and his Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership. The two books spoke to our different graduate school training, he largely as a political theorist and I, a comparativist. Terms of Order operates almost exclusively at the level of ideas in books; Islam and Politics is empirically grounded, based on original field research. While the former argues that politics are mainly a Western ordering of the world and absent in traditional African societies, the latter instantiates that politics, the struggle for power, existed in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Africa, accompanied by, contra Robinson, leadership. The latter, in fact, was at the very center of my book, namely, how Islam was employed by a religious leader to advance the interests of the formerly enslaved through modern political action. If Robinson were to be believed, the reality I discovered and described was the exception to Africa’s “metaphysical,” as he called it, reality. I contend that what I found and wrote about was more representative of real Africa than Robinson’s mostly classless, apolitical, and ahistorical portrait of Africa. Without going into more detail, suffice it to say that both our books anticipated the very different political trajectories we would take.However influential my background and training might have been in my political direction, I end the chapter with a reminder about luck — good luck specifically — advice all so important for youth today. That’s why I dedicate the book to “the radicalizing youth everywhere in quest of the real Marx.”

Early this week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, speaking at the Urban 20 (U20) Mayors Summit, bemoaned that government “efficiency has been taken on as a right-wing concern,” with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) being a particularly vile example. As with the phrase “quality of life,” the mayor observed, “there has been a sense that if you admit to an interest in those things, then you are assisting the Right.”On the contrary, the mayor said: “If you ignore these things,” that’s actually assisting the Right. Government efficiency is “incredibly important,” something “we have to deliver”; he stressed that we can’t let the Right have an “ideological monopoly on it.”The remarks were consistent with a broader effort in the Mamdani administration, which has a charter commission called the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE), a cheeky reference to Musk’s DOGE. The charter amendments, which will be on the ballot in November, were crafted with consultation — including ten public hearings all over the city — with city workers, small business owners, and other members of the public; they aim to shore up the city’s rainy day fund (its backup savings in case of a crisis) and to lessen red tape in new construction, city procurements, the use of city properties, improvements to street safety, and many other areas.This is a lane that the Left should have long occupied. Government efficiency should be a socialist priority, because socialist governments are asking the public to trust them to do more rather than less. To buy into that project, the public must have confidence that government can deliver and deliver well. Every public dollar wasted on inefficiencies and red tape, or on corrupt middlemen looking to make a buck on the public’s dime, is a dollar that could have gone toward making average people’s lives better and rebuilding people’s trust in government’s ability to act in their interests.Mamdani is not the first socialist mayor to make this case. Bernie Sanders, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, was successful and popular in part because he balanced budgets and emphasized government efficiency. After Sanders won reelection in 1982, he reflected on his success speaking at a conference in New York City. He noted that many Republicans supported him “because we are now running — as any city government should run — an honest, efficient government,” with centralized purchasing and other sensible reforms.As for COGE, not everyone on the Left has been thrilled with the name, reflecting unease with the project itself. In an online briefing on Tuesday, one question submitted from a member of the public was: Why use the name COGE, given that DOGE has “caused so much harm. People lost their jobs and important services were cut. Is that what COGE is?”“I like this question,” said Susan Kang, a member of the commission and a professor of political science at John Jay College at the City University of New York. She encounters versions of this skepticism a lot. The name, she says, reflects the administration’s belief that “government efficiency is not a right-wing thing. It doesn’t mean a loss of services.” Instead, she said, it should mean “a government that delivers quickly and in a way that uses the labor of city workers well, and that makes our citizens feel heard, respected, and treated in the way they deserve.”Kang also pointed out that the COGE name has succeeded in drawing interest: “If we just called it a ‘charter commission,’” the project would not have made “such a splash. This has become international news.”COGE is part of a series of visible good-government initiatives by this administration. Last spring, Mamdani appointed a chief savings officer to each city agency to identify waste and streamline services and announced reforms to make it easier to deliver affordable housing faster. This summer, he unveiled more than fifty reforms to “slash red tape” for small businesses and created a team of technologists to make city services easier for New Yorkers to access.To execute on more of his agenda, Mamdani will at some point need to ask more of the citizenry. Ray Horton, former president of the Citizens Budget Commission and a retired Columbia Business School professor who has written books about New York City government and its fiscal problems, says demonstrating government efficiency is particularly crucial since Mamdani will need to raise taxes, certainly on the superrich but probably also on single-family homes, which are vastly undertaxed in New York City.If Mamdani “is able to make a case that he is improving the quality of municipal services,” says Horton, a democratic socialist, the argument for higher taxes will be much easier to make.Still, Horton notes that not all the issues addressed by COGE are of earth-shattering importance. He laughingly points out that there is an entire amendment simplifying the permitting for outdoor dining, whereas there are hundreds of pages in the municipal contracts that can complicate the delivery of more crucial services like education. (None of that can be addressed until union contract bargaining next year, a situation that is likely to be fraught as the socialist mayor steps into the role of the boss in bargaining with the unions — a tricky dynamic that has already emerged in his negotiations with the city’s main teachers’ union.)Some of the COGE amendments do touch on big issues like traffic safety. But for those leading this effort, the granularity is also part of the point. As Mamdani put it in his U20 remarks, “The smallest concerns are oftentimes the most important concerns, because that is where you can build those early blocks of trust with a constituent that this government can somehow be different than those which have preceded them.”In contrast to DOGE, which treated government workers as the enemy of the public good, COGE emphasizes that those workers are partners in efficiency, the best experts to guide this process, and stresses how much city workers have to gain from a more functional government.Ann Cheng, executive director of COGE, says she has been drawn to solving these problems partly because she has worked in government in many different capacities; she was a public-school teacher before she went into policy. When you work for the city, Cheng says, you expect the “hard things to be hard, but your easy things are also hard.” Her husband, an assistant principal, breaks up fights at school — hard work, to be sure — but often gets even more frustrated that it takes six weeks to replace a child’s lost MetroCard.Cheng says city employees understand that it is hard work to dig a water tunnel or plow the city after a snowstorm. But, she asks, “Why is it so hard to get the paperwork signed off?”The charter amendments risk being overlooked, given they aren’t exactly hot-button issues, nor are they overtly ideological. But Kang feels that the Left needs to get more engaged in this fight. Speaking after the briefing Tuesday, in her personal capacity, Kang worried that many on the Left “don’t understand the political importance of the success of these ballot measures.” She hopes that those who support Mamdani’s affordability agenda will grasp the stakes: “The success of these ballot measures,” she says, “is going to be seen as a measure of his ability to be effective in government.” Positioning a left-wing mayor as fiscally responsible, Kang argues, “is an important part of the left governance project.”

How do you make a boring film about a peasant revolt? Writer-director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, Captain Phillips, United 93) has found a way. His new film, The Uprising, is about the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and it’s such a glum plod I should’ve forgotten it immediately after seeing it. But somehow it haunts me.Maybe it’s the dismal blue-lit cinematography, so typical of our spiritless era. And on top of that, Greengrass’s tendency to favor in intense scenes his wobbling, uncertain handheld-camera work that has so little impact, you want to yell at the screen, “Pick a shot, man! You’re the director!”But mostly, it’s the way the film disapproves of peasant revolts, which you might say is surely impossible. If there’s a peasant revolt, you side with the peasants, obviously — even old Hollywood flicks made by rank conservative movie moguls got that part right. But The Uprising earnestly insists on an “its complicated” stance toward the events of 1381. There’s all that distasteful violence and looting by enraged and starving peasants, for example. And the protagonist, a leader of the massive rebellion, tut-tuts and shakes his head and gets depressed over that in a way that says plainly, “The peasants are revolting in more ways than one.”This view reflects Greengrass’s fundamental take on revolutionary history worldwide throughout recorded time. Once a documentary filmmaker who worked in apartheid South Africa and Northern Ireland, Greengrass maintains his very limited, Cambridge-educated-Brit notion of the breadth of historical events, saying smugly, “Revolutions always eat themselves.” In other words: Why bother? “They start off with people’s intense hopes and dreams, but once you pull authority down, the result is chaos.”Greengrass follows the same logic of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises and many other contemptible movies about the folly of mass revolt, showing that suffering proles driven to the edge by a corrupt ruling class are sympathetic only up until the moment when they rebel and fight back. From then on, unless they repent, they’re the baddies — mindless, bloodthirsty, brutal mobs. They can only become fully sympathetic again in abject defeat — if then.Ploughman, the Worst Superhero EverThe film is not helped along by having our hero played by the stupefyingly dull Andrew Garfield. As the fictional farmer called simply “Ploughman,” he’s in perpetual mourning over his family that died in the black plague. Pushed to his limit by the royal taxes that are beggaring his community, Ploughman assaults the tax-collecting hirelings of King Richard II, thus kicking off the revolt.Ploughman explains that his name refers to the fact that he and his work are regarded as one entity, but hearing it said over and over gets very distracting. What’s with that name anyway? Ploughman. Is he the worst superhero ever? Is his superpower growing potatoes?I should add that Garfield is in no way believable as a fourteenth-century farmer. He has the soft-boy look of some random coffeehouse laptop jockey, yet we’re supposed to accept that he’s a formidable figure, lean and sinewy from a lifetime of hard labor. Wielding his favorite weapon, the sickle — don’t get your hopes up, communists! — he’s such a deadly fighter, he readily defeats the knights who are guarding the king, one after another, in an absolutely delusional action sequence that arrives late in the movie. Honor labor, Greengrass, by acknowledging that a farmer might be very handy with his sickle and still not be able to defeat, on his own, several highly trained knights whose lifelong calling is combat.Unsurprisingly, this lame attempt at an action-oriented historical epic is bombing badly at the box office. It’s the second of two failed films in a row for Garfield after The Magic Faraway Tree, which is the real title of a real movie that opened a few weeks ago and was immediately consigned to oblivion by a disgusted public.Making Ploughman the superhuman Everyman at the center of The Uprising pushes into secondary roles the more interesting historical figures who actually led the revolt, played by more exciting actors — Cosmo Jarvis as renegade soldier Wat Tyler and Jamie Bell as seditious priest John Ball. There was a certain poetry and logic to soldier and priest, sword and scripture, joining forces to lead the most massive peasant revolt in English history. But here, it gets thrown out of whack by shoving a sad-sack farmer into the foreground.Greengrass wants to make sure that women get some screentime too, which is fair enough, so there’s a fictional character named Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), an ex-nun who was raped by a priest and had her newborn child torn away from her, who’s now a head-shaven toughie ready to fight. And the worried mother of troubled boy king Richard II, Joan of Kent (Katherine Waterston), prays that he’ll find the strength to rule independent of his corrupt and self-serving counselors who include the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury (Stephen Dillane), Sir Robert Hales, the grand prior of the Knights Hospitaller (Tom Hollander), and nobleman politician William Walworth (Jonny Lee Miller).Woody Norman as fourteen-year-old Richard II, tormented by nightmares and conniving advisers and presentiments of doom, does a nice job of making the boy king both pitiable and disturbing. He appears to be a weak reed on which to build any confidence, yet the peasants still believe intensely in kings divinely ordained by God and are convinced he’ll cast off his evil counselors once the people petition him with their grievances. When the boy king finally does find the strength to lead, well — I probably don’t have to say “SPOILER ALERT!” when I tell you that this doesn’t go well for the peasants. Or for peasant leaders.Robin Hood and His Morose MenJust to give you one example of what ultimately happened — though it’s not handled this way in the film, which chickens out at every turn — the priest John Ball was executed by being hanged, drawn, and quartered. If you look it up, you’ll find that’s a gruesome multiple-step form of medieval capital punishment that certainly wasn’t the origin of the word “overkill,” but that term comes to mind nevertheless.But that’s a bummer, right? So Paul Greengrass decided to find a way to tack a happier ending onto The Uprising. And this really is a SPOILER: Greengrass has Ploughman escape and then turn up again in an idiotic denouement when the heavily guarded royal coach bearing King Richard II and the Queen Mother is lumbering through the woods and gets surrounded by a bunch of masked figures all wearing dull green who drop down out of the trees.“It’s Robin Hood and his Merry Men,” you think with a sinking sense of despair, and it is, only this bunch is anything but merry. It’s Robin Hood and his Morose Men, starring Ploughman as the beloved masked outlaw of Sherwood Forest, not in the least cheered up by finding this liberating form of ongoing rebellion and guerilla-style warfare. Ex-nun Alyce is now one of the low-spirited gang. Any hopes Greengrass might have cherished that The Uprising would kick off a rebooted Robin Hood series die a well-deserved death right here.Where’s Errol Flynn when you need him? When somebody in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) says in shocked tones to Flynn’s Robin Hood, “You speak treason!” he answers with heartening élan, “Fluently.” So goddamn proud of himself and his fellow rebels, I mean. Those were the days. But here, we have the worst of both worlds: gritty “realism” and absurd Hollywood convention.Here Ploughman/Robin Hood has a chance to kill Richard II, this little royal sumb-tch who betrayed Wat Tyler and John Ball and slaughtered thousands of trusting peasants who believed in him. But you can’t count on these dreary depressive half-hearted rebels who never really commit to their own revolution. Ploughman/Robin Hood merely drags the king out of his carriage into the dirt and says scornful words at him. He promises that, after this schoolyard-style humiliation, the boy king will be harassed by a fresh set of nightmares till the end of his days. Yeah, that’s real punishment. An already nightmare-plagued teenage king, safe in his castle, has more nightmares. That’ll show him.How media-makers have embraced utter toothlessness even in fictionalized narratives of historical rebellions is sickening to contemplate. Movies like this are just one more way of reminding ourselves that for decades we’ve been macerating in weak equivocation and class-traitor spinelessness.So there’s yet another promising cinematic premise gone down the chutes — with a bomb this size, nobody will be able to make another 1381 English Peasant Revolt movie for who knows how long. And I’d like to see a unsparingly realistic version of that film that includes some of John Ball’s famous incendiary speeches, such as the one with the mocking kick-ss line, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”Then it should show Ball’s hanged-drawn-and-quartered execution after Richard II reneges on every promise to his too-trusting subjects in order to get them to disband and then hunts down their rebel leaders.Let’s look at this historical uprising squarely. It has, shall we say, enduring relevance.

It’s all too common for people to associate the existence of markets with capitalism. But because we know markets had a life before capitalism, we can also imagine them having a life after.On this latest episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek compare how markets operated in precapitalist economies versus modern capitalist economies to see if markets may prove useful in future socialist societies.Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here.Melissa NaschekIn our episode on market socialism, you talked about why markets are not inherently capitalist and why the socialist movement should think seriously about how to incorporate them into socialism. Today we’re going to take more of a theoretical and historical approach and look at what markets are, how they operate within capitalism, and why markets could be compatible with a socialist society.Vivek ChibberThe neoliberal right and mainstream economics take markets to be synonymous with capitalism. They see capitalism simply as a quantitative expansion of the market. Ironically, there’s a mirror image of this within the Left too. Whenever they see a market, it has to be a capitalist market. And this is where a lot of the objections to market socialism come from.So I think it’s good to see if we can detach markets from capitalism conceptually and then try to show that the market itself is very limited in its properties. How it functions will depend on how it’s embedded in the wider and more encompassing context of other social relations. And that will help us think better about what aspects of the market are intrinsic to it and what aspects of the market actually are ones that are endowed through capitalism. And hence, if we were to take it outside of capitalism, we can see which aspects of markets will remain and which aspects of market will fall away. And it might turn out that the aspects that remain are actually not only unobjectionable but quite useful.Precapitalist MarketsMelissa NaschekWhy don’t we start, then, with the markets that existed before capitalism. What did markets look like in a precapitalist society?Vivek ChibberIn one sense, they looked like markets do anywhere else, which is to say that they were places where people went to buy and sell stuff. But in a deeper sense, the markets were very different prior to the rise of capitalism.Before capitalism, the buying and selling of things occupied a much more peripheral and marginal place in economic activity. The actual existence of trade is thousands of years old. It’s existed almost since the deepening of settled agriculture. But it’s also known that the trade tended to be of goods that were what you might call “surplus production.”Prior to the rise of capitalism, the fundamental production unit was the peasant family farm. And the peasant farm overwhelmingly raised crops and made things for its own consumption. This sometimes was taken to be a sign of what’s called a natural economy. Within a natural economy, every unit was taken to be totally self-sufficient. They produced just for themselves, and nobody traded. But we now know that has never been the case. Natural economies are mostly fictional entities.Even when people were primarily growing and making things for themselves, they always engaged in trade. But the trade they engaged in tended to be of stuff that was left over after their consumption needs were taken care of. They took those to the market. And most markets tended to be rural or village markets. They didn’t go to the cities.Melissa NaschekWhen you say consumption needs, can you just clarify that?Vivek ChibberThe peasant family primarily engaged in agriculture. It would grow crops. Depending on the country, some of this would be a grain like wheat or rice. And then there would also be other subsidiary crops that they grew on the side, many of which were used for fertilizer. So you would consume some of it, and then the rest, like turnips, you would use for fertilizer.The family unit also made its own manufactured goods. So prior to the rise of capitalism, manufacture and agriculture were not separated as economic activities. The same unit that did agriculture also did manufacture. And Karl Marx speaks eloquently in Capital about how, with the rise of capitalism, you get a division of labor in which, for the first time, manufacturing activity and agricultural activity become functionally separated from each other. Manufacturing is done in urban areas or in different localities, and agriculture is done as a separate activity.Melissa NaschekSo in theory, the rural peasant family is self-sustaining just by its own production?Vivek ChibberLet’s say it strives toward self-sufficiency, never achieving it.Melissa NaschekRight, because then you mentioned that there are subsidiary things that they were going to market for.Vivek ChibberExactly. They would grow their own crops, but then they would also try to build some of their own tools. They would also try to make their own clothes. They would, to the extent that they could, make whatever furniture is possible. But obviously they couldn’t do all of these things. Some of it they would have to get from elsewhere, either from, say, blacksmiths or carpenters within their village.And in India, you had something called the Jajmani system. The Jajmani system was one in which different groups of people specialized in particular things that they made and were usually organized around caste. And then they would exchange with each other through that specialization, but in a non-monetized way. It would be exchange in kind. This many shoes for this many shirts, that kind of thing.Melissa NaschekWould you still consider that a market?Vivek ChibberIt’s not a market. It’s exchange activity. We call a market something where there is a concentration of exchange in a specialized location. So suppose different families are trading with each other in the same village. It’s not a market. But now suppose you put a place separately where everybody brings their wares when they want to put them up for sale or trade with somebody. Now you’ve got a market. But before the rise of capitalism, there weren’t a lot of markets in that sense. Most exchange took place informally and locally. So first, not much of the product was actually put up for exchange.What was put up for exchange was stuff left over from the family’s primary production; those things were taken to the market. This means that the production activities were not done with trade in mind.The implication is that peasant producers didn’t care so much about cost and quality. I made it for myself to my liking, and I made it at a cost that I don’t really worry about being competitive, since that’s an afterthought for me. But that means that the stuff that’s coming to the market is neither very cheap nor very good. It’s just stuff that is there, and if you want to buy it, you can buy it.Now, what about the cities? Interestingly, the cities, right up until the fifteenth century or so, were of two kinds: large urban cities and the smaller townships. Most urban settlements were small townships before the rise of capitalism, and these townships are actually an extension of the rural areas. They are not, as Max Weber thought, islands of urban activity and mercantile activity separate from, say, the feudal economy. Cities were actually controlled by feudal lords.Melissa NaschekWhat is their role in the feudal society in that case?Vivek ChibberBoth consumption and production. There were places where feudal lords took some of the stuff that they were having made, but they were also mainly places where people, if they moved out of the village, would come and live, and then they would engage in some kind of mercantile activity. But that mercantile activity was controlled by guilds, and guilds were essentially urban merchant associations or producer associations — carpenters, tradesmen, things like that. And those guilds tightly controlled the markets.So it’s not the case that there was a flourishing market in urban areas that would then spread into the rural areas, like capitalism spreading from the city to the rural areas. The cities were completely controlled by feudal lords. Their economies were run and controlled by the guilds, and the guilds could only control the urban economy if landlords gave them monopoly powers. The cities could not, therefore, be a source of opposition to feudal lords in the way that Weber thought. Cities were in fact primarily and overwhelmingly controlled and dependent upon feudal lords.Markets, therefore, were not a dissolving element to feudalism anywhere in the world. They were internal to feudalism. And what that tells us is markets are not a solvent. Wherever you put them, they don’t just spread like a virus across the economic activity. They are as much under the influence and control of political relations as anything else is.So prior to the rise of capitalism, markets were fully contained, they were limited in what they could do, and they were limited in their impact upon society. But that also means that finding a market prior to the modern era is not evidence that capitalism was coming about or was on its way, because that relies on the assumption that prior to capitalism, there was a natural economy in which there were no markets. That’s wrong. It also relies on the assumption that once you have a market, it has this internal engine that causes it to spread everywhere. That’s not the case. They were limited and contained as long as the class structure and the production relations remained feudal.Melissa NaschekThe theorists who have argued that capitalism has been steadily developing since the beginning of human civilization have pointed to markets as part of their proof. And what you’re saying here is that capitalism is not just some natural outgrowth of economic relations and exchange but in fact an imposed and discrete political-economic system.Vivek ChibberThat’s exactly right. Capitalism cannot be understood as simply the result of the natural growth of the market, because — this is the important thing — the market did not grow naturally. It existed, but it actually ebbed and flowed. From about the year 1000 CE to 1350 CE, it grows, but then it recedes for about eighty to a hundred years. Then it starts growing again. From thirty thousand feet on high, you can say, “Okay, if you just look at history long enough, you can see that there’s been a growth of the market.” But that misses the fact that for the market to have grown, it required prior political changes first.There was nothing natural about the growth of the market and, therefore, nothing natural about the rise of capitalism. When capitalism does come about, it’s because there is a discrete and very specific change in class relations from lord and peasant to capitalist landlord and tenant farmer, then later capitalist and worker. And that took very specific actions. It’s conceivable that it might not have happened for several more centuries.Capitalist MarketsMelissa NaschekSo how did capitalism transform markets?Vivek ChibberThis is the really important thing. As I said, prior to the rise of capitalism, market exchange existed. Markets as discrete places in society existed. But the things being traded were things that are surplus, that are left over after you’ve made your stuff. And the things being traded were never made with the intent of selling them. And so they weren’t disciplined in the producer’s mind right from the start with the intention that this commodity has to be good enough to sell, cheap enough to sell, and have a market available. He just made them for himself.The second thing is that because they were peripheral and marginal, they never really controlled people’s lives. People’s lives were overwhelmingly determined by their own production units — their own consumption habits and consumption needs, by the growing and the creation of stuff for themselves — and by the authority relations around them, which were aristocrats, feudal lords, or, if it’s Rome, maybe slaveholders. But markets did not have much of an impact on people’s lives. People didn’t depend on them for their livelihood. They didn’t depend on markets for their consumption goods.What changed with capitalism is not just that the market became bigger, more expansive, and consistently growing — although of course that’s true. What changed is that, for the first time, market exchange comes to rule people’s lives in a very fundamental way.The deepest way in which it rules their lives is this. Before the rise of capitalism, what was a basic production unit? As I said, it’s the family farm, the peasant unit. And within that unit, people grow stuff for themselves and rely on their own labor, which is unpaid. They’re working for themselves.When capitalism comes about, what’s the basic production unit? Let’s just say stylistically, it’s the factory. And in that unit, what is the typical form of labor now? It’s wage labor. Now of course, wage labor can be found in all sorts of precapitalist societies. It existed, but it was small in the proportion of the labor force that actually engaged in it. And the people who did wage labor often did it as a “side hustle” — they didn’t depend on it.Now, what’s the defining element of capitalism? People no longer have their own plots of land. They were kicked off the land, which is called expropriation. Peasants became workers. And with that, they had no choice but to sell their labor-power in order to get the money to make the goods. Previously they grew their own goods. Now they have to buy them.Melissa NaschekSome of what you’re saying is that, even though capitalism didn’t invent the labor market, the role that the labor market comes to play under a capitalist society has qualitatively changed.Vivek ChibberExactly. Not just quantitatively but also qualitatively changed. It’s possible to have a quantitative expansion of the labor market without it changing its quality. This could involve more peasants doing their side hustles, resulting in the labor market growing, or the wage-labor market growing, but it wouldn’t change in its actual functions in society.Melissa NaschekJust like in our day-to-day, when the labor market expands or contracts, it doesn’t signal some kind of major shift within the structures of capitalism.Vivek ChibberYes, that’s just a quantitative expansion or contraction of an institution, but the role of that institution hasn’t changed.What happened with the rise of capitalism is, for the first time ever, people had to buy the stuff they need to survive, and in order to buy the stuff, they need money. And since money doesn’t grow on trees, the only way they can acquire it is by selling something. The thing they sell is their labor-power.So capitalism is a system in which everybody sells in order to buy. Everybody’s selling something. Capitalists sell goods and services. Workers sell their labor-power. They become dependent on the labor market in a way that no peasant ever was. And the reason that mattered for the peasant was, if, say, there were no jobs in the urban area or nearby villages, the peasant would still be okay, because they had their plot of land. They would still survive. The farm was essentially their social insurance.With the wage-labor market, you become completely dependent on the market for your survival. That puts you at the mercy of two things. First of all, it puts you at the mercy of the guy giving you the job, because if he fires you, you’re out on your butt, and you’re not going to survive. Secondly, the wage-labor market makes you dependent on money and having enough to be able to survive. Money within capitalism became a central social institution in a way that it never was before.So capitalism universalized and expanded two markets. A market for labor, which had never occupied a central place in society. And the other is a market for products. In the past, people took a surplus to the market, stuff that was left over after their consumption needs. They never made things specifically with selling in mind. Now with capitalism, the capitalists who own the factories can’t consume the stuff they’re making, because a lot of the stuff they’re making is things like metal goods. You can’t consume it. The only reason you’re interested in making it is that it’ll get you money.Melissa NaschekCan you talk about the relationship between production and exchange within a capitalist system?Vivek ChibberPrior to the rise of capitalism, exchange had no deep connection to production. Production was carried out for use, for your own consumption. Exchange occurred as a side activity, and often peasant households would do very little exchange. And as I said, the result of that was that the products that were taken to the market were of uneven quality, oftentimes not cost-efficient, not that concerned with whether there is a market for them.Within capitalism, every capitalist knows that unless the products he makes sell in sufficient quantity and at a sufficient profit in the market, he’s going to lose his assets or his factory, et cetera. So right from the start, the capitalist has to make things that are cost-efficient and that are of good quality. Now, you might ask, “So what?”Melissa NaschekRight, this feels very commonsensical to us because we’re living in a capitalist system.Vivek ChibberBut there’s a political and social consequence of this. Because every capitalist has to fundamentally be concerned with things like cost-effectiveness, unit costs, and quality, he has to worry about how the work that people are doing for him is being carried out. The capitalist brings labor into the workplace. He could say to the workers, “Hey man, look, I’ve hired you for eight hours. I’m going leave now and I’ll be back at five o’clock. Whatever you’ve made, just hand it over to me and I’ll go sell it.”Melissa NaschekWow, sounds like a great boss.Vivek ChibberYeah, that’s the kind of boss everyone wants. But nobody has that boss. Why? Because the capitalist knows, if I commit to paying this person, I have to have revenues from my sales that are high enough to pay for this person and to have my profits. And those revenues are not going to come easily, because there’s somebody else competing with me on the market to sell the same things that I’m selling. So that means if he’s going to survive, he has to be concerned with cost-effectiveness and quality from top to bottom in all of his operations.But that means he cannot trust his workers. He cannot trust them to provide labor in the quantity and of the quality that he wants. And that means that he has to exert power over them and make them work faster, harder, and better. And that puts him at loggerheads with the workers.See what’s happening? This is creating the basis for class struggle.If capitalists didn’t care about the quality and the quantity of their goods, they’d let workers do whatever they wanted. And if they did that, there would never be conflict between these two classes. Why do they care so much? It’s because production is right from the start shaped by exchange. That was not true before the advent of capitalism.What happens in capitalism is exchange on the market takes over your life. It takes over your life directly if you’re a wage laborer, in that you’ve got to go sell your laboring activity on the market. It takes over directly for the capitalist because he has to make sure that whatever goods are being made under his authority are sellable, are good enough. And then indirectly, it is the institution, the factor that creates the conflict between labor and capital, because if the capitalist is going to survive, he’s got to make his profits. If he’s going to make his profits, he’s got to sweat the worker’s labor. If he’s going to sweat the worker’s labor, there’s going to be a conflict.The capitalist market fundamentally changes all social relations because, once you have people dependent on the market, everything else changes around them. Their culture is going to change. How they think about the world is going to change. The social institutions they make are going to change. Everything changes. And that’s why Marx thought that until you dramatically reduce the place of the market or roll it back altogether, you’re not going to be able to bring about the kind of social changes that we would associate with a more humane and just society.Melissa NaschekSpeaking of Marx, I wanted to ask: How did he understand markets, and how does a Marxist understanding of the economy differ from that of conservative economists?Vivek ChibberMarx’s theorization of the market is the most profound analysis of market activity that social science has ever come up with. And it’s something of an achievement of modern social science that it manages to marginalize and ignore Marx on this issue. It takes real dedication to marginalize such a profoundly insightful theory. But universities have managed to do that.There is a deep difference between Marx’s view of the market and the conservative one. The conservative view of the market sees it fundamentally as an arena of opportunity and freedom. How? Well, for the conservatives, there are no power relations involved in the market. You go to the market, you bring your stuff along, and either somebody’s going to buy it or not. Nobody’s forcing anyone to buy anything. Nobody’s forcing anyone to sell anything. And if you find that your stuff is not selling, you’ll go back home and you’ll make something else. And you bring that.The beauty of the market is that, through an iterative process, sellers find out what society wants. Because if some stuff doesn’t sell, it means no one wants it. If the stuff does sell, it means it’s meeting a need. And then because all the sellers want to make a profit, they keep looking for things that will sell. And through that process, they end up making things that are actually desired and actually needed. From the buyer’s standpoint, they go to the market knowing exactly what they want. And if what they want isn’t there, they let it be known that, “Hey, we’d really like to have some shoes. There are no shoes here.” And somebody will make shoes for them because it’s a market waiting to be tapped, as they say.So there’s this iterative process from both sides. And everybody gains. Everybody’s happy. Nobody can force any one thing on the other. That’s the conservative side, including the labor market.From the conservative standpoint, labor markets are as much a realm of freedom as product markets. Why? Because if I come to work for you, and I don’t like the way you’re treating me, I can just quit and go work for somebody else. Nobody’s forcing me. I’m not a serf. I’m not a slave. I can quit and go work for somebody else. And that’ll be punishment to you as a bad employer. You’ll have to change your ways. Vice versa, if you hire me and you don’t like the work I’m doing, you can get rid of me. You can fire me, and you’ll hire somebody else. In these fully free exchanges, each person has an exit option. And it’s exactly like when you go to a stall in a flea market. If you don’t like what you’re getting, you go to the next stall. If a capitalist doesn’t like the work that the worker is doing, he’ll go to the next worker. If the worker doesn’t like the way his employer is behaving, he’ll go to the next employer. No coercion, all voluntary action, and it’s a realm of freedom. As Paul Samuelson famously said, employees hire their employers as much as the employers hire them.Melissa NaschekSounds nice.Vivek ChibberIt does sound nice. The thing is, it’s based on a completely hallucinatory understanding of how labor markets actually work. But before I explain that, let me say, it’s not that the entire description is wrong. There is an aspect of the market, especially the product market — the market for goods and services — that is really free and expansive. And Marx admired that. He understood that.Melissa NaschekRight, as much as we talk about exploitation, we’re not saying that wage labor and slavery are comparable institutions.Vivek ChibberExactly. The fact that I can quit my job, go to somebody else, is a massive advance over being enslaved or over being somebody’s serf. That’s real. That said, there is a genuinely fictional component of the conservative description.It is true to say that I can quit my job working for you and go work for somebody else. But it does not follow from that that there are no power relations between us. Actually, Adam Smith had the best explanation for this, and Smith is known as the founding father of modern economics and a trailblazer for defending capitalism. In fact, Smith hated capitalism — he just said that it was better than the alternative at the time, which was feudalism, and he admired its efficiency gains.Smith said that anytime there is a standoff between an employer and an employee, it’s pretty clear who’s going to win: the employer wins every time. And the reason the employer wins is that he has so much more wealth at his disposal that if his workers refuse to work for him, he can just rely on his stocks of wealth. Back then, it was his inventories, his corn, whatever he had in his granary. But today we would say it’s his assets, it’s his stock portfolio, his savings. Whereas workers have no savings, and if they do, it’s usually only enough to tide them over for a week, two weeks, or a month.In that situation, the employer is always going to win precisely because of his greater wealth and assets. He can hold off longer. So the mere fact that I can change my employment venue from you to somebody else doesn’t mean that the power that the two of you have over me disappears. All it means is I’m going from one situation in which I’m the inferior party to another situation in which I’m again the inferior party. What might change is the degree to which I am mistreated by one or the other, or the degree to which I’m vulnerable to you or the other. But the vulnerability itself never goes away.This means that the labor market is intrinsically and inalterably a site of domination. It’s a site where power is wielded by one party over the other regardless of what the rate of unemployment is. In mainstream economics, if every worker has a job, it equalizes the bargaining relationship. But it never really does, precisely because even if everyone has a job, and they’re able to raise their wages, they never equalize the power relation between themselves and their employers. And that’s why Marx thought the only way to actually democratize economic relations is by eliminating the workers’ dependence on finding an employer for themselves.Melissa NaschekSo would it be fair to say that Marx’s critique is centered on the labor market? What about nonlabor commodities?Vivek ChibberThe pillar on which the moral critique of capitalism rests for Marx is exploitation. And exploitation occurs between labor and the employer. So you could say that the labor market is the foundation, is the central institution, that Marx is aiming at when he criticizes capitalism.But of course it’s not the only one. Marx also thinks that there’s something about the human beings relating to each other through things, through the commodity, through buying and selling, through only meeting each other in a very instrumental way as sellers and buyers of commodities, that’s also, he thinks, dehumanizing. We abstract away from our personhood, from our individuality. And that means that the richness of potential sociability between us is now set aside in favor of this very crass instrumental need. And for Marx that’s a dimension of what he calls alienation.Then there’s also the problem of the immorality of my having to rely on the market for my basic necessities. Imagine if there’s no wage labor at all. I’m given some kind of basic minimum support, but I still need to find all the stuff I need on the market. And there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be made. To give you a great example, suppose it’s decided by the people who control markets that certain pharmaceuticals are just not profitable enough for them, and they’re not going to make them. Even though wage labor has been abolished, the production of goods is still completely dependent on profitability and whether or not those goods bring adequate profits to the person, instead of being ruled by people’s needs. Marx also objected to that.I think it’s true that most of Marx’s moral and political theory revolves around the extraction of work, the consequences of that, both at the micro level and the macro level. But he thinks there are aspects of markets and market dependence writ large that also have evils of their own. And that’s why, in his mind, it really was an imperative to reduce or abolish the market altogether.Melissa NaschekSo let’s keep talking about exploitation. What role does the market play in capitalists exploiting their workers?Vivek ChibberPeople normally think of exploitation in a very commonsensical way, as when you’re really treating somebody badly. In Marx’s economics, there is a dimension of that in exploitation. That’s why he calls it exploitation. In Marx’s view, when workers are being exploited, they are being treated badly in some way. But it’s not just like they are pushed around or being dominated. For him, it’s something quite specific in addition to the fact that they’re dominated — because they are dominated. Workers are exploited because they end up providing capitalists their labor in such a quantity that capitalists don’t have to work anymore. Capitalists derive their income and livelihood from the work done by workers.What does that mean? It means that you come and work for me and you make stuff. And when I sell the stuff, the revenues from it are enough to both feed you and to give me an income, regardless of whether or not I’ve worked. So in mainstream economics, they’ll often say, ‘Well, the capitalists’ profits are just his wages. They’re wages from the fact that he also contributes to production. He manages, he supervises, he thinks hard. . . . ” Okay, you can say that. But here’s the difference.If a worker isn’t working, he doesn’t get a wage. That’s simple enough. If a capitalist decides not to work, he can still claim his profit, because his profits were never based on the fact that he’s working. They were based on the fact that he owns the factory. If he does work alongside the worker, whether it’s management or anything else, that’s just something he decided to do. He could just as well hire somebody else to do it and pay them.Capitalist income is always a claim on property. Workers’ income flows from their actual laboring activity. And the test is: if workers stop working, they starve. If the capitalist stops working, he just sits around all day, and the income still keeps coming in. That’s exploitation. The exploitation is the extraction of labor. You work for me, and you work long and hard enough that your labor actually provides an income for both of us.The question is: Why do capitalists do it? The answer is simple. If they don’t do it, their operations go under. So if I hire people to work for me, but I do not extract labor from them — what’s called a surplus — then I don’t have the profits and the revenues to plow back into the factory as reinvestment, nor do I have enough for me to live on. I can pinch pennies on my end. But at the end of the day, if you are not making enough stuff for me with an efficiency and of the quality that I need, that I can sell at a profit, my factory will go under. And that means if I want to succeed, I’ve got to get you to make stuff for me that is cheap, that is competitive, and that customers will buy. That requires that I supervise you; that I make sure you work really hard as fast as possible; not just fast enough, not just well enough, but at the highest possible level, because that’s how I beat my competitors.It’s because I’m obsessing over my competitors that I treat you the way I do. Because otherwise, I could just leave, come back at five and say, “Hey Melissa, I’ll see you in eight hours. Work if you want, work if you don’t want, but at the end of the day, as long as there’s enough for us to live on, we’ll be happy.” Why does no capitalist do that? It’s because they’re competing with each other. It’s because they have to get not just some labor out of their employees but the maximum labor out of their employees.Markets force them to do it, which again brings Marx back to saying, “Don’t tell capitalists to be better people. Don’t tell them to behave better; they’re not behaving the way they are because of their personalities. They’re behaving the way they are because the pressure is on them to make a profit.” And so if you want better employers, if you want a society in which the work relation itself is more humane, you’ve got to eliminate the pressure of profit maximization, that pressure of constantly extracting more labor, and that comes from the capitalist market.Postcapitalist MarketsMelissa NaschekIf markets are playing this huge role in exploitation and essentially forcing the owners of industry to exploit their workforce, how can we think that markets would be a neutral or even good thing under socialism?Vivek ChibberThat’s a very good question. And indeed, the onus is on market socialists like myself to justify having markets. Just as I said, I laid the gauntlet down to people who support planning to say they need to make an argument for why they think planning could work when it never actually has anywhere else. So I think the justification for markets is twofold.One is that if it is indeed correct that central planning is a nonstarter, then it’s just a matter of necessity. You’re going to have to have markets to a greater or lesser extent whether you like it or not, because the alternative, which is a fully planned economy, is not a workable alternative. Now, that’s just a recognition of reality. And so a lot of socialists treat the issue of markets and planning as if they’re items on a menu. How can you say you don’t want central planning? It assumes a choice where there might not be one. And it’d be really, really great if people on the Left could just be pragmatic about this and realize that you cannot treat this as if it’s just all up to you, whether you can opt for door number one, which is markets, or door number two, which is planning.I think it’s perfectly fine to say we would prefer to have planning, and then ask: Could we actually have it? And that’s a great way to then say, “Okay, let’s plan those things that can be planned. And if we find that there’s things that are not amenable to it, then we accept the market in those domains, but, most importantly, we have to then neutralize those components, those aspects of the market that are obnoxious, that generate all these bad outcomes morally, politically, economically inside capitalism.”Melissa NaschekI took from what you said on market socialism that it’s also not quite an either-or; that markets are in fact a tool that can be used, if not fully to plan an economy, then to facilitate a more planned economy compared to what we have now.Vivek ChibberYeah, compared to what we have now — because in a market socialist economy, there will be more planning than there is in a capitalist economy. I don’t know if I put it as they facilitate planning. What they do is they complement planning.So one part of the economy is planned — and I said this would be things like transportation, utilities, media, and medical care. These are easy to plan because they’re substantially planned even inside capitalism. But when it comes to a lot of consumption goods, like services, like restaurants and hotels and small operations, like sporting goods stores and things like that, I just don’t see how you’ll ever be able to plan those. The goal, then, is that you have those things be put up in the market, but the employment relation and the ownership relations within them have to be different than they are in capitalism.So perhaps you can have enterprises producing goods for the market, but they’re all going to be co-ops. There won’t be an owner inside them. They’ll be paying their workers wages, but the wage will have a fixed component to it, where every enterprise has to give their workers something like a living wage, no matter what. And then on top of the living wage, the co-op can decide, if it wants to take some of its revenues and distribute them as wages, or if it want to take its revenues and perhaps put them in investment or something like that.The key thing is that there will be no owning class. If there’s no owning class, then all the key decisions about how fast to work, when to work, what to make, they’re all made democratically by the workers themselves. The enterprises will compete with each other.Now, won’t competition force them to do the same things that competition forces owners to do in capitalism? No, because your entire fate is not bound up with the success of your enterprise. So in market socialism, people who are working in the market sector would get a nominal wage, but they would also get a huge social wage. That is, guaranteed access to goods like housing, health care, childcare. All of these sorts of things will be citizenship rights. That means, then, that when you’re making your decisions in your co-op about how to distribute your revenues and how to use them, you won’t be burdened with this idea that unless you put all of that stuff back into investment, so that you can drive down the cost of your goods, you’re going to be out on your butt without any kind of survival chances. Because even if your enterprise goes under, you will still have access to certain basic goods as a citizenship right. That means competition won’t exert the same force on you that it does in capitalism.These are just ideas, and I think we have to think through them further. The reason I’m very serious about it is that you can’t just wave your hand and say we’re going to have central planning. Either it works or it doesn’t. And not to have discussions of a fallback option like market socialism is just irresponsible. Because if you take this leap in the dark again at a fully planned economy and it fails again, the result of it is not neutral. People will turn against not just planning, but the whole socialist idea itself. And they’ll say, “Screw it, let’s go back to capitalism.” And you’ll have a movement backward, a new constitution, new rules, new laws, and you’ll bring back capitalism because at least it works.I would just tell socialists: Don’t make the same mistake that mainstream economists do, which is that whenever they see a market, they think it’s capitalism in germinal form. Markets, depending on the wider context, just do different things. It’s still called a market because it has a thin veneer that is common across different systems. But if you just look vertically and how it’s embedded in those systems, it’s those vertical ties to the deeper system that really give it whatever functions it has.What that means then is: Don’t think that if we have markets in socialism, we’re bringing in capitalism. That’s just not true.

It happens every time now. The United States jumps headfirst into a Middle Eastern quagmire, and, like clockwork, voices start rising, blaming it all on Israel. The two most salient cases of this exercise unfolded around the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the George W. Bush administration, and the joint US-Israeli onslaught on Iran that began on February 28, 2026, led by the second Trump administration.The best-known “blame it on Israel” controversy remains the one touched off by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. It began with an article of theirs published in the London Review of Books in 2006 before being developed the year after into a hefty book of close to five hundred pages, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The two authors began this work at a time when the Bush administration’s fiasco in Iraq had become so blatant that the US Congress had to intervene and appoint a bipartisan commission — the Iraq Study Group, also known as the Baker–Hamilton Commission — tasked with designing a way out of what had evolved into a damaging morass.This fact alone raises a question: Why hadn’t the two authors reacted in the same way to the previous devastating war waged on Iraq by the United States, the original 1991 onslaught led by the George H. W. Bush administration? After all, Israel’s interest in destroying both Iraq’s armed forces and the country’s infrastructure back then was certainly greater than any interest it might have had in seeing American troops occupy the country in 2003, especially as they brought with them from exile the Iraqi allies of Israel’s regional archenemy, Iran, and included them in the postinvasion Coalition Provisional Authority.Prior to the 1991 onslaught, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had come out of its eight-year war against Iran with a swollen army and a huge debt. It invaded the oil-rich Emirate of Kuwait in August 1990 in an attempt to solve its economic problem and fund the preservation and development of its armed forces. Israel obviously had a huge interest in the destruction of that Iraqi state, and it would have been easy to build a compelling argument showing how both the Israeli government and the Israel lobby had intensively and decisively intervened on the side of the pro-war section of the US establishment.It’s no great mystery why Mearsheimer and Walt omitted this history: they both supported that war, which they likely saw as serving the United States’ national interest — a concept that refers to a state’s interest in a traditional “realist” manner, with no regard to the specific social interests this state represents. The two academics’ conservative brand of realism thus construes the world as divided among powers whose legitimate interests stem from their geopolitical position and their drive toward achieving regional or global hegemony.As realists, Mearsheimer and Walt were very much in tune with the senior Bush administration’s own realism, which converged with the view of Washington’s Arab allies that, in the absence of a credible alternative suiting American hegemony, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime was to be avoided. This is why the 1991 onslaught stopped short of marching on Baghdad, a position that led to bitter recrimination from some neocons and their Iraqi allies, who saw in it a betrayal of their aspiration for regime change. Trump would later heap scorn on the regime change ambition once it had failed, fully endorsing the so-called realist approach.The contrast between the 1991 war and the 2003 invasion was blatant — not only because the neocon-stuffed Bush administration pursued regime change, much to the annoyance of the Arab oil monarchies, which rightly feared that the real beneficiary would be their nemesis Iran, but also in the war’s rationale from the standpoint of the US national interest as Mearsheimer and Walt perceived it.They found the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein “difficult to fathom.” Hussein was, they granted, “a brutal tyrant with worrisome ambitions — including a desire to obtain WMD — but his own incompetence had put these dangerous objectives out of reach. His army had been routed in the 1991 Gulf War and further weakened by a decade of UN sanctions,” leaving Iraq’s military power “never impressive except on paper” and “a pushover by 2003” without weapons of mass destruction.Yet in the aftermath of 9/11, when one would have expected the United States to be focusing laser-like on al Qaeda, the Bush administration chose to invade a deteriorating country that had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and was already effectively contained.For Mearsheimer and Walt, it was “a deeply puzzling decision.”The worst possible key to this “puzzle” is indeed Israel, for the obvious reason that the above factors determined the Zionist state’s own priorities even more than those of the United States. Why on earth would the Israeli government be keen on inciting the United States to invade Iraq when this country had already been crippled by the devastating destruction of its military power, along with its civilian infrastructure, in 1991, followed by a dozen years of US-inflicted strangulation? Would anyone believe that Israel was less worried than the Gulf’s Arab oil monarchies about Iran potentially seizing control of Iraq? And yet such obvious considerations did not prevent Mearsheimer and Walt from laying the blame on the Israel lobby, while carelessly lumping together specifically pro-Israel US institutions — the most notorious of them being the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — and the neocons, in particular those who lobbied for the invasion of Iraq as members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).The two academics did a good job of exposing the nefarious influence of the Israel lobby on US Middle East policy in general. For this, they were unfairly accused of antisemitism, a charge that Israel and its supporters deploy against most critics. But they also provided ammunition to the “blame it on Israel” stratagem, to which they fully adhered.Their argumentation mobilized numerous quotes from Israeli sources — politicians and media — in order to demonstrate that Israel had intensively lobbied for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was done against the US “national interest.” There is no doubt, of course, that many Israeli politicians supported the George W. Bush administration’s drive to occupy Iraq. The most enthusiastic among them was Benjamin Netanyahu, except that — during the crucial period of discussion in the United States, in which he took part by testifying under oath as a private individual before a committee of the House of Representatives — he was at the same time busy maneuvering against his rival Ariel Sharon, who was then Israel’s prime minister and leader of the Likud party.The case regarding Sharon’s lobbying for the 2003 invasion of Iraq is much more tenuous. Of course, the Israeli PM could hardly openly state his reservations (and those of the Israeli intelligence community) about the pet project of a US administration backed by many of Israel’s friends within the American establishment. But by the time Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis had become a topic of heated discussion, significant evidence pointing to those reservations, and their expression through discreet channels, had emerged. A prominent testimony in this regard is that of Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said in a 2007 interview that Israel had warned the United States not to invade Iraq.The debate boils down to this: Was the invasion of Iraq undertaken following pressure from Israel and its supporters against the US national interest, or was it undertaken in pursuance of that national interest, as understood by the George W. Bush administration?Consider the difference between AIPAC and PNAC — one that’s visible in their respective names. It is indisputable that PNAC played an incomparably greater role in the administration’s decision to invade Iraq than whatever specific component of the Israel lobby did. The three most influential members of the administration — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, who also happen to be the three most involved in the Iraq adventure — were among PNAC’s twenty-five founders, as was Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush’s ambassador to Iraq.Unlike AIPAC, however, PNAC’s rationale was not support for Israel but the drive for a “new American century,” as its name indicated: in other words, the furtherance and consolidation of US imperial hegemony over the rest of the world. In the January 1998 PNAC letter to Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq, the eighteen signatories mentioned Israel only once and on a par with America’s Arab allies: “The safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.”The letter expresses the most widely shared view of what US national interest consisted of within elite circles. Instead of focusing on the discussion of that view, Mearsheimer and Walt — two members of the US foreign policy establishment themselves — chose to lay the blame on the Israel lobby, a stratagem that allowed them to explain the Iraq fiasco without a frank and open (and more difficult) discussion of US imperialist interests, aka national interest.This is not wisdom in hindsight. Many critics of US imperialism have explained why the belief that Israel was dictating US policy in the Middle East was, in fact, a case of the tail wagging the dog. The point requires a historical perspective. By the early 1960s, a radicalizing Arab nationalism had forced Washington to give up its direct military foothold in the region — it abandoned the Dhahran air base, in the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, just as the interests that base was meant to protect came under threat. Unable to intervene openly without inflaming Arab hostility further, the United States found in Israel a priceless strategic asset. As I wrote in 2003, “On the one hand Israel played a military role as watchdog of imperialist interests in the region. On the other hand, Washington derived political benefits in Arab countries’ eyes by showing that it had a grip on the watchdog’s leash.”Seen from this perspective, the sums the United States spends on Israel represent one of the most profitable investments it has ever made in building up its hegemony. Compare the more than $300 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance that Washington provided Israel between 1946 and 2024 with the $1.5 trillion that the Trump administration is requesting for the Pentagon for the next fiscal year alone. It is obvious that what economists call the “marginal utility per dollar spent” on Israel is far greater than that of the same dollar added to the gigantic US military budget.This perspective allows for a much closer understanding of what was at stake in the 2003 invasion project and what was revealed, the year after it took place, about the debates it had led to, not only within the Bush administration but also between Washington and its Arab allies (and, behind the scenes, Israel). I commented on these debates in May 2004, long before the Mearsheimer–Walt controversy, in an article entitled “Bush’s Cakewalk Into the Iraq Quagmire.”Mearsheimer and Walt cannot bring themselves to see that the guiding rationale of US policy in the Middle East is the strategic importance of the Gulf to US imperial interests — common knowledge since 1945. Nor will they admit that this same importance is the main rationale for the US-Israeli alliance itself. So they join in the refusal to concede what Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chair from 1987 to 2006, acknowledged in his 2007 memoir: that “the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Greenspan, no radical, called Middle East instability the eight-hundred-pound gorilla capable of halting world economic growth — a factor, he noted, that sober energy forecasting cannot pretend away.Today US control of the Gulf’s oil flow matters less for the United States’ own supply than as leverage over others: over import-dependent China, its only real peer competitor, and over its own import-dependent allies in Europe and East Asia. And the prize is not just oil but oil money — the petrodollars Greenspan left out. The sovereign wealth funds of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) monarchies together manage nearly $6 trillion, more than 40 percent of the global total. Those same states are crucial customers of the US military-industrial complex: according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, three of them — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar — ranked among the world’s top ten arms importers in 2020–24, with the United States supplying 74 percent of Saudi imports, 63 percent of Kuwait’s, and 48 percent of Qatar’s.Add the well-known business interests that the Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff families hold in and with the GCC states as well as the increasingly decisive stakes of the tech oligarchy, and the sheer range of US interests in the Middle East comes into view. These weighed more heavily than any other factor, Netanyahu’s incitement included, on Trump’s decision to join Israel’s strikes on Iran in June 2025 and then, on February 28, to wage a joint war alongside it. To imagine that Trump launched a military expedition of this scale mainly to please Netanyahu misreads the “America First” president as badly as the notion, popular before his second inauguration and for months afterward, that he was an antiwar man of peace.The only argument that could make the case that striking Iran’s nuclear program served no US national interest was made, almost preemptively, by Mearsheimer and Walt in their original 2006 article. Iran’s nuclear ambitions, they granted, gave Washington its own reasons for concern — but, they went on, those ambitions posed no direct threat: “If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran.”This is but another blatant underestimation of the strategic importance of the Gulf region for US imperial interests. The United States could do nothing but adapt its nuclear strategy to the growth of China and the USSR’s arsenals. The nuclear armament of North Korea, a country adjacent to China and under its wing, was of limited strategic significance for Washington: it did not substantially change the balance of forces in East Asia. The same goes for the nuclear armament of India and Pakistan and their mutual deterrence. A nuclear Iran, however, would be a very different story indeed. It would jeopardize US hegemony in the Gulf region by demonstrating a major failure of its pledge to provide protection to its vassal states. It would also trigger a nuclear race in the region, greatly compromising the security of this highly strategic part of the world, way beyond Iran’s already significant role in compromising it through its regional proxies and allies.It is thus highly credible that, behind the Saudis’ official line of appeasing Iran, Riyadh actually joined Israel in encouraging Trump to go to war, as reported on day one by the Washington Post. In any event, Trump would not have gone to war before consulting his local friends, foremost among them the Saudis and the Emiratis. It is most unlikely that he would have gone to war had he encountered real pushback from these two key regional allies. The only plausible and meaningful reservation against the war was likely expressed by the emirate of Qatar, which has always hedged against risks by befriending everyone, from hosting the key US regional military base and command center to cozying up to Tehran and its allies — and which stood to be heavily affected by the war, as indeed happened. But Qatar’s influence on Trump is much weaker than that of the Saudi kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, despite its attempt to enhance its influence by gifting Trump a luxurious Boeing plane taken from its own princely fleet.All of the above does not alter the fact that Trump and his administration have launched what I called “the most botched up of all US imperial wars.” And it didn’t take long for everyone to notice that, compared to the imperialist expedition against Venezuela, Washington faces a much tougher nut to crack, with the risk of having to choose eventually between escalating the war with no exit strategy and exiting it without achieving its proclaimed goals. That is precisely when voices started rising from every corner — from the far right, à la Tucker Carlson, to figures of the mainstream MAGA crowd, to even some on the Left who believe that anti-Zionism requires the espousal of the Israel lobby thesis.Aside from those who fantasize about an all-powerful Israel, thus belittling the United States’ own huge imperialist interests, most of those who resorted to the “blame it on Israel” stratagem, consciously or by knee-jerk reaction, deflected attention away from those very imperialist interests, which they strongly endorse as clearly corresponding to the so-called US national interest.That Netanyahu and his far-right government as well as the entire Israeli power elite were wholeheartedly in favor of the war on Iran is beyond question. That they are the ones to blame for Trump and his team’s highly blundered engagement in this war and conduct of it just does not hold up. One can in fact make the opposite case: that Netanyahu is Trump’s poodle, as was said of Tony Blair at the time of the invasion of Iraq, judging by how the US president is treating the Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu now stands accused by the Israeli opposition of being a “puppet” and turning Israel into a “vassal state.” The inescapable truth is that, whatever advice Netanyahu might have given Trump, the crucial responsibility for the ongoing war lies with the American president, along with those members of his administration who share his delusions of grandeur.

Turkey’s political scene is moving. The recently passed Framework Law redirects the Kurdish question — the principal fault line in the country’s imagined national unity — from armed confrontation to regulated pacification. This has political consequences far beyond its narrow legal scope. More than bringing one period of the Kurdish conflict to a close, it opens a new phase in Turkey’s class struggles by reshaping the balance between the state, the Kurdish movement, and the political opposition.The August 10 Framework Law — officially the Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Cohesion — is a genuine rupture in Turkey’s handling of the Kurdish conflict. More than an administratively dressed-up executive concession, it crowns a parliamentary process initiated by an all-party commission, excluding only the ultranationalist Good Party (İyi Parti). This commission was mandated to recommend measures to end the armed conflict, including talks with the guerrilla Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan.The law passed with an exceptionally broad parliamentary majority: 467 votes in favor, eighty-seven against, and seven abstentions. Alongside the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Devlet Bahçeli’s Nationalist Action Party (MHP), the coalition behind the text included the Kurdish-based Peoples’ Democracy and Equality Party (DEM Party), the newly formed Yeni Parti, the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP), the Labor Party (EMEP), several independents, and a small minority of Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputies. Despite radically different narratives on the Kurdish question, these parties converged on the legal framework regulating the consequences of the PKK disarming.That breadth of support matters because it prevents President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (AKP) from claiming exclusive political credit for ending the armed conflict. However, despite Yeni Parti leader Özgür Özel’s deft efforts to stop Erdoğan from monopolizing the peace process, the political initiative currently rests with the Erdoğan–Bahçeli coalition and Öcalan — not with the main opposition Yeni Parti. This latter emerged from the split in the historic CHP, after most of its parliamentary group and grassroots supporters defected in protest at former Chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s attempt to regain the party leadership through what they saw as a court ruling shaped by Erdoğan’s influence over the judiciary.If implemented in full, the law will release imprisoned PKK-affiliated political activists or suspend pending prosecutions. Release is conditional upon a three-to-five-year probationary period. Any new criminal offense committed during that period will reactivate the remainder of the original sentence in addition to any new penalty. Those convicted of offenses committed before 2005 and those serving aggravated life imprisonment remain excluded.Room for ManeuverBy securing parliamentary backing for the disarmament process, the Erdoğan–Bahçeli alliance has accomplished what once appeared politically impossible. Despite steadily declining approval ratings since the 2024 local elections, the ruling coalition has partially detached the Kurdish question from the traditional government-versus-opposition cleavage and gained unprecedented room to maneuver politically.Until now, the parliamentary arithmetic had been relatively stable. The ruling bloc depended on Turkish conservative-nationalist mobilization; DEM on organized Kurdish democratic-patriotic support; the CHP — now largely succeeded by the Yeni Parti — relied mainly on urban secularist votes. Across the last four national and local elections, Kurdish voters and their political leadership consistently backed the CHP as the only viable national alternative capable of producing a new interlocutor for a negotiated settlement.Beginning with the secret talks with Öcalan, continuing through his unilateral call to dissolve the PKK and culminating in the Framework Law, the ruling coalition has cut diagonally across Turkey’s political alignments. Unlike during the 2013–15 peace process, Ankara’s implicit message is now clear: the state can negotiate directly with Öcalan and the Kurdish movement without first democratizing Turkey’s political order.This has given Cumhur İttifakı (the ruling People’s Alliance) a major competitive advantage. Under the banner of Terörsüz Türkiye (“Terrorless Turkey”), it can pursue a strategy that combines regulated pacification of the organized Kurdish movement with continued authoritarian competition against the main opposition. From the government’s perspective, the two tracks are complementary rather than contradictory.The second track has continued uninterrupted since 2025. Beginning with the arrest of Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu in March last year, there have been police raids on at least thirty-nine municipalities that the opposition CHP captured in the 2024 local elections. Dozens of mayors have been detained or imprisoned on corruption charges based largely on forced or highly contested confessions.The same governing technique was first perfected against Kurdish municipalities. Between 2015 and 2025, Kurdish mayors were removed in successive waves under terrorism-related charges; CHP municipalities are now targeted through corruption, bribery, and embezzlement cases built on similarly politicized judicial practices.Leverage for DEM and ÖcalanFor the Kurdish movement, the Framework Law, despite the state’s instrumentalization of it for pacification, is far more than symbolic. According to the statement released by the DEM Party after its visit to İmralı, Öcalan said:A trek of a thousand kilometers commences with a single step. With this law, we are setting out to resolve a historical problem. We are at the beginning of a democratization process that will be at least as important as the founding of the Republic.The “process,” since its public announcement by Öcalan on February 27, 2025, has progressed through irreversible steps demanded by the government — disarmament, dissolution, and withdrawal of armed units from Turkish territory — whereas the state’s own commitments remained political pledges rather than legally binding. Öcalan’s optimism is clearly nurtured by the fact that some of those assurances have now been written into law and thereby transformed into legal obligations, thus marking a threshold.As a result, Öcalan emerges politically stronger after two years of negotiating. His February 2025 call, the PKK’s dissolution congress, the symbolic disarmament, the formation of the parliamentary commission, negotiations over a legal framework, and the Framework Law comprise an unbroken chain of concessions and Öcalan’s recognition by all negotiating parties as the indispensable interlocutor of the process.However, this success comes at a price. The more effectively Öcalan delivers PKK disarmament, the more Erdoğan becomes confident that he can separate the settlement of the armed conflict from Turkey’s progress toward the rule of law, human rights, and democracy.Thus, the framework law remains both historic and deliberately confined in the face of colossal historic demands. It regulates pacification, prosecution, and reintegration but leaves full Kurdish demands unresolved. It offers no promise or call for Kurdish rights, no local democracy, no return of the mayors replaced by government-appointed trustees, no amnesty for prisoners of conscience, and no hint of Öcalan’s future status.This is the political world into which former PKK guerrillas will return after their release.Yeni Parti MomentumThe political force that defeated the ruling alliance in the 2024 local elections with decisive Kurdish support was subsequently dismantled by judicial intervention. Following the court-imposed return of former CHP Chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the majority of the parliamentary group, local leadership, and grassroots organization regrouped as the newly founded Yeni Parti, under Özgür Özel, while maintaining its commitment to a negotiated solution of the Kurdish question and supporting the Framework Law.Yet the parliamentary vote exposed a profound contradiction. A majority of Yeni Parti deputies voted against legislation that could release imprisoned PKK members and suspend pending prosecutions. Whatever the party’s broader democratic credentials, many Kurdish voters interpreted that vote as opposition to the immediate release of their imprisoned relatives.The Yeni Parti is not as powerful as before the vote — a move that weakened its standing within the Kurdish electorate, albeit not irreversibly. There remains room for Özel and his leadership to reconstruct a democratic alternative that links the end of armed conflict to wider democratization. Whether they succeed may become one of the decisive political questions of the next phase.Kurdish OpinionThe majority of Kurds support the “process.” Yet this should not be confused with trust in Erdoğan. They are carefully observing how the law will be implemented. It is moving beyond rhetoric into legislation; there is reason to hope for an end to the armed conflict, the release of prisoners, and the normalization of political life.Yet there still remains the memory of the collapse of the previous peace process of 2013–15, and the ongoing reality of trustee-controlled municipalities, mass prosecutions, and the weaponization of the judiciary against those calling for Kurdish rights. Therefore, if Kurds are turning their faces toward peace, this by no means implies that they are opening their minds to Erdoğan’s autocracy. They have learned a bitter lesson: if they don’t empower themselves, they will remain powerless.The continuing repression of Yeni Parti municipalities creates an intense dilemma within the Kurdish constituency. A Kurdish voter may simultaneously believe that Öcalan is right to pursue negotiations, that ending the armed conflict is historically necessary, and that the government’s treatment of the Yeni Parti is fundamentally undemocratic.The methods now used against the Yeni Parti — criminal investigations, removal of elected officials, prolonged detention, and politicized prosecutions — closely resemble those long directed against Kurdish municipalities. Rather than drawing Kurdish politics toward Erdoğan, this may reinforce a different conclusion: negotiations can end the war, but democratic guarantees must become universal.The government’s current perspectives and actual governance give no hint of democratic transformation. They are best understood as a set of selective nonaggression pacts under a wider authoritarianism. The state is relaxing one historic axis of coercion while intensifying another.Armed conflict has long vanished from the former war zone between Turkey and the PKK. The decisive question is no longer whether there will be armed conflict or whether the PKK leaves the mountains. The issue, now, is whether the political room opened by the call to lay arms becomes a democratic space for all or merely space newly monopolized by Erdoğan’s state and his military-industrial complex.

When the French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard died in 2022 at the age of ninety-one, obituaries celebrated both his boundless cinematic inventiveness and the radical politics that shaped his work. To some, his death marked the end of an era of politically committed filmmaking. But in Japan, another artist as equally radical is still, at age eighty-seven, hard at work.In the last four years alone, Masao Adachi has released two movies, both dealing with political militants — including Shinzo Abe’s assassin — and has also worked with other artists, like French filmmakers Éric Baudelaire and Philippe Grandrieux in the early 2010s. His most recent collaboration is with Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, whose new short film, Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo — chronicling Adachi’s latest attempt to apply for a passport — screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and will play at the New York Film Festival this autumn.As Adachi told the The New York Times in 2012, he is pleased that these new endeavors do more than just burnish his reputation as an elder statesman of the Japanese New Wave. “Through this way,” he said, “I’ll continue to revolt.”In his 1970 manifesto “What Is to Be Done?” Godard argued for the need not to make political films but to make films politically, since the former is idealistic and bourgeois, while the latter is militant and “belongs to the Marxist and dialectical conception of the world.” In 1971, Adachi responded to Godard’s text with his own tract that asserted undō (movement, activism) over seiji (politics), arguing that drawing binary distinctions between political films and political filmmaking was counterproductive when a collaborative and dynamic undō-centered modality of cine-politics could encapsulate both concepts and more.It has long been a cliché to discuss Adachi’s work as standing at the intersection of politics and art, but what is particularly compelling in this regard is how the trajectory of his own life has embodied this intersection. In the 1970s, Adachi became directly involved in the Palestinian struggle and eventually relocated to the Middle East, where he was active as a member of the Japanese Red Army, a group that carried out hijackings and embassy attacks and claimed responsibility for the 1972 attack on Lod Airport in Israel that left nearly a hundred people dead or injured. Adachi, though, has always maintained that he was never involved in any attack on civilians. The Japanese Red Army leader, Fusako Shigenobu, who was released in 2022 after more than twenty years behind bars in Japan, became a close friend during his time with the group.This undeniable association with the Japanese Red Army has made Adachi a favorite of certain online radicals: the director who put down his camera and reached for the gun. This is not quite true; Adachi’s primary motivation for relocating was to continue his revolutionary filmmaking, but he soon found himself unable to return to Japan without risk of arrest. After living in Lebanon for more than two decades, he was picked up by authorities for passport violations in 1997, jailed for three years, and then extradited back to his homeland, where he is now effectively barred from leaving. Today there is a stark disparity between Adachi’s repute abroad as a legendary provocateur who made politically engaged sexploitation, experimental underground films, and conceptually bold propaganda, and his status in Japan as a rather obscure and neglected filmmaker and former member of a terrorist organization.Over the course of writing a biography of Adachi, Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw, I found that to better understand his contribution to cinema and revolutionary politics, we need to contextualize his work within postwar Japan and what is known as the country’s “Long ’60s.”Japan’s Wild, Radical, and Terrifying 1960sMultilingual scholarship in the past twenty years has dislodged the stereotype of Japan as an inherently conservative and peaceful society without any protest culture. But the legacy of the Long ’60s remains bitterly contested due to the violence — directed not only at the state but inward, at rival New Left factions. For most of the Japanese public at large, the period tends to exist as a blur of helmeted students clashing with riot police for causes vaguely related to the Vietnam War.But the famous unrest of the late 1960s had a precedent. A decade earlier, Japan passed through a comparable period of political and social turbulence over the American military bases on its soil and the security treaty that bound the country firmly to the Western bloc. Adachi belongs to the generation that came of age around the renewal of the treaty in 1960 and that remained haunted by its failure to stop it — a failure that made them appear, to the young activists at the end of the decade, outdated and politically compromised. This goes some way toward explaining Adachi’s detached, often satirical portrayal of student radicals during his peak years from around 1967 to 1972. In the films he directed or wrote for Wakamatsu Kōji in this period, such as Schoolgirl Guerrillas (1969) and Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), the leftists are no better than the authority figures they oppose and tend to collapse into glorified LARPing or, worse still, self-destructive violence.Alongside this societal strife, postwar Japanese culture witnessed an explosion in the avant-garde that redefined attitudes toward the body and artistic mediums. Visual artists like Kazuo Shiraga turned painting into a physical record that captured the traces of the practitioner’s body, and dance styles like butoh fractured the aesthetic of the body into something grotesque and fragile. There was a shift to more allegorical modalities of political art, to which aspects of Adachi’s output also adhere, such as his early films Bowl (1961) and Closed Vagina (1963), which express the disillusionment of the 1960 security treaty protests through oblique metaphors like the titular female genitalia instead of more didactic messages. One of the many reasons a film like Galaxy (1967) is so engrossing and rewarding to rewatch is that you can read it as both an allegory of mid-’60s disenchantment and a surreal psychodrama about a bourgeois man’s mental breakdown.Far Weirder Than Just AgitpropAdachi’s more allegorical and ambiguous films may reward a closer look in ways the better-known ones — those in which the oppositional politics of the day are writ large — do not. Compared both to the militant documentaries of Shinsuke Ogawa, which chronicled the struggle of farmers opposed to the construction of Narita Airport in the 1960s and ’70s, and to the overtly political (and almost instructive) films of Jean-Luc Godard from around 1968 to 1976, much of Adachi’s work is far more opaque, even abstruse at times, despite the agitprop reputation of his output.Nominally a film about a notorious spree killer, A.K.A. Serial Killer is a highly conceptual exploration of state power residually haunting the postwar landscape of Japan, rendered through hypnotic visuals. Completed in 1969 but not shown publicly until 1975, it focuses on the everyday urban and rural spaces that shaped the perpetrator of sensational crimes and is regarded as a seminal work in landscape theory (fūkeiron). The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), codirected with Wakamatsu, was filmed while Adachi was embedded among Palestinian guerrillas and was initially dismissed as merely recruitment propaganda for impressionable Japanese leftists, yet it is actually a pensive meditation on the nature of living on a daily basis as part of a revolutionary struggle, engaging in a dialectical inquiry with the viewer by posing questions and positions.Like. A.K.A. Serial Killer, Adachi’s recent films Revolution+1 (2022) and Escape (2025) have dealt with sensational figures — former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assassin and the fugitive bomber Satoshi Kirishima, a marginal member of a group that carried out a series of bombings of corporations in the 1970s — albeit in a somewhat more conventional biopic style. Upon release, they prompted febrile responses in Japan (especially the Abe film), but the headlines overshadowed the fact these films were avowedly not celebrating their subjects. Neither condemning nor condoning, Revolution+1 portrays how Abe’s assassin was pulled almost inevitably toward his act by domestic and socioeconomic circumstances, while Escape focuses on the mental strain of living an ascetic life on the lam as a way of both atoning and continuing the struggle. In these times of endless culture wars and social divisions, such approaches to political art (and violence) are arguably more fertile than the didactic or provocative.An Artist’s Late StyleAdachi has expressed admiration for Franz Kafka and Lu Xun, drawing on their writing for his film Artist of Fasting (2016), a typically bawdy tale of a man who arbitrarily takes up residence one day in a quiet neighborhood and becomes a spectacle attracting a broad range of people in society, all looking to exploit him for their agendas. Static, disjointed, and packed with literary references, the film seems very distant from Adachi’s 1960s and ’70s output’s cast of student activists and wannabe revolutionaries and its more frenetic pacing. And yet Artist of Fasting ultimately suggests a through line between both periods by functioning as an ironic portrait of an individual’s attempts to resist power.While the overtly politicized filmographies of others may date, Adachi’s oeuvre has the potential to outlive his and our lifetimes and offer lessons for future viewers. “Creating is, above of all, firstly about hoping,” Adachi wrote in 1970. Though his work lacks the formal elegance and stylistic consistency of Japanese filmmakers like Nagisa Ōshima (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and In the Realm of the Senses) and Yoshishige Yoshida (Eros + Massacre), it is precisely this anarchic range and rejection of cinematic convention that gives his cinema the capacity to retain political currency. And this should indeed give us hope.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, American economic policy has rested on the seemingly unshakable conviction that global markets for US government debt were bulletproof. This fact would supposedly allow the state to run enormous deficits indefinitely, financing massive tax cuts for the wealthy even while military spending approached $1 trillion.The same confidence underpinned the idea that the Federal Reserve possessed virtually unlimited firepower to contain economic crises. Yet in recent weeks, this assumption has begun to look considerably less secure. It turns out that even the American state is subject to the discipline of capital after all.As concerns over inflation mounted — and, perhaps more important, doubts about the willingness of the Fed to act to contain it grew — borrowing costs for the US state rose sharply. Last week, the ten-year Treasury rate crossed the symbolic threshold of 5 percent, its highest level since 2007. Although Donald Trump continued to loudly demand lower interest rates, the Fed saw little alternative but to raise them, while indicating that further hikes lie ahead.The move exposed the shortsightedness of suggestions that the era of central bank “independence” has come to an end. Indeed, the requirement that the Fed be able to impose monetary austerity regardless of electoral outcomes stems not merely from institutional rules or political culture but from the structural imperatives of capitalism itself. As Trump’s policies have run up against these constraints, his efforts to subordinate the Fed to his will have crumbled.Decline of the Petrodollar?Many will interpret this development as another step in the collapse of the American empire. Iran’s threats to sell oil in renminbi have led to prognostications about the imminent demise of the “petrodollar” regime, often depicted as the culmination of “de-dollarization” initiatives led especially by the BRICS. Yet the idea that the US empire rests on a “hydrocarbon-dollar complex” is a myth.The dollar’s status does not derive from the fact that any particular commodity is priced in dollars but from its role within the global credit system and the strength of the US economy. Large inflows of private investment into the United States have sustained demand for dollars, even as the dollar’s share of official reserve holdings has gradually declined. Moreover, that the dollar anchors credit markets means that the balance sheets of firms and central banks are tied to dollar obligations and assets. Debt is just as important — perhaps even more fundamental — for fueling global capitalism as fossil energy.To be sure, raising rates will have little impact on inflation — barring a truly drastic increase sufficient to spark a recession, as with the 1979 “Volcker Shock” that inaugurated the neoliberal period with an iron fist. Raising rates will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz and reverse the surge in oil prices now rippling through the economy. Nor can monetary policy undo Trump’s chaotic tariffs, which have also generated significant price pressures.Rather, the Fed’s imposition of monetary austerity is necessary to protect the stability of a global financial system that remains deeply dependent on the dollar. With enormous fiscal deficits requiring ever-growing issuance of Treasuries, failing to raise rates risked deepening the bond market sell-off by raising doubts about whether the Fed retained sufficient independence to impose discipline. Because the dollar is world money, this turmoil in Treasury markets would reverberate through credit, funding, and asset markets across the global economy.That the imposition of monetary austerity is necessary for global capitalism points to the illusory nature of the pro-worker Keynesian alternative imagined by some on the Left. The Fed was by no means faced with a straightforward choice between a pro-worker low-interest-rate policy and a pro-business high-interest-rate policy. Raising interest rates clearly has real costs for workers. On the other hand, had the Fed continued to pursue a more accommodative path, long-term US interest rates would likely have risen still further, increasing borrowing costs while threatening greater stress in Treasury markets. And a serious Treasury crisis — or the emergence of a “doom loop” in which the Fed became the dominant buyer of US debt — would hardly be good for workers. Given the existing balance of class forces, workers would doubtless bear the costs of restoring stability.Who Pays?Bond market volatility represents capital cracking down on the American state’s profligacy. The question now is who will pay for the belt-tightening.Rather than a lack of working-class discipline, at issue today is a macroeconomic regime that has combined tax cuts for capital and enormous military expenditures with war and tariffs. While Trump sought to partly fill the fiscal hole by aggressively slashing Medicaid, food assistance, and other programs for social provision, these cuts could only go so far. As inflation, rising interest costs, and volatility in Treasury markets narrow the room for maneuver, those priorities increasingly come into conflict. Either capital is made to absorb more of the adjustment through higher taxes and a reordering of fiscal priorities, or workers will be forced to pay through some combination of inflation, high interest rates, unemployment, and further cuts to social provision.The stakes extend beyond the affordability crisis. The same pressures that impose the need for adjustment also bear directly on the ability to address the existential crisis of climate change.Decarbonization requires enormous investments in energy, housing, transportation, and infrastructure over long time horizons, which are made much more difficult by growing pressure on public finances. Net interest payments have now surpassed military spending, exceeding $1 trillion per year, and are projected to rise rapidly as debt and borrowing costs increase. Yet it is impossible to imagine addressing the ecological crisis without massive expansion of state investment. Raising taxes, shifting budgetary priorities, and monetizing debt can create space to begin this project, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the extent to which capital will vehemently oppose all of this, let alone the extension of state planning a green transition would require.Achieving a sustainable future therefore hinges on building the power of the working class to take on capital and empire. While stabilizing Treasury markets is imperative in the short run to prevent a broader economic contraction and hold down household borrowing costs, the current turmoil demonstrates how sharply even the American state’s room to maneuver is circumscribed by financial markets.The episode reinforces the lessons drawn long ago by Marxist state theorists Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas: the capitalist state possesses real autonomy, but that autonomy remains decidedly relative. For socialists, the contradictions that follow from this fact cannot be escaped simply by choosing better monetary policies. This is precisely why the state cannot simply be wielded by socialists elected to govern it. The challenge, rather, is to operate within a state that is constrained by capitalism while simultaneously building the power necessary to transform those constraints — no small task.

The Greens were for decades a relatively marginal force in British politics, with only one member of Parliament (MP) and a modest but growing number of local councilors. However, its prospects changed in September 2025 after Zack Polanski was elected party leader on an eco-populist platform. This new leadership defined itself against Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, rejecting his apologia for Israel’s genocide in Gaza as well as his fiscal austerity, anti-migrant measures, and anti-protest authoritarianism.Over the last year, the membership of the Green Party of England and Wales (there is a separate Scottish party) has surged from around 66,000 to over 230,000. This February, the Greens’ Hannah Spencer won the Gorton and Denton by-election, defeating both Labour and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, and in May the Greens achieved their best-ever local election results. Now Polanski is running for Parliament in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. In this contest, he aims not just to replace Starmer (who has resigned as an MP) but to consolidate the Greens’ position as a permanent left-wing opposition to the Labour Party.Polanski himself is unusual for the extent of his political development over a short timescale. In a new book, Russell Warfield describes how Polanski began his political career by joining the Liberal Democrats in 2015, toward the end of the party’s stint enacting austerity in coalition with the Conservatives. Polanski joined the Greens in 2017 after failing to be selected as a Lib Dem by-election candidate, all the while opposing Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from the right. Elected as a London Assembly member and deputy leader of the Greens, Polanski then moved to the left and defeated the more centrist incumbents in last year’s leadership election.In this context, Warfield’s book The Green Socialist: Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future book is a timely contribution to understanding the Green Party as it seeks to forge a new role in British politics. Warfield is transparent about his own political commitments. A long-standing left-wing Green Party member, he volunteered on Polanski’s leadership campaign and sees the party as a vehicle for ecosocialism. The Green Socialist is thus most useful as an insight into how Polanski’s most erudite supporters think of themselves, their project, and the man currently at its center.Optimism flows through Warfield’s analysis, but the book is also a productive entry point for considering the challenges facing the Green Party in the current political environment. While the inconsistency of Polanski’s politics may represent a genuine personal journey, it also underpins latent incoherences within the project associated with his leadership.Polanski has inspired hope so far because he effectively reflects back to his supporters the political and moral principles that they already hold. This apparent attempt to rerun Corbyn’s Labour leadership has drawn support both from prominent figures and dedicated activists from that period, as well as a new generation not forged by that experience. For this project to succeed, they must now collectively reckon with the current incoherence of the Greens’ electoral strategy, political offer, and party organization.OptimismWhile Warfield echoes some Green members’ calls for a new focus on “community organizing” (a vague ambition that has both preoccupied and evaded much of the British left for several years), Polanski’s leadership continues to define success in terms of electoral victories. His distinct strategy has been to maximize the party’s potential with an eco-populist political offer and more sophisticated communications. Warfield embraces the necessarily difficult task of analyzing such an electoral project while it is not just ongoing but still in its very early stages.The book went to print before the Makerfield by-election, which resulted in Andy Burnham’s return to the House of Commons as a Labour MP and his successful ouster of Starmer as prime minister. This means that now very significant context is out of scope in the analysis. Without doubt, Polanski’s bid to reach Parliament in the coming Holborn and St Pancras by-election will itself be a defining chapter in this story.Such accounts are thus inevitably provisional and partial, and Warfield is right to historicize Polanski’s rise in order to give the reader a stronger basis for understanding events as they continue to occur. Working backward, he locates the Polanski project in a lineage of electoral advances and leftward shifts in the Greens’ recent past. This particularly includes Natalie Bennett and Caroline Lucas’s spells as leader, as well as an ecosocialist tradition in the party dating back to the mid-2000s.However, this optimistic story of the Greens’ initially slow and steady but now accelerating advance is complicated by recent events. Burnham’s arrival as prime minister makes Polanski’s task more difficult, as he seeks to differentiate himself from an apparently authentic and relatively popular Labour leader who is prepared to criticize neoliberalism. This challenge was underlined by the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election on July 30, which Labour won decisively despite the Greens’ hubristic claims that they alone could defeat the hard-right Reform. A Polanski defeat in Holborn and St Pancras would not signal an end to his project. Yet in further slowing the Greens’ momentum, it would raise questions about whether the party can adapt to the new terrain under his leadership.PurposeA Polanski victory in Holborn and St Pancras, on the other hand, would likely renew the party’s confidence that it can win anywhere, especially to damage the Labour government from the left. Still, even such an outcome should not obscure the deeper incoherence that has underlain the Greens’ current electoral strategy. Within Warfield’s account, we can identify three distinct electoral aims expressed in the party: to supplant Labour; to stop Reform UK; and to represent a progressive social bloc.Polanski is quoted in The Green Socialist as aiming to replace Labour as the main party of the Left. In this vision, the Greens see themselves as capitalizing on a broader realignment in British politics, with the old parties in terminal decline.However, this trend is less obvious today than it appeared a year ago. Just as Farage’s Reform UK has struggled to fully supplant the Conservatives, Labour has consolidated its position by substituting the uniquely out-of-touch Starmer with Burnham’s centrist populism. This strategy mobilizes Burnham’s Northern English identity and working-class affect against the Westminster system, while offering piecemeal ameliorations to the cost-of-living crisis. Polanski has, for now, lost his monopoly on hope in British politics, meaning he is no longer able to just fill the space abandoned by Labour. Reaching beyond his natural supporters to build a diverse social coalition motivated to support his eco-populist insurgency is a more compromising task.This tumultuous political environment further complicates the second thrust of the Greens’ electoral mission: the call to stop Farage and his Reform UK vehicle. While the Gorton and Denton by-election demonstrated the Greens’ capacity to play this role, other parties have shown they can too. As well as Labour retaining the Greater Manchester mayoralty, Plaid Cymru cohered the anti-Reform bloc in last year’s Caerphilly by-election. Furthermore, beyond specific (by-)elections, Labour has the strongest claim to the anti-Reform mantel nationally, as the only party that can plausibly incorporate both Green and Reform voters into its own coalition. Indeed, although both the Greens and Reform are motivated by an antiestablishment energy, both lack a genuinely majoritarian impulse; they each appeal to distinct social bases that are highly unlikely to vote for the other in great numbers. This puts a relatively low ceiling of support on both parties.The Greens’ third electoral purpose, the least explicitly discussed by Warfield, thus appears to be the most viable. Labour may be the strongest electoral bulwark against the far right, but the Greens can confidently claim to be the main political opposition. While Burnham continues to tail Reform with regressive migration policies and backsliding on climate action, Polanski’s Greens can differentiate themselves as the standard-bearers of migrants’ rights, climate justice, and anti-fascist and Palestine solidarity. By consistently offering a principled alternative to Reform in the public debate, the Greens could secure a permanent place on the Left of British politics without indulging in the compromises required for outright electoral victory.EcosocialismIt is evident in Warfield’s account, though, that sections of Polanski’s supporters are not satisfied with a party that simply reflects progressive talking points back to a minority section of voters. Warfield, like the party faction Greens Organise (composed mostly of activists not schooled in Corbynism), is committed to an ecosocialist politics. Even though Warfield projects the label onto Polanski (including in the book’s title), Polanski prefers to describe himself as an eco-populist. In fact, I could find no public record of Polanski proactively using the term ecosocialist. This exposes a contradiction within not just the Green Party but the Polanski project itself.This distinction between eco-populism and ecosocialism is not just semantic. For it also represents a latent tension between Polanski as the figure who has catalyzed the Greens’ rise and more politically ambitious elements of his base. If ecosocialism is an ideological politics (socialism within ecological limits, per Warfield), then eco-populism is a communication strategy (the construction of a “people” mobilized against a socio-ecological enemy, as in the call to support the 99 percent against the ultraelite 1 percent). Although they may be complementary, the one does not necessarily imply the other. Polanski’s use of eco-populism is relatively unsophisticated, deployed to signal an implicit environmentalism while mostly speaking about inequality.Ecosocialism is laden with a greater depth of meaning, however. Warfield characterizes this as a project to build the economy within ecological limits, by discarding both the profit motive and the pursuit of perpetual growth. This implies an essentially revolutionary politics of rupture with the core logics of capitalism, even if Green ecosocialists don’t necessarily articulate it in that register. This is not to say that ecosocialists should adopt the style of unreconstructed revolutionaries. But it is necessary to politically clarify the contradictions between socio-ecological transition and capitalism, especially considering the urgent timescales of the climate crisis.Ecosocialism simultaneously implies both a conviction regarding what must be done and uncertainty about how to achieve it, amid an unprecedented constellation of structural crises. It means offering a programmatic alternative to a growth strategy based on the combination of remilitarization, artificial intellgience, and fossil fuel production — a socio-ecologically destructive strategy to which Burnham’s Labour still subscribes. If the Greens’ current political approach is a shopping list of more or less agreeable (and sometimes contradictory) left-wonkish policies, ecosocialism implies a shift toward a program of democratic ecological planning and experiments in transition.OrganizationFor Green ecosocialists serious about this politics, the key question is whether the party’s organizational structure is currently capable of developing and advancing this alternative. The answer, quite manifestly, is no.Warfield argues in The Green Socialist that the main point of optimism is not Polanski himself but the party’s membership and democratic structures. While this is a useful corrective against a tendency to overinvest in inevitably inadequate leaders, it underplays the limitations of the party’s democracy and culture.Currently, the Greens have a structure that allows any member to attend party conferences and vote on policy motions. While this may appear to be participatory, it only aggregates individual preferences rather than cultivating a collective democracy. Those who self-select to determine Green Party policy experience no democratic accountability, and those who cannot attend conferences have no opportunity to shape their political composition. This is not the mass deliberation needed in order to develop a shared analysis and a coherent ecosocialist program to drive the project forward.Furthermore, the lack of a democratic whip for councilors or MPs means that they are free to ignore the party membership or prioritize local concerns over advancing collective priorities. The composition of Greens Organise means that it has not learned the most important lesson from Corbyn’s Labour. Like previously failed projects on the Left, the faction has deprioritized organizational questions rather than understanding that satisfactorily resolving them is a precondition for sustained outward-facing success. But Green ecosocialists must be prepared to confront the limitations of the party. Its democratic structures are not something to be celebrated but completely remade in service of a collective party life.

Zach Cregger’s horror-comedy Resident Evil is a real blast of a movie, fast, funny, scary, and inspired. Only an exuberant film lover could come up with such a gleefully inventive ninety-five-minute thrill ride as this one.I gather that Cregger is a fan of the Resident Evil video game franchise. That seems like the only possible explanation for why the acclaimed director of highly praised non-IP horror hits Weapons (2025) and Barbarian (2022), who presumably has a blank check to make any horror-related movie he wants, would choose to make the eighth Resident Evil entry in the twenty-four-year-old franchise.The reason certainly isn’t his love for the previous films. In an interview, he was unable to define what his version of Resident Evil is in relation to the rest of the movies — “A sequel? Prequel? Universe-expanding retro-reboot?” Cregger answered with a shrug. “I couldn’t really say. I’ve never seen one.”To Hell With the Franchise. Just Make a Good Movie.Fans of the films won’t like it, but I say this is the right attitude. Though some people claim that Cregger’s Resident Evil really conveys the sense of playing the game. Maybe it does. I don’t care. I don’t think it matters one single, solitary damn. I only care about how it plays as a stand-alone film, and as a stand-alone film, it’s delightful as hell.It stars Austin Abrams, who was so memorable as James, the addled young drug dealer living in a pup tent in the woods in Weapons. He plays Bryan, a harried twentysomething medical courier up against a crazily escalating series of gruesome attacks by “fucking monsters” as he tries to deliver an unidentified but urgent package to the remote rural Raccoon City hospital up in the wintry hills.Bryan is a callow young man in most ways, and perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But he brings an excessively dogged dedication to this courier job that makes him a comic example of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “bad faith” actor who’s allowed his identity to collapse into his professional role. Though there’s one complicating factor explaining his absolute desire to take on this last, voluntary delivery of the night: Bryan doesn’t want to go home. If he goes home, he has to have a serious face-to-face talk with his girlfriend, Michelle. She’s just discovered she’s pregnant, and she’s increasingly upset about Bryan’s glib answers on the phone that serve as a way to dodge any in-depth consideration of their relationship. It seems Bryan will face a thousand lab-created killer mutants on the loose rather than have that talk.Besides, delivering this package pays double Bryan’s usual rate. Given the grim economic times we live in, that’s motivation enough for most.There’s a glorious initial horror sequence — let’s call it the mountain road sequence — with so many lines of tension developing toward bloody disaster, the delirious viewer gets tied in knots just watching it. Bryan goes skidding up a heavily forested mountain road at night, his beat-up little car not equipped with the tire chains he’s been told are a necessity. In front of his meager headlights, the road fades into terrifying blackness. Michelle is on the phone with him, but at critical points in their angsty conversation, the reception keeps dying out.Just then — heart attack — a woman steps out from the snowy void right in front of him, and he brakes wildly but hits her anyway, tossing her up over the roof of his car. He swerves to a stop and gets out, horrified at what kind of gore he’s about to see. But all he can find are tracks in the snow heading off into the trees.Inadequately dressed in a puffy jacket and crappy sneakers, and relying on the thin light generated by his cell phone, he follows the tracks into the wilderness of trees, absurdly calling “Hello? Hellooooo?”He finds the woman, pale and staring, lying on her back, apparently alive but catatonic, with her contorted arms held out stiffly in front of her. As Bryan creeps up to her, we see him from her point of view, his head framed in the weird rectangle made by her arms.“Good gods,” I thought. “Cregger’s recreated the shot from Rashomon.”That’s Akira Kurosawa’s famous art film, released in 1950, which also serves as a dire referendum on Japanese culture post–World War II. In it, the complex central narrative commences when a woodcutter discovers a dead samurai in the forest. It’s a shocking event that will lead to an investigation and a series of deeply degraded, self-serving, and blatantly unreliable courtroom accounts about how the samurai died that indict a culture fallen into a moral abyss, and perhaps a humanity that’s truly irredeemable. And that’s the surreal shot from the dead samurai’s point-of-view, his reaching arms frozen in a state of rigor mortis framing the woodcutter’s face, that Cregger is evoking.A Darkly Comic Portrait of a Society at CollapseIt’s both harrowing and funny for the 0.0000001 percent of the audience that gets the reference — film studies teachers everywhere will love it — because in an amusing genre-flick way, the reference is significant. This Resident Evil is creating a black comic portrait of a culture that’s probably past saving. The way people continue to follow their petty job descriptions and ignore the absolute catastrophe that’s staring them in the face — that’s soon biting and zombifying and mutating and consuming them — is summed up in Bryan’s stubbornly repeated lines, “That didn’t happen,” and “That wasn’t real.”But at the same time, it’s not ordinary people’s fault. As systems collapse all around them, a job these days is a hard-won lifeline.There are a lot of homages to other films — John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Alien are obvious ones — but many aren’t even references to other horror movies. For example, there’s the Die Hard–like scene when Bryan faces up to the fact that his situation is so desperate, he’ll probably never make it back to have that serious talk with Michelle. So via cell phone. he leaves an emotional apology and affirms his devotion to her in a heartfelt too-late-now message before he goes into the final climb up to the twenty-eighth floor of the Raccoon General Hospital building to deliver his package. And, like in Die Hard, he ends up doing it all without shoes.But back to the mountain road sequence. It goes on and on as a tour de force of pitiful human striving and error on Bryan’s part and increasing dread and nervous laughter for the audience. Bryan gets the catatonic woman into the car and tries to drive her to safety, ignoring her increasingly feral behaviors. Then he gets pulled over by an irritable local sheriff (Johnno Wilson) — relieved to offload the woman onto the police officer — and then all hell break loose on the road. Cregger keeps returning to deep-focus shots of the entire frozen landscape encompassed in the sequence, while adding new elements of terror into a frenzied chase involving a vicious dog that’s not just an ordinary dog, the wrecked and abandoned vehicles, the catatonic woman suddenly fully mobile and racing through the snow with animal speed, and Bryan’s sprints to a barn for shelter from weather and other, more urgent dangers. Then he tries to find sanctuary in a farmhouse, going from homely room to room and venturing up the dark, doomy stairs — yes, that’s Night of the Living Dead, folks.Far in the background, the flashing red-and-blue light bar on the police car is a haunting constant, a visual sign of urgency as well as a landmark indicating the spot where the surreal crisis state started for Bryan. It’s also an indicator of splendid filmmaking from start to finish, so good that the rest of the movie can’t quite live up to it.The catastrophic harm done by the biotech firm the Umbrella Corporation, which unleashed the experimental substance that infects and monstrously mutates whatever living beings come into contact with it, is ludicrously downplayed as a minor “human error” by its officious representatives, played by great comic actors Paul Walter Hauser and Zach Cherry. It turns out Bryan is carrying, instead of a kidney or other lifesaving organ to be transplanted, the “stabilizer” that can cure the infection and undo the mutations — it’s not just a McGuffin, it’s the solution to all the chaos!Even knowing how crucial his mission is can’t propel him to the top level of the hospital, however, when he finds out he’s expected to walk up all twenty-eight floors. It’s dangerous to take the elevator in a collapsing building blinking and buzzing with electrical shorts, a building which also happens to be teeming with kill-crazy mutants. But Bryan is dead-tired by the fourth floor. After all, how bad can the elevator be?You should go see the movie and find out. And without spoiling anything, it’s quite an ending! Cregger’s Resident Evil is an unexpectedly refreshing exercise in pure genre film entertainment, and it’s quite rightly doing gangbusters business. Cregger has done it again: he’s three for three now.