In 2024, of the 97 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, only New Mexico’s Teresa Leger Fernandez represented a primarily rural district. No sitting representatives from districts like hers were endorsed by Bernie Sanders in 2022.

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Zooming out to the Democratic Party as a whole, the pattern is consistent: the overwhelming majority of 2022 general election Democratic congressional candidates who ran in rural districts lost their races, and the same is true of candidates in mixed rural-suburban districts.

While fewer in number than their suburban and urban counterparts, rural districts and districts with a rural-suburban mix make up 41% of all congressional districts, and often much higher percentages of state legislative districts. So Democrats can and have won control of Congress with virtually no help from rural America, but they’ll have a hard time building durable majorities without improving in “flyover country.”

One of the obvious reasons Democrats in general and progressives in particular do badly in rural areas is because rural communities simply have a lot of conservative voters. Rural Americans are much more likely to be white, consume conservative media, own a gun, be an evangelical Christian, and be a senior citizen. They are also much less likely to hold a four-year college degree.

Rural voters hold conservative views on a wide range of issues: they overwhelmingly support beefing up border security, increasing our exploitation of fossil fuels, and making it easier to buy guns. Only around 30% of rural voters believe slavery or discrimination makes life hard for African Americans, and less than 20% favor legal status for law-abiding undocumented immigrants.

Even if rural voters weren’t an electorally important group for progressives to reach, however, abandoning rural America means that we undermine our longer-term strategic prospects by ceding large swaths of the country to far-right domination. As Andrew Levison has argued, “Right now in many Deep Red districts Democrats are essentially invisible and the Republican Party organization is entirely committed to defending MAGA extremism.” He concludes that, even if progressive efforts in rural districts seem irrelevant in purely electoral terms, they could foster an opposition that will weaken the Right. There are many progressive voters in rural areas, and there is no reason to think their ranks couldn’t be expanded with greater commitment and smarter appeals by progressives.

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Rural Americans are surprisingly progressive on a host of issues: more than 80% of rural voters support background checks for guns; despite their portrayal in liberal media as being hopelessly racist, over 60% back commonsense programs to address police violence against minorities, and just 30% argue that racial problems are rare in the United States. These figures are supported by a survey from the Race-Class Narrative project, which found that 89% of rural Americans agreed with this sentence: “In small towns and rural communities, we believe in looking out for each other, whether we’re white, black, or brown, tenth generation or newcomer.”

• 29% of rural Trump voters support a $15 minimum wage and oppose banning abortion.

• 19% of rural Trump voters support increasing state education funding and disagree that racial problems are rare in the United States.

• 18% of rural Trump voters believe that government should take action to address climate change and oppose eliminating the visa lottery for immigrants to the United States.

• 11% of rural Trump voters hold strongly progressive views on both economic and social policies, supporting both Medicare for All and banning assault weapons.

Equally encouraging is the fact that substantial majorities of rural Americans support progressive economic policies, ranging from a $15 minimum wage to Medicare for All. As we’ve seen, many rural Americans really do hold conservative views that place important limits on their receptiveness to progressive appeals, but at the same time, they express a range of opinions that overlap considerably with the progressive agenda.

Still, these policy preferences don’t necessarily mean that there are a substantial number of rural voters ready to vote for the political left.

To get a sense of how large the pool of potentially persuadable rural voters is, I looked at the percentage of 2020 Donald Trump voters who both held policy views that aligned with a progressive policy agenda and did not hold conservative views on key wedge issues that Republican candidates would almost certainly weaponize against Democrats or progressives running in rural districts. As expected, voters who meet these criteria make up a fraction of Trump’s rural electorate, but it’s a surprisingly large fraction, depending on the issue combinations you look at.

For instance, 29% of rural Trump voters support a $15 minimum wage and oppose banning abortion. If we focus on even more conspicuously progressive issues, the numbers get smaller, but even then, 11% of rural Trump voters hold strongly progressive views on both economic and social policies, supporting Medicare for All as well as banning assault weapons. These estimates are consistent with a 2023 poll from the Center for Rural Strategies and Lake Research Partners that found around one-third of rural voters surveyed in twelve battleground states were persuadable.

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Extremely narrow margins decide elections in swing states, so even a modest shift among that 11% could be decisive.

To be effective in reaching these voters, however, candidates should take several lessons from research and polling on rural voters conducted by the Center for Working-Class Politics, RUBI, and others. Progressives should package their policy appeals in plainspoken language that avoids jargon, and they should never pander to reactionary social views, but they should also be careful not to needlessly alienate persuadable voters. In turn, progressives should capitalize on their shared aversion with rural voters toward unaccountable corporate elites and use populist, “us-versus-them” appeals that pit workers against the superrich. Finally, candidates should focus on bread-and-butter economic issues that connect with rural voters’ overwhelming sense of economic dislocation in the face of decades of plant closures, mass layoffs, and disinvestment in their communities.

While the universe of winnable Trump voters isn’t huge, it is unquestionably large enough to present intriguing possibilities for candidates willing to think outside the box and meet rural voters where they are.

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Jared Abbott is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics and a contributor to Jacobin and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

Shawn Gude’s book American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs is available from the Jacobin Store.

The specially chartered locomotive pulled out of Chicago on a late August day in 1908, heading west, a sleeper car, dining car, and baggage car loaded with socialist pamphlets in tow. Red flags poked out, bunting and streamers festooning the sides.

The passengers were in high spirits. Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs joked that he and his balding brother, Theo, were the resident “long hairs”: “We have three long hairs between us.” Neighbor Stephen Marion Reynolds, whose new biography of Debs was serving as campaign literature, pinned a red flag to his pajamas and explained, “Something might happen in the night, and they would find me dead or unconscious. How would they know I wasn’t a Republican?” As the train raced across the fields of Iowa — flat, flat, flat — a newspaper reporter asked Debs what he’d enjoyed most on the trip so far. “Oh, associating with this brace of despots, I suppose,” Gene quipped.

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Debs’s speaking trip was a cavalcade of railroad depots and opera halls, scheduled speeches and impromptu whistle-stops. His September 2 itinerary read like this:

Des Moines, Iowa: Depart at 6 a.m.

Creston, 9:40–10:10

Corning, 10:50 to 11:20

Clarinda, 12:20 to 1 p.m.

Burlington Junction, Missouri, 1:45 to 2:15 p.m.

Kansas City, MO: 3:30 p.m. (speech that evening)

He spoke at each stop, plus at least six other unscheduled ones.

Sometimes he mounted a platform outside the Red Special — as Debs’s campaign train was known — speaking as Theo and others distributed campaign literature in the crowd. Other times, he simply rained down words from the caboose. He attracted converts, critics, and the merely curious. At the Corning, Iowa, stop, a woman, sneering, asked a man clad in overalls whether he’d accepted a socialist book. The man — half-sheepish, half-unapologetic — showed he had.

Briefly, Debs considered cutting south to speak in the minefields of Birmingham, Alabama, where members of the United Mine Workers were engaged in a daring interracial strike. He ultimately judged the detour cost-prohibitive given the cramped budget. The Red Special continued speeding west. (The landmark strike was soon crushed by the government, wiping out the local union and, with it, the rare organization able to challenge Jim Crow.)

It was Debs’s third presidential bid in a row. His Socialists would again try to beat the vast structural odds by reaching the toiling masses rally by rally, pamphlet by pamphlet. By sheer exertion. By relying on the “Jimmie and Jennie Higginses,” as the selfless rank-and-file members of the Socialist Party were known. People like Sarah Cluff of Provo, Utah, and E. Z. Ernst of Olathe, Kansas.

Cluff was in her early fifties, an English immigrant who had toiled at a lace factory as a young girl and raised three children in poverty. Opinionated and resolute (she’d successfully divorce her husband a few years later on grounds of cruelty), Cluff was part of the volunteer army that sold Appeal to Reason, the massive socialist paper out of small-town Kansas that was proving a linchpin of Debs’s campaign.

As a younger woman, Cluff had been mystified about “why it was so hard to get enough to subsist on.” Then she’d studied socialism. It was “the only light,” she told the Appeal, “that can dispel the darkness for working people.”

Ernst, also in his fifties, was a farmer and artisan in northeast Kansas who’d once led a sixty-acre socialist commune. An 1896 illustration in the paper Ernst edited at the time showed him with short hair and a long tangle of muttonchops and a beard, as if while clearing farmland the underbrush had leapt onto his face and taken up residence. By the 1908 election, he’d been a radical agitator for decades, passing out literature, selling subscriptions, and knitting together town and countryside, so crucial to Socialist success in the rural Midwest.

Sarah Cluff and E. Z. Ernst weren’t outliers. Socialist Party membership had doubled since the last presidential election to 40,000, and a staggering four thousand volunteer speakers were available to work the soapbox. In Milwaukee, party members would venture out every Sunday morning, arms chock-full of literature and buttons, brains swimming with answers to questions they’d receive at the doorstep.

They could take heart that the headline-grabbing Red Special was barreling across the country at that very moment.

The Red Special experienced some hiccups once it reached the Pacific Coast. The campaign was already running low on money, threatening an embarrassingly early end to the trip. Debs turned to average party members, whose nickels and dimes filled up the campaign coffers. The show would go on.

Supporters contributed more than just money. They would pile onto the iron caravan at each stop, their enthusiasm infectious, sometimes bearing gifts. One day in Oregon, Theo described the bounty to his daughter: “The baggage car is half full of the finest fruit I have ever seen. At every station our supply is increased: pears, plums, seedless raisin grapes, and such bunches, strawberries, watermelons, and today a comrade handed in a magnificent string of fresh mountain trout.” They wolfed it down for dinner that evening, joined by Socialist rank-and-filers, who could pay two cents a mile (and fifty cents a meal) to ride for several stops.

Along the road, Debs saw the unmistakable sign of recession: workers on the “tramp.” One day, shortly after leaving San Bernardino, California, the train stopped when a tramp was found on board attempting to snag a ride. Normally, the man would have been tossed off the train. But this was the Red Special. He was instead ushered up “to ride with a presidential candidate on the plush,” Debs recounted with a laugh.

“Of all the workers who are tramping,” Debs told a reporter, “we have not seen one of the type usually used for caricatures in the comic sections of the Sunday newspaper editions. All we have encountered since leaving Chicago on this campaign train have been fine young fellows, the same kind that have helped make this country what it is today, but have been thrown out of work by the trend of the times.”

And what use was an economic system that regularly made millions beg for a job?

As Debs crucified capitalism, its leading champions mounted a defense. Earlier that summer, President Theodore Roosevelt had used a memorial ceremony near his twenty-three-room summer home in Long Island to charge Debs and his compatriots with promoting “equality of reward” rather than “equality of opportunity.” Socialists would sweep away a system that valued “energy, foresight, intelligence, thrift, courage” in favor of one that allowed the undeserving to “rob his neighbor of what that neighbor has earned.” (The dedication ceremony was for a monument to an early English settler named John Underhill, the famed leader of a colonial militia that massacred American Indians.)

Debs couldn’t conceal his scorn, unloading on this “well-groomed president of the ruling parasites” in an Appeal article. What “equal opportunity” was there for the unemployed workers teeming the breadlines? What “equal opportunity” was there for the child laborers “fed alive to Mammon”? It was capitalism, not socialism, Debs growled, that had a skewed system of rewards — bequeathing “colossal private fortunes” for owning rather than toiling.

Debs was more gracious with Lincoln Steffens, the Progressive journalist, who interviewed Debs in Milwaukee shortly after Roosevelt’s address. Sympathetic but skeptical, Steffens pushed Debs on the nuts and bolts of his socialist vision. Debs explained that in the “cooperative commonwealth,” as he called it, everyone able to work would have a job. No one would be terrorized by the “fear of starvation.” Workers would be “paid according to their social use” rather than the profit-minded calculations of the free market. “Skill and ability would count” in determining remuneration, but workers performing undesirable jobs (say, sanitation) would also get better pay or shorter hours. Labor-saving technology would be used to reduce drudgery. Pay wouldn’t be equal, but nobody would pile up money like a Rockefeller (or a Roosevelt).

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Wasn’t Debs worried, Steffens asked, that people would lack an incentive to work? He wasn’t. Human beings had an innate need to be active, he explained, and they were motivated by a range of concerns other than making the most money possible. And “a society that produced for use and not for profits would have plenty of work to have done.” Plus, with much shorter hours, all workers would have ample leisure time, when they could “enjoy healthily all the good things of the earth.”

What about individuality? Wouldn’t socialism “level men down”? Here, Milwaukee Socialist Victor Berger, who joined Debs for the interview, jumped in with characteristic gusto: “The capitalist system — doesn’t it level most men down now? Yes, it takes all the individuality, all the courage, self-respect, liberty, and beauty out of the great mass of men to produce a few” economic titans. Debs agreed.

He slapped down the stereotype that socialists fomented class hatred (“There are classes now and we say so. Why not? It’s true”) and that they wanted to seize personal property. “Socialism does not abolish private property,” he explained, as he’d surely explained so many times before, “except in the means of production. We want all men to have all they produce, all; we are for [personal] property; it is Capitalism that is against it.”

Nor was Debs worried about running a socialist economy. He cited capitalism’s recurring depressions and panics as “proof that capitalists cannot handle industry, business, nor even money.” He noted one of the contradictions at the heart of capitalism, what economists call the “overproduction problem”: employers want to keep labor costs as low as possible, but this means that workers don’t make enough money to buy the goods they produce. And so, Debs explained, “The surplus grows, a load on the market, till the crash comes, production halts, men are discharged, prices fall, and — there’s your panic.”

Debs thought the solution was simple: socialize the economy, remove the profit incentive, distribute the economic pie more equally, all fixed. Even in the Steffens interview, he never laid out precisely what a democratic socialist economy would look like. Yes, the railroads and steel mills and banks and other large industries would be publicly owned, managed in some capacity by a democratically accountable government. But what role would their workers play in directing these enterprises? How would socialists ensure that an expansive state didn’t become another haughty boss? And what of smaller firms? Would they be run as worker cooperatives? What role might markets play?

Like many socialists of the era, Debs seemed to think it was preemptive, even undemocratic, to sketch out a postcapitalist blueprint. That was for the people themselves to decide (and the socialist intellectuals to agonize over).

He certainly underestimated the difficulty of managing a modern economy. And yet this fuzziness about the nitty-gritty turned off fewer people than we might imagine. Catholic priests fulminating against “ungodly” socialism and major-party newspapers smearing “violent” socialists probably dissuaded more workers from voting for Debs than the charge that he lacked a fully fleshed-out alternative.

Many Americans had lived through a Civil War that had extinguished an entire economic system in the South. Many remembered a time before industrial capitalism. The Socialists’ claim that they would harness the economic trends and technologies of the day and simply transfer them to democratic, public hands seemed less far-fetched to early twentieth-century ears than twenty-first-century ones.

Or as Debs ended the interview, soaring back into the heavens:

We know that economic conditions determine man’s conduct toward man, and that so long as he must fight him for a job or a fortune, he cannot love his neighbor. Christianity is impossible under capitalism. . . . When things are rearranged so that I can help my fellow man best by helping myself, by developing all my skill and strength and character to the full, why, then, I shall love him more than ever; and if we compete it will be as artists do, and all good men, in skill, productiveness, and good works.

By the end of September, Debs had traveled nine thousand miles and delivered 187 speeches over twenty-five days in every western state and territory, to an estimated 275,000 people. Exhausting. So exhausting, in fact, that occasionally, when it was an especially small town and Gene’s throat felt especially aflame, Theo would fill in for his brother unannounced, the doppelganger convincing the crowd that this balding man gesticulating wildly before them was the famed Eugene V. Debs.

And still the East Coast lay ahead.

There were some highlights out east: Gene’s wife, Kate, joined him for this leg of the journey, and in Trenton, Ohio, a scrum of children dashed through the rain after school to greet the Red Special — “one of the most beautiful compliments paid us on the entire trip,” Debs told the kids, choking up. “This train,” he explained, “represents an effort to make it possible for all children everywhere to have time for play, and time to go to school, and the opportunity to grow up.” The band struck up a tune, and they were off.

Debs’s train rumbled through nearly every state in the Upper Midwest and Northeast, clattering textile towns and cacophonous manufacturing cities. He marched in front of a parade stretching ten full blocks to Boston’s Faneuil Hall. He sold out New York City’s Hippodrome Theatre, with 7,500 paying admission and 2,500 more turned away. After working himself into a sweat — a photograph from the event shows Debs in a three-piece suit speaking from the wooden floor of the hall, his sea-blue eyes flaring like a tropical storm, his hands in a flurry so fierce the shutter could only register a blur — Debs climbed into an open-roof car and headed down to the Lower East Side.

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By that point in the journey, Debs admitted, “I was little more than a portable corpse.” The newspapers reported that he was so fatigued it “was painful to witness,” and Debs told those assembled at Hamilton Fish Park he wouldn’t be giving a speech because “I am not able to do so.”

Kate was watching from a box at the Hippodrome — accompanying New York Socialist Morris Hillquit and his wife, Vera — with what must have been a mix of pride and dismay. What would be left of her Gene after the cause had gotten through with him?

Her husband pushed on. Turning back west, continuing to fill speaking engagements along the way, the Red Special made an impromptu stop at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the site of John Brown’s doomed antislavery rebellion. Standing at a monument marking the spot where Brown was captured, Debs delivered brief remarks: Brown “dared the whole world and gave up his life for freedom. What more can a man do? . . . [Ralph Waldo] Emerson has said: ‘The time will come when John Brown will have made the gallows as glorious as Jesus Christ made the cross.’”

Cheers and tears. William Lowery, a former slave who owned the scuffed-up tin candlestick that lit John Brown’s fort, gifted Debs the timeworn object. Theo found it the “most thrilling and dramatic” moment “of the entire trip.”

The Socialist Party was making an explicit appeal to black voters that year despite their minor electoral heft. (Ninety percent of African Americans still lived in the Jim Crow South.) A party pamphlet cast Debs, rather hyperbolically, as “the John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln of the new emancipation all rolled into one.” Jobs and political rights for all — Debs’s “new emancipation” would rip out the roots of racial oppression (although the pamphlet omitted mention of any immediate civil rights measures). The party dispatched several black speakers, including the Reverend George Washington Woodbey, who traversed the Upper Midwest and the East Coast, culminating in a two-hour, eve-of-the-election address on a cold night in the increasingly black New York City neighborhood of Harlem.

Other slices of the working class also received targeted appeals. Denmark’s A. C. Meyer, a Socialist member of parliament, crossed the Atlantic to campaign for Debs, often making his overtures in his native tongue at Scandinavian venues like the soaring five-story brick of Minneapolis’s Dania Hall.

It had been an inspired campaign. Debs had crisscrossed the nation twice, traveled over 20,000 miles of tracks, forced his raspy voice to deliver addresses sixty-five days straight in “one of the most aggressive speaking campaigns ever undertaken by a presidential candidate,” according to one biographer. He had heard passing train drivers sound their whistles in solidarity, seen buggies queue for miles along the tracks and throngs so eager to hear his words they’d block the rails to make the Red Special stop. At his final campaign address, the Chicago crowd cheered him for twenty-seven minutes straight.

The results of Debs’s 1908 Red Special campaign were disappointing: a mere 20,000 votes more than in 1904. Good for just 3 percent of the national vote, despite higher shares in strongholds like the Mountain West, the industrial Midwest, and the Great Plains. His Red Special, the campaign’s great expenditure at $35,000, had been funded by 15,000 contributions and $14,000 in ticket sales. J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie alone had donated millions to the GOP.

But all was not lost. Far from it. By Debs’s next presidential bid four years later, party membership had tripled to roughly 120,000; some 1,200 Socialists held elected office, including eighty mayors in thirty-six states; and strikes were cascading through the country, many led by Socialists.

Maybe, just maybe, Eugene Debs’s “cooperative commonwealth” was still on the horizon.

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You can order a copy of American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs here.

Shawn Gude is a former Jacobin editor, an Iowa native, and the author of American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs.

Review of Keeping Workers Off the Ballot: How Democracy Undermines Working-Class Representation by Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu (Princeton University Press, 2026)

According to data from a sweeping new study of working-class legislators by political scientists Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, only about 2 percent of legislators across the world’s democracies held a working-class job — which the authors define as manual, service, or clerical work — before getting into politics. Yet as the authors document in their new book, Keeping Workers Off the Ballot: How Democracy Undermines Working-Class Representation, about seven in ten jobs in a typical democracy are working-class jobs, from construction workers and truck drivers to servers, cashiers, receptionists, data-entry clerks, day laborers, and street vendors. In the United States, working-class people make up more than half of the labor force but just 5 percent of candidates for state, county, and local office. In Brazil, workers represent more than 70 percent of the labor force but just 8 percent of candidates for the national legislature.

Drawing on a wide range of previous scholarship and original analysis, Carnes and Lupu show why having more workers in office matters. Politicians who have had working-class jobs back more pro-worker economic legislation, cabinets with more working-class ministers build more generous welfare states, and citizens trust legislatures less when they include fewer workers.

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In short, “when workers don’t hold office, economic policies and outcomes are better for the haves and worse for the have-nots.” Keeping Workers Off the Ballot focuses on the obvious follow-up question: If working-class officeholders are so good for working people, why are there so few of them?

Their answer is pretty demoralizing. The problem, they argue, contrary to the dominant view of many on the Left, isn’t money, the weakness of unions, particular electoral rules, or an aversion to working-class candidates among voters. Instead, the reason lies deeper, embedded in the logic of electoral democracy itself: running for office is personally grueling, demanding time, money, and a willingness to put one’s job and income at risk that people in working-class jobs can rarely afford, and party gatekeepers rationally pass over those least likely to weather the storm of an electoral campaign. Together these two processes ensure that working-class candidates will always face major headwinds that limit their success.

The book’s major contribution is showing how hard it is to elect legislatures that represent working people. But its central claim is more fatalistic than its own evidence supports, and its remedies leave out a key path that has historically given working people real political leverage: working-class organization.

Where Is the Leak in the Candidate Pipeline?

Carnes and Lupu begin by dispensing with a range of other explanations for low working-class representation, starting with the idea that workers simply don’t have what it takes to govern. The authors reject this and other “deficit explanations” by showing that workers are nearly as likely as others to have the traits of successful candidates, that they are just as interested in running, and that they are no less popular with voters.

They are equally skeptical of country-level explanations. Using an original database of legislators in ninety-seven democracies in 2016–18, the scholars conclude that variation in types of electoral systems and the strength of left parties make no significant difference in the prevalence of working-class legislators. By contrast, they find that public financing of elections and union density do matter, but the authors judge their effects too small to make a meaningful difference.

The real problem, according to Carnes and Lupu, comes before the ballot box: “The vast majority of the screening out [of working-class candidates] seems to happen at the point when people get on the ballot.” They offer two primary reasons.

The first is what the authors call the hidden costs of campaigns. Running for office means giving up time, privacy, income, and certainty about the future, not to mention risking embarrassment and reputational damage. These costs weigh most on workers: in the authors’ surveys in Mexico and Canada, 29 percent of high-potential working-class respondents said they would worry about giving up their job or income to run, compared with 14 percent of equally qualified professionals.

The second factor holding back workers from running for office is the strategic logic of party gatekeeping. With limited resources, parties go after “low-hanging fruit”: people they already know and trust, who seem likely to make good politicians and to have a comparatively easy time running a campaign. Under pressure to win now, even sympathetic party leaders pass over candidates who can be less easily presented as sure bets, and those are disproportionately working class. In surveys across ten democracies in the Americas, Carnes and Lupu found that the most promising working-class respondents were far less likely than comparable professionals to have been encouraged to run by political elites: 12 percent versus 34 percent.

These forces are so powerful, Carnes and Lupu argue, that “even if workers run and win and hold office successfully,” elections “will always exert a gravitational pull” against them. Stronger unions, public financing of elections, and lower inequality, they argue, “will only matter on the margin.” Electing many workers requires “extraordinary and unusual alignments of political forces.”

Unions to the Rescue?

What are those alignments? Above all, they consist of durable partnerships in which parties build formal channels for recruiting candidates straight out of strong, centralized labor unions. These unions give working-class candidates the money and backing to shoulder the burdens of running, and equally important, they seek out worker-candidates and sell them to other party insiders, in effect bypassing the usual logic of gatekeeping.

Britain’s Labour Party is a case in point. By 1929, more than a quarter of the House of Commons had previously held working-class jobs. British unions sponsored worker candidates, turned out voters for them, paid for their campaigns, hired local party staff to work for them, and sometimes topped up their salaries, while local Labour parties chose from a union-drawn list of candidates who came with union money.

Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) worked much the same way, reserving safe list positions for union officials. In 1969, about 16 percent of the Bundestag came from working-class jobs.

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If these parties could effectively get workers elected in partnership with the labor movement, why can’t parties do the same today? Carnes and Lupu’s answer is that such arrangements are historically rare and effectively irreproducible. In both Britain and Germany, white-collar unions eventually displaced industrial ones, professionals replaced manual workers on party benches, and leaders like Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder cut unions’ role in choosing parliamentary candidates. As a result, today even the strongest unions only manage to get modest numbers of their members into office.

Law of Democracy or Product of Neoliberalism?

Carnes and Lupu make a strong case that the ceiling for working-class representation in contemporary democratic politics is low, but are their sobering conclusions about the meager possibilities of building real working-class power through national legislatures justified?

Let’s start with the mechanisms Carnes and Lupu identify as the key barriers to greater working-class representation. By their own estimates, moving from no public financing to the most generous system observed would raise workers’ share of a national legislature from near zero to about 5 percent, and high unionization would raise it to about 9 percent. Similarly, their estimate for the impact of inequality, which imagines a country where the bottom half of earners takes home half of all income (much higher than a typical democracy today), yields about 7 percent. Parties matter, too: 10 percent of legislators from parties whose supporters are mostly working class have held manual, hospitality, or other working-class jobs. And parties that champion workers and unions the most in their party platforms have legislative delegations that are about 15 percent working class, according to Carnes and Lupu. Against a global average of 2 percent, these are not small differences.

In addition, the authors test each of these factors individually and set them aside because none has a big enough impact in isolation. They do raise the possibility that “some combination of country-level traits could together explain” worker underrepresentation but don’t pursue this possibility. Yet their own history of the British Labour Party shows how country-level factors can work together to produce strong worker representation in office: a mass union movement funded and sponsored worker candidates, local parties chose candidates from union-generated lists, and the party depended on working-class votes for success. None of these alone would have led to workers occupying a quarter of parliamentary seats. Nor is it clear why a union-party partnership is the only combination of factors that could lead to a higher share of workers in office, given that Carnes and Lupu’s data show public financing, lower inequality, and parties’ dependence on working-class voters also matter.

Many of the strategies the authors recommend have also never been tried at scale. By their own account, there are few if any political scholarships or seed-money programs aimed at working-class candidates in the United States, and only a handful of union-run candidate schools exist across the country. Even short of anything approaching class parity, gains of the magnitude that are likely achievable through these mechanisms would substantially improve the quality of working-class representation. Working-class candidates who got on the ballot wouldn’t just be those able to run the gauntlet that liberal democracies put before them.

Timing matters, too. The book’s cross-national data is a 2016–18 snapshot in time, taken when unions were weak, inequality was high, and left parties had long since weakened their ties to labor. Britain and Germany elected more workers when unions were both large and powerful inside parties. By contrast, union membership today is far lower, and where it remains comparatively high, unions have largely lost their influence over the nominating process. The modest union effect the authors find may thus say more about the particular period they study than about what strong, politically embedded unions can do to boost working-class representation.

The authors’ case study of Britain also suggests these gains are stickier than their “boom-and-bust” account implies. The number of working-class MPs did collapse when Labour lost four-fifths of its seats in the early 1930s, but the authors’ own figure shows their share climbed back to above a quarter of the Commons by 1945, was around 15 to 20 percent through the 1970s, and remained above 10 percent until the 1990s. Half a century of meaningful working-class representation is hardly a blip.

The effect of gatekeeping is similarly contingent. The authors offer powerful evidence that recruiters favor professionals, but that is not, in itself, evidence that the “fundamental logic” of elections works against workers. In an era of extreme class segregation and professionalized politics, party officials mostly know professionals. When unions are central to a party’s coalition, gatekeepers’ networks fill with working-class people, and when candidate schools train union members, the pool of “low-hanging fruit” begins to include more workers: the New Jersey AFL-CIO program counts nearly 1,400 election victories since 1997. And with trust in government near record lows, candidates with a working-class background can be an asset that even the most cynical operatives may find appealing, which is one of the reasons we’re seeing more high-profile working-class candidates in the 2026 electoral cycle.

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Class Quotas and Citizens’ Assemblies to the Rescue?

The book’s final chapter turns to solutions. The authors examine steps unions and parties could take: pipeline programs like New Jersey’s, “political scholarships” to replace lost wages, seed money for working-class candidates, a right to return to one’s job after campaigning, and worker committees inside parties. But they see these as “temporary solutions,” since elections will keep working against workers once reformers’ efforts begin to stall.

Ultimately, Carnes and Lupu turn to two structural fixes that, they argue, would remove the obstacles keeping workers out of legislatures: worker quotas and citizens’ assemblies. With a quota, the authors note, if a party must nominate a worker for a seat, “it doesn’t really matter whether workers have a harder time running.” Likewise, citizens’ assemblies chosen by lot skip campaigns altogether and can ensure roughly equal participation across class.

The trouble is that quotas are unlikely to be easier to win than the alternatives the authors consider inherently limited. They acknowledge that quotas require “the hard work of constructing political coalitions to pass laws and amend constitutions.” But a coalition strong enough to make legislators, most of them professionals, hand seats to workers would also be strong enough to strengthen workers’ right to organize and so substantially grow the labor movement, or to pass a wave of pro-worker legislation. Mandatory quotas are thus not a shortcut around building working-class power, but rather contingent upon it. And without that power, quotas may guarantee workers seats but not influence, since party leaders could simply fill seats with working-class candidates prepared to advance their agenda rather than pro-worker politics.

Citizens’ assemblies raise a different problem. They are very good at producing bodies that look like the public: Austria’s 2022 Citizens’ Climate Assembly was about as likely to include college graduates as the public at large. But the authors never say how much power assemblies would hold. They describe sortition as a way to “select leaders without holding elections,” yet the assemblies they point to make recommendations that elected officials can take or leave. Ireland’s assembly paved the way for the 2018 referendum that repealed the country’s abortion ban, but only because politicians chose to put the question to voters. An assembly with real authority would have to be won from those same politicians, which brings us back to building working-class power. Assemblies can be useful on the margins, but no amount of deliberation by randomly chosen citizens will change the balance of political power unless workers have real leverage behind them. At worst, these reforms could help legitimize parties that ignore workers’ interests by letting them appear to give workers a stronger voice.

Strikingly, for a book whose central historical finding is that workers are more likely to reach office when strong unions put them there, Keeping Workers Off the Ballot never recommends building stronger unions. There is nothing on labor law, organizing, or how working-class movements might regain the political leverage they once had.

Nevertheless, Carnes and Lupu have written an indispensable book on a question the Left cannot afford to ignore. They are right that working-class representation does not happen by accident, that it is not mainly about workers’ talents or voters’ prejudices, and that it depends on institutions that put workers’ interests at the center of candidate recruitment. But the absence of workers from office is not a gravitational constant. It is a measure of the weakness of the labor movement and of parties’ choice to abandon it. Workers will hold power in national legislatures again when they first regain power outside of them. Ultimately, the point of electing more workers is not to help parties win the next election, but rather to give working people a direct role in how their lives, communities, and country are governed. And that depends on building power in workplaces and communities, not just winning elections.

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Jared Abbott is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics and a contributor to Jacobin and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

This article appeared in Issue 57 of Jacobin. Get or give a year of Jacobin in print for just $10.

Donald Trump is back in power, and, to put it mildly, he’s no fan of globalization. The president has publicly “rejected globalism and embraced patriotism” and said that “it’s left millions and millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.” To better understand the current era of globalization that he’s trying to bring to an end and its track record, it’s useful to compare it with the globalization that took place between 1870 and the outbreak of World War I.

Both globalizations represent pivotal periods — watershed years that shaped today’s world. And both saw the largest expansions of global economic output to date.

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However, they were also very different in many respects. The first globalization was associated with colonialism and hegemonic rule by Great Britain. It led to large increases in per capita income in what later became known as the developed world. At the same time, it produced stagnation everywhere else, and even income declines in China and Africa. The most recent numbers from the Maddison Project’s database of historical statistics show that the cumulative increase in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP per capita for the United Kingdom between 1870 and 1910 was 35 percent, while GDP per capita doubled in the United States over the same period. (The average US real per capita growth was thus 1.7 percent per year, a very high number for that era.) Chinese GDP per capita, however, declined by 4 percent, and India’s only slightly increased, by 16 percent. This particular type of development created what later became known as the Third World and reinforced the cleavages in average incomes between the West and the rest.

From the point of view of global inequality, which is largely a reflection of these facts, Globalization I produced an increase in inequality as the already rich areas grew faster and the poorer areas stagnated or even slipped backward.

On top of the rising inequality between nations, inequality also increased within many of the rich economies, including the United States, as seen in its upward sloping line in figure 1, with richer deciles growing more. The UK was somewhat of an exception, as the peak of inequality was reached just before the beginning of Globalization I, during the 1860s and ’70s. In the British social tables, the key source of information regarding income distributions in the past, the one produced by Robert Dudley Baxter in 1867 (coincidentally the year of publication of Karl Marx’s Capital) marks the year of the highest inequality in the nineteenth century. British inequality was afterward reduced thanks to a number of progressive laws, ranging from limitations on the length of the workday to the ban on child labor and expanded suffrage rights. Recent data show an increase of inequality in Germany, too, after its unification in the late 1860s. François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, on whose numbers figure 1 relies, did not have information on the changes in inequality in India and China, so both are represented by a straight line across income deciles (implying that they have grown at the same rate). The new Indian fiscal data focusing on the top of the distribution, produced by economists Facundo Alvaredo, Augustin Bergeron, and Guilhem Cassan, likewise show stable, albeit very high, inequality. Thus, generally, both components of global inequality (between nations and, in most cases, within nations) went up during Globalization I.

How does this differ from the current globalization (Globalization II) conventionally dated from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the COVID-19 crisis of 2020? Note that the exact end point of Globalization II may be a matter of dispute; one could mark it at Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports back in 2017 or even, in a symbolic way, at Trump’s second accession to power in January 2025. But which date we pick does not make a difference regarding the essential features of Globalization II.

During this time, the United States, the UK, and the rest of the rich world experienced growth but at rates that, when compared to Asian countries, were fairly modest. Between 1990 and 2020, US real GDP per person increased at an average annual rate of 1.4 percent (thus slower than under the first globalization) and British GDP per capita grew by only 1 percent per annum. Populous and relatively poor countries (poor, at least, at the onset of Globalization II) grew much faster: Thailand at 3.5 percent per person, India at 4.2 percent, Vietnam at 5.5 percent, and China at an astonishing rate of 8.5 percent.

The contrast is shown between figures 1 and 2. In figure 1, which shows the data for the period 1870–1910, every part of the rich countries’ distributions grew faster than every part of the poor countries’ distributions. In figure 2, which shows the data for 1988–2018, growth rates of all parts of the Chinese and Indian income distributions exceed that of all parts of US and UK income distributions. This has totally transformed the economics and the geopolitics of the world: the former by moving the economic center of gravity toward the Pacific and by affecting the relative income positions of the populations in the West and Asia, and the latter by making China a credible challenger to US hegemony.

It’s undeniable that, over these last three decades, the global income positions of large swaths of the Western middle and working classes have gone down. This was particularly dramatic for Western countries that failed to grow; for example, Italy’s lowest income decile dropped from the 73rd to the 55th global percentile between 1988 and 2018. In the United States, the two bottom deciles slipped in their global positions, although the drops were smaller (7 and 4 percentage points, respectively) when compared to Italy’s. Additionally, the Western middle classes lost in comparison to their own compatriots at the top of their countries’ respective distributions. The middle classes of the West were thus double losers: to the fast-rising middle classes of Asia and to their much richer compatriots at home. Metaphorically, one can see them being squeezed between the two.

But unlike during Globalization I, global inequality went down during the second iteration, driven by high rates of growth in large Asian countries. Within nations, however, inequality generally increased. This was most obvious in China, where the Gini coefficient, a common measure of inequality, almost doubled following liberal reforms. The same was true for India. Figure 2 shows the income growth of rich Indians and Chinese outpacing that of their countries’ poor. But inequality increased also in the developed countries, first under Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s reforms, whose effects continued even into the administrations of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, only to finally plateau in the second decade of this century.

In summary, the first globalization saw the rise of the West, the second the rise of Asia; the first led to an increase of between-country inequalities, the second to their decline. Both globalizations tended to increase inequalities within nations. The unevenness of countries’ growth rates during Globalization I installed most of the Western populations at the top of the global income pyramid. It is rarely recognized just how highly placed even the poor deciles of the rich countries were in the global income distribution. Economist Paul Collier, in his Future of Capitalism, writes wistfully of the time when English workers were on top of the world. But for them to feel high, somebody else had to feel low.

The second globalization drove some of the Western middle classes from these perches and produced a great reshuffling of incomes as they were overtaken by a rising Asia. This relatively imperceptible decline occurred together with the Western middle classes’ far more perceptible one with respect to their own national elites. It caused political dissatisfaction that found its reflection in the rise of populist leaders and parties.

Finally, we should note that the convergence of worldwide incomes did not extend to Africa, which continued on its path of relative decline. If that is not changed — and the likelihood of such change seems low — the relative decline of Africa will, in the decades to come, overturn the forces currently pushing global inequality downward and usher in a new era of rising global inequality.

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An Unlikely Coalition of Interests

What was perhaps not noticed at the beginning of Globalization II — only to become increasingly apparent with its unfolding — was the alliance of interests between the richest corners of the Western world and the poor masses of the Global South. At first glance, this bond seems bizarre, as there is almost nothing that the two groups have in common, including education, background, and income. But it was a tacit alliance, not fully realized by either side until it became glaringly obvious. Globalization empowered the rich in the developed countries through changes in their internal economic structure: reduced taxation, deregulation, and privatization, but also the ability to transfer local production to places where wages were much lower. Replacing domestic labor with cheap foreign labor made the owners of capital and the entrepreneurs of the Global North much richer. It also made it possible for the workers of the Global South to get higher-paying jobs and escape chronic underemployment. The losers in all this were the workers in the middle who were replaced by the much cheaper workforce from the Global South. It is therefore not a surprise that the Global North became deindustrialized, not solely as the result of automation and the increasing importance in services in national output overall, but also due to the fact that lots of industrial activity went to places where it could be done more cheaply. It’s no wonder that East Asia became the new workshop of the world.

This particular coalition of interests was overlooked in the original thinking regarding globalization. In fact, it was believed that globalization would be bad for the large laboring masses of the Global South — that they would be exploited even more than before. Many people perhaps made this mistake based on the developments of Globalization I, which indeed led to the deindustrialization of India and the impoverishment of the populations of China and Africa. During this era, China was all but ruled by foreign merchants, and in Africa farmers lost control over land — toiled in common since time immemorial. Landlessness made them even poorer. So the first globalization indeed had a very negative effect on most of the Global South. But that was not the case in Globalization II, when wages and employment for large parts of the Global South improved.

Of course, it is also true that the length of the workday and the working conditions in the Global South were often very difficult and continued to be much worse than for workers in the North. Worker complaints regarding the 996 schedule (work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) are not uniquely Chinese — it’s a fact of life across much of the developing world. But these poor conditions represented an improvement over what came before and were accepted as such.

Even if contemporary critics of Globalization II were wrong that it would deteriorate the economic position of large masses of the Global South — instead, as we’ve seen, it hurt the middle classes of the Global North — they were right about who would benefit from these changes the most: the global rich.

Domestic Neoliberalism vs. International Neoliberalism

When discussing neoliberalism, we have to make an important analytic distinction between, on the one hand, domestic policies of neoliberalism and, on the other hand, international neoliberal policies. The first type includes the usual package of reduced tax rates, deregulation, privatization, and a general rolling back of the state. The second type consists of the reduction of both tariffs and quantitative restrictions, and thus the promotion of free trade in general as well as flexible exchange rates and unimpeded circulation of capital, technology, goods, and services. Labor was always treated differently — that is, its movement was never as free as that of capital, although its global mobility was one of neoliberalism’s aspirations.

This analytic distinction is particularly important for understanding China and for figuring out what will be coming next under Trump’s second administration. It immediately makes clear that China did not follow the precepts of neoliberalism in its domestic policies, while it mostly followed them in its international economic relations. That distinguishes China from many other developed and developing countries that took both the domestic and international parts of globalization quite seriously. From the 1980s onward, the United States kicked off the neoliberal turn, and it was not limited to domestic policies; it encompassed a reduction in tariffs, the creation of NAFTA, and increased inbound and outbound foreign investments. The same was the case with the European Union. It was also true for Russia and formerly communist countries.

The only major holdout was China. It alone maintained an important role for the state, which remained the preponderant actor in the financial sector and in key industries like steel, electricity, automobile manufacturing, and infrastructure generally. Even more important, the state remained powerful in policy formulation and maintained what Vladimir Lenin called the commanding heights of the economy. These Chinese policies, especially under Xi Jinping, can be understood best as something akin to Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Under the rules of these regimes, the state lets the capitalist sector expand in the less important sectors. But it maintains control over the most important parts of the economy and makes key decisions that have to do with technological development. The Chinese state has been heavily involved in the development of today’s most cutting-edge technologies, including green tech, electric cars, space exploration, and, most recently, artificial intelligence and avionics.

That involvement has ranged from simple inducements in the form of lower taxes to more direct pressure, where private companies are told what to do if they want to stay on good terms with the government. An obvious example of the difference in power between the state and the private sector was on display when, in 2020, the government canceled what would have been the largest IPO in history, by Jack Ma’s Ant Group, an affiliate of Alibaba, that would have allowed it to expand into the largely unregulated fintech industry.

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So when we talk about the success of globalization in reducing poverty and increasing growth in many Asian countries, especially in China, the distinction between domestic policies and international ones should be kept firmly in mind. It could be argued that China’s success was precisely due to its ability to combine these two parts in this unique way that left the power of the government largely intact domestically while it allowed the full display of the advantages of trade to play to its strong points. That particular strategy could possibly work well for other large countries like India or Indonesia too. But it has clear limitations with small countries, since they lack economies of scale and, perhaps more important, do not have the kind of bargaining power with respect to foreign capital that allowed China to benefit from substantial technological transfers from the more developed countries.

Trump as the Death Knell of Globalization II

The international wave of globalization that began over thirty years ago is at its close. Recent years have seen increased tariffs from the United States and the European Union; the creation of trade blocs; strong limits on the transfer of technology to China, Russia, Iran, and other “unfriendly” countries; the use of economic coercion, including import bans and financial sanctions; severe restrictions on immigration; and, finally, industrial policies with the implied subsidization of domestic producers. If such departures from the orthodox neoliberal trade regime are made by the key players — namely, the United States and the European Union — transnational organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank will not be able to continue preaching the usual Washington policy precepts to the rest of the world. We are therefore entering a new world of nation- and region-specific trade and foreign economic policies, moving away from universalism and internationalism and into neo-mercantilism.

Trump fits that mold almost perfectly. He loves mercantilism and sees foreign economic policy as a tool to extract all kinds of concessions, sometimes not having anything to do with economics proper, such as his threat to levy tariffs on Denmark if it refuses to give up Greenland. Perhaps it’s all just bluster. Yet it does show Trump’s view that economic threats and coercion should be used as political tools. Such policies will further parcel the global economic space. Washington’s objective is to slow the rise of China and to reduce the ability of the Chinese state to develop new technologies that may be used for not only economic but military purposes.

However, on the other hand, the domestic part of the standard neoliberal package will, if anything, only be reinforced under Trump. This is already apparent in his hopes to reduce personal income taxes, deregulate practically everything, allow much greater exploitation of natural resources, and push privatization of government functions further, essentially doubling down on all the domestic precepts of neoliberalism. We would thus have something contradictory only in appearance: increased mercantilism internationally with increased neoliberalism at home — in other words, the very opposite combination of China’s policies.

Some economists, citing historic examples, believe that mercantilist policies must necessarily be accompanied by policies of greater domestic state control and regulation. But that is certainly not the case with the current administration. The new combination that Trump is promoting — tightly controlled immigration paired with extreme domestic neoliberalism and mercantilism abroad — would likely appeal to many in France, Italy, and Germany as well.

The world is thus entering a new era in which the rich countries will follow an unusual two-pronged policy. Having jettisoned neoliberal globalization, they’ll now press ahead even more firmly with a project of domestic neoliberalism.

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Branko Milanovic is an economist and a visiting presidential professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

In 1931, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria traveled to the foothills of the Alay Mountains, in the barren borderlands between Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, to find out how the locals thought. He was trying to prove the theory that “mental processes are social and historical in origin” — that the way we think, not just the content of our thoughts, is determined by the kind of society we live in.

The society he found in the Alays was very different from his own back in Moscow. In the dry hills, illiterate pastoralists kept cattle; in the green valleys that jeweled the hillsides, illiterate peasants grew cotton. For centuries, essentially no one who lived here had been able to read or write. But that was changing. When Luria arrived, the Soviet government was busy forcing herders and peasants into collective farms, where large numbers of rural people were being taught, for the first time, to read. He spent the next year among these people, bothering them with a series of annoying tests.

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What Luria found was that just a few years of basic literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects. In one of his early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures: complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares, and rectangles drawn with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group the shapes together. Even if they didn’t have any training in geometry, nearly half of the peasants who’d learned to read sorted the shapes geometrically: squares with other squares, circles with other circles. Meanwhile, none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all; they related them to objects.

One subject, Khamid, a twenty-four-year-old woman from an isolated village, insisted that nothing could be grouped with an incomplete circle. “That should go by itself. That’s the moon.” When Luria tried to suggest that she group a square and a rectangle, she refused. “That’s a glass and that’s a drinking-bowl, they can’t be put together.” Other subjects described the shapes as tents, bracelets, mountains, irrigation ditches, and stars.

When sorting objects, collective farmworkers put a saw with a hammer, because they’re both tools, while peasants put a saw with a log. “The log has to be here too! If we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.” Luria tried presenting them with syllogisms. “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are bears there?” Every single person who had received any literacy education at all, even the ones Luria described as “barely literate,” could easily answer this question. But people who hadn’t been exposed to the written word simply refused.

They consistently explained that since they’d never been to Novaya Zemlya, they couldn’t say what kind of bears they had there. One middle-aged villager named Rustam said, “If there was someone who had a great deal of experience and had been everywhere, he would do well to answer the question.” Eventually, after repeated prodding, he said that while he’d never personally been to Siberia, “Tadzhibai-aka, who died last year, was there. He said that there were bears there, but he didn’t say what kind.” Others, like thirty-seven-year-old Abdulrakhim, grew angry. “I’ve never seen one and hence I can’t say. That’s my last word. Those who saw can tell, and those who didn’t see can’t say anything!”

The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects to suppose it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana. How long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farmworkers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that these distances were inaccurate and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted reality. “No!” one exploded. “How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?”

Luria took pains to point out that these people weren’t remotely stupid. They were perfectly capable of thinking rationally and deductively, and they could make “excellent judgments about facts of direct concern to them.” But they lived in an incredibly conservative world, with its walls built tightly around direct sensory experience. Meanwhile, even a cursory exposure to writing produces an entirely different kind of thought. It lives in a spooky realm of ideal objects and useless categories, where you can speak confidently about invisible bears and measure distances even when they contradict reality. But what we think of as politics, and revolutionary politics in particular, seems to depend on this stuff. The experience of poverty or oppression isn’t enough; you need to be able to situate your own life in terms of something bigger and imagine an entirely separate way of living that doesn’t currently exist. In 1919, launching the Soviet mass literacy program, Vladimir Lenin had declared that “without literacy, there can be no politics. There can only be rumors, gossip, and prejudice.” Any transformative politics is, in some sense, the art of solving a problem even when it isn’t so.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Luria had a basically progressive model of psychological development: thinking based on abstractions is more advanced than thinking based on direct experience; as time moves on, the advanced way of doing things will obviously overtake the more backward. This is why he had to go to the farthest barren fringes of the old Russian Empire to find people who had never been exposed to writing. But the villages he visited hadn’t always been a backwater. A thousand years ago, during the Islamic Golden Age, this land in the foothills of the Alay Mountains had been one of the great centers of world civilization. In his notes, he mentioned that he was walking in the homeland of scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, and poets like Ulugh Beg, al-Biruni, and ibn Sina. The illiterate herders and peasants were living in the ruins of a sophisticated literary culture that had, for the most part, vanished from the world.

Now the same thing seems to be happening to us.

The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the United States, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. Today 40 percent of fourth graders have “below basic” reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, doing so no longer seems to make their minds start working in textual ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they encounter the written word, they come to it from the outside.

This is not just happening to the impoverished or the disenfranchised. Professors at elite universities increasingly report that their students are no longer capable of reading an entire novel, or even a thirty-page extract; some of them have difficulty making it through a single sentence. Instead of reading and understanding anything, they’re willing to pay $300,000 in tuition for the privilege of dumping an entire text into ChatGPT and submitting its response as an essay.

Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens and explain after each sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5 percent of the students could produce a “detailed, literal understanding” of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases or could not comprehend anything at all.

One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: “As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” The students found this figurative language impossible to parse; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: “It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.” The study assessed this person as a “competent” rather than a “problematic” reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.

Bleak House is not an elitist text — not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited the United States in 1867, more than one hundred thousand people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today a person studying English literature in college responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality.

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The situation is not likely to get better. Every advance in communications technology creates a new generation of people progressively more divorced from the abstractions of writing. In the late twentieth century, television was bad enough to inspire jeremiads like Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Now it seems almost benign; our supposed cultural elites keep congratulating themselves on their ability to watch an entire episode of a prestige drama without distractedly poking at their phones, as if Mad Men were a kind of penitential mental gruel. I’m old enough to remember the first time I ever went online, and a lot of my contemporaries seem to have the same story. They loved to read as children, but they mysteriously lost interest in books around the time that permanent broadband connections started appearing in every home.

Today’s undergraduates, meanwhile, were born around the same time the iPhone was released; they were approximately twelve years old at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and fifteen when ChatGPT launched. They can’t parse complex sentences, but at least they can identify words. What about the cohort that doesn’t have a gaping hole in their education at age twelve but at six? What happens when the babies currently being raised by AI-powered dolls grow up and it’s their turn to govern the world?

This is not a society we’re prepared for. Modern democratic politics assumes a literate population: people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy risks becoming a kind of tribal head count or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies behind much of the liberal panic over the decline of literacy. For a growing chorus of people who write in the Atlantic, we’re recoiling into pre-Enlightenment conditions of absolute domination. A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A postliterate world will be unreasonable and irrational, full of anger and madness and people eating each other in the streets.

Meanwhile, many Silicon Valley ideologues agree that this is a good thing. In their ideal future, the vast majority of people will be wireheads, hooked up to an AI-powered pleasure machine that will keep them in a state of permanent hedonic bliss — at which point democracy becomes impossible, the masses are evicted from history, and a natural elite emerges to rule the world. The reactionary ideologues assume they’ll be part of that literate elite, not plugged in to the infinite porn machine. Given how many of their leading lights have already developed AI-induced psychosis, I wouldn’t be so sure.

I don’t think people are wrong to fear an undemocratic postliterate future. You can already see it taking shape, and it isn’t pleasant. For a while, in an earlier phase of social media, it looked like everyone would be shaping their worldview from frantic six-second sound bites. What’s actually happened is much worse. The most influential political figures among young people are now streamers: people like Nick Fuentes who talk extemporaneously about politics into a webcam, sometimes for sixteen hours a day. It doesn’t matter if you notionally agree with one of these people; if you’re accustomed to the written language, everything they say will sound aggressively stupid.

Streamers repeat themselves. They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate on the same phrase six or seven times before moving on. As Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, this is normal in illiterate societies. Unlike writing, “the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. . . . Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer surely on the track.” It doesn’t seem to matter that on a stream the utterance doesn’t truly vanish; you can go back and hear what was just said again. Clearly, no one does. Without text to structure it, we revert to mindless repetition, which is “in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity.” Relatedly, oral discourse tends to be low resolution. Like epic poets four thousand years ago, streamers rely on formulas. “Not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.” There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Postliterate culture is deeply incurious.

Still, as miserable as this stuff might be, it’s strange that a lot of liberals tend to automatically associate literacy with careful, judicious, reasonable politics, and nonliteracy with arbitrariness and unreason. In fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions. Lewis Mumford called it the “general starvation of the mind,” in which actual sensuous knowledge of the world is replaced by “mere literacy, the ability to read signs.”

In late medieval Europe, the printing press and the beginnings of mass literacy didn’t produce an age of sober reason but an enormous explosion in all forms of mysticism and esotericism: astrology, divination, witchcraft, Neoplatonist sects, and charismatic religious cults; some of them peaceful, some of them murderous. It’s not hard to see why. These doctrines usually centered around the idea that material facts are just an echo of mental processes; they would have made a lot of sense to people who’d recently been traumatically ripped out of physical reality by the strange magic of the written word.

At the same time, as large numbers of people started to read the Bible for themselves for the first time, there was a wave of mass insurrections. These were revolutionary responses to the deeply unjust feudal and clerical system of the time, but they were also deranged. After radical Anabaptists seized Münster in 1534, they abolished money and socialized all private property. They also gave political power to whoever could most convincingly claim to have received a revelation from God. Eventually one of these people was declared king, at which point he started renaming the days of the week and other people’s children, enforcing polygamy on pain of death, and trying to bring about the end of the world.

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Even once the initial shock of expanded literacy faded, it could still produce bizarre and destructive ideologies. Modern nationalism would have been impossible without the dislocation of the written word. Your community is no longer made up of the people who surround you; it’s an entirely virtual construct, consisting of people you’ve never met in your life but whose spoken language has been similarly homogenized by the mass production of printed texts.

When Alexander Luria traveled to Uzbekistan, something terrible was happening just over the border in the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet authorities had decided to liberate the Kazakh people from feudalism by confiscating their cattle and forcing herders to join collective farms in lands entirely unsuitable for agriculture. As a result, in the three years between 1930 and 1933, around one-third of the Kazakh population died — some of starvation, some while trying to flee across the desert, some shot by border guards or the police. It was a disaster of a kind that could never have been produced by the backward peasants and herders Luria interviewed. They didn’t have the necessary abstractions; they were too blinded by how things actually are. Only the highly advanced and literate people who had sent him there could have imagined such a hypothetical reality and tried to bring it into being.

One result of the Soviet Union’s mass literacy campaign is that today Russians are seemingly the only truly literate people left. The vast majority of Russians read regularly, more than most people in the world. Reading rates are lower among young people, but not by much. Nearly everyone in the country is intimately familiar with the great works of Russian and world literature; they can all talk for hours, with sensitivity and insight, about the genius of Alexander Pushkin and Anton Chekhov. But somehow, political culture in Russia is even less sane and democratic than in the mentally enfeebled West. It’s possible that great works of literature don’t actually do anything political at all — that they don’t make us better people or freer citizens, that their value exists in an entirely different world.

Postliteracy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type. Marshall McLuhan imagined a peaceable “global village” in which electronic technology gently snuffs out all the constant ideological warfare of the Gutenberg age, integrating the entire world under “the spell and incantation of the tribe and the family.” It hasn’t quite worked out like that. He thought electronic media would be primarily tactile, which is understandable; he was writing in an age when a computer was made of punch cards and magnetic tape. He couldn’t have known how aggressively audiovisual computers would end up being.

Our illiterate future is unlikely to be peaceful. But political and ideological conflict is already waning, being replaced with something much more intimate. In every developed country, the last few decades have seen a massive political polarization along gender lines. Young women are swinging hard to the left; young men are swinging to the right. A lot of people seem to think this is because we disagree more about politics than ever before, but it’s the opposite. Politics is losing its content; “being on the Left” has come to mean “being a girl,” and “being on the Right” is just another way of saying “being a boy.” Teenage boys watch esoteric Nazi edits for the same reason they used to pull girls’ hair: as a way of working through the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. Right-wing economic policy is now framed as a way of punishing women, reducing their social status until they’re willing to turn back the clock on liberation. In some parts of the Left, anything can be justified as long as it seems to reduce the power of men. When we can no longer conceive of a political whole, this is what will be left: all struggles will be powered by outright sexual sadism.

Still, I think McLuhan was right that the postliterate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. Our direct sensory experience, though, won’t be of the things that physically surround us but of the images streaming through our phones. It’s likely that before very long, absolutely all of those images will be generated by AI. In the same way that a Tolstoyan peasant has a deep spiritual knowledge of the land, we will have a deep spiritual knowledge of Tung Tung Tung Sahur. The politics of the future will be cautious, conservative, pragmatic, and unadventurous, grounded in empirical experience instead of fanatical ideologies. We will no longer try to think beyond the things we can see. It’s just that nothing we see will be real.

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Sam Kriss is a UK-based writer.

Like the seemingly omnipotent antagonist in any given horror movie, capitalism is not just unstoppably horrific. It horrifies in its apparent unstoppability.

“The runaway world,” argues Chris Harman in a book on zombie capitalism, “is the economic system as Marx described it, the Frankenstein’s monster that has escaped from human control; the vampire that saps the lifeblood of the living bodies it feeds off.”

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The diagnosis invites the big question: how do we orient ourselves politically within a social dynamic whose very essence is horror?

This is a question taken up by Karl Marx himself, whose writing overflows with tropes and figures born of the gothic, and it is one worth revisiting for Halloween.

“Capital,” Marx tells us, “is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” Or, in an altogether more grotesque formulation:

The capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries, by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced, and new labourers are begotten.

These two passages from Capital sound more like Mary Shelley than a work of political economy, summoning predatory vampires, undead monsters, and dismembered bodies.

Both Dracula and Frankenstein have been read as tales of capitalism. The vampire is, of course, a capitalist hellbent on imperial expansion:

There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster.

Frankenstein’s monster is, by contrast, the zombified embodiment of proletarian retribution:

All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment: I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me; and, finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.

But unlike the novels of Stoker and Shelley, Marx’s account is not only gothic. His descriptions of a blood-drenched and gore-caked mode of production are prescient of horror as we see it in more recent cinema. Whatever these descriptions lack in the sense of morality shared by gothic novelists they make up for in cold rationality.

Marx’s horrors are irredeemable and absolute. When he insists that capitalism is the mode of production that “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” he really commits himself, as a gifted writer and a master-stylist, to conveying specifically that kind of horror.

Elsewhere in Capital, when the vampire image returns, narrative emphasis shifts from the bourgeois predator to the exploited worker, and specifically to the worker’s obliterated body:

It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity “labour-power” face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no “free agent,” that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.”

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The vampire reveals itself only when it is already too late, when the façade of legal niceties turns out to be an evil, Faustian pact, inescapable until the death of either party.

Stylistically important is that quoted material at the end, taken from a description made elsewhere by Friedrich Engels. The quotation from Engels confirms the organic substance of capital, its own expropriated lifeblood, is the insides of the worker.

While Marx frequently draws on the patently gothic imagery of vampires and werewolves, specters and gravediggers, here we can see that his accounts of capital also acquire a taste for human viscera, with sentences chewing their way through bodily gristle:

We may say that surplus value rests on a natural basis, but this is permissible only in the very general sense, that there is no natural obstacle absolutely preventing one man from disburdening himself of the labour requisite for his own existence, and burdening another with it, any more, for instance, than unconquerable natural obstacles prevent one man from eating the flesh of another.

Capitalist accumulation is, as Marx knows, a crime whose most obvious analogue is cannibalism. Born into the wage-relation we are not human subjects. We are only our capacity to work, which means serving up our variously muscular, nervous, and cerebral organs — and consuming those of our friends and families, as well as those of complete strangers.

Gothic descriptions like these are not merely decorative. Instead, they get to the very essence of life under capitalism. They remind us how bodies and brains are mutilated into commodities. Literally, we need only think of the deformations, injuries, and fatalities caused by strained working conditions at every level of capitalist industry, from neurological trauma through to heart attacks, right down to broken bones, amputated limbs, and mass deaths.

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Figuratively, every minute and every hour spent in wage labor is another minute and another hour in which our bodies are wired to a vast machine that only lives by draining our life substances.

Life under capitalism is the experience of horror, the irreversible liquefying of human substance and its necrophagic consumption. Like the grim fate of the victims in any given horror film, whose bodies are obliterated beyond all recognition and so frequently ingested by other humans, once our labor succumbs to value that transformation is utterly irreparable. So reflects poet Keston Sutherland in a brilliantly nauseating essay on Marx’s jargon: “All that is meat melts into bone, and vice versa; and no effort of scrutiny, will or heated imagination, however powerfully analytic or moral, is capable of reversing the industrial process of that deliquescence.”

The lesson can be put this way: we all inhabit the same horror story and we should all be intensely revolted by this. But, even if we cannot undo what has already been done, that revulsion might still be a catalyst for revolution. Perhaps this is what Marx was trying to teach us all along with his unique brand of gothic horror.

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Mark Steven is senior lecturer in 20th- and 21st-century literature at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (2017) and Splatter Capital (2017).

The status of literary reputation is in a funny place. On the one hand, we inhabit a necrophiliac literary culture. Lost classics, never-before-translated classics, and unjustly forgotten geniuses are exhumed every month, and laurels are placed on their authors’ skeletons. “The proper response to this is surely celebration,” the critic Madeleine Schwartz wrote in a 2019 review of Elsa Morante’s 1957 novel Arturo’s Island. “But I can’t help feeling a bit depressed that so many of the cool new writers are dead.”

On the other hand, a new anxiety has attached to the already famous dead: the specter of oblivion as a casualty of culture war. Of course, oblivion is the natural state of things for most writers and artists, and it usually sets in before they die, if they were lucky enough for things ever to be otherwise. But recent controversies over posthumous reputations, all putatively being argued on moral grounds, seem to me something else entirely: the language of morality enlisted for the purposes of marketing, publicity, and literary consumerism.

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Consider the 2022 case of Norman Mailer. On January 3, Michael Wolff reported for the newsletter The Ankler that Random House had canceled the publication of a new Mailer collection because of “a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, ‘The White Negro’ ” and “the objections of feminist and cultural gadfly Roxane Gay.” Wolff’s sources were Mailer’s son, the film producer Michael Mailer, and unnamed employees of Random House. “A world without Norman Mailer — this new intellectual nanny-state  — surely harms the literary consumer,” Wolff concluded.

On January 4, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris reported in the New York Times that Random House, Mailer’s principal but not sole American publisher since the 1950s, had not canceled the collection but merely declined to contract it. It would be published instead by Skyhorse, recently home to other “controversial” titles such as Woody Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing, shelved by Little, Brown after staff objections on the grounds of allegations of sexual abuse by Allen’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow, and Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, recalled by W. W. Norton after multiple allegations of rape against its author. Mailer’s youngest son, John Buffalo Mailer, said he knew nothing of the objections of the junior staffer nor those of Roxane Gay, who herself denied having anything to do with the matter. Random House remains the publisher of Mailer’s extensive backlist, including multiple books that contain “The White Negro,” which is anyway available to read in the archive of Dissent.

Whatever the inner workings of Random House, the Wylie Agency, and the Mailer estate, the one-two punch of reported cancellation and denial of cancellation was the biggest publicity Mailer had received in years. Since Mailer’s death in 2007, the four biggest publishing events around him have been the publication of his wife Norris Church Mailer’s memoir A Ticket to the Circus in 2010; the concurrent release of J. Michael Lennon’s biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life and Mailer’s Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays in 2013; the Selected Letters of Norman Mailer in 2014; and the Library of America’s Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s in 2018. I happen to be among the critics who wrote on these books, and as far as I can tell, none of them sparked a major Mailer revival. So the new Mailer volume and the either ginned-up or accidental controversy around it constitutes a rebranding of Mailer for “the era we’re living in,” to use John Buffalo Mailer’s phrase.

According to the Times, he put the collection, which includes both published and unpublished writings, together “in the wake of growing partisan division in America and the Jan. 6 riots.” No doubt Mailer’s writings on the March on the Pentagon, his dispatches from the Democratic and Republican national conventions beginning in the 1960s, and his various other political interventions up through the George W. Bush administration will continue to have resonance. He was an excellent student of the psychology of politicians and a sharp anthropologist of rank-and-file American right-wingers. Those who choose not to read him — because he stabbed his wife Adele Morales with a penknife in 1960; or because he headbutted Gore Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971; or because he supported the 1981 release of the convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbott, who went on to kill Richard Adan, a waiter and playwright in the East Village, six weeks into his parole  — will be free to continue not reading him. Nobody ever needs an excuse not to read a book. (One could as easily cite the quality of his writings on sex, race, and plastics.) But his “cancellation” has the feeling of a false flag operation.

Writing on Mailer in March for the Nation, Darryl Pinckney mounts a vivid reading of “The White Negro” within the context of Mailer’s life and career, his rivalry with James Baldwin, and the essay’s status as “an update on an American fetish” for black primitivism. “As a historical document,” he concludes in part, “ ‘The White Negro’ does not need to be defended.” Pinckney goes on to make some provocative points about “the era we’re living in”:

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What separates the chaff from the wheat these days, and who decides and by what criteria? In print culture, the change in who gets to say what is grounds for expulsion from cultural memory signals a shift in power, a creation of new powers. The offended are not merely heard, they are enthroned.

It’s a chilling phrase, “expulsion from cultural memory,” but also a vague one. Culture and literature are hard, if not impossible, to contain. What’s repressed tends to return — if it was indeed repressed and not merely forgotten, the way most things are.

“The market loves what are deemed icons,” Pinckney writes, “while the culture has come to suspect individualism.” Yet these propositions also admit their converse: the market loves to destroy icons, and however suspicious the culture has become of individualism, it (or its journalistic and scholarly avatars) has not yet found a way to talk about writers and artists so powerful as talking about them as individuals. Otherwise, why would some of them occasionally need to be expelled or exhumed? “The age of auteurism is over,” Pinckney concludes. “We all can be stakeholders in the fantasy that culture should be a safe place and that talent must be democratic, not a mystery.” The auteur theory, as it was invented in France in the 1950s, was a response to the notion that the movies of the golden age of Hollywood were mostly the products of a system. The elevation of film directors may have involved a degree of overcompensation — see Pauline Kael’s case for Herman Mankiewicz’s contribution to Citizen Kane — but somebody does the directing, somebody does the writing, and somebody paints the paintings. Books and artworks may seem to be symptoms of the moment of their production, but they are never merely symptoms. Every virus requires a host.

Here another example is instructive. After Joan Didion’s death in December 2021, the eulogies were mostly in unison, perhaps best represented by Zadie Smith’s tribute to Didion as “a woman who did not so much express opinions, or emotions, as interrogate both.” Smith continues: “If this still strikes us as unusual, it seemed unprecedented to me, when reading her for the first time in the late eighties. That she was a woman mattered, very much.” But one woman’s feminist trailblazer is another’s “archpriestess of cool — possessed of a corrosive sense of irony and an overriding habit of condescension,” as Daphne Merkin put it in the New York Times in January 2022, also citing Didion’s “un-self-conscious snootiness.” Of Didion’s late-twentieth-century heyday, Merkin writes:

It was a time before the indictment of the blindness of white privilege, the justifiable outrage of Black Lives Matter, the score-settling of #MeToo and the prim judgments of woke culture. Many of her views, especially her obsession with class indicators such as dress, décor, name brands and status, would not fly today.

But surprise! “Oddly, for all her insistent elitism, young readers have embraced Didion.” It may be that Merkin and these “young readers” are paying attention to different things in Didion’s work, that the accidental details of Didion’s obviously upper-middle-class lifestyle are just those: accidental details. And that underneath the layers of irony, she was attuned to states of suffering (see her essay on Terri Schiavo), to miscarriage of justice (see her essay on the Central Park Five), and to elite betrayal of democratic values (see her essay on the 1988 presidential campaign, where her sympathies were with Jesse Jackson). “ ‘Privilege’ is an accusation,” Didion wrote in Blue Nights, her 2011 memoir on the long coma and death of her daughter, Quintana. “ ‘Privilege’ remains an area to which — when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later — I will not easily cop.” Does this still “fly” today?

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Merkin is attempting to enlist the other side of the culture war in her long-running “stand against the adulation” of Didion. But it proves a flimsy ally, just as the “cancellation” of Mailer, with any scrutiny, can be seen as little more than a counterintuitive marketing maneuver. The emphasis in each instance on biographical details and anachronistic imposition of pieties misses the point of why any writer acquires a readership in the first place. As Pinckney writes of Mailer and Baldwin: “Baldwin said he wanted to die in the middle of writing a sentence. Time has obscured what he and Mailer once had in common, their love of purely literary qualities.” But time only obscures this fact if “time” means “not opening their books,” in which case the common commitment to “purely literary qualities” is obvious. Was talent ever a “mystery”? Artistic and literary production is better understood as a dialectical process artists and writers undertake between the formal conventions they inherit and the liberties they take, as Jed Perl argues in his book Authority and Freedom. As such, writers’ politics and personal behavior are what time not only obscures but renders irrelevant.

The sides of the political feud that got Dante expelled from Florence are the last things anyone remembers about The Divine Comedy. The works of avowedly reactionary writers later become fodder for critics who would have been their political opponents: think of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Honoré de Balzac or Perry Anderson on Anthony Powell. “What is being canceled is the status of art as sacrosanct, and that of the artist as belonging to an elect,” Pinckney writes, but that status was always an illusion.

All writers will be buried, but try to bury their books, and somebody will always dig them up again.

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Christian Lorentzen’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, Bookforum, Artforum, n+1, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the Paris Review, the Baffler, the New York Times, Slate, the Literary Review, and the New Leader. From 2015 to 2018, he was the book critic for New York Magazine.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

Ninety years ago, as the Popular Front, led by the Socialist Party, was voted into power in France, workers across the country decided to hasten its promised reforms, striking and occupying factories to ensure that their demands were met: a forty-hour work week, higher wages, paid vacations, and union rights.

They occupied factories with the knowledge that, with the Socialists in power and the Communists supporting the government, they ran no risk of being attacked and driven from their bastions. Instead, they settled in with food, wine, and accordions, turning working France into a festival. And with the government acting in their favor, they won many of their demands.

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In 2016, with the Socialists in power, people again took to the streets, this time protesting against the government’s drive to chip away at the rights fought for and obtained over decades of working-class struggle. Far from being protected by a Socialist government, they found themselves attacked by the police, demonstrations banned or restricted to routes of less than a mile.

This bookending of protest movements says all we need to know about the descent of the Socialist Party, from one of the two great parties of the French working class to just another force aimed at imposing austerity.

But it also speaks to the differences in the figures heading the nominally socialist governments. Today it is François Hollande, someone of no obvious left-wing credentials. In 1936 it was a leader of true stature: Léon Blum.

Pierre Birnbaum’s biography, Léon Blum: Prime Minster, Socialist, Zionist, provides us with a brisk and insightful introduction to Blum’s life and ideas.

The Young Léon Blum

Nothing of Blum’s role in history was foretold by his youth. Born in 1872 into an Alsatian Jewish family relocated to Paris, Blum was, first of all, an aesthete, a discerning literary critic for several reviews in late nineteenth-century France.

As a young man he was, most notably, an expert on Stendhal, who was perhaps his strongest early influence. If Blum was, as he was called, “the first true Stendhalian of modern times,” it was not just for his admiration of Stendhal as one of the greatest stylists of the French language. Nor was it simply because Stendhal inspired him in his skewering of bourgeois morality in his brilliant On Marriage, a book that called for the liberation of both partners in marriage from social constraints.

Oddly, it was his love of Stendhal that would set him on the path to the Socialist Party, for, as Birnbaum writes, “Blum also shared Stendhal’s contempt for money and commerce, and [his characters’] cult of the French Revolution.”

Blum was a perfect example of what Birnbaum calls the “State Jew.” This figure of the Jew who enters the halls of government, either as elected representative or highly placed functionary, could not have existed without the Republic, which, in turn, owed its existence to the revolution. Both, in turn, won veneration from many French Jews, freed from some of the constraints that existed elsewhere in Europe.

Which, of course, does not mean that anti-Semitism wasn’t rampant, and few French Jews were as directly and consistently the target of Jew-hatred as Blum. During the Dreyfus Affair the Right hated Dreyfus, but he at least was a soldier. Birnbaum points out that the self-presentation of his vocal supporter Blum, who entered politics thanks to the affair, “seems to have encouraged anti-Semitic pamphleteers to describe him as the exact opposite of Dreyfus: an effeminate personality instead of a manly one.” Attacks on Blum the Jew would be a constant through World War II.

Blum’s assumption of power in 1936 itself elicited a famous interpellation by the anti-Semitic deputy Xavier Vallat: “Your accession to power, Mr. Prime Minister, is undeniably an historic date. For the first time this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew.”

For Birnbaum, Blum’s position as socialist leader Jean Jaurès’s heir flowed naturally from his Jewishness: “Jewish socialists identified with Jaurèsian messianism, direct descendant of the French Revolution they so greatly admired.” Blum inherited Jaures’s form of socialism, “a deeply original synthesis of individualism and collectivism, the values of the French Revolution and the theory of class struggle, revolution, and reform.”

Perhaps no idea of Jaures’s would more influence Blum than his statement in Etudes Socialistes that “the Republic is the political form of socialism.” For Blum, then, the republican state “should be used to define, protect, and guarantee the condition of the working class.” In 1927, nine years before the Popular Front victory, he provided the theoretical basis for its imposition of pro-working class measures by saying that “the government derives [this right] from its prerogatives as a public power, from its command over firms, and from its national and legislative sovereignty.”

A Workers’ Government

The gestation period of the Popular Front lasted over two years, dating to February 6, 1934 and the riots in Paris by the ultra-right that nearly overthrew the Radical government, whose corruption was demonstrated by the Stavisky Affair, in which Alexander Stavisky, who had close ties to members of the government, swindled hundreds of millions of francs.

A firm response was demanded from the Left, and on February 13, 1934 two separate marches were called, one by the Socialists, the other by the Communists. The two parties had been at daggers drawn since the split in the Socialist Party at the 1920 party congress that had led to the foundation of the French Communist Party (PCF), where Blum led those opposed to affiliation with the Comintern, and there was some fear as the two marches approached each other.

Blum would write of the day:

We advanced. The space between the leading elements of the two columns of marchers grew smaller with every passing second . . . Would the encounter lead to a clash? . . . The two columns now stood face to face, and identical shouts broke out on all sides. Identical songs were sung. The two columns met, but there was no clash, only fraternization.

This ad hoc unity was formalized on July 14, 1935, when the united left held a massive demonstration, and ten months later, on May 3, 1936, the Popular Front government emerged victorious from the second round of the legislative elections, with the Radical Party and Socialists official participants in the government, and the Communists remaining as outside supporters. The Communists’ stance was not to Blum’s liking. “If the Communists do not associate themselves with us in the exercise of conquered power the disappointment will be great within, and no doubt outside our ranks.”

Though PCF secretary Maurice Thorez, along with the rest of the party leadership, would have preferred to take this step, the Comintern decided otherwise. Despite the PCF’s enormous gain of sixty-two seats, from its previous ten, and the Socialists’ gain of forty-nine seats, Thorez justified what was officially his and the Central Committee’s decision by saying that Communist entry into the government would cause “panic and confusion” and would lead the Radicals to leave the government, ending the experiment before it could truly begin. This Communist cautiousness would manifest itself throughout the strikes and occupations that would be set off by the Popular Front’s electoral victory.

Defining May-June 1936 is as difficult as defining May-June 1968. Blum had a Jaurèsian notion not just of the French Revolution, but of revolution, one that dismissed not just the need for, but even the possibility of armed revolution. A lecture Blum delivered in 1917 explains his vision of working-class revolution: “A revolutionary act occurs . . . each time the working class achieves significant progress sooner than would have been the case in the normal course of events . . . Reform is revolutionary, and revolution is reformist.”

By this standard the events of May and June 1936 were a revolution, one that the syndicalist Pierre Monatte would credit to the electoral victory of the Popular Front: “The decisive factor in the unleashing [of the strike wave] was the arrival of the Popular Front government . . . Suddenly, it was no longer possible to put up with things as they were . . . The trigger was pulled.”

Strikes and occupations occurred throughout France. Birnbaum is right when he says that “reform without revolution: this was the symbolic significance of the Popular Front.” But the reforms it led to were far from symbolic: the government sat with the unions and the employers’ association and imposed the Matignon Accords on the bosses on June 7, granting across-the-board wage increases of 20 percent, two weeks paid vacation, collective bargaining rights, and the establishment of unemployment insurance. These gains were epochal, and the Popular Front government, and Blum, are still remembered fondly for their implementation.

The Popular Front aimed at ameliorating existing conditions, not overturning them. Blum, with his vision of the state, the republic, and socialism, can hardly be blamed for not becoming the French Lenin. Those further to the left saw things differently. As the strike wave continued to spread even with the signing of the accords, the leader of the independent socialist left Marceau Pivert would say “Everything is possible,” and Leon Trotsky would proclaim that “The French revolution has begun.” Maurice Thorez, leader of the PCF, on the other hand, announced that, “It is important to know how to end a strike when satisfaction has been obtained.”

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As Birnbaum laconically phrases it, “The Popular Front experiment ended all too soon. The hopes that had been raised were quickly dashed.” The Matignon Accords, which were only accepted grudgingly, were combated by the bourgeoisie, capital fled, strikes and occupations broke out again, production dropped, unemployment rose, and the middle class, the source of the Radical Party’s strength, began to abandon the Popular Front project.

The Right reawakened, and when Blum refused to ban a rally by the right-wing French Social Party, the Communists called for a demonstration against it. Police fired on the demonstrators, and Blum now became “the murderer Blum” in the Communist press. By 1937 the Radicals had had enough, and refused to grant Blum the sweeping powers he needed to deal with the economic crisis and capital flight.

So within a year Blum was out of office and almost every Popular Front gain had been rolled back. It can perhaps be said this shows the limitations of the Blumian notion of revolution through reform: unlike changes resulting from a revolutionary state, these could be largely undone in a single election. Given the scope of the strike movement the actions of Blum and Thorez have been viewed as constituting a brake, if not a betrayal of the possibilities of May-June 1936.

But a closer examination of facts reveals that things were not quite as Trotsky and Pivert claimed. In the first place, the Popular Front victory was not as sweeping as initially appears. Though the Popular Front won by 1,200,000 votes, their vote total had increased by 300,000, or 3 percent, over the Left’s results in 1932. Not a small increase, but hardly a tidal wave, so the support across France was not all that overwhelming.

And if the Socialists gained seventeen seats over the previous elections, and the Communists an impressive sixty-two (also receiving almost eighty thousand more votes than the Radical Party), the Radicals had lost fifty, so the swing was a total of twenty-nine seats. Thorez’s fears of alienating swathes of the French population were not groundless.

It is unquestionably astounding that twelve thousand enterprises went on strike, and that nine thousand were occupied. Like Trotsky, the French owning class saw the strikes as the beginning of the “sovietization” of France. Based on the workers in a cookie factory in Paris having taken over and run their enterprise, and the insistence by militants elsewhere that other workers were ready to do the same, has led some, both then and now, to say that the revolution had indeed begun. But as the historian Antoine Prost would write, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the calls for workers’ control “were simple threats, and they were rare.”

As a participant recounted: “There were dances, and all of that . . . We sang, we were happy. Even if we knew we were later going to return to work. Even so, we had a good time together.”

Criticisms that things could have gone further must then be at least questioned and credit granted for what was actually accomplished. Blum’s view of the role of the government was that it was a force for good, and his ability to have his administration act to meet working peoples’ needs won him real support. Birnbaum includes a sample of the letters of thanks Blum received from French workingmen, and it is clear that for the average French worker, May and June 1936 were revolutionary.

And yet, however positively Blum can be viewed over these two months, after July 1936 his role in international affairs cannot be seen so sanguinely.

Friends in Need

Despite Blum’s constant victimization at the hand of native fascists, when the moment arrived to actually confront and defeat fascism, he failed miserably. When dealing with the Spanish Civil War his respect for order led him into the worst error of his career, one that has justly blackened his name for nine decades and contributed to the death of the Popular Front.

On July 18, 1936, one day after the Franco’s coup, with Blum’s popularity still riding high, his chief of staff received a formal request for military aid from the Spanish Popular Front government, and Blum agreed to send aviation and artillery. But he quickly reneged, facing opposition from elements of his government and, more importantly, from Britain, which was, as Birnbaum says, “keen to preserve peace in Europe and to defend their military interests in Spain.”

Birnbaum describes Blum as being “distressed” when in a speech delivered in September 1936 he told Socialists calling for intervention, “Do you think I do not hear or approve of a single thing you are feeling?” But Blum was now in power, and approval of a sentiment and feeling distress only matter when matched by action. He could have sold intervention to the French people, or at least tried to do so, but he chose not to use his reserve of goodwill and, sticking by international agreements calling for non-intervention, refused to involve the French Popular Front in defense of the Spanish Popular Front.

Jean Lacouture, an earlier biographer, pointed out the weakness of Blum’s excuses for failing to assist Spain. The Spanish government’s request for assistance “was not in any way exorbitant. Not only because international law authorizes assistance to a legal government confronting rebellion, but because Paris and Madrid had signed an agreement in 1935 . . . an accord calling for the delivery of French war materiel to Madrid worth up to 20,000,000 francs.”

Later in September 1936 he would lay out his case, saying that France “identifies peace with respect for international law and international contracts; with faithfulness to contracts and the word given.” His speeches and writings of the time are filled with platitudes of this kind, that “history demonstrates that real and stable peace cannot rest on injustice or egoism,” that “peace must be general because war will be general.” It was as if Blum’s desire to avoid alienating Britain was leading him to fail to see that peace had ceased to exist, that the danger the Popular Front was formed to combat — fascism — was at France’s border.

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Even more damning than his 1936 refusal to intervene on the side of the Republic is his continued defense of this position in 1938, when non-intervention’s impact was clear. He would write, “The Anglo-French accord is and remains the primordial condition for European peace.” His government, he continued, “in its dogged will for peace feared delivering the coup de grace to an international convention that, despite it all, possesses a certain pacifying virtue.”

And he challenged the readers of the Socialist Party daily: “One can make all the objections one likes to this conduct. One can reproach its lack of stature and grandeur . . . I will limit myself to but one response: Would it have been better to officially reassume our freedom of action and officially and legally denounce those accords?” That “yes” was the proper answer for a socialist didn’t occur to him.

That he allowed a certain amount of weaponry to pass into Spain is undeniable; that he didn’t stop the International Brigades from crossing the border is true; but it is no less true that this was little in the face of the aid provided to Franco by Hitler and Mussolini.

Several of Blum’s ministers strongly disagreed with him, yet he remained firm that alliance with Britain and not alienating a portion of the French population were more important that actually helping defeat fascism. Like too many politicians of the time, he believed that treaties would serve the purpose weapons were called on to play.

Birnbaum can do no better in defending Blum than to quote statements made by Spanish Republicans in later years thanking him for “[f]inding it within himself to commiserate with the tragedy of our war and exile;” exculpating him for being “unable to convince other democratic governments to see things as he did or to act on behalf of Spanish interests as well as justice and freedom.”

But these words do little to change the fundamental fact that Blum failed to move decisively. He would himself say that “We are bastards if we don’t keep our promises,” and considered having the Socialists resign from the government rather than live as such. But he didn’t.

France was deeply divided on the matter of intervention, but it was also divided on the Matignon Accords. All of Blum’s limitations are revealed in his handling of Spanish intervention. He was exactly right when he said his conduct was lacking in grandeur.

He, who had felt in his flesh the evils of fascism, who would later be arrested by the Vichy government and put on trial for his acts as head of government, a trial where he so strongly and effectively defended himself that the Germans ordered that it be halted, failed to act. The State Jew opted for reasons of state over socialist solidarity and his moral sense.

History has not judged him as kindly as Birnbaum. In Blum we find both the grandeur and misery of interwar social democracy.

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Review of The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian by Emile Chabal (Harvard University Press, 2026)

Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm published his best-selling history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes. The book presented a man coming to terms with the fate of the political project to which he had committed his adult life while trying to understand the twentieth century as a historical epoch. Though famous for its pessimism, the book, like the work of many left-wing authors in the 1990s, was also an opportunity to rethink what the project of the Left might become after the collapse of communism.

In its final pages, Hobsbawm reflected darkly on the future. The “titanic economic and techno-scientific” development of capitalism, he wrote, had unleashed forces capable of destroying “the material foundations of human life” while eroding the social bonds of the past, including the ones capitalism itself depends upon. “Our world risks both explosion and implosion. It must change.” Humanity could not survive the third millennium by prolonging the past or the present, he warned, and “the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.”

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Almost twenty years later, in 2011, mass protests erupted across the world. The Arab Spring overthrew dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, while the uprising in Syria descended into civil war. Elsewhere, Occupy Wall Street emerged in the United States, and the Indignados movement occupied the streets and squares of Spain. I was among those participating in these demonstrations and at the time was reading The Age of Extremes with my classmates. The book made a lasting impression on how we thought about both the past and the possibilities of the future. It was not only the history Hobsbawm was telling but the feeling that we were somehow living through the same story again. For a left that had struggled to articulate a vision of the future since the collapse of communism, the Indignados movement became a moment of political imagination, when a different future seemed possible. For a new generation of politically committed historians, the struggles of Eric Hobsbawm — a communist who had lived in Berlin when the Nazis came to power, been in Paris at the height of the Popular Front in 1936, and traveled to Spain during the civil war — could be inspiring.

I wasn’t alone. In 2018, the historian Emile Chabal traveled to Delhi where he encountered a group of left-wing students who admired Hobsbawm’s work. They encouraged him to search for the hashtag #Hobsbawm. To his surprise, he found numerous social media posts featuring the historian’s books: typically an open laptop flanked by a copy of The Age of Extremes accompanied by hashtags about the challenges of student life. But as Chabal asks, what can the life of Hobsbawm — the historical figure rather than the myth — teach us about the prospects of the Left today?

A Historian With a Historical Life

Few twentieth-century historians have generated as much biographical interest as Eric Hobsbawm. Born in Alexandria in 1917, raised in Vienna and Berlin, and arriving in Britain shortly after Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power, Hobsbawm joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936 and remained a member until its dissolution in 1991. He also became one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, moving from the relatively confined world of British Marxist historiography to an extraordinary international readership. Emile Chabal’s The Age of Hobsbawm therefore enters crowded territory. Yet his new biography provides an excellent opportunity to revisit the life of a committed communist through the wider history of twentieth-century communism and to ask what Hobsbawm might teach us at another moment of profound uncertainty for the international Left.

Chabal is less interested in discovering an unknown Hobsbawm than in explaining the making of the historian and political intellectual. His is fundamentally an intellectual biography. Rather than separating Hobsbawm’s historical writing from his communism, journalism, friendships, travels, and political interventions, Chabal reconstructs the environments in which Hobsbawm’s ideas were produced. The result is something larger than a biography: a history of twentieth-century intellectual life viewed through an individual who moved between communism and academia, Britain and continental Europe, specialist scholarship and mass publishing.

As the historian Alberto De Bernardi has argued, antifascism needs to be reconsidered as a central component of European political culture, one that shaped political identities through the second half of the twentieth century. Hobsbawm belonged to what might be called the “generation of the October Revolution”: those who lived through the rise of Nazism, the antifascist response, and World War II. These experiences forged a powerful political commitment that, in Hobsbawm’s case, proved impossible to break even after the communist crisis of 1956. If 1945–48 marked the high point of communism’s appeal in Europe, the following decades witnessed its gradual decline and eventual collapse in 1989–91. Hobsbawm lived through all of it without renouncing communism. His generation was defeated and had to adapt to a world shorn of the project to which so many of them had dedicated themselves. Few intellectuals experienced these transformations with the same degree of proximity or persistence. Fewer still attempted, as Hobsbawm did, to interpret these upheavals historically while simultaneously participating in the debates that animated them. His political identity may sometimes have appeared understated, but the extraordinary reach of his historical writing ensured that his engagement was far from marginal.

While Hobsbawm’s formative years and the crisis of 1956 are among the best-known aspects of his biography, less attention has been devoted to Hobsbawm during the crucial middle and later decades of the Cold War. How did a committed partisan of the October Revolution navigate the successive downturns of communism, and what might his responses teach us about the prospects of the Left? Each major crisis — in 1956, ’68, and ’89 — prompted Hobsbawm to reconsider fundamental Marxist concepts such as revolution, class, and political organization. His responses were shaped by a combination of personal experience, scholarly research, and interactions with international political movements, particularly those in Latin America.

A Communist in Retreat?

Until 1956, Hobsbawm remained a loyal communist, even an open Stalinist. Chabal’s biography argues that the crisis of 1956 transformed him into a semidetached communist. He interprets Hobsbawm’s subsequent turn toward primitive rebels, bandits, and millenarian movements partly as an intellectual retreat. This is a persuasive interpretation. Yet a closer examination also reveals a Hobsbawm attempting to reconstruct a theory of revolutionary agency at a moment when old certainties had collapsed and the search for alternative models of political transformation increasingly led beyond Europe’s borders.

After 1956, the problem of who makes history, under what conditions, and through which forms of organization became increasingly central to his thinking. This inquiry took him beyond the industrial heartlands of Britain to the rural peripheries of Spain and Italy and, eventually, to Latin America. Between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, these travels became a means of thinking through some of the dilemmas exposed by 1956. In Andalusian villages, in the hills of Calabria, and later in the Andes and the Cuban countryside, he encountered agrarian worlds that appeared to exist outside conventional categories of modern politics, inhabited by millenarians, rebellious peasants, and bandits whose forms of resistance often predated the structures of modern class politics. These encounters culminated in Primitive Rebels (1959) and Bandits (1969).

His travels to Cuba, Peru, Chile, and Colombia exposed him to forms of political struggle that reshaped his understanding of Marxism. The so-called Third World became not simply an object of European theory but a generator of concepts and political strategies. The Cuban Revolution, Andean guerrilla movements, and the nationalist experiment of Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru suggested that radical political transformation might emerge from unexpected sources (armies, states, and rural insurgencies) rather than exclusively from the industrial working class.

Such encounters broadened the geographical and conceptual horizons of European Marxism. They also fed back into Hobsbawm’s reflections on the politics of his own continent. The global circulation of ideas that characterized the postwar left is often narrated as a one-way movement from metropole to periphery, but Hobsbawm’s trajectory reveals a more complex picture: Latin American thought and political experience helped transform European debates about revolution, development, and political strategy. In this sense, Latin American revolutionary movements contributed to what Christoph Kalter has termed the “decolonization of the imagination” within the European left.

Hobsbawm and ’68

The second great crisis, 1968, represented by the events in Paris and Prague, exposed a widening gulf between Communist parties and the new social movements transforming political culture. It revealed tensions long present within Western Marxism: between cultural critique and political strategy, democratic aspirations and party orthodoxy, and working-class traditions and new political identities. For Hobsbawm, it raised a central question: What was the future of socialism in advanced industrial societies in which the traditional working class was changing, fragmenting, or losing its political coherence?

His answer evolved through his deepening contacts with the Communist parties and intellectual cultures of Italy, France, and Spain, the emergence of Eurocommunist strategies, and political events ranging from the Prague Spring of 1968 to Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973. They informed his important contribution to British politics in the late 1970s and ’80s, when he applied decades of intellectual and political reflection to the specific conditions of the United Kingdom. His landmark 1978 essay, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?,” argued that the working class was undergoing a profound transformation, that new social groups were emerging, and that the labor movement had failed to provide adequate strategic leadership. It sparked fierce debate.

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Chabal critically reconstructs how Hobsbawm remained skeptical of, and at times openly hostile toward, aspects of the legacy of the New Left and postmodernism. One revealing example is a letter reproduced by Chabal in which Hobsbawm responded to a student who proposed reconstructing a historical narrative in which gender, race, sexuality, and subjectivity would be central rather than adjuncts to a “grand narrative.” Hobsbawm rejected the proposed approach as neither his “kind of history” nor, in his view, Karl Marx’s, and regarded the project as symptomatic of the retreat of the Left.

Hobsbawm’s attitude toward the New Left had two important and contradictory consequences. It left him poorly equipped to understand some of the new political forces that emerged after the 1960s, including feminism, identity politics, new social movements, cultural politics, and some forms of anti-colonial and postcolonial politics. It narrowed his political analysis, but in some respects it also strengthened it. Less attached to the revolutionary optimism associated with parts of the New Left, Hobsbawm became one of the first major Marxist intellectuals in Britain to confront directly the decline of traditional industrial working-class politics. By the 1970s, he was increasingly concerned not with proclaiming revolutionary possibilities but with identifying the social forces and political alliances capable of producing meaningful change. This suggests that Hobsbawm’s analysis of the relationship between Britain, the labor movement and the working class was shaped neither by British exceptionalism nor solely by the history of the British left. Rather, it emerged from global Cold War experiences and, in particular, from the history of international communism and Marxism during the critical years between 1956 and 1978.

The End of the Cold War

Finally came the collapse of communism in 1989–91 and the emergence of the post–Cold War world, an episode that, for Hobsbawm, brought the “short twentieth century” to an end. For some, the fall of the Eastern Bloc signaled the triumph of liberal capitalism and the exhaustion of ideological alternatives. For Hobsbawm, however, it marked the disappearance of the historical horizon that had structured the twentieth century. The collapse of the communist project did not vindicate capitalism in his eyes. Rather, it exposed the fragility of a world order deprived of a credible vision of collective emancipation. The post-1989 decades were characterized by what he and others perceived as a profound fragmentation of political and social life: the resurgence of nationalism, the assertion of American military power, and the deepening individualism of neoliberal societies.

For Hobsbawm, the collapse of communism was therefore not simply a geopolitical event. It represented the disappearance of the world that had shaped his political and intellectual imagination since his youth. Many welcomed 1989 as a moment of liberation; Hobsbawm experienced it as the closing of a horizon. The moment echoed earlier defeats that weighed heavily upon the Left’s collective memory, but it carried a deeper sense of finality. He faced fundamental questions: What remained of Marxism when the political project historically associated with it collapsed? How should a historian write in an age that appeared to have lost its belief in alternative futures? Could history itself function as a form of political intervention when political horizons had narrowed?

Confronting the end of the project that had animated his generation, he turned increasingly to history itself as a mode of political engagement. The collapse of communism did not silence him; it compelled him to find a different voice, one that combined melancholy with realism and realism with a persistent belief that historical understanding could still serve the cause of human emancipation. The Hobsbawm who emerged after 1989 was continuous with the earlier historian of rebels, revolutionaries, and Eurocommunists, but his task had changed. If the twentieth century had been defined by competing visions of the future, the world after communism demanded something different: an explanation of history in the absence of the very future that had once animated it.

His biography reveals that his greatest political strength was not his loyalty to a particular communist doctrine but his capacity to rethink socialist strategy after defeat. Yet it also shows the danger of letting loyalty to inherited categories blind the Left to new agents of change.

What, then, can Hobsbawm’s life tell us about the future of the Left? Hobsbawm belonged to a political world that has disappeared: the world of mass communist parties, powerful trade unions, organized industrial working classes, and a socialist project that, however compromised by the realities of Soviet power, appeared to millions of people to offer an alternative future. Yet this distance from our own political circumstances is precisely what makes his trajectory worth revisiting. Hobsbawm’s political life was defined not simply by commitment but by a succession of defeats that forced him repeatedly to ask what remained possible when inherited expectations no longer corresponded to political reality.

Wisdom in Defeat

There is much in Hobsbawm’s answers that cannot simply be recovered for the present. His commitment to broad alliances could also become excessively cautious, privileging electoral viability over political mobilization. And his lifelong loyalty to communism sometimes prevented him from confronting fully the failures of a political tradition to which he remained emotionally attached.

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Yet Hobsbawm also understood something that remains indispensable: political strategy cannot be constructed from desire alone. The Left has to begin with the world as it exists, identifying the social forces capable of changing it rather than assuming that the agents, organizations, and strategies inherited from an earlier period will somehow return. This was the enduring insight behind “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” The industrial working class that had sustained the European left was being transformed. The task was therefore not to abandon class politics but to understand class anew and to construct alliances capable of turning fragmented social interests into a political project.

This problem has hardly disappeared. The twenty-first-century left confronts a working class that is larger globally but transformed in its composition, fragmented across services, logistics, care, technology, and precarious employment. It confronts climate change, migration, and racial inequality alongside the older questions of exploitation and economic power. At the same time, the crisis of the neoliberal order has not automatically benefited the Left. Across much of the world, the far right has proved remarkably effective at transforming economic insecurity, political alienation, and anger at established institutions into nationalist and authoritarian politics. The contemporary challenge is therefore not simply to demonstrate that capitalism is in crisis. Hobsbawm knew better than most that capitalism could survive crises. The harder task is to build the social forces, organizations, and political imagination capable of turning crisis into progressive transformation.

Here Hobsbawm’s relationship with the New Left offers perhaps the most productive lesson. His skepticism toward its politics simultaneously narrowed and strengthened his analysis. He failed to appreciate the extent to which feminism, anti-racism, and new forms of political subjectivity were permanently transforming the meaning of emancipation. But his insistence on class, organization, strategy, and the construction of political majorities identified a weakness that continues to trouble parts of the Left. A viable socialist politics must be capable of incorporating the expanded understanding of emancipation produced after 1968 while recovering Hobsbawm’s insistence that political movements ultimately have to organize social interests into durable forms of collective power.

This brings us back to 2011. For those of us who occupied squares during the Indignados movement, as for those who participated in Occupy Wall Street and the movements that followed the Arab Spring, those months seemed briefly to reopen a future that had been declared closed after 1989. The years that followed demonstrated both the possibilities and the limitations of that political moment. Protest could recover political imagination, but imagination was not the same thing as power. The movements that emerged from the crisis of 2008 succeeded in changing political language, creating new organizations, and returning inequality, class, and capitalism to public debate. But they also encountered the old problems that had preoccupied Hobsbawm: organization, social alliances, political strategy, and the difficult transformation of popular mobilization into durable power.

This is why returning to Hobsbawm now is more useful than simply celebrating him as the great historian of a vanished left. The value of his life lies neither in nostalgia for twentieth-century communism nor in finding a political blueprint among his writings. It lies instead in his persistent willingness to ask difficult questions after defeat. Who are the agents of political transformation when the old working class changes? How can movements with different interests be brought into a common political project? How should the Left respond when its inherited organizations cease to command loyalty? And, most importantly, how can political defeat become an opportunity for strategic reconstruction rather than permanent retreat?

There is an irony here. Hobsbawm ended The Age of Extremes warning that humanity could not enter the third millennium by simply prolonging the past or the present. More than thirty years later, the warning appears remarkably contemporary. The climate crisis, deepening inequality, geopolitical instability, and the resurgence of the radical right make the future no less uncertain than it appeared to Hobsbawm after 1989. But the history reconstructed by Chabal also suggests that uncertainty need not mean political paralysis. Hobsbawm’s twentieth century was punctuated by moments when apparently settled political worlds suddenly collapsed, and new possibilities emerged from their ruins.

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Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz is an intellectual and political historian of twentieth-century Europe.

In 1872, the German socialist newspaper Der Volksstaat ran a series of articles on housing. The breakneck growth of industrial cities had brought overcrowding, squalor, and soaring rents for workers. Their author, Arthur Mülberger, drawing on the ideas of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, offered a simple solution — tenants should become owners.

In the scheme, rental payments would be transformed into something like a mortgage payment. Eventually, every worker would hold the title to their own home.

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Friedrich Engels was unimpressed. In a series of replies later collected as The Housing Question, the cofounder of Marxism dismissed Mülberger’s plan as both impractical and political malpractice. Elsewhere in the same work, criticizing the reformer Emil Sax, he warned: “Give them their own houses, chain them once again to the soil and you break their power of resistance to the wage cutting of the factory owners.” For Engels, the answers to the housing question would only be made possible through the abolition of the capitalist mode of production.

A century and a half later, the Left is still battling over housing. In a certain populist sense, Mülberger won the argument with Engels. Across the world, homeownership has become a defining ambition of working-class life, and the housing crisis is often framed as a crisis of access to it.

Meanwhile, much of the debate on the Left today is framed as a fight between YIMBYs and NIMBYs. One divide is between those who seek to impede market-rate construction, arguing that it can fuel displacement and offers too little to low-income renters, and those who support construction with fewer caveats to boost supply and the bargaining power of renters along with it. We can all agree on building social housing, but so far that hasn’t materialized into a program on the scale of the crisis.

However, it’s worth stepping back from these fights and asking what ultimate vision we are fighting for. In what follows, we set aside the thorny problems of transition — how we get from here to there and who will fight for it — and sketch out a maximalist vision of socialist housing.

Our answer builds on Engels’s critique of Mülberger while putting aside his reluctance to offer details about the possible shape of a socialist future. We advocate the abolition of private ownership of housing and a fully socialized housing system.

A Blueprint for Socialized Housing

A home of your own — one you can shape to your tastes and needs, and that you feel secure in — is a genuine good worth preserving. But capitalist homeownership binds together choices about your home with choices about finance and wealth that inevitably come with risks, and the dynamics of the housing market are prone to generate arbitrary inequalities.

In a socialist economy, we could preserve that security and freedom while socializing the financial risks and gains of housing. Engels warned that “to speculate as to how a future society would organize the distribution of food and dwellings leads directly to utopia.” But given the “capitalist realism” we seem stuck in today, we think the effort is worth it.

In a capitalist society, housing inequality is more than a symptom of broader income and wealth inequality. Homes are both places to live in and vehicles of wealth. In fact, owner-occupied housing alone accounts for about half of gross household wealth in most of the twenty-nine Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries covered in a 2022 study. Individuals often hold business wealth through shares, investment funds, and pensions, but they tend to own dwellings directly, whether they live in them or rent them to others as a landlord. Housing wealth is very unevenly distributed, but owning a home is a widespread experience and ambition, and the fact that it is such a personal form of wealth for owner-occupiers complicates the politics of inequality in contemporary capitalism. Housing makes up most middle-class assets in most OECD countries, and accumulating that wealth is often a lifetime project involving paying off a mortgage over many years.

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Many of the features that make housing unusual as a consumer need would persist under socialism, so it calls for special consideration. Housing stock is expensive to produce and very long-lasting if maintained. It occupies space in particular locations. People care about where they live — in terms both of their home’s position relative to other places that matter to them and of the character of the natural and built environment around it. There is an ineradicable element of scarcity to desirable locations. A given patch of land can be used more or less densely, modifying the supply of dwellings in an area, but density and type of housing are themselves aspects of a location that people care about.

Households deciding whether to meet their housing needs by renting or by taking out a mortgage can compare expected interest, maintenance, tax, and insurance costs, along with transaction costs and the opportunity cost of the money tied up in the home, with the rent on an equivalent property. Some households may be willing to pay a premium for the security of ownership and the freedom of renovating; on the other hand, the illiquidity and risks of ownership may lead others to prefer to rent. For some, there is no choice: since mortgage borrowing generally requires a deposit and the lender’s confidence in the borrower’s ability to repay, many of those on low or insecure incomes are unable to finance a purchase.

Then there are capital gains. Even gains driven by rising incomes and population can be arbitrary — windfalls unrelated to anything the homeowner has done. Such gains can widen a wealth gap between homeowners (and their descendants) who got in early and those stuck renting or only “getting on the property ladder” later in life.

There are a number of ways a socialist society might structure the provision of housing. We suggest a simple approach. In our model, the land and housing stock are publicly owned, but households have secure tenure in the dwelling they live in and the capacity to renovate to their taste. People make regular rental payments for housing, rather than being involved in a financial relationship paying off a large asset purchase over decades. Households take neither the property-price risks nor the capital gains that come with ownership — these are socialized — while the system aims to preserve the security and freedom of a place to call their own.

Rents are set by a housing authority, generally aiming to match demand to supply. A household’s rent may shift over time according to changes in supply and demand for dwellings that are similar in location and type. In other words, rents adjust in response to market conditions and are not simply set forever at the beginning of tenure, though movements can be smoothed to avoid sudden shifts. The housing authority is tasked with developing supply in response to projected demand, so that significant general increases in rent would be considered a policy failure to be remedied. Urban planning and development are in public hands and engage worker-managed construction firms to do the building.

This system aims to allow each household to make its own housing choices, each bearing the appropriate cost, within a wider system of guaranteed minimum incomes and needs-based transfers that support those who could not otherwise afford adequate housing. Some may prefer a modest apartment so as to have more to spend on other things, while others put more of their budget into spacious villas. Many people will make different choices at different stages of life. The system can accommodate experiments in self-managed collective living for those who want it — as well as handling the traditional family home.

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Residents are custodians rather than full owners of their homes, but they can use and adapt them to their needs within agreed rules. They can initiate renovations in partnership with the housing authority or its associated bank. Instead of paying up front, the costs of renovations are factored into rents and paid over time. Because maintenance costs and depreciation are already baked into the rent of all dwellings, each comes with a budget and schedule for renovations. Households only need to pay extra for modifications that are idiosyncratic or costlier than the standard.

The housing authority could adjust the pace of renovation to help smooth activity for the construction sector, which is notoriously cyclical in capitalism. If a lot of new construction is going on, renovation can be made temporarily more expensive or limited with a waiting list. When new construction slows, this can be reversed. The pace of renovation can also potentially be varied to help with macroeconomic stabilization beyond the sector.

Because capitalist housing markets are riddled with externalities, housing is an excellent place to reduce the role of markets and open up a considerable role for public planning. Our model of socialist housing aims to accommodate the diversity of household preferences and needs and preserve the central features of “a home of one’s own” — without the individual property-price risks and windfalls that come with the capitalist model of ownership. A century and a half after Engels, that remains the answer to the housing question.

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This piece draws on material from The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World (Verso, 2026).

In 2022, when Mike Davis died at age seventy-six, obituary writers rightly praised his radicalism, his anti-imperialism, his warnings of environmental catastrophe, and the sophisticated yet lucid brand of Marxism with which he observed capitalism’s dystopian transformation of Los Angeles and other cities. Many called him “the prophet of doom.”

His energy was enormous. He had twenty books to his name, and some, including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums, have become classics with an ever-widening influence. But his rough, tough, working-class persona, forged in the gritty, downscale reaches of the Southern California suburban frontier, has often obscured his relationship to the ideas and texts that he encountered, mastered, revised, and deployed in a forty-year outpouring of work whose vitality and breath continues to astound readers. So how did Mike Davis, the San Diego County redneck, become Mike Davis, the transatlantic intellectual, a man whose first book and his last were histories of the working class?

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There are many sources of Davis’s ideas, from his experience in the Congress of Racial Equality, the Students for a Democratic Society, and the California Communist Party to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) seminars of Robert Brenner and participation in the International Marxist Group (a Trotskyist formation largely active in the United Kingdom). The Brenner seminars of the early 1970s, where students and instructors read Capital in the context of debates within British Marxism on agrarian class struggles and the transition from feudalism to capitalism, were a particularly “exhilarating experience,” Davis remembered. They “gave me the intellectual confidence to pursue my own agenda of eclectic interests in political economy, labor history, and urban ecology.”

But even more formative were the years when Mike Davis lived in the United Kingdom and in particular those he spent as contributor and editor at the New Left Review in the early 1980s, a time when Perry Anderson was the reigning presence. It was at the New Left Review that Davis wrote a series of incisive essays on the history of the US working class, the political economy of post-Fordist America, and the rise of Ronald Reagan. Collected in his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream (1986), they reflect the extent to which Davis stood aside from and sometimes in opposition to the influence of E. P. Thompson, whose nuanced studies of how English subalterns created their own sense of class consciousness was then at its most influential among the younger generation of American labor historians.

In the United States, social historians celebrated the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World as authentically radical formations contesting capitalist hegemony in the Gilded Age. They sought to probe and celebrate how an anti-capitalist consciousness emerged out of the cultural and ideological influences arising from Revolutionary War republicanism, Irish and German immigrant radicalism, Civil War–era abolitionism, and the late nineteenth-century Social Gospel.

By the end of his life Davis would incorporate a good deal of this ideologically inflected social history into his way of thinking, but in the 1970s and 1980s, Davis was far more of a structuralist, akin to Brenner and Anderson. When writing the New Left Review essays that became Prisoners of the American Dream, Davis reported that Anderson was “critically engaged with this project from the first draft.” Although there was nothing deterministic about the way he uncovered those social and economic peculiarities that blocked the crystallization of a socialist tendency among working-class Americans, Davis surveyed the history of nineteenth-century labor with an eye not to the sources of communitarianism and solidarity rediscovered by the likes of David Montgomery, Alan Dawley, and Herbert Gutman, but with a keen appreciation for the ways in which ethnic, racial, and political disorganization set the stage for a series of crucial setbacks and blocked opportunities.

Prisoners of the American Dream traced the enormously variegated set of ethnic and racial cleavages that have long divided the American working class. In each epoch, from the arrival of the Irish in the early nineteenth century to the mass migration of African Americans out of the American South, key working-class elements sought to advance their status and power by allying themselves with elements of the ruling elite, in the factory, on the farm, and in the local polity. This was not quite the same thing as racism or an investment in whiteness (that term would become pervasive only in the 1990s); rather, it reflected how various iterations of a capitalist economy continuously create hierarchical labor markets and the ethno-social markers that signify each stratum.

In the mid-twentieth century, a Fordist world of mass production gave rise to a brief moment of interracial, interethnic solidarity and social democracy. But in the Reaganite 1980s, Davis saw this moment fading fast. Unlike some other socialists of that era, including Kim Moody and Jeremy Brecher, Davis did not think a revitalization or reform of existing unions held much promise. To Davis, “the unions have closed in around the laager of the seniority system, abandoned the unemployed, betraying the trust of working-class communities, and treating young workers as expendable pawns.”

Debates at the New Left Review

So how did Davis arrive at this remarkably profound pessimism? One could not find such an argument when in 1975 he published “The Stopwatch and the Wooden Shoe: Scientific Management and the Industrial Workers of the World” in Radical America, an early New Left publication then taking a decided turn toward the working class. Davis’s study of Industrial Workers of the World resistance to Taylorism put him squarely within the historiographic world being constructed by Gutman, Montgomery, and others influenced by E. P. Thompson, the scholar who did so much to found the new labor history. This Davis essay is an excellent example of the genre, exploring the mentality, values, and successful shop-floor resistance of a variety of American workers and their unions to managerial power and manipulation.

By 1976, Davis was in the United Kingdom on a fellowship paid for by his father’s union, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. Here he came in contact with the New Left Review (NLR) intellectuals. “We were all very impressed with Mike’s amazing intellectual energy,” recalled Tariq Ali, another NLR editor of that time, “and he had a desire to learn. He was always asking what he should read.” Perry Anderson mentored Davis, and the latter adopted much of Anderson’s sharp and lucid style.

This was the end of a decade or more when many New Left Review writers were seeking a more structural understanding of how and why the forward march of labor had come to a halt, a conclusion reached by none other than Eric Hobsbawm in 1981.

Tom Nairn and Anderson had already published a series of articles emphasizing the degree to which any sort of genuinely bourgeois revolution in Great Britain had been distorted and constrained by the continuing ideological and political power of the old aristocracy, a condition that accounted for both the relative decline of the British economy after 1880 and the stolid Labourism of the British working class. As Anderson put it in the mid-1960s,

The late Victorian era and the high noon of imperialism welded aristocracy and bourgeoisie together in a single social bloc. The working class fought passionately and unaided against the advent of industrial capitalism; its extreme exhaustion after successive defeats was the measure of its efforts. Henceforward it evolved, separate but subordinate, within the apparently unshakeable structure of British capitalism.

Such an outlook contrasted sharply with that of Thompson, who emphasized the role of consciousness as the wellspring of social and political agency. To Thompson, socialism could be achieved if people, imbued with socialist ideas, willed it so. Thus it did not matter if Great Britain was some sort of capitalist laggard. Because of the vibrancy of working-class culture, “made” more than a century before, the nation was overripe for socialism. By contrast, the New Left Review authors thought that Britain’s upper class had not yet completed a successful transition to bourgeois modernity, thus forestalling any fundamental radicalism from below.

Begun in the 1960s, this debate reached a climax in the years when Davis joined the NLR editorial board. After Thompson published The Poverty of Theory in 1978, Anderson replied with Arguments Within English Marxism in 1980. That work acknowledged Thompson as “our finest socialist writer today” but also took him to task for a muddy and contradictory understanding of working-class “agency,” even in such classic works as The Making of the English Working Class and Whigs and Hunters.

Davis joined in shortly thereafter, although the terrain of dispute shifted to the nature of the new Cold War that had begun with the rise of Soviet influence in Afghanistan, Angola, and Central America, the Reagan military buildup, and the NATO decision to place medium-range missiles in West Germany. Thompson thought the renewed threat of nuclear confrontation had engendered an existential danger so threatening that he labeled it “exterminism.” It was a new, increasingly irrational phase in the Cold War, requiring the mobilization of a transnational, trans-bloc response if a nuclear holocaust were to be averted. To his great credit Thompson plunged into a public, political, agitational role as a key leader of this antinuclear mobilization.

While the New Left Review editors were as hostile to this heightened bipolar militarism as Thompson was, they thought his analysis once again privileged radical humanism and populist agency, failing to grapple with the actual geopolitical uses to which both sides in the Cold War, but mainly that led by the United States, deployed the nuclear threat and actual military force to suppress anti-capitalist insurgencies and nationalisms in the Global South. Anderson and others therefore gave their thirty-five-year-old American comrade the lead role in critiquing the great historian.

In an extraordinarily wide-ranging essay titled “Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence,” Davis offered Thompson a sharp rejoinder, emphasizing the degree to which nuclear weapons played a rational and functional role in maintaining the US-led imperialist world order. Not only did the United States use the arms race to economically pressure the USSR; the nuclear threat also provided an umbrella enabling the free use of conventional forces in a series of counterrevolutionary actions. To Davis, the Cold War was not an anachronistic, irrational feud staged essentially in Europe but a rationally explicable and deeply rooted conflict of opposing social formations and political forces whose center of gravity was the Third World.

This theme would appear in Prisoners of the American Dream, in City of Quartz, and in several of his other interventions. In the foreword to Prisoners, Davis wrote, “It is a central thesis of this book that the future of the Left in the United States is more than ever before bound up with its ability to organize solidarity with revolutionary struggles against American imperialism.” In sympathy, another NLR writer declared of the Davis role in his debate with Thompson, “Whatever the errors of its ‘immaturity,’ the (American) New Left should not be disparaged for having emphasized the dependence of the hopes of socialism in the Northern hemisphere upon the desperate and courageous battles being waged on the other side of the world.”

One can find echoes of the initial Anderson-Thompson debate throughout Prisoners of the American Dream. The book emphasizes the degree to which the racial and ethnic divisions within the American working class cut across any larger sense of social solidarity, a view that Thompson’s American followers were not willing to embrace. For example, Herbert Gutman structured his famous 1973 essay “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America” in terms of the radicalism generated when wave after wave of immigrants came in contact and confrontation with industrial life, but Davis, who may never have actually read that Gutman essay, saw these waves of immigrants as creating a hard “internal stratification” within the American proletariat.

A New Take on Capitalist Development

Prisoners also provided insight into the character of the US bourgeoisie and its peculiar vibrancy. Such scholarship was largely missing from the new labor history, and it would take another quarter century before historians like Sven Beckert, Jon Levy, Richard White, and Michael Zakim would begin to rectify the situation. Davis argued that the American bourgeoisie was unusually coherent and self-confident, both in terms of sheer economic and political power and in terms of the ideological hegemony it exercised.

Thus, in the United States, unlike most of Europe, the existence of the white male franchise meant that most nineteenth-century economic struggles were largely divorced from the quest for working-class political participation. This preempted the fusion of these two demands — for both an economic and political voice — which had nurtured socialism on the European continent and a species of laborism in Great Britain. A striving individualism flourished, while ideas of socialist collectivism, except in some immigrant neighborhoods, were marginalized.

To a degree this sounds like Louis Hartz, but Davis also used Prisoners to deploy his own version of the Marxism arising out of France, a schema that would also do much to structure the argument put forward in City of Quartz. In 1978, Davis published, in the Fernand Braudel Center’s journal, Review, a sixty-three-page exposition, appreciation, and critique of the work of Michel Aglietta, whose Regulation and Crisis: The Experience of the United States, had just appeared, but only in French. Aglietta’s book was among the first of the French “regulation school” studies to achieve wide influence in Anglo-America, especially after the NLR’s Verso imprint published an English translation a few years after Davis’s essay. This French interpretation of US political economy played a large role in popularizing the concept of “Fordism” as an explanatory framework linking the rise of both mass production and mass consumption with a Keynesian state and powerful labor movement.

When I was writing this essay, I emailed both Anderson and Brenner to ask if either had introduced Davis to Aglietta’s work. Both declared they were astounded by Davis’s unexpected engagement with this new way of looking at capitalist development. The NLR editors, according to Anderson, were “blown away” when they read Davis’s review, which “taught us (not the other way around) about the existence of Aglietta and his book.” Shortly thereafter they invited Davis to become a member of the NLR editorial collective. From 1980 to 1986, Davis worked out of the journal’s London offices.

Aglietta and others in the regulation school held that neither politics nor ideology reflects merely economic forces. Instead, “configurations” exist in which political parties, social ideology, and economic structures reinforce each other, sometimes in conditions of great stability and in other instances as a moment when crisis engulfs the system. The particular configurations with which Aglietta was concerned were “regimes of accumulation,” which were “regulated” by a specific set of political and economic institutions. Such regimes of accumulation were the crucial, limiting context within which working-class agency might make itself manifest.

Davis put Aglietta’s regimes close to the heart of Prisoners of the American Dream, especially in the second half, where he discusses the New Right’s road to power and the political economy of late imperial America. Those regimes — “extensive” in the late nineteenth century, “Fordist” during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and “overconsumptionist” in the era of Ronald Reagan — were a product of the interplay between the structures of capital and the capacity of the working class to influence the way political elites searched for regimes of stability and profitability. Because Aglietta took the United States as a case study, he focused on what many left intellectuals in the 1970s were coming to call the “Fordist regime,” whose rise explained both the remarkable character of the postwar boom and the strength of the post–New Deal labor movement. And to the degree that the Fordist regime had begun to crack, so too did US trade unionism enter an era of crisis and retreat.

Labor’s Weakness

Davis divided Prisoners of the American Dream into two parts. The first three chapters account for the weakness of American labor and the ideological and cultural illusions that constituted and subverted the American dream. The first chapter, “Why the U.S. Working Class Is Different,” was the most provocative. In an expansive forty-eight-page survey, Davis argued that a species of American exceptionalism thwarted the kind of class consciousness that had arisen, if imperfectly, in Europe.

In a review of the book, Montgomery wrote that Davis was a defeatist, contemptuous as to the possibilities for the rise of a majoritarian opposition to American capitalists, of either Gilded Age or New Right character. “Davis’s perceptive and rigorous structural analysis glides silently up to the dock of political passivity,” wrote the most distinguished labor historian in the United States. “The reader gradually realizes that the workers themselves have virtually disappeared from view.” To such criticism Davis might well have replied, as he did in Prisoners, that he was only as pessimistic as reality itself.

Davis’s second chapter, titled “The Barren Marriage of Labor and the Democratic Party,” considers labor’s political weakness during the era of high Fordism and why even under those favorable conditions labor could not consolidate itself as an institution functional to a mass production economy. He integrated his account of the pacification of the insurgent working class that briefly emerged onto the political scene in the 1930s and 1940s into a structural analysis of how postwar US capitalism, now at the center of the global system, was able to offer the white industrial working class rising real wages and a largely privatized welfare state.

This chapter and a third denouncing the postwar failures inherent in firm-centered collective bargaining reflect the views of many post–New Left critics of the union movement, including Peter Friedlander, Moody, Brenner, Staughton Lynd, and myself. If all this struck the reader as “unduly pessimistic,” wrote Davis, that was because “political and economic supports for a more humane capitalism no longer seem to exist.” Better to prepare for the colder climate ahead than to take hope from the “make believe social democracy” that tepid socialists like Michael Harrington still projected.

Los Angeles: City of Quartz

This austere vision animated Davis’s 1990 masterwork, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, a hugely capacious exploration of the dystopia created by the hard power of a regional bourgeoisie. The book highlights the desperate illusions of so many in a Southern California landscape reshaped by a predatory capitalism virtually unfettered by any of those forces whose demise Davis charted in Prisoners of the American Dream. Explaining the title of the book, Davis remarked to an interviewer that Los Angeles was like quartz, “something that looks like a diamond, but is really cheap; translucent but nothing can be seen in it.”

To get at the essence of Los Angeles, Davis would therefore have to uncover layer after layer of geographical and historical obfuscation. In the epilogue of Prisoners, Davis outlined the class/spatial framework that structures City of Quartz. At one pole are the sumptuary suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods occupied by the middle classes, the wealthy, and elements of the skilled white working class. Undoubtedly, writes Davis, “neo-liberalism will seek to preserve the superstructures of social liberalism — sexual toleration, free and virtually unlimited choice among cultural commodities . . . while building new parapets between this gilded paradise and the other social orders.”

This is the realm of “overconsumption” as delineated by Aglietta. That did not mean billionaires buying yachts or homeowners purchasing another color TV. Instead, “overconsumption” referred to the tax and spending policies that led to the political subsidization of a sub-bourgeois layer of managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and rentiers, often in finance and real estate. Faced with rapidly declining organization among workers and minorities, they have been overwhelmingly successful in profiting from both inflation and expanded state expenditure. Thus, Davis endorsed the newspaper headline that called California’s Proposition 13 “the Watts riot of the middle class.”

And then, beyond this overconsumptionist strata lay the first circle of the damned, those living in ghettos and barrios, now joined by déclassé and deindustrialized layers of the white working class. Possessing “citizen rights to a minimal social safety net,” this enlarged low-wage working class would remain politically divided and disenfranchised as the influence of labor and minorities within the political system declined. “Social degradation and relative impoverishment,” Davis wrote, is the fate of this element of the working class most traumatized by the collapse of the Fordist order. Then Davis postulated a still more debased strata in an outer perimeter of US society composed of workers without citizen rights or access to the political system at all: an American West Bank of terrorized illegal laborers, a social layer of twenty to thirty million people, a poor Latin American society thrust into the domestic economy.

Given this geographically inflected class schema, Davis made the case, in both Prisoners and City of Quartz, that it was Southern California, not the ex-Confederate South, that served as the prefigurative laboratory for the rightward drift of national politics. California’s internal antinomies usually anticipated the form and content of social conflicts elsewhere. Within the state, Berkeley, Watts, and Delano constituted the imaginative army of progressive disruption, while Orange County and similar suburbs provided the troops for the rise of the New Right.

Davis continued to write as a socialist and a radical, always searching for those conjectures that might spark the struggle for liberation, either at home or abroad. But it was his understanding of social and political defeat — “Junkyard of Dreams” is the title he gives to the chapter about the rise and fall of his Fontana birthplace — that actually proved enormously liberating when it came to the socioeconomic Southland tour that he offered readers in City of Quartz. Davis spent little time on resistance, working class or otherwise, but traced in diabolical detail the successful ruling-class effort to transform a built environment to their liking. Davis saw the exercise of class power manifest in every zoning ordinance, highway project, urban redevelopment, and municipal annexation.

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In the years before Davis left for the United Kingdom, he had driven trucks and buses throughout Los Angeles, watching the fortress-like hotels and skyscrapers arise in the midst of an urban streetscape never entirely cleansed of a semi-employed black and brown working class. In 1985, shortly after literary critic Fredric Jameson published a celebrated essay in the New Left Review, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Davis weaponized his intimate knowledge of the city to once again cross swords with an eminent scholar. Like Davis, Jameson was a Marxist who rejected any deterministic schema driving history from one epoch to the next. His championship of a postmodern sensibility celebrated playfulness, fragmentation, pastiche, and paradox, cultural elements he found among those architects who rejected the angular, glass-walled International Style that typified the corporate headquarters and sleek hotels characteristic of so much postwar urbanism.

Davis did not dissent from that sort of postmodern critique, but he was enraged when Jameson deployed that vision to declare the new Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles something close to a “populist insertion into the city fabric,” with a verdant, parklike interior full of “spectacle” and “excitement,” a “postmodern hyperspace” that promised “a new collective practice.” Instead, Davis saw hotels and office buildings like the Bonaventure as “fortified skyscrapers” that turned their back on the city, analogous to the armories and gated mansions constructed after the violent railroad strike of 1877.

The fundamental logic of such structures, wrote Davis in rejoinder to Jameson, “is that of a claustrophobic space colony attempting to miniaturize nature within itself.” Writing along lines that would be amply extended in City of Quartz, Davis concluded, “This profoundly anti-urban impulse, inspired by unfettered financial forces and a Haussmannian logic of social control, seems to me to constitute the real Zeitgeist of postmodernism . . . a sympathetic correlate to Reaganism and the end of urban reform.”

A Vision of the Los Angeles Future

Ironically, the enormous success enjoyed by City of Quartz proved an indication that Davis was no lonely Cassandra. In 1992, the Rodney King riots seemed to validate the author’s darkest visions. More importantly, Southern California was on the verge of a shift leftward as both the labor movement and the Latino community increased their power within and beyond the Democratic Party. Southern California became, over the course of the next three decades, an epicenter for the nation’s union revival and a liberalism that sometimes extended even into Orange County itself. Of course, there were old-fashioned Los Angeles boosters who decried City of Quartz and the follow-up, Ecology of Fear, published in 1998, but their denunciation of Davis’s dark vision seemed far more of a Babbitt-like self-parody than any kind of critical threat.

In the 1940s, by way of contrast, the Popular Front journalist and activist Carey McWilliams had also debunked the pretensions of the Southland Anglo elite in a series of engaging books and articles. But his work was quickly marginalized, consigned to the guidebook literature suitable for out-of-town tourists. McCarthyism soon sent McWilliams to New York, where he became editor of the Nation and defended an embattled postwar liberalism. Davis did not have to get out of town, although academic mandarins made sure he never won the secure, high-profile professorial post he clearly deserved. City of Quartz was such a tour de force that it made other great books of urban conflict and reconstruction, including Robert Caro’s celebrated biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, seem far too narrowly cast.

The best chapter in City of Quartz is the eighty-page “Sunshine or Noir?,” an all-encompassing survey of Los Angeles intellectuals and writers. These Davis categorizes as boosters, debunkers, noirs, exiles, scientists, and mercenaries, each of whom offered a set of ideological and cultural ambitions appropriate to their individual social strata and economic sector. In an epilogue to the chapter, titled “Gramsci vs Blade Runner,” Davis offers his own contested vision of the Los Angeles future. He poses a question characteristic of the entire Davis oeuvre: Will Los Angeles become a world city dominated by a neoliberal elite, or will the powerful, ethno-radical political and social impulses surging out of Compton and East Los Angeles generate a new cultural hegemony reflecting the city’s multiethnic majority?

During the thirty years of enormous productivity following publication of City of Quartz, Davis offered some answers. He wrote a huge variety of books, essays, and other interventions. One can divide them into roughly three periods and subjects, each a decade in length and each devoted to yet another way to understand how class, race, nationhood, and an ever-shifting system of capitalist exploitation shaped Los Angeles and the world. In the 1990s, Davis published two more Los Angeles books, both of which extended themes first introduced in City of Quartz. They also signaled Davis’s interest in innovative questions about the relationship between changes in the natural world and those evoked by a predatory capitalism.

Davis began to win a reputation as a prophet of doom with the publication in early 1998 of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, another bestseller that contained a sensational chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” Pointing out that naturally recurring fires were destined to periodically destroy hundreds of exurban houses each decade, Davis called for an abandonment of the residential push into the mountainous hillsides and exurban terrain most prone to such conflagrations. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars defending these bourgeois abodes, the money might be better used to fireproof downscale urban apartment houses. Real estate interests denounced the book, but in the wake of the hyperdestructive California fires of recent years, Davis’s once-outré proposition has become something close to the conventional wisdom.

Ecology of Fear showed that the Los Angeles style of urbanization amplified not just natural disasters but also the routine ebb and flow of the Mediterranean climate: the heavy rain, periodic droughts, and other episodic events created havoc when visited upon a metropolis structured by class and racial inequalities. This kind of climatological dialectic became a hallmark of books Davis published just a few years later, but there were other chapters in Ecology of Fear whose darkness mirrored and extended the racial dystopia found in City of Quartz.

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For example, “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles” is less about the earthquakes, fires, and floods that so many writers and filmmakers have imagined than the racial wars projected to accompany these disasters. Davis catalogued scores of novels, films, stories, and other prognostications that from the late nineteenth century onward forecast a bloody race war, sometimes a product of foreign invasion, usually from Japan, but just as often arising out of a homegrown conflict. Needless to say, in most of these fictional conflicts a brave and embattled cohort of Anglo men and women prove murderously victorious.

But Davis was not all doom and gloom when considering the Los Angeles future. In Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (2000), Davis celebrated the rapid growth of Latino Los Angeles, observing that this vibrant population was “bringing redemptive energies to the neglected, worn-out cores and inner suburbs of many metropolitan areas,” first among them those of Southern California, where immigrant homeowners were the “anonymous heroes” of a more exuberant urbanism.

Especially important was the revival of the labor movement, now increasingly under Latino leadership. Davis had neglected that topic in his other Los Angeles books, but now he could write, “Over the last decade, Latino rank-and-file workers have made the Los Angeles area the major R&D center for 21st century trade unionism.” And beyond that, Davis happily confirmed the existential fears animating contemporary immigration restrictionists: “The Anglo conquest of California in the late 1840s has proved to be a very transient fact indeed.”

Capitalist-Made Disasters

Davis would not be finished with Los Angeles, but during the next decade he lifted his sights beyond Southern California and toward a global political ecology designed to explain the environmental cum capitalist-made disasters that had enveloped the Third World and might yet come crashing home on the First. He published an astonishing four books in six years, animated by a scientific curiosity, evident since childhood, that now made Davis conversant with some of the latest developments in geology, astronomy, climatology, virology, and demography.

Developing on a world scale the socio-environmental analysis first offered readers in Ecology of Fear, Davis plunged into the writing of books that showed how ecological dysfunction turned deadly in a world of imperial hubris. Late Victorian Holocausts (2001) recovered for our time the famines that killed thirty to fifty million Asian and African colonial subjects between the 1870s and the turn of the twentieth century. Their deaths were exacerbated not just by imperial oppression but also by an international grain market disrupted by dislocations in the transpacific El Niño weather pattern: “Suddenly,” wrote Davis, “the price of wheat in Liverpool and the rainfall in Madras were variables in the same vast equation of human survival.” Insights of this sort were further advanced by Scott Nelson, Beckert, Greg Grandin, Steve Striffler, and other students of commodity markets cum capitalist development during the last two global centuries.

Four years later, Davis published The Monster at Our Door (2005), which raised the possibility of a disastrous global pandemic, exacerbated by a disjointed system of public health provision in the Global North and endemic poverty and urbanization in the Global South. That a “viral asteroid” might strike Earth seemed to solidify the Davis reputation as prophet of doom — and then it became a deadly reality in the spring of 2020. That book was quickly followed by Planet of Slums (2006), which captured in a truly expansive time frame the demographic transformations reshaping the megacities of the Global South. If outright imperialism had underdeveloped India, Africa, and Latin America, then a century later the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and associated financial institutions continued that work.

The staffers at the IMF were the “postmodern equivalent of a colonial civil service,” opening those economies to market forces that undermined peasant agriculture and low-tech manufacturing, thereby sending hundreds of millions toward the bloated Third World cities denuded of industrial employment. Davis noted that as a result, a “watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial Revolutions,” was on its way: “For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural.”

Such chaotic and impoverished urbanization, the product of a postcolonial neoliberalism, generated an explosive discontent, which Davis explored in the Planet of Slums spin-off book, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, published in 2007. That referenced wagon, a horse cart, was the property of anarchist Mario Buda and killed forty bystanders when it exploded on Wall Street in 1920. It was the first of many wagon, car, and truck bombs to follow, “a modern technology” that would constitute the “poor man’s air force” in the urban warfare that began decades before the deaths of American soldiers and contract mercenaries in Iraq, not to mention even more local civilians, were being counted up on the nightly news.

Davis condemned such weapons as immoral and politically ineffective but acknowledged that they were nevertheless hugely impactful. The incessant fear of such vehicular explosions had begun to transform many an urban streetscape, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with “rings of steel” against a weapon hidden within the traffic flow generated by thousands of ordinary cars and trucks.

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Radical Consciousness and Unified Insurgencies

In the third and last phase of the Davis oeuvre, he returned to the subject matter he had first grappled with in the 1980s. But now Davis would give to the nineteenth-century working-class movement and to twentieth-century Los Angeles a very different flavor, one that found agency, radical consciousness, and a far more unified and effective set of insurgencies than anything he had chosen to highlight in Prisoners of the American Dream or City of Quartz.

He wrote the new studies largely in the second decade of the twenty-first century. As early as 2003, Davis told historian Jon Wiener that writing a history of the multifaceted social movements that erupted during the Los Angeles 1960s was his “day job.” A first slice of it came out in 2007, when Labour / Le Travail published “Riot Nights on Sunset Strip,” a celebration of the white teenagers who defied city curfews and the police to party in West Hollywood. Wrote Davis, “Los Angeles, in the eyes of the establishment, suddenly seemed like a besieged patriarchy.”

In 2020, Davis and Wiener coauthored Set the Night on Fire, a sprawling account of radical Los Angeles in the 1960s. Although not a memoir, the book celebrates many of the comrades and social movements Davis encountered during his activist youth. Some of the oppressive institutions deconstructed in City of Quartz are present, among them the militarized Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and its chief, William H. Parker. Davis calls him the “warden of the ghetto.” The most powerful public official in the city in Davis’s opinion, he was an ever-present foil to the multiracial left that would repeatedly challenge the LAPD for control of the streets and other public spaces.

Davis and Wiener proved a good team, with Wiener writing chapters on the largely white institutions and movements that came to sustain the Los Angeles left (radio station KPFK, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Free Clinic, gay liberation, and the movements against the Vietnam War and for women’s liberation), while Davis wrote the chapters that stood at the heart of the book: a detailed and evocative narrative of the civil rights movements, the Watts Riot, the Latino high school “blowouts,” and the even more spectacular Latino antiwar mobilization. Davis got right inside these movements, with particularly insightful discussions of the conflict at UCLA between the Black Panthers and the nationalist group led by Ron Karenga, the fight to keep Angela Davis out of jail, and the campus activism that created new departments devoted to black and Latino studies at several Los Angeles area universities.

The book was not just another regional 1960s history, because Davis and Wiener paid close attention to what made Southern California different. For example, in the Bay Area, Boston, and at Madison and Ann Arbor, one or two giant universities anchored the movement and provided the terrain of struggle. But in Los Angeles, the University of Southern California was still a Republican bastion, while UCLA was a commuter school located in a high-rent enclave.

The real action took place at the Cal State institutions, Northridge above all, and among high school and middle school students, black and brown, whose solidarity and activism was facilitated by the dense, segregated neighborhoods from which the secondary schools drew their students. But sociology was not enough, and Davis had no truck with spontaneity. Leadership and cadre were essential to any social movement, so Davis took pains to identify the key spark plugs, the on-the-spot publications, the new organizations and sympathetic politicians who provided the context for the eruptions that so puzzled outside elites.

The Search for Agency

As with Set the Night on Fire, the search for agency — “revolutionary agency” — stands at the heart of Davis’s Old Gods, New Enigmas, an essay collection that appeared in 2018, written almost in tandem with the Los Angeles ’60s narrative. The keynote article, a 154-page history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European American working class, covers a good deal of the same social and political terrain as the labor history in Prisoners of the American Dream, but it could hardly be more at odds with the argument and spirit of that late 1980s book.

Davis began this long essay as a follow-up to Planet of Slums. If the proletariat of the North Atlantic has been eviscerated through automation, outsourcing, deunionization, and right-wing politics, how could the billions-strong workforce of the Global South, impoverished and contingent, find the agency to move the world? “Contemporary Marxism must be able to scan the future from the simultaneous perspective of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and Lagos,” wrote Davis, “if it wants to solve the puzzle of how heterodox social categories might be fitted together in a single resistance to capitalism.”

Car bombs were not the answer. But neither did Davis offer any extended probe into just how that Asian/African class of hyperexploited workers might reach for power. Instead he does something almost as good, returning to ground well trodden by Marx and his successors so as to “mine our current understanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century working-class history — the fruits of hundreds if not thousands of studies since 1960 — to highlight the conditions and forms of struggle through which class capacities were created and the socialist project organized itself.”

In nineteenth-century Europe, just as in the twenty-first-century Global South, no such thing as a classical proletariat existed. “Exceptionalism” was not confined to the United States. As in Prisoners of the American Dream, the working class was stratified and of varying degrees of consciousness, but those fractures and peculiarities were not necessarily debilitating. “Militant workplace society . . . was the product of a synthesis of partial group interests around a common resistance to exploitation and employer despotism.”

Davis was looking for agency, for “a historical sociology of how the Western working classes acquired consciousness and power.” And he was finding it. In Prisoners, Davis had heaped scorn on a northern European aristocracy of labor that often saw itself as aloof from the struggles waged by the immigrants and lesser skilled. But in Old Gods, New Enigmas, he highlights, along with Montgomery and other historians influenced by Thompson and Hobsbawm, the vanguard role that highly skilled labor could play, from Glasgow’s Clydeside to the Berlin armament factories and on to Homestead and Dearborn.

Challenging Power and Privilege

Had Davis changed his mind? Was he now rejecting the New Left Review structuralism that had framed so much of his output? The answer is probably twofold. First, Davis never let his understanding of capitalist power and elite hegemony blunt his engaged, insurgent outlook. As he told a reporter just weeks before his death, “I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined — you know, fighting.” Thousands of readers, students, and movement activists saw him as a radical because even in his darkest books, he was constantly searching for those elements of the body politic ready to rebel. They might not be the classical proletariat, but if another formation was ready to challenge power and privilege, Davis was its champion.

Second, times changed. With Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ascendant in the 1980s, Davis had joined the New Left Review in an exceedingly dark hour. Arguably, there was a good deal more progressive light in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the rise of Bernie Sanders animating the Left even in an era that saw President Barack Obama disappoint and Donald Trump win both power and a massive following. So Davis found enormous potential in a new generation of young people.

Indeed, in Old Gods, New Enigmas, he seemed positively Thompsonian when it came to the construction of a socialist consciousness. In that book, Davis celebrates the labor temples, sports organizations, rent strikes, and proletarian reading circles that contributed to the growth of working-class self-confidence. “Proletarian subjectivity,” wrote Davis, also requires “moral self-recognition through solidarity with the struggle of a distant people, even when this contradicts short-term self-interest.”

Just as the Lancashire cotton workers hailed Abraham Lincoln and the Northern cause, so too might twenty-first-century workers someday link their fight to that of the Global South multitudes. Socialism, wrote Davis, required men and women “whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual.” The prophet of doom had come a long way since his London sojourn at the New Left Review.

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Nelson Lichtenstein is a research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent book is A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism.

Republished, with permission, from LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History.

When writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho was on a press junket with his sensational genre-twisting, furiously satirical 2019 film, Bacurau, Brazilian cinema was in a state of crisis. Jair Bolsonaro’s oppressive right-wing government targeted the national cinema for destruction, aggressively slashing budgets, halting funding, canceling projects, and leaving thousands of films at various stages of development stuck in limbo. Punitive policies were tied to ideological manias such as Bolsonaro’s open hostility to members of the LGBTQ population, which led to government attempts to ban their favorable representation on-screen.

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Mendonça, a former journalist and outspoken leftist who frequently participated in anti-Bolsonaro protests, somehow kept making films that seemed designed to madden Bolsonarists. Set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife and his native Northeast Brazil, they find inventive ways to revive the Cinema Novo tendency to explore the region’s harsh history of colonialism, political corruption, economic exploitation, and oppression in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality. His work critiques the amnesiac state encouraged by the Brazilian amnesty law of 1979, which granted blanket pardons to the military government for political crimes committed from 1961 to 1979, including, by implication, the murder, torture, and forced disappearance of thousands of Brazilians. The citizenry was encouraged to forgive and forget the brutalities of military dictatorship, even as the Bolsonaro government seemed to wallow in nostalgia for it.

Issues of history, memory, and the past repeating itself are central to Mendonça’s The Secret Agent (2025), a period thriller set in 1977. It’s about a mild-mannered professor, played by Wagner Moura, who gets targeted for assassination by the military government and finds refuge in a safe house for dissidents in Recife. Viewing it, Mendonça’s friends immediately said that he’d made a film that “was actually about the last few years living in Brazil” under Bolsonaro.

What a difference six years can make. By the time Mendonça was once again attending film festivals and participating in press junkets for the successful and politically fierce Secret Agent, Bolsonaro was being tried for his failed attempt at a coup, for which he would be sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison, while President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (generally known as Lula) was back in power. Mendonça was exulting in the national cinematic revival. “Once Lula came back and Bolsonaro lost the election, the whole system was brought back,” as he put it. “So now Brazilian cinema is back.”

This revival seems almost miraculous when considered against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s two terms. There is much leftist despair in the United States right now over whether there will be any recovery from the political and cultural destruction of government agencies, systems supporting scientific advancement, arts and education, racial equality, national health, international aid, and environmental protections. Though the cinema of the United States — never reliant on government funding, which is almost nonexistent — hasn’t been decimated by Trump, it seems to be slowly falling apart regardless.

The Trump administration was ideologically aligned and strongly supportive of the Brazilian government under Bolsonaro, to the point that the latter’s imitative policies earned him the description the “Trump of the Tropics.” But Trump is generally harshly critical of the Lula presidency. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil was given favorable trading status and validation of its many corrupt and destructive Trumpian policies. This is consistent with a long and appalling US history of aggressive interference in South American politics, bolstering right-wing power and subverting left-wing power.

Hollywood and Cinema Novo

There’s an equally long history of US cinema’s oppressive effects on the region’s national cinemas. At its early-twentieth-century height, the US film industry sought domination of international cinemas — with Hollywood films sometimes monopolizing nearly 100 percent of screens in South American countries — and often enacted punitive measures against nations that attempted to save their own industries. Added to this, the United States routinely poached top talent from other countries, offering the highest salaries and the broadest distribution reach to established directors and nationally known film stars especially. Few could resist the possibility of becoming globally famous.

Though Brazil had an established film industry of its own in the early silent film era, movies from the United States were so overwhelmingly popular from the mid-1910s through the 1950s that the country became one of Hollywood’s biggest export markets. Hollywood films dominated screens and gave rise to similar glossy movies made in Hollywood-imitating studio systems in Brazil.

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Periodic forays into strengthening Brazil’s homegrown cinema arose at points when turmoil in Hollywood provided opportunities for other national film industries. In the late 1920s, for example, when the silent era waned as talkies became popular, attempts were made in South American film industries like Brazil’s and Argentina’s to take advantage of the local preference for movies with dialogue spoken in Portuguese or Spanish instead of English. It took several years before Hollywood studios figured out systems of dubbing and subtitling that would allow US cinema to recover its overwhelming global appeal. In a brief window of time up to the early 1930s, several new Brazilian studios were established to produce Brazilian-made, Portuguese-language movies: Cinédia, Sonofilms, and Brasil Vita Filmes.

But shaky success in aligning their films with local working-class tastes led Brazilian cinemas to increasingly depend on state cultural development agencies and their funding for survival. Indeed, partial reliance on government funding would be the route taken by the majority of national film industries globally — including in Western Europe — particularly after World War II.

As Hollywood’s international power at last began to decline throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, new national cinemas sprung up around the world, while existing national cinemas grabbed their chance to feature local films and homegrown talent on-screen. In Brazil, the highly influential and politically radical Cinema Novo movement arose. Influenced in part by European art house movements like Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, this gritty tendency founded itself on the rejection of Hollywood commercial film products and practices, turning toward low-budget, on-location, guerrilla-style filmmaking, often in remote, impoverished rural regions of Brazil, where economic injustice, colonial exploitation, and political oppression were starkly apparent.

The form’s most prominent filmmaker, Glauber Rocha, wrote an incendiary manifesto called The Aesthetics of Hunger. But Cinema Novo was forced into disguise with the military coup of 1964, when filmmakers like Rocha pivoted toward surrealist allegory to avoid censorship and reprisals.

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A cinema of resistance

It is Cinema Novo that Mendonça most consistently evokes in his own work. His insistence on filming in and around the sunbaked terrain of Northeast Brazil is itself a Cinema Novo tendency. Mendonça portrays a largely economically struggling rural and small-town proletariat. As Juliano Dornelles, Mendonça’s codirector on Bacurau, has put it, “The Northeast is where maids in São Paulo come from, and where Kleber and I are from. We wanted an adventure where we are the heroes.”

The central adventure in Bacurau, their contribution to the Weird Western genre, involves the impoverished title community’s struggle to battle a multipronged onslaught that recalls the long, tortured colonial history of the region. Besieging the town are corrupt politicians attempting to control precious water rights in combination with sinister foreigners roaming the area from the United States, Australia, and Europe (specifically Germany, in the form of the ever-menacing Udo Kier). There may also be UFOs involved, given the sophistication of the technology arrayed against the community, which wipes the town from satellite maps. But whoever the attackers are, the people of Bacurau intend to fight them off by any means necessary.

Given his political tendencies, how did Mendonça manage to keep functioning as a filmmaker under Bolsonaro’s crackdown on the film industry? It was largely by relying on his own established reputation, and consequent international coproduction opportunities, to bolster private investments and already approved public funding. Even with those advantages, however, he faced hostile showdowns with the government. During the 2019 Bacurau premiere, it sued to reclaim funds from his 2012 feature debut, Neighboring Sounds, claiming the director had gone over budget. Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, which had awarded the funds to Mendonça in the first place, had been abolished by Bolsonaro. In interviews at the time, Mendonça said:

Everything we did to adapt the budget was consulted with the Brazilian Film Agency and the Ministry of Culture at the time. . . . Unfortunately, there was a takeover of power, and the Ministry of Culture was taken over by people from the right who now saw an opportunity to begin to sabotage Brazilian cinema.

But as Mendonça likes to crow, Brazilian cinema is back, baby.

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Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

As we enter the late 2020s, the legacy of the Beatles — history’s biggest band, by any measure — is facing a final reckoning. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the group’s last surviving members, are now eighty-four and eighty-six, respectively. This should remind us that what might be called the “Beatles generation” is reaching the end of its natural lifespan, its icons departing the stage to become musty archival heritage. All things, as the late George Harrison once acknowledged, must pass.

Partly as a result, the second half of the decade looks set to be a heyday of fabology (that is, critical appraisal of the Fab Four). But many of the retrospectives, gratingly, will seek to claim the Beatles for the cause of cultural liberalism. The last few years have seen a rash of books by “centrist dad” media figures, from Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs to Stuart Maconie’s With a Little Help From Their Friends (the titles sum up the soggy, middlebrow bias of these texts). Even more ominously, a blockbuster Beatles biopic is now in production. Directed by Sam Mendes, a filmmaker who churns out vaguely progressive-nationalist fare in the vein of 1917, Britannia, and the James Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre, “The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event” will likely trigger a British Invasion for the TikTok era when it drops in April 2028.

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The battle for the soul of the Beatles, and their sociopolitical significance, is well and truly on then. On the one hand, there is something understandable, even appropriate, about attempts to locate the band at the cuddlier end of capitalism. The first mass-marketed boy group, the Beatles undoubtedly began as front men for the consumerist strain in postwar social democracy. A bolder thesis is that they saved American capitalism from itself at a crucial moment in the mid-1960s, pacifying a populace that had been destabilized by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and helping to downgrade a radical zeitgeist into a harmless hippie bacchanal that ultimately served the socioeconomic status quo rather well.

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This, more or less, was the view of the critic Ian MacDonald, whose 1994 book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties is often judged to be the definitive study of the band. In MacDonald’s telling, the counterculture the Beatles embodied “divided America against itself more violently than at any time since the Civil War and came within a whisker of sweeping the French government out of office” — however, “its actual achievements were meagre: a few curriculum changes and some minor additions to civil rights legislation.” Writing in the ashes of the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher era, MacDonald judged the Beatles phenomenon (if not the band itself) to be a dress rehearsal for the neoliberal turn. For him, the deification of “individual self-determination” in the Beatles narrative and the wider 1960s scene was a sort of cultural Mont Pèlerin moment.

A glance at the record sheet throws up plenty of support for this theory, from the proto-monetarism of “Taxman,” Harrison’s Toryish whine of 1966, to the left-baiting grouches of “Revolution,” John Lennon’s counterrevolutionary take on 1968, culminating in the more recent missteps of the elder Beatles, such as McCartney’s acceptance of a knighthood in 1997 and his performances at Queen Elizabeth II’s jubilee concerts in 2002 and 2012. However, the idea that the Beatles were in thrall to the capitalist establishment and godfathers of modern individualism has real limits.

To understand the Beatles’ political side, we must first examine their tribal roots. While the Irish ancestry of the band members is well-known, surprisingly little has been made of the fact that both Lennon and McCartney were descendants of migrants from Ulster, one of many violent historic epicenters of British colonialism. This was hardly irrelevant. While McCartney responded to the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry by composing the strident “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” Lennon (who had once claimed the Beatles were “all Irish”) offered vigorous support for the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the same period.

In fact, while McCartney’s politics were basically those of a natural, if unaligned, socialist (support for civil rights, vegetarianism, refusal of private schooling for his children), Lennon’s were often militantly leftist. Despite much easy sneering about the millionaire who dreams of a world without possessions in “Imagine,” Lennon was authentic in his engagement with the radical left. His political journey in these years is yet to be fully mapped, but the dialogue he maintained with New Left Review editors Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn in the early ’70s and the products of this relationship — the ultraleft “Power to the People,” and attendance at a 1972 Troops Out of Ireland demonstration with a “For the IRA, Against British Imperialism” banner — are well attested.

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Remarkable in themselves, these biographical morsels highlight a more essential aspect of the Lennon and McCartney worldview. As Irish-coded natives of Liverpool — a culturally working-class northern city where “Scouse not English” is a common rallying cry — the Beatles were fundamentally at odds with the traditionalist core of bourgeois England. With a history of famine, slavery, and industrial hardship in mind, they were disinclined to view Anglo-Saxon capitalism as a static, essentially benign entity (as does the average English liberal). Through many twists and turns, this was the grounding of the band’s basic allegiance to iconoclastic, historically un-English values like modernism, egalitarianism, and political rebelliousness.

Whether this deeper cultural identity is useful as a framework for understanding the nuances of the music itself is a more expansive question. While we have to be careful not to reduce aesthetics to pure ideology (after all, musicians are not political theorists), there is surely a case to be made that the power and resonance of the best Lennon and McCartney songs derives from their central themes of mutuality, cooperation, collectivism, and love — in other words, the cornerstones of socialism. But that debate is for another arena. The more urgent task facing us is to somehow rescue the Beatles from the cynics and the centrist dads before Hollywood poisons the well forever, and to recover the buried implications of their radical art.

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Alex Niven is lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and editor-at-large at Repeater Books. His first book, Folk Opposition, was published by Zero Books in 2011.

Why do we keep coming back to Christopher Lasch? There are political reasons why commentators on both the Left and the Right find it useful to return to his books and renew his criticisms of American society, or else simply filch them at their own convenience. Certainly, there is plenty in Lasch to raid, but his lasting appeal is due, I think, to a deeper quality in his writing.

Lasch’s polemical works of social criticism have a dramatic quality of plunging us into (and back into) crises we didn’t know we were experiencing but immediately recognize. His is a vision not of heroes and villains, nor of friends and enemies, but of a system that has, through accumulating unintended consequences, atomized the citizenry, undermined the idea of “the common life,” and rendered the world instead “a war of all against all.” Given that the first priority of anyone who finds themselves in such a world will be survival, Lasch’s works have the same appeal as classics of dystopian literature.

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Take this passage, from Lasch’s 1984 book The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times:

A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism — which we can define, for the moment, as a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires — not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and to provide for their own needs. The consumer feels that he lives in a world that defies practical understanding and control, a world of giant bureaucracies, “information overload,” and complex, interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown, like the giant power failure that blacked out the Northeast in 1965 or the radiation leak at Three Mile Island in 1979.

The references to the 1965 blackout and Three Mile Island, not to mention consumerism itself, sound quaint now, but they are the sort of problems that are still with us. Similarly, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, the 1979 bestseller to which The Minimal Self is a clarifying sequel, begins with an invocation of the twentieth century’s terrors: “The Nazi holocaust, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the depletion of natural resources, well-founded predictions of ecological disaster have fulfilled poetic prophecy, giving concrete historical substance to the nightmare, or death wish, that avant-garde artists were the first to express.” At the heart of both books is a lament for a culture that has lost the ability to accept limits, that has been overtaken by a horror of death and old age, and that, having sacrificed the consolations of religion, belief in posterity, and a long view of history, acquiesces to a general anomie.

I happened to revisit Lasch’s work around the same time I saw a screening of Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, which I was also rereading. Baumbach treats DeLillo’s story, perhaps appropriately, as a comedy and a period piece. Jack and Babette, the sympathetic campus yuppies raising a family of children from their previous marriages in a college town, are Laschian characters: Jack, the academic careerist whose shtick is to treat the life of Adolf Hitler as a sort of pop culture artifact; Babette, in thrall to her fitness regime and to an experimental drug that promises to rid her of the fear of death. After a comically violent climax that has the couple suffering minor gunshot wounds, they arrive at a hospital where they are attended to by nuns.

It’s a moment Lasch might have appreciated, a symbolic return to the care of those who still value the sacred and the ancient. In the novel, one of the nuns tells Jack: “It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.” When their wounds are healed, Jack and Babette bring their family to that paradise of consumerism — the supermarket, where, in Baumbach’s adaptation, an uproarious musical number with what seems like the whole town dancing ensues.

It is an ironic twist that the apparent true believers are involved in a sort of spiritual division of labor and that the temple of mass consumption becomes the site of family and community renewal. Lasch, whose books are marked by readings of literary authors like Donald Barthelme, Philip Roth, and Frederick Exley, might have appreciated the joke. (Lasch’s freshman roommate at Harvard was John Updike.) He was possessed of a Promethean sense that genies cannot be put back in their bottles. He had a pessimistic sensibility but not a hopeless one. The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self have remained mainstays as starting points for broad diagnoses of the evolving age of pervasive anxiety and hyperindividualism in the podcastsphere and in books like Kristin Dombek’s 2016 study The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism. But two of his later works, 1991’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics and his posthumous The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, published in 1994, are even more relevant to the current American scene. These books both grew out of his works of psychologizing cultural sociology and return to the plane of politics that his earlier work inhabited.

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The True and Only Heaven begins with a long section of intellectual autobiography, in which Lasch traces his evolution from an upbringing in Midwestern progressivism “overlaid by the liberalism of the New Deal” through a phase of socialism to a loss of “faith in the explanatory power of the old ideologies.” He opposed the Vietnam War and was at first heartened by the student movement, but then he came to believe that the “trouble with the new left . . . lay precisely in its ignorance of the earlier history of the left, as a result of which it proceeded to recapitulate the most unattractive features of that history: rampant sectarianism, an obsession with ideological purity, sentimentalization of outcast groups.” By this time, he had steeped himself in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, and the Frankfurt School, and he had written books chronicling American liberals’ response to the Russian Revolution, the radical tradition in the United States, and crises of the Left during the early years of the Cold War. Nearly six hundred pages in length, The True and Only Heaven proceeds from Enlightenment ideas of progress and countervailing populist movements through to the emergence of the so-called new class after World War I.

For Lasch, this class consisted of both the professional-managerial class of liberals and the neoconservative vanguard of the New Right. Both were united by a “culture of critical discourse.” (On this topic, Lasch’s writing takes on an aphoristic power: “Both the virtues and the defects of the professional class spring from the habit of criticism, which, unleavened by a sense of its own limits, soon reduces the world to ashes.”) In a basic sense, both liberals and conservatives were advocates of Enlightenment ideas of progress: liberals in their commitment to science, the Right in its allegiance to capitalism. In their different ways, Lasch argued, both the liberals and the conservatives were running cover for consumerism. The liberal professionals had promoted a cult of choice and therapeutic remedies, in essence creating demand for their own services and acting as adjuncts of Madison Avenue. Meanwhile: “The ideological appeal of the new right depended on its ability not only to emphasize social issues at the expense of economic issues but to deflect ‘middle-class’ resentment from the rich to a parasitic ‘new class’ of professional problem solvers and moral relativists.” Further:

New-class theory enabled the right to attack “elites” without attacking big business. Businessmen, it appeared, were responsible and public-spirited: they were accountable to the consumers to whom they sold their products, just as practical politicians were accountable to the voters; and the market thus limited any power they could hope to exercise. The new class, on the other hand, was accountable to no one, and its control of higher education and the mass media gave it almost unlimited power over the public mind.

Looking to the Left, Lasch was skeptical of Barbara Ehrenreich’s view, in her 1989 book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, that the new class had “the makings of a universal class and that its ‘program,’ accordingly, should seek ‘to expand the class, welcoming everyone, until there remains no other class.’” Lasch was somewhat withering on this point:

Neither left- nor right-wing intellectuals, strangely united in their determination to rescue the new class from itself, seem to have much interest in the rest of American society. Their view of the United States begins and ends with the knowledge industry. Other classes enter the picture only as images and stereotypes projected on the consciousness of the new class. It does not occur to these intellectuals that the rest of the country may have only a limited interest in the “soul” of the new class. Nor does it occur to them that universal access to professional status may not describe the ambitions of most Americans, much less an ideal of the good society.

The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy expands on this claim. At its heart is a critique of meritocracy, elaborating on the ideas of Michael Young, the English novelist who coined the term in 1958. “The general course of recent history,” Lasch writes, “no longer favors the leveling of social distinctions but runs more and more in the direction of a two-class society in which the favored few monopolize the advantages of money, education, and power.” The book has at times been appropriated by thinkers on the Right as an endorsement of their strategy of fomenting resentment toward liberal elites. (In 2017, Steve Bannon, then still in the White House, was reported to be reading it.) But such interpretations misplace the emphasis of Lasch’s arguments, much as the cover of his book does, printing the first half of its title in much larger type than the second half.

I recently observed a webinar of right-leaning intellectuals who wondered aloud whether Lasch could be recruited to the cause of “post-liberalism,” citing the book’s fourth chapter, “Does Democracy Deserve to Survive?” The question is rhetorical, and Lasch’s implication is that a centralized society dominated by the “talking classes,” liberal and conservative, had become so insular as to be almost entirely divorced from the concerns of “ordinary citizens.” In a discussion of political debate, he argues that the press, in becoming professionalized and prioritizing the objective dissemination of information, had declined relative to the more opinion-driven, even yellow journalism of the late nineteenth century. It’s an argument of a piece with his constant return to the ethic of small proprietorship as a countervailing force to centralized power.

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The twenty-first century has not returned us to such a nineteenth-century scheme of things (or media landscape). In The True and Only Heaven, Lasch expresses admiration for the virtues of the petty bourgeoisie — “its egalitarianism, its respect for workmanship, its understanding of the value of loyalty, and its struggle against the moral temptation of resentment” — while refraining from “minimizing” its vices of “narrowness and provincialism,” nor denying that it has produced “racism, nativism, anti-intellectualism.” This class has long been a hinge in American politics, the proverbial small-business owners to whom each party tends to pander. It is to the vices of this group that the Republicans have increasingly catered (while some Democratic leaders have refrained from concealing their disdain for “deplorables”).

Whereas some intellectual heroes of the post-liberal right wing have advanced this sort of division — especially the unfortunately rehabilitated Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, with his vision of the distinction of “friends” and “enemies” as the essence of politics — it was anathema to Lasch. Though he was skeptical of the emergence (or desirability) of a “universal class,” the notion to which he constantly appealed was that of “the common life.” Against the “optimism” of technocracy and therapeutic culture and the sunny dreams of capitalist affluence, it was his source of hope:

If progressive ideologies have dwindled down to a wistful hope against hope that things will somehow work out for the best, we need to recover a more vigorous form of hope, which trusts life without denying its tragic character or attempting to explain away tragedy as “cultural lag.” We can fully appreciate this kind of hope only now that the other kind, better described as optimism, has fully revealed itself as a higher form of wishful thinking. Progressive optimism rests, at bottom, on a denial of the natural limits on human power and freedom, and it cannot survive for very long in a world in which an awareness of those limits has become inescapable. The disposition properly described as hope, trust, or wonder, on the other hand — three names for the same state of heart and mind — asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits.

Of course, hope, trust, and wonder aren’t material things, and it might be naive to think we could have them in the same ways people used to. Then again, it might be arrogant to believe that things are so different now. At the end of DeLillo’s novel, Jack, the narrator, speaks of going nightly to an overpass with his wife and son to look at vivid and newly colorful sunsets in a sky that has recently been pocked by a large toxic cloud as the result of an accidental chemical spill.

Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don’t know what we are watching or what it means, we don’t know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass.

The hard thing about dystopia, or about the future, might be telling wonder from dread.

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Christian Lorentzen’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, Bookforum, Artforum, n+1, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the Paris Review, the Baffler, the New York Times, Slate, the Literary Review, and the New Leader. From 2015 to 2018, he was the book critic for New York Magazine.

It is hard not to romanticize Harry Braverman. A Depression-era metalworker and committed socialist who in 1974, two years before his untimely death, published what remains one of the most powerful applications of Karl Marx’s theory of capital to American history — isn’t this the archetype of Antonio Gramsci’s organic intellectual, the worker raised to consciousness through study and struggle?

To understand how capitalism works requires journeying into “the hidden abode of production,” Marx wrote, the place where human labor power is consumed. Labor and Monopoly Capital took this idea seriously. Across twenty meticulous chapters, Braverman explored the process by which capitalists siphoned value out of their workers. This extraction splintered the human being. Body was torn from mind; motions became mechanical; knowledge was locked away in business suites. Here was “the degradation of work in the twentieth century,” as Braverman’s subtitle had it. But alongside degradation ran a second process. As workers were automated out of industrial production, capital furrowed its way into other realms of life. Factories gave way to offices, the coppersmith to the clerk, and then to sprawling postindustrial economies of services and care. The genius of Labor and Monopoly Capital was to narrate these two developments together. Capital reconstituted itself over and over in an endless cycle. But in so doing it created new worlds of labor, a molten working class.

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Half a century after its publication, Labor and Monopoly Capital remains a classic. It has sold over one hundred thousand copies and continues to inform studies of capital, labor, and class. But it has also been subject to partial or plainly incorrect assessments. Many have reduced Braverman to the “deskilling thesis” — the idea that capitalism linearly forces workers to perform ever-simpler and more menial labor — when in fact he insisted that this was too simple a claim. Others have accused him of a wistful nostalgia for artisanal labor, when in fact Braverman countered that objection in his introduction (although this is a point to which we will return). Worst of all, despite its impressive reach in radical circles, Labor and Monopoly Capital has been ignored by mainstream historians of capitalism and dismissed by many sociologists of labor. (With some important exceptions: for instance, the labor historian David Montgomery and many of his students.) The feeling was mutual, though. Never a professor, Braverman acerbically critiqued his academic counterparts.

Braverman’s text remains remarkably useful to think with. Some of its assumptions feel dated, of course. There is no mention of globalization, and Braverman did not anticipate the full force of neoliberalism — two processes that, although already underway in 1974, had yet to cohere into objects of analysis. And yet much of the book feels ahead of its time. Labor and Monopoly Capital was prescient in its emphasis on services and care work as capital’s future objects. It correctly anticipated that the mid-century boom in productivity was singular and unrecoverable. It identified a confluence of management and technology that has evolved into ever more oppressive forms under platform capitalism. On each of these fronts, Braverman’s arguments forecast the present historical conjuncture. They can help see us through it too.

We want to emphasize three aspects of Labor and Monopoly Capital that feel particularly relevant today. The first is Braverman’s fidelity to Marx — especially the latter’s understanding of capital as an unending process of valorization that nonetheless creates a potential emancipatory future. The second is Braverman’s treatment of the service economy, which is too often subordinated to his analysis of Taylorism and industrial production. For Braverman, the rise of services was not a mere repetition of capital accumulation in a new realm. It threatened the emancipatory opening of the future that he took from Marx. In other words, this second aspect of the book puts pressure on the first. The result is an ambivalent approach to nostalgia and temporality in Braverman’s anti-capitalism — the third aspect — that speaks to our own moment just as much, if not more, as it did to his.

Origins of an Anti-Capitalist Organic Intellectual

Braverman came young to Marxism. Born in 1920 to a working-class family in Brooklyn, as a teenager he joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), where he remained an active member until mounting internal conflict led to his expulsion in 1953. Founded in 1938, at the height of the political upheavals of the “Age of the CIO,” the SWP was communist but anti-Stalinist; skeptical of big-tent coalitions with liberals; committed to a worker-led revolution. Although Braverman often criticized the party, for fifteen years it was his political home. It gave his radicalism a dissident lilt, invested in revolutionary politics but equally in critique, a rare blend of what Ernst Bloch called the “warm” and “cold” streams of Marxist thought.

From 1937 to 1953, Braverman worked as a manual laborer. He apprenticed as a coppersmith at the Brooklyn Naval Yards and refit asbestos pipes on harbored ships (possibly the cause of his early death). In 1946, he followed his wife, Miriam — also an SWP organizer — to Youngstown, Ohio, where he became a steelworker. Braverman rarely invoked these experiences in his public writing. And yet in a sense he was always reflecting on them. “I had the opportunity of seeing first hand, during those years, not only the transformation of industrial processes but the manner in which these processes are reorganized,” he remarked in the introduction to Labor and Monopoly Capital; “how the worker, systematically robbed of a craft heritage, is given little or nothing to take its place.”

For much of this time, Braverman was writing: book reviews, essays, screeds in the latest intra-Trotskyite brawl. But it was upon leaving the SWP that he turned his full attention to critical analysis, first as the editor (with Bert Cochran) of a short-lived but significant journal, American Socialist — an effort to strip the “Old” Left of its worn-out slogans and analyze the postwar conjuncture with fresh eyes — and then at Grove Press and finally Monthly Review Press. In essays written in and against the heady “golden age of capitalism” of the 1950s and early 1960s, he homed in on the two themes that would undergird Labor and Monopoly Capital. The first was bringing Marx’s critique of political economy to bear on the current social world; the second, understanding the process by which capital shaped the American working class.

These were urgent and related tasks. Capital seemed to be expanding into every corner of life, subjecting an ever greater variety of social roles to the logics and immiserations of proletarian labor. And yet “working class life is less described the more it has become widespread,” Braverman wrote in 1959. Socialists had abandoned Marx’s “critique of the capitalist mode of production” in favor of “a critique of capitalism as a mode of distribution” (a slippage that endures today). What would it mean to “revivify Marxist economic perspectives,” bringing them to bear on “the world around us as it is, not as it once was”? That is what Labor and Monopoly Capital proposed to do.

Starting With the Building Blocks of the Labor Process

Braverman understood work and the working class as social processes, continually producing and produced by history. He rejected the contradictory and ahistorical analysis proffered by contemporary social science: the obsession with the better-educated “new working class,” the acceptance of alienation as “inevitable,” the measurement of worker consciousness through snapshot surveys. In its place, Braverman returned to the building blocks of the capitalist labor process. Labor and Monopoly Capital therefore began with the concepts of labor power and the manufacturing division of labor. The former set up the problem of capitalist management (the need to extract labor from workers within a given timeframe), while the latter partially solved it (by simplifying tasks and gathering workers under one roof). Both were precedents to the next advancement in capitalist control of labor, and an object of real ire for Braverman: the rise of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, “the explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production.”

Scientific management was distinct from actual science in that it did not revolutionize tools or technology. Instead, it sought to perfect capital’s control over labor by monopolizing knowledge of the labor process. Management separated conception from execution, assigning to itself the work of science and depriving the worker of any planning capacity. This negated craft knowledge (a key element of worker power) and degraded work “almost to the level of labor in its animal form.” Braverman’s focus on this particular form of alienation was likely informed by his own experience as a craft worker.

The historical process of degradation was born with the detailed division of labor in early manufacturing, perfected by Taylorism in the late nineteenth century, and intensified with technological advancements like computing throughout the twentieth century. This last phase, the “scientific-technical revolution,” marked a qualitative change for the labor process. Rather than reappropriating worker knowledge, management produced its own knowledge, leaving the worker in “ignorance, incapacity, and thus a fitness for machine servitude.” Science itself became capital, an instrument bent toward management and production rather than human flourishing. For example, the advent of “numerical control” technology — in which preprogrammed software moved tools automatically — divided and simplified the machinist’s work, transforming what was once control and knowledge of the machine into its mere operation.

The constant advancement of machinery had a double effect. It both intensified managerial control and increased productivity, at once harnessing labor power and rendering it obsolete. As we will discuss below, Braverman recognized mechanization as a reality that would alter the occupational structure of the working class, and he sought to understand that new structure. But he also insisted that mechanization took a particular (and horrific) form under the social relations of scientific management.

More liberatory possibilities presented by machinery were “systematically thwarted” by management’s obsession with separating control and execution. Instead, the social relations of machinery were “best adapted to control of both the hand and the brain worker, best adapted to profitability, best adapted to everything but the needs of the people.”

In elaborating these processes — the stripping of knowledge from workers, then the creation of new knowledge from which workers were alienated from the start, and finally the domination of living by dead labor — Braverman effectively superimposed volume I of Capital onto the arc of the American Century. (In his forward, Monthly Review editor Paul Sweezy argued that it was necessary to read the two texts alongside one another.) Braverman’s fidelity to Marx’s magnum opus is remarkable. Labor and Monopoly Capital might even be read as an early, Americanized application of value-form Marxism, then nascent in Germany and now en vogue in Marxist circles.

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Nowhere is this clearer than in Braverman’s insistence that capital, not labor, is the universal subject of the modern social world. This was not an easy move to make in 1974, when what Moishe Postone calls “traditional Marxism,” with its emphasis on the working class as a uniquely positioned agent for revolutionary change, remained dominant. Though Braverman held out hope for proletarian self-actualization — “I have every confidence in the revolutionary potential of the working classes,” he wrote in 1975 (note the plural) — the theme was conspicuously absent from Labor and Monopoly Capital. The Subject of the book, in every sense, was capital, an unending process that over time stripped labor of its concrete specificity, rendering it increasingly interchangeable and increasingly abstract. Braverman’s fellow radicals often reprimanded him for the lack of agency afforded to workers in his text. Doubtless that lack had something to do with
organized labor’s faltering power in his historical moment. But it was also based on a faithful reading of Marx’s later works.

Faithful, too, in Braverman’s insistence that the damage wrought by capital had nothing to do with workers getting paid less and less (which they weren’t) or with inequalities of wealth. The real problem was that under capitalism it “becomes essential for the capitalist that control over the labor process pass from the hands of the worker into his own.” The cruelty lay in the absence of control. “The transformation of working humanity into . . . an instrument of capital,” Braverman wrote, “is repugnant to the victims, whether their pay is high or low, because it violates human conditions of work.” The reference to Marx’s own “immiseration theory” in Capital — “in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” — is hardly subtle.

But behind the degradation of labor lies an ironic point of light (or, depending on your disposition, an ongoing tragedy). Capital develops the possibility for its own transcendence through the creation of potentially emancipatory technologies. Here too Braverman drew directly from Capital. Under capitalism, he argued, “the remarkable development of machinery becomes, for most of the working population, the source not of freedom but of enslavement, not of mastery but of helplessness, and not of the broadening of the horizon of labor but of [its] confinement.” Compare this passage to Marx’s commentary on machines in chapter fifteen of volume I:

Therefore since machinery itself shortens the hours of labour, but when employed by capital it lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital it heightens its intensity . . . since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital it makes them into paupers.

Braverman parallels Marx’s substance but also his form: the rhythmic give-and-take of a potential freedom coming into view even as it curdles into its opposite. In generating the possibility of a new social world even as it prevents that world from being realized, capital creates the grounds from which we might criticize it. That is, we can critique the present from the standpoint of an immanent (though not necessarily imminent) future, rather than a transcendental norm or a lost past.

The Commodification of Service Work

An immanent critique of the present requires a clear-eyed analysis of the present. To that end, the second half of Labor and Monopoly Capital took stock of the recently transformed working class. As machine technology advanced, it created the conditions for the decline of manufacturing work. Braverman refused to lament this, avoiding the trap of industrial nostalgia that burdens the Left even today. Instead, he followed the history of manufacturing degradation to its unexpected conclusion: the rise of service degradation.

Drawing as ever on Marx, Braverman argued that capitalist accumulation affected working-class composition in two major ways. First, newly mechanized methods of production “set free” former industrial workers, creating a labor surplus that would tend to cluster in labor-intensive occupations. Second, newly accumulated capital, needing somewhere to go, “thrust itself frantically” into new branches of production, creating new occupations in the process. From these two tendencies, the rise of services followed. Capital expanded into all of society, transforming previously uncommodified relations (like recreation, amusement, security, and care) into service commodities produced by service workers.

Explicit in Braverman’s analysis was a normative argument against the encroachment of the market into family and community life. (The Frankfurt School and Monthly Review crowd might have inspired this line of thinking for Braverman, though it also strikes a reader as reminiscent of Karl Polanyi or anticipating Christopher Lasch.) The marketization of leisure resulted in “a standard of mediocrity and vulgarity which debases popular taste.” The atrophy of community life “leaves a void,” filled by institutions like schools and prisons that were “barbarous and oppressive.” While Braverman acknowledged that marketization resulted in part from increased efficiency and decreased costs, he argued that it also resulted from advertising, changing status expectations, and a deterioration of skills. That is, the commodification of daily life was not just a natural process in which technology created more free time but was instead a process created by capitalist social relations that ultimately degraded social life.

Normativity aside, the commodification of daily life doubtlessly reconfigured the working class. The expansion of state institutions to fill the new social “void” meant job growth for prison guards, police, and social workers, as well as teachers. Meanwhile the growing hospitality and retail industries created “a huge specialized personnel whose function is nothing but cleaning.” Newly commodified service occupations were growing far more rapidly than employment as a whole. It was ironic, but also perfectly coherent, that in an “advanced” capitalist economy, labor was most concentrated in parts of the economy least impacted by the scientific-technical revolution, in occupations that had not yet been mechanized or never would be.

This process of labor accumulation was a gendered one. Braverman criticized the Department of Labor’s “custom of disregarding female employment, which is considered to be somehow temporary, incidental, and fortuitous, when it should actually be placed at the very center of all occupational studies today.” Gender operated on multiple levels of the new working class. It was women’s household production most recently commodified — the work of cleaning, caring, and feeding — that supplied capital with new opportunities of valorization. It was women who entered the workforce to do these now-commodified jobs, in part because of the declining participation of men in the workforce and in part because of a need for larger household incomes to purchase the service commodities once produced in the household. And it was largely women who were relegated to sub-subsistence-level waged work.

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What is so helpful about Braverman’s account is that even as he explained the rise of services, he refused to naturalize that rise. The entrance of women into the workforce was not a simple product of progressive politics. The rise of services was not an evolution into a “higher” or more civilized economic form. Capitalist accumulation brought new occupational structures into being, but those occupational structures were not an inevitable or final form of work. On the contrary, they were continuously degraded and necessitated some kind of challenge.

But what is missing from Labor and Monopoly Capital is a clear direction for that challenge — an alternative to degradation — in the context of services. Regarding manufacturing, Braverman had a coherent demand: the reuniting of mental and manual work, of conception and execution, in combination with modern engineering and science. But since much service work remains immune to scientific progress, the “reintegration” of conception and execution is less relevant. The problem with cleaning work is not that a janitor does not understand the technologies of her cleaning supplies. The problem with prison work is not that guards do not have enough space to think about their work processes, but that the work processes themselves are socially destructive. For service work, then, the solutions to degradation seem to be of a different character.

In his analysis of the transition from artisanal to industrial labor, Braverman insisted that capital creates a hitherto unknown potential for human freedom even as it degrades our existence in the present. The history of capitalism was thus a tragedy and a comedy all at once. The mandate to labor to the rhythms of Taylorism was “a crime against the person and against humanity.” And yet it was part of a process that was “necessary for the progress of the human race,” a process that once underway was not only “inexorable” but, on the longest of views, good. Writing in 1984, Fredric Jameson implored Marxists to “somehow . . . lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst,” to think “catastrophe and progress all together.” Braverman did this.

But the rise of services seemed to push this “austere dialectical imperative” (to again quote Jameson) to its limits. Braverman tried to articulate the same give-and-take that he had applied to the rise of machines in industry. “The very social services which should facilitate social life and social solidarity [now] have the opposite effect,” he wrote:

As the advances of modern household and service industries lighten the family labor, they increase the futility of family life; as they remove the burdens of personal relations, they strip away its affections; as they create an intricate social life, they rob it of every vestige of community and leave in its place the cash nexus.

Here Braverman repeats, in a new key, his careful mirroring of Marx’s description of machines in Capital. Capitalism creates the potential for “an intricate social life” of mutual interdependence, but in degraded form and to degrading ends. Yet even as Braverman gestured toward this interpretation of the service economy, he seemed unwilling to accept it. The commodification of care, the subsumption of our most human social relations into the logic of capital — was this development too one-sided, too totalizing, for the old dialectic to hold? Braverman never broached this question explicitly. But it ran hot beneath his analysis.

If capital had ceased to point beyond itself, one solution was to turn back. The longing for a bygone past is a spectral presence in Labor and Monopoly Capital, never quite there but never quite absent either. “I was always a modernizer,” Braverman wrote in his introduction, an insistence that preceded an admission: “as I reread these pages, I find in them a sense not only of social outrage, but also perhaps of personal affront.” Still, though: “I hope no one draws from this the conclusion that my views are shaped by nostalgia for an age that cannot be recaptured. Rather, my views about work are governed by a nostalgia for an age that has not yet come into being.”

Braverman protested too much. If it is hard not to romanticize him, it is also hard to deny that he romanticized — against his intentions — a world of artisans and embedded communities, itself a part of early capitalism. “I think it is hard for people of the present student generation to understand,” he said in a lecture soon before his death. “When my generation was growing up, this wholesale destruction of a way of life was still going on.” Social outrage, personal affront: the line is thin. Fifty years on, though — as capital hollows out our social relations and sets our future ablaze — Braverman’s ambivalences are instructive for the anti-capitalism that our moment requires. Not just the transcendence of work through technology, but its redistribution and abolition through political will. Perhaps the social revolution of the twenty-first century should take some of its poetry from the past.

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Republished from New Labor Forum.

Sophina Clark is a PhD student in sociology at Princeton University, studying the future of work (or its absence).

Daniel Judt is a PhD candidate in modern US history at Yale University, with a focus on social theory and the history of capitalism in the late twentieth century.

While European labor movements established foundations for their welfare states in the late nineteenth century, it was not until the New Deal that the United States began instituting policies like unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. But although working-class struggle was also key to this success, several unique factors in American history proved an impediment to more egalitarian policies.

In this episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek continue their deep dive into the history of social democracy. Together, they look at the impacts of craft unionism, mass immigration, racial tensions, and employer violence in explaining American exceptionalism.

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Melissa Naschek

Today, we’re continuing our series on social democracy. In the first episode, we took a broad view to discuss what social democracy is, and in the second episode, we followed up on the circumstances that led to its flourishing in the postwar period, what it accomplished, and the many challenges the movement faced.

We’re going to switch gears a little bit today to look specifically at social democracy in America. I don’t think most people really associate social democracy with American politics. So, to start us off, can you talk about whether America actually had a period of social democracy?

Vivek Chibber

Yeah, it did. Remember when we tried to define the goals of social democracy, we said there was a minimalist and a maximalist agenda. The minimalist agenda was to try to tame capitalism and to give people some necessary goods as a matter of right rather than as a matter of privilege, goods that the market gives them only if they have the money to do so. And so, what social democrats said was “No, as a functioning member of society, you should have as rights not only political freedoms, but also certain economic freedoms and economic guarantees.”

The maximalist agenda, of course, was to use legislative means to try to move beyond capitalism toward socialism. So the minimalist agenda was to tame capitalism and make it less inhumane. The maximalist one was to go beyond it.

Well, where does the United States fall on the spectrum, if at all? It did manage to institutionalize some version of the minimalist agenda starting in the 1930s with what is famously called the New Deal, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt implemented. And this had two components to it. There was a welfare state of some kind, which really hadn’t existed to any serious extent before. And that welfare state meant people got certain nonmarket access to goods and services.

Melissa Naschek

Things like unemployment insurance and government pensions.

Vivek Chibber

Yes, and Social Security. And then over time, what came to be known as Medicare, which is medical care for people over a certain age, was added.

Melissa Naschek

Right, although that didn’t get enacted until the 1960s.

Vivek Chibber

Right. That was a deepening of the New Deal. And the two pillars of American welfare today are still Social Security and Medicare, alongside Medicaid, which expanded considerably under Obamacare. These are real aspects of a welfare state.

The second pillar of American social democracy was the legalization of union rights and the institutionalization of unions within the political economy. And during the heyday of American social democracy, which was from the 1930s into the 1970s, unions had a real voice inside the Democratic Party. Not anything to the extent of what you had in their European counterparts, but it was still an institutionalization in which the Democratic Party took the unions very seriously and passed legislation knowing that the unions had to be placated, and that they had to cooperate with them.

Melissa Naschek

When you say that labor rights suddenly had a place in the state, what was the before and what was the after?

Vivek Chibber

Labor rights really became institutionalized in what’s called the Second New Deal. And the hallmark of this was the Wagner Act, named after Senator Robert Wagner of New York and passed in 1935.

What existed before 1935? Well, the Wagner Act made collective bargaining mandatory for American employers in situations where a majority of workers in an establishment voted to join a union. So if a majority of workers said they want to be in a union, the employer was legally obligated to negotiate with them in good faith around what’s called a contract. And that contract would then govern pay scales, work relations, the pace of work, and such things.

What was there before that? Organizing unions was extremely difficult, and workers had far weaker legal protections.

Melissa Naschek

Right. Because there’s a long history of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American labor movement.

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. But employers generally faced no effective obligation to bargain with their employees if they formed a union. So employers could just sit it out. People could come and say, “We want to form a union,” and employers could say, “Well, I’m firing you. I’ll just bring in new workers,” or “I’m going to lock you out, and I’m going to wait for you guys to give up.” That’s what changed. And with the Wagner Act, you saw an explosion of union membership.

In Roosevelt’s first term, you get both of these things, which are real hallmarks of social democracy. You get a real welfare state, anemic though it is, and you get the institutionalization and the empowerment of unions, weaker though they are than their European counterparts. Once that’s in place — and every scholar of the issue agrees with this — I think the United States had some kind of social democracy.

But it was, however, a much weaker, more anemic, less developed social democratic enterprise than you had anywhere else in the capitalist world. Whether it’s Europe, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, the United States was the weakest of all of them.

American Exceptionalism

Melissa Naschek

We’ve talked before about the fact that American social democracy is much weaker in comparison to other Western social democracies. Why is that the case?

Vivek Chibber

There are several factors that explain why the American case is the way it is and why it’s weaker than the European, Australian, and Canadian counterparts. It all largely falls under the rubric of what’s called “American exceptionalism.” American exceptionalism is basically the question of why America is so different from all the other countries.

Well, different how? Typically, the question is, why isn’t there a socialist party in the United States? But it also kind of boils down to some subsidiary questions, all connected to this. Why is the union movement so weak? Why was there never a serious communist party in the United States? Things like that.

So let’s just ask the question in its broadest form, which is, why is American social democracy so much weaker than elsewhere? Two things are really crucial for this. Compared to Europe, the union movement, even at its peak, was much smaller than in most other Western countries. I think the only other country where union density remained as low as in the United States was probably France.

Melissa Naschek

When you say smaller, do you mean numerically or proportionately?

Vivek Chibber

Proportionately. Because Sweden is a tiny country. It has a population smaller than California’s. So in absolute numbers, even if everybody in Sweden were in a union, it would still be quite small compared to, say, the West Coast.

What we’re talking about is the proportion of the labor force that’s in unions. And the concept that’s used to capture that is union density. Union density captures the proportion of your employed labor force in trade unions. Now, in the United States, at its peak, it was around 35 percent. This would be from about 1944 to the mid-1950s.

Melissa Naschek

What was union density like leading into the New Deal?

Vivek Chibber

When the New Deal really takes off, density is actually still quite small. But the point is, it’s growing. In 1932, union density was around 12 percent. That’s small. But by 1945, it’s gone from that number to 35 percent. So it explodes. Now, compared to Europe, though, that’s still quite small. When you look at European countries at the same time, they’re over 50 percent. And they grow. From the 1950s into the 1970s, they kept growing their union density.

Melissa Naschek

Why was the United States so much less dense?

Vivek Chibber

Well, that’s the question. And I’ll address that in a minute.

The second aspect of American social democratic weakness, though, which is the core of the question of American exceptionalism, is that there has never been a mass socialist party in the United States.

Now, in the previous episode, you had said that one of the hallmarks of the New Deal was that there was no labor party in office, whereas when social democracy took off in Europe, there were labor parties in office. And we had said that that’s what made it so much more difficult for American unions to really capitalize on their organized strength, because American unions didn’t have a friend, a partner inside the state who would try to leverage union power to get whatever they could out of government. So the question then becomes, why wasn’t there a socialist party in the United States?

Melissa Naschek

Right, especially when you look at other countries. In France, their labor party was formed in 1880. In Sweden, their labor party was formed in 1889. And in the UK, their labor party was formed in 1900.

When we look at America, there’s no labor party. But there were other developments toward an independent political movement in the late nineteenth century.

Vivek Chibber

Right. The key period here is 1890 to 1910. That’s when this partnership between labor unions and socialist parties blossoms in Europe.

And it didn’t always come from the same direction. In cases like England, the unions formed the Labour Party. But in other countries, it was the labor parties or socialist parties that created union federations. Who initiated it is less important than the fact that, in all these countries, there was a very, very tight partnership between the two entities.

At that same time, you see, this is where the divergence with the United States comes up. There are some attempts for socialist parties and unions to partner up in the United States, but they don’t really come to anything. And so, this is the moment when the divergence between Europe and the United States takes place. And the question is why?

Early Democratization

Melissa Naschek

So maybe we should look a little more at what’s going on in the labor movement at this time, and then move into how that affects their political actions. So what is happening in the American labor movement broadly in the lead-up to the New Deal?

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. The question is, why doesn’t the labor movement either create its own labor party, or why doesn’t a labor or socialist party come to the unions in the way you had in Europe? There are a number of factors that go into this, and it’s a matter of judgment which ones you prioritize.

In my opinion, one of the most convincing points the scholarship makes on the fundamental contrast between how and when labor parties rose in Europe and the United States is the fact that, in the very early nineteenth century, the United States was unusual in that it got very close to full enfranchisement for white men across the class divide.

This is what’s called early democratization in the United States. Women still don’t have the right to vote, and of course the enslaved black people in the South had no question of any right to vote. But it’s quite significant that in the North, white men got the right to vote. And even in the South, if you’re a property-owning white man, you’ll have the right to vote. In Europe, this is just not on the agenda. They don’t get full enfranchisement for a hundred years after that. Now, why should that matter?

The reason that matters is that, in the United States, because white men have the right to vote, political parties, which are all elite-dominated, need their votes. And so parties incorporate and co-opt these working-class white men into political networks, even before the trade unions are ever formed. So, in order to advance their economic interests, much of the white working class now has a political outlet without relying on unions.

In Europe, that’s simply out of the question. There, when the working class really started to develop in large numbers — after 1850 — it found itself completely shut out of the electoral system. It had no voting rights. So in Europe, industrialization came before democracy. In the United States, you had democratization before industrialization.

This had huge implications. As their numbers grow, European workers are confronted with needing both political rights and economic protections. So they struggle for trade union rights and for a political party to fight for them at the same time. Because they don’t have any access to politics, all existing parties are dominated by employers and by landlords. So that means, in order to have political representation and political leverage of any kind in an era where they have no real political rights, they have to create parties of their own.

And because the European ruling class has its own parties, and the middle class has access to them, the parties that workers create are by default workers’ parties. They have to be workers’ parties. And because they have to cater to these workers’ needs, they’re not only staffed with workers, their agenda becomes a working-class agenda. And topmost in that agenda is the right to vote. They are demanding the right to vote.

Workers found that their labor parties were fighting for three things: economic protections, legislation that would protect them and allow them to form unions, and representation within the state.

So when the unions came around in the late 1880s and ’90s, it was natural for them to ally with these parties because the parties were already doing the work of fighting for workers’ rights. There’s a natural alliance between unions and labor parties because both of them are shut out of the system.

Both of them came from the same constituency, and that constituency had two kinds of interests: political and economic. And it finds that a political party is the best way to advance its political interests. No other party will do it. And the unions were the best way to advance their economic interests because, of course, employers wouldn’t do it. That’s what’s going on in Europe at that time.

What happens in the United States is that, because they had democratic rights before they could even have unions, when the working class had economic demands, they had some institutional entrée into the state, even though it’s elite-dominated and comes through bourgeois parties.

So American workers didn’t have that same imperative to create their own party. Instead, they formed networks with existing parties and were patronized by those parties to get something out of it. So, over the nineteenth century, through the 1880s and ’90s, the desire, the imperative, the need to form their own party was tremendously weakened. The motivation isn’t there because they already had some kind of access to political institutions. That’s a fundamental difference between Europe and the United States, and the Americans never recovered from it.

Craft Unionism, Immigration, and the AFL

Melissa Naschek

What was going on in the American labor movement at this time?

Vivek Chibber

On the labor side, there’s also something very different, which is that, between the 1880s and ’90s, the United States was the target of the largest wave of immigration that we’ve seen in the modern era. There was wave upon wave of European immigrants.

Early on, they were all coming from Northern and Western Europe — Germany, Sweden, England, and Ireland — and many of them were Jewish immigrants as well. Later on, at the turn of the century, Southern Europe began sending many people, with Italians playing a very big role.

Why is this important? This is the moment at which industrialization really takes off in the United States. And that should be a moment when workers start to organize, because when industrial employment is rising really fast, workers become a lot more emboldened because it’s easy to get jobs, and you’re less worried about being fired if you’re organizing a union.

Melissa Naschek

Right, the question of how tight the labor market is has always been important in the labor movement.

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. In fact, that moment could have been a propitious one for unions coming together. The problem was that the obstacles to unionization weren’t just legal but also cultural.

It’s just very basic: to have a union, you need to be able to talk to people. In the 1910s, something like three-fourths of American workers in the manufacturing sector were first-generation immigrants, and they were all speaking different languages. They often had cultural hostilities toward each other. This makes it exceedingly difficult for them to organize, especially compared to the Europeans.

That wave upon wave of immigration created obstacles on top of the legal obstacles, the political obstacles, and the fact that there was a lot of violence that employers were using, which made organizing these unions all the more difficult.

Now, layered on top of that, there was another issue: in Europe, by the early 1900s, a new form of unionism was making union growth easier. They switched from what’s called craft unionism to industrial unionism. Craft unionism refers to organizing people on the basis of their particular specialization, the craft that they’re deploying, rather than the fact that they’re wage workers.

Melissa Naschek

Right. So their actual job, their role in the workplace.

Vivek Chibber

Yes. And this meant that the same workplace, with different jobs, would have many different unions, right? So you will have carpenters, machinists, and tailors all in different unions.

Melissa Naschek

Right. And just to be clear, craft unionism still exists today, and many unions are still organized along craft lines.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. But today, it is more of a minority stream within the union movement. Most unions are called industrial unions. And in industrial unions, you brought together workers of all different occupations and specializations into the same union. So instead of having many different unions in one auto plant, you would have all the auto workers in one union. That’s called industrial unionism.

Melissa Naschek

So, regardless of your role in the workplace, everyone is in the same union because they work at the same location.

Vivek Chibber

An interesting contrast between these two kinds of unionism is that industrial unions are also much, much more interested in political agitation and mass politics.

Melissa Naschek

Why is that?

Vivek Chibber

Because they have a much more offensive strategy. Industrial unions don’t intrinsically have as much leverage as craft unions do. The reason craft unions can be successful is that they have tended to predominate among more highly skilled workers. And because they’re highly skilled workers, they are more scarce. They’re more difficult to replace. So they rely on what’s called an exclusionary strategy: they attempt to limit the people entering the trade or craft so that it’s harder to replace them. The focus, therefore, becomes controlling the labor market, controlling economic institutions, and entry and exit from the labor force.

Melissa Naschek

So, keeping the labor market tight in order to maintain your leverage?

Vivek Chibber

Not just the labor market, but also keeping that segment of the labor market tight. You want to make sure there are only so many electricians and so many machinists, right? That’s why crafts have apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeship programs are a way of controlling entry into a job. The union controls the entry. So the craft union’s focus is on the labor market and economic institutions.

With industrial unions, they don’t even try, because everybody’s a wage laborer. Everybody’s entering the labor market. They’re much more interested, therefore, in legislation to protect workers as a whole, rather than their particular craft.

Melissa Naschek

And what sort of strategies involve protecting workers as a whole?

Vivek Chibber

Industrial unions want protective legislation, for example, on union rights, pensions, and unemployment insurance. Traditionally, craft unions kept the state at a distance, saying, “We are going to be the ones doling out unemployment. We’ll be the ones doling out pensions. We want to control it as unions.”

In Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of industrial unions made it natural to also form a political party that would fight for your economic and political imperatives within the state. European craft unions were also suspicious of political engagement and of mass politics. But the shift toward industrial unions made the marriage between labor parties and unions a lot easier.

In the United States, craft unionism wasn’t displaced until the 1930s. That meant these unions were much more hostile to mass political organizing, which was carried out through the European socialist parties.

So on top of the ethnic problems of immigration, you had the problem of craft unionism. And the thing is, they reinforced each other. And because these immigrants often brought very specific skills from their European backgrounds, they would then get jobs for one another through their immigrant networks. Those jobs tended to be in the same line of work. And once you’re in the same line, you would enter the same craft union.

So these unions were not only different in terms of their skills and the economic groups they were organizing but also culturally very different from each other. Going back to our example, machinists would all speak one language, carpenters another, and they tended to live in ethnic neighborhoods.

Here’s the interesting thing. The switch to modern capitalist industry threw all these workers together, creating the material basis for a common identity. They then formed industrial unions, which institutionalized that common identity, and created labor parties that fought for that common identity.

In the United States, that progression was stalled. The Americans didn’t go from craft unionism to industrial unionism until much later. The issues of craft unionism were overlaid by these ethnic and linguistic differences, which were so much greater and deeper than anything you had in Europe. And on top of that, there’s the problem of indigenous racism.

So, in sum, by the 1910s in Europe, workers were coming together to fight for their political rights through parties. And those parties partnered up with unions. That partnership was made easier by the fact that European workers were switching to industrial unionism. Mind you, that switch was oftentimes initiated by socialist parties, because these parties were ideologically committed to a vision of unionism that was an industrial union vision. They reinforced each other.

In the United States, in contrast, craft unionism endured for a long time. Workers were sucked into elite parties and didn’t have the same motivation to form their own parties. What’s the result? The parties fought along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines, and not along economic lines. The parties said to them, “Okay, you’re coming in as Irish workers or Catholic workers, and you live in these segmented neighborhoods, so we’re going to mobilize you along these identities rather than a class identity.”

This meant the United States had a working class split along ethnic and linguistic lines, and a union movement that catered to very narrow craft interests rather than class-wide ones. So by the 1910s, you’ve got two very different cultures of class politics on the two continents. And underneath everything is the fact that in the United States, democratization came before industrialization, whereas in Europe, industrialization occurred first and democratization later, once the working class started fighting for it.

Melissa Naschek

You mentioned that the 1930s were when the American labor movement started to really embrace industrial unionism. I think we should take a step back and look at the institutions of the American labor movement that perpetuated the craft union strategy before the industrial union strategy took over. Can you talk about the institutions of the American labor movement before the 1930s?

Vivek Chibber

From the late nineteenth century into the 1930s, the main union federation in the United States was called the American Federation of Labor (AFL). And this was a craft union federation. It was basically a collection of unions organizing workers along particular craft lines.

The AFL was famously led by Samuel Gompers. And Gompers himself was America-First, ethnocentric, and very racist. He embodied a lot of these components of craft unionism that I’d mentioned, which reinforced ethnic and cultural divisions within the working class because they overlapped with skills.

The AFL had two noteworthy components. One was that it was this very elitist, exclusive craft unionism. But the other was that it was pretty suspicious of, and you could say hostile to, politics, to actually trying to engage the state — trying to have political campaigns, trying to get candidates into office who were friendly to it. The AFL dabbled with this early on, but it never really took the project on in any serious way, which further distanced the labor movement from forming a political party the way its European counterparts did.

Now, the AFL in its own way could be quite militant at times. It fought very hard for workers’ rights and for craft unionists, but it remained small because, of course, it never tried to organize the unskilled or the unemployed, who were always a majority of the working class and were in fact quite hostile to them. That meant that as new waves of immigrants arrived, as long as they were not sucked into prized, highly skilled craft positions, not only did the AFL not organize them, but the immigrant workers were also pretty hostile to these unions because they saw them as elitist and exclusionary. This created a horizontal split within the working class as well.

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Melissa Naschek

It’s very strange to think of a movement of workers as having an elitist outlook, given their position in the economy.

Vivek Chibber

It has to do with the way in which the modern working class was created. The very earliest urban working class was created by bringing various artisans into warehouses and putting them to work together — simply working side by side, each doing their own labor, but under one roof. This was before mass depeasantization, in which peasants streamed into cities. We’re talking about the early 1800s, the 1790s through the 1820s.

These were craftsmen who were being brought into new economic locations, and they didn’t see themselves as workers per se. They saw themselves as craftsmen. They had a disdain for the unwashed masses, for the toilers, for the unemployed, for the people who were looking for jobs out in the streets. They saw themselves as a labor aristocracy. The unions organized around that identity and ideology were imbued with this sort of elitism, which was only broken down in the late nineteenth century, when crafts were essentially broken down.

The late nineteenth century is a moment when de-skilling actually occurs, when the exclusivity of these skills is broken down as modern mechanization takes over industries. And as this mechanization proceeds, instead of highly skilled workers deploying their tools in a very careful way, what happens is machines start deploying workers. The workers become appendages to machines. And that is the moment at which you get the material basis for a new workers’ identity and a new kind of unionism as well.

Melissa Naschek

Right. And what you’re talking about is what Karl Marx talks about in Capital, in which, in order to increase efficiency, production is organized by increasing cooperation, getting workers together, getting them to make the same product at a similar quality. And then, when that’s no longer enough to keep raising profits, technological developments are introduced, which de-skill or proletarianize workers, as Marx would say. And the story goes on.

Vivek Chibber

That’s exactly right. And these early decades, when they’re being brought together, they’re being brought together as craftsmen. And in the nineteenth century, worker struggles in Europe often involved craftsmen trying to hold onto their jobs as they were displaced by machines.

Melissa Naschek

Right. Sound familiar?

Vivek Chibber

Well, they had real skills. They actually knew how to make something. This is a topic for another day, but this is where many conceptions of socialism come from, in which workers have control — workers’ control — and overcome their alienation from the product, becoming one with the product again. It’s a kind of romantic notion that comes from an era when workers were trying to recapture the autonomy and connection to the products they had when they controlled everything.

Racial and Ethnic Working-Class Divisions

Melissa Naschek

We’ve said a lot about the particular aspects of the American labor movement and their impact on politics, but there are other very salient divisions. You talked a little bit about ethnic divisions, but there are also significant geographic divisions, particularly between the North and South, and, of course, racial divisions. How did racial divisions play into all this?

Vivek Chibber

I brought up ethnicity first because the parts of the country that could be unionized and were unionized were all in the North. The South remained a primarily agrarian economy well into the 1940s and ’50s. And it had two distinguishing characteristics.

One is that there wasn’t a lot of industry there to organize. It’s not that there wasn’t any; the American South had mining and textiles. But compared to the North, it was far less organized. And the second thing is that in the North, where there was the possibility of organizing, the black population was very, very small. It was 2 percent or less in most of these industrial cities. So the main obstacle to working-class formation could not have been race between the 1890s and 1910s.

Melissa Naschek

This was before the Great Migration.

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. So, in this period, the impediment was ethnicity. And so we should look at race and ethnicity as working together with different weightage at different moments.

In the late nineteenth century, I think ethnicity in the North mattered more than race did. In the South, of course, race is everything. And that matters if you’re looking at the mining industry or textiles. And there, of course, the division between white and black workers is just overwhelming. So when you put those together, they both functioned in ways that made the growth of trade unionism much more difficult in the United States than in Europe. And that plays into this American exceptionalism.

So the irony is, where race didn’t matter, ethnicity stepped in. Where ethnicity wasn’t an issue, race stepped in. But the labor movement was really held back by one or both of these in a way that the Europeans just weren’t.

The Knights of Labor and Employer Violence

Melissa Naschek

We established that craft unionism was dominant at this time. But were there any efforts toward industrial unionism?

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. This is where counterfactuals become really interesting. There was an organization in the latter half of the nineteenth century called the Knights of Labor, and they were committed to industrial unionism — and, I should say, multiracial unionism. They had it in their constitution that they would not make distinctions between black and white workers. They believed in workers of all ethnicities coming together. And they had a lot of success in the Northeast, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other parts of the eastern seaboard.

This is where the peculiarities of American history add some contingency. There could have been a world in which they grew, and they linked up with a socialist party the way you had in Europe. And in fact, there was something called the Socialist Party in the United States, famously led by Eugene Debs. And Debs was very hostile to the AFL and very friendly to some kind of industrial unionism.

The world in which that partnership grew never came about. And it mostly has to do with the incredible violence that was unleashed on the Knights of Labor in the various cities where they were growing.

Melissa Naschek

Did that violence come from employers or from the state?

Vivek Chibber

Both. And this is a peculiarity and a puzzle. I have to say right here, I haven’t seen a good answer to this question. Let me lay out the question and I’ll give you a hypothesis of some kind.

The question is, why is there so much more violence toward unions in the United States than in Europe? It’s a peculiarity.

Most labor historians, I think, acknowledge that the United States, even though it never had a big union movement, nevertheless had an incredible wave of employer violence. You would think that since there wasn’t much of a union movement, elites wouldn’t be as panicked. And, on the other hand, in Europe, when there is a big labor movement developing, why isn’t there more violence? Why weren’t employers even more freaked out in Europe?

Melissa Naschek

And it’s interesting how long the violence toward the American labor movement lasted.

Vivek Chibber

Absolutely. It lasted well into the 1930s.

Melissa Naschek

Yeah. During the New Deal, even as the state formally recognized the right of unions to organize, there were horrible, deadly clashes between the state, employers, and union organizers.

Vivek Chibber

In mining towns, they unleashed state militias. In West Virginia, they bombed the mines.

Melissa Naschek

Yeah, they often brought in the National Guard. It’s crazy. I read this story about how they were bringing cannons into the street.

Vivek Chibber

I think it has a lot to do with the very, very decentralized character of the American state. It’s a lot easier for employers to buy up and wield control over government when local government has all the power over police, over labor legislation, and over the way in which employment relations are governed. But that’s just a guess.

The fact of the matter is, there was a lot of violence. And it’s not just that capitalists had control over the mayor, had control over city hall, had control over the cops. They also had their own private militias.

Remember the Pinkertons, who are often portrayed as private detectives. The Pinkertons were a mercenary mob. They were essentially guns for hire to be used against striking workers, and they would just come in and slaughter workers.

So the Knights of Labor were subjected to this in a way that the AFL just wasn’t, and they never recovered.

Now, in the 1910s and ’20s, you could have had a socialist party in a prime position. But ironically, after 1910, the Socialist Party also went into terminal decline. Partly it was because of its opposition to World War I. And while it was heroic in many ways, that opposition set them up as anti-American in the public image and they never came back from that.

And by the 1920s, they became a very sectarian party. And while they had some success in local government — Victor Berger in Milwaukee, George Lunn in Schenectady, socialists in Reading, Pennsylvania — the national party was often indifferent or hostile to these efforts because it saw them as insufficiently revolutionary.

American Socialism, Communism, and the CIO

Melissa Naschek

Can you discuss the roles of both the socialist and communist movements in American politics at this time?

I think it’s important to underscore here, in current politics, if you call yourself a socialist as opposed to a communist, it’s often just a way of signaling how radical you are. But in this time period, to call yourself a socialist or a communist had very heavy political implications about what parties you were affiliated with and what you were advocating for.

Vivek Chibber

At a very high level of generality, the Socialist Party can be characterized as ideologically very committed but fairly sectarian, and as having much weaker connections to the American labor movement than socialist parties in Europe had to their labor movements. And these characteristics tend to be mutually reinforcing.

Labor movements have a way of disciplining political parties and calming them down because unions are very practical institutions. They are charged with governing and overseeing the lives of millions of workers. They can’t engage in empty sloganeering and ultraleftism the way a party that’s a collection of small intellectuals might be able to do.

And very early on, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, you saw European socialists and party members remarking that the Socialist Party in the United States was kind of strange. It was very shrill, very sectarian, very absolutist, very puritanical. And it’s true, they were.

One reason they were was that that nascent partnership with the Knights of Labor was destroyed early on, and they never were able to reinitiate contact with any other mass labor movements. There was the AFL, but Gompers hated them, and Eugene Debs hated Gompers. It was mutual. But the key thing is that the Socialist Party was hostile to them.

Melissa Naschek

I think your comments about how labor movements approach politics differently are important. And while I wish that the Left today were a bit more grounded in reality and in the labor movement, on the flip side, I think it’s important for the labor movement to have a relationship with socialists because socialists bring a different perspective to class war, which is essentially what unions are engaged in.

Vivek Chibber

That’s exactly right. A union without a political perspective can just kind of put its head down and do what its essential function is, which is to negotiate for a better price — the price being the price of wage labor. And that’s easy to do.

If you want to have a more ambitious class-wide strategy of taking on employers, that takes ideological commitment because it involves a much more ambitious agenda and much greater sacrifices, for which you need to be committed ideologically in order to come up with what that strategy will be, and how you’ll get members to commit to it.

So, as I said, the Socialist Party became much more sectarian and distant from the labor movement. But in the 1930s, membership in the Communist Party USA grew enormously. The Communist Party began growing in the late 1920s but really took off during what’s called the Popular Front era. And importantly, this was the moment at which communists, socialists — the Marxian left broadly — actually became embedded in the labor movement. It occurred primarily through the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which is an industrial union federation unlike the AFL, which was composed of craft unions.

It’s through the CIO that you get the Communist Party embedding itself in the working class. And it’s huge. It could have really had a very, very direct impact. But here again, because of its connection to the Communist International (or Comintern) and the Soviet Union, it entered a predicament after 1941, when the Soviet Union entered the war, where everything became subordinated to defending the Soviet Union and keeping employers happy so they would keep the war effort going. And during that wartime period, employers unleashed a wave of very demanding conditions on workers. And the Communist Party was torn because of this.

Melissa Naschek

So when this deeper connection between the Left and the labor movement was established, why wasn’t it leveraged to create an independent political party?

Vivek Chibber

There was talk about it. And, interestingly, within both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, there was some talk that maybe this was the time to strike out and form a party of our own. Because, of course, in the United States, there were two bourgeois parties and no labor party. And they were in a moment when it looked like the working class was up, mobilizing, and organizing. And this seemed like the moment to establish a proper labor party. The communists and socialists would have had some grounds for saying, “We need another party, and we’ll transplant or push aside one of these parties.”

Melissa Naschek

Right, that would have mirrored the exclusion that you talked about in Europe.

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. The problem was that the Democratic Party, at this very moment, seemed to be fighting for workers.

Melissa Naschek

Say more about why that was a problem.

Vivek Chibber

It was a problem because Roosevelt actually ended up being very friendly to unions and willing to take on the employers. So you see this debate occurring within the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. The Communist Party basically says, “We cannot at this moment go up against Roosevelt because we will lose.”

Norman Thomas, the leader of the Socialist Party, actually says, “No, I think we should run against Roosevelt.” And he does so in 1932 and 1936, and gets clobbered each time. And after each one of his presidential campaigns, the Socialist Party membership hemorrhages. Not only did party membership hemorrhage, but the leaders of unions with links to it opposed Thomas and the Socialist Party’s strategy and eventually left the party.

So the problem was kind of an incarnation of the early democratization problem you had in the nineteenth century. Early democratization meant that workers had other avenues for advancing their interests. What happens now is that the Democratic Party suddenly opens itself up to unions and to the Left. And the Left was faced with a choice: Do we urge workers to reject the very party that seems to be fighting for them and form a new party? Or do we enter that party and try to take advantage of whatever we can get inside it?

Those people who were in favor of urging workers to form a new party actually tried it, and they got clobbered; they lost.

Get Jacobin in print

The Barren Marriage

Melissa Naschek

We’ve established some of the historic reasons why American social democracy is so much weaker than European social democracy. But now we’re talking about how one of the parties, the Democratic Party, actually embraced an alliance with workers. Why did they do that, and what did that concretely look like?

Vivek Chibber

They did it for two reasons. One is that, in the parts of the country where the workers were really being mobilized, which were the eastern seaboard and the Midwest, they didn’t have much of a choice. The union movement was growing so fast and so strong that Democratic political leaders had to give them something, or they would be displaced. That’s why they did it.

Now the question is, to what extent did they do it? It was very limited. And the reason for that is, remember I’d said, you really have two economies inside one nation state. There’s the South and there’s the North.

In the North, you get some kind of opening, and it happens through historical accident. Roosevelt happened to be somebody who learned, who grew with this. And I really think that if you had looked at him in, say, 1928, you would have never guessed that this guy would end up being a beacon for American welfare state advancement.

Melissa Naschek

Yeah, even his 1932 campaign was not that aggressive.

Vivek Chibber

That’s right. It was not. It is just true that he learned. He grew, and he was open to it. And because he had that class confidence that comes from being a blue blood, he hated the fact that these capitalists and these bankers would stand up to him because he was like, “Who are you to stand in my way?”

Melissa Naschek

Well, I think the other thing is that Roosevelt wanted a strategy for handling the Great Depression that would have the state play an active role in fixing the economy. And every time he tried to implement something that was in some way telling capitalists what to do, they pushed back.

Vivek Chibber

Well, every time it entailed giving something to workers. It’s important to remember that the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the first response to the Great Depression, was a regulatory response, and capitalists are perfectly happy with more regulations as long as they can control the regulations. It’s when Roosevelt shifted to the left that they really started taking those regulations on.

That’s a positive element. Then there’s the fact that half the party, the real stronghold of the party, was located in the South, and Southern Democrats were uniformly reactionary. They hated the labor movement. They hated the communists, they hated the Left, and Roosevelt could not get around them. This is another reason why the welfare state remains weak.

So there are two basic reasons why American social democracy remained weak during the New Deal period. One is that there was no labor party as a vehicle for the working class to maximize its economic leverage. Instead, workers had to rely on a bourgeois party. That’s the Democrats. That party happened to be somewhat open at the time because of Roosevelt, but it’s still a bourgeois party.

And then, in that party, there was a fundamentally reactionary element. It’s like the Junkers inside Prussia in the early twentieth century. It’s these Southern planters and the representatives of those planters, and they are basically outright antidemocratic. I don’t want to call them fascists, but they’re antidemocratic oligarchs. They opposed the New Deal, and they held senior positions within the party that allowed them to block much of the legislation.

So when you put these two things together, this is why not having a labor party in the United States really hurts. Not only are the Democrats a bourgeois party, they are a bourgeois party with a significant chunk that is not just bourgeois, but antidemocratic, agrarian, oligarchic, and which has a fundamental interest in pushing back all the New Deal legislation.

So workers were having to fight not twice as hard, but three times as hard. They had to fight to drag a bourgeois party toward welfare state legislation. And within that party were people who didn’t want to see any kind of union legislation at all, which were the Southern Democrats. And this ended up holding back whatever leverage they might have had.

Now, how much leverage might they have had? Well, there’s the fact that even at their peak, American labor never came anywhere near what the European labor movements were able to get to in terms of union density and in terms of real presence within the economy.

So you have a working-class movement that’s structurally weaker and smaller than in Europe, in a political system where they don’t have a party of their own, and where the party that is friendly to them has one wing that is not just hostile but would like to destroy that labor movement. When you think about it that way, it’s pretty impressive that they were able to get anything at all.

Melissa Naschek

So what are the long-term implications of all of this?

Vivek Chibber

First of all, the United States did acquire a welfare state, and it was a huge leap forward for the ordinary lives of American workers of all races, ethnicities, and genders. But even though it was a huge leap forward, it remained both weaker than the Europeans and on precarious footing because, ultimately, all social democracies rest on the organized power of labor. And as labor gets weaker — everywhere you’ve seen this happen — as labor gets weaker, the welfare state shrinks.

So even at its peak, the American welfare state rested on a precarious footing. But the influence of the South was the real kicker because, after 1945, you see European social democracies growing. I said in a previous episode that because European capitalists were flat on their back and because the Left had its prestige and its organizational level enhanced, social democracy was successfully pushed forward.

In the United States, the end of the war marks the point at which you see a retreat in the labor movement. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, which undid a lot of the benefits the Wagner Act had provided. But on top of that, the union movement starts to shrink within a decade. It doesn’t grow, it shrinks. Why? It’s because the South was never organized.

And because the South was never organized by the unions, it was a union-free zone. And as early as the 1950s, you see capitalists from the Midwest and the eastern seaboard start to migrate to the South to get out of these union shops. And because of that, a weak union movement became weaker and weaker as they started hemorrhaging jobs that went to the South in these union-free zones.

Melissa Naschek

When you say the US labor movement didn’t organize the South, was it because they didn’t try, or because conditions were so hostile there?

Vivek Chibber

It was definitely both. Now, conditions are hostile everywhere all the time, but there’s a difference in the gradient of hostility depending on the kind of industry you’re dealing with and the kind of profit horizons that they have.

In the South, most industries were very labor-intensive. That means the wage bill is very high as a proportion of the total cost structure. And they were also not on the cutting edge of global technology. They were somewhat technologically backward. This meant their profit margins were quite low. So for them, a fight over unionization would be a fight to the death. Contrast this with the North, where by the 1930s, the economy was made up of the most productive firms in the world, quite large, very capital-intensive. And even though they hated unions, at the end of the day, they could live with them. Among Southern capitalists, they had the view that if their shops were unionized, they’re just going to go under. And for many of those firms in the textile and mining industries, that would have been true.

Now that said, it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have organized them. It just meant more resources. George Meany, who was the head of the AFL-CIO, came out and basically said, “I’m not going to organize the South.” It’s true he put some effort into it, but you could view effort in two ways: It’s a token effort where they’re doing it for the sake of doing it, or they’re doing it in a way that they’ll actually win. And the way you make that judgment is, given that employer hostility would have been so much greater, given that workers’ racism was so much greater, you know that you’re going to have to pour a lot of resources into it. They poured some, but I think they knew that it wouldn’t be enough.

The way I would put the situation is this: The landscape was much more hostile, and had the labor movement had the commitment, it would have had to pour huge resources into doing so. But by not putting those resources into it, they signed their own death warrant. And I think they knew that.

And one reason that they didn’t do it was that by 1945, you’ve already seen a retreat of the Left within the CIO. And Meany represented the more conservative forces within it. Had the communists and more radical elements been able to wield sufficient influence in the CIO, they would have, in my view, committed those resources because everybody knew what was at stake. When Meany said, “I’m not going to organize the South,” he was issuing a prayer: “Maybe things will work out for us.”

Melissa Naschek

Right. And when you look at statements from communists at that time, so many of them emphasized how important it was to organize black workers, that this was a huge division in the American workforce that was being used against the labor movement.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. And we often think that McCarthyism was the moment when the Left is pushed out of the labor movement. But in fact, in the late 1930s and through the 1940s, the right wing of the labor movement was already allying with the Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations to push back the communists and the radical elements in the CIO. And those were the most committed anti-racist elements, and also the ones who would have put all the effort into going into the South.

So, not organizing the South was a result of a political battle within the unions. And it essentially gave the employer class a gift in these union-free zones. The long-term implication, therefore, was that Americans got a social democracy, but its foundations were not only weak to begin with but grew weaker and weaker.

And the two parties, which are bourgeois parties, were so much more easily captured by capital than in Europe, because one of them was never friendly to labor — which is the Republicans — and the other one, the Democrats, which was friendly to labor for some time, became friendly in a very grudging fashion. And by the mid- to late 1970s, as union density declined, as unions became more conservative, the Democratic Party was ripe to move to the right much faster and with much more consistency than the Europeans did.

So the United States was late coming to social democracy, and it was early exiting from social democracy into neoliberalism.

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Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University. He is the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

Melissa Naschek is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not — if we look into the future — the permanent problem of the human race . . .

— John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” 1930

The short run had never looked as bleak to Keynes as it did in 1930: “a slump which will take its place in history amongst the most acute ever experienced.” In Britain, the twenties had not so much roared as spluttered. But when Keynes visited Madrid to give a lecture, he chose to adapt one he had been trotting out to students for more than two years, attacking both revolutionary and reactionary doomsayers. Pessimism had made people “blind to what is going on under the surface.”

In the long run we are all dead, but not all at the same time. Keynes’s message was simple: extrapolate conservatively the economic growth rate of the modern age so far, and imagine the wonders one hundred years hence: 2030. His audience would not live to see it, but many of their grandchildren would. The great-grandchildren, born in the last quarter of the twentieth century, would climb a stairway to heaven and bask in unknown pleasures from middle age. The generation after that would be born into paradise.

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In the best traditions of science fiction, the author fudged the precise workings of the technology behind the wonders. Keynes evidently had little growth theory to draw on: he talks in monetary terms of the wonders of compound interest. Investments simply grow at around 2 percent a year — ask not why. Technology improves, for an improvement in “technical efficiency” of 1 percent a year. Making generous room for more of the “disastrous mistakes” that had brought forth the depression, he predicted that living standards would “in the progressive countries” be four to eight times higher a century on. There would be a phase of “technological unemployment” as labor productivity outpaced the finding of new uses for labor, but ultimately we would work out how to spread the dividends so that everyone worked an average of three hours a day.

Science fiction tends to be at once too radical and too conservative in its visions of the future. We don’t have jetpacks, a moonbase, robot butlers, or a mission to Mars, but we do have the internet. Judged against the data available in 2012, Keynes was on track in his numerical guesses. According to the long-run data assembled by the late Angus Maddison, per capita real income in the United Kingdom was in 2008 4.4 times that of 1930. Extrapolating that average 1.9 percent annual growth rate forward to 2030, and Keynes’s great-grandchildren (not literal ones; he had no kids) would have on average 6.6 times the real income of his contemporaries in 1930. On the same extrapolation, the United States would be right at the upper bound of Keynes’s estimate, having grown on average 0.2 percentage points faster per year: 5 times the real income of 1930 in 2008 and 7.9 times by 2030. (It works out to 7.6 times if we extrapolate from the slower average growth rate since 1970.) Extending the arithmetic to all the countries Keynes considered “progressive” — Western Europe and the Anglo colonies (Japan was still a long way behind in 1930 and Latin America a mixed bag) — we find real per capita income 5.5 times that of 1930, implying a 9-fold increase by 2030 if that historical growth rate continued. Maddison’s figures give us estimates in the same ballpark for the world as a whole, but extrapolating from the different 1950–2000 data in the Penn World Table, Fabrizio Zilibotti finds a more astonishing 17-fold rise, due to a few extra tenths of a percentage point in annual growth.

And yet, could “the economic problem” seem any less solved? Where is our fifteen-hour workweek? Had Keynes been right about how society would use its productivity growth, we would not find his predictions borne out in the per capita income statistics — these measure only the production of commodities. It can be argued that we have taken some of the dividend in leisure at the end of our individual long runs: by the early 2010s, life expectancy had risen while retirement ages had fallen since 1930: the average American male enjoyed an extra thirteen golden years. But even including this, the average European worked almost double the proportion of their lifetime waking hours that Keynes predicted, and Americans two-and-a-half times. People everywhere were being told to lower their expectations and buckle down to years of austerity.

Keynes represents the strange intersection of two traditions. On the one hand, he is an heir to a Victorian stream of aesthetic, moralistic anti-capitalism — with roots in an aristocratic worldview whose genealogy has been traced by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society. He is contemptuous of the “strenuous purposeful money-makers,” suffering from “a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.” He looks forward to a

[ . . . ] return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue — that avarice is a vice, that the exactions of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow.

On the other hand, Keynes belongs to a tradition of technocratic liberalism, which he played no small part in modernizing himself. Here, the economic order is justified not on the grounds of private property and tradition, but on utilitarian ones. It is a system that works, and to the extent it doesn’t work, experts need to tune up the machine, ignoring the misguided short-term self-interest of labor and capital. Thus the speed at which the economic problem is solved depends on “our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science.”

This combination of attitudes explains how Keynes can be seen as both conservative and radical. “Economic Possibilities” is not the only work in which Keynes seems to wax socialist. There is, for instance, the “euthanasia of the rentier” passage at the end of the General Theory in which he looks forward to the end of capital incomes and the “functionless investor” who earns them. There too, he stresses that the transition “will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.” Actually existing socialists, and sometimes the working class itself, disgusted him. In 1925 he asked, “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?” He never had much interest in distribution or inequality, except insofar as they were of functional importance to the system: how much would the poor spend out of increments to their income relative to the rich?

The second, liberal technocratic side to Keynes remains a vigorous strain in economic thought, but the aristocratic anticapitalism has been bred out. For the modern neoclassical it is obvious why Keynes’s predictions went astray — he was simply wrong about preferences.

He projected the ethic of Bloomsbury or the Cambridge Apostles onto the public at large. In the future, everyone would be an aesthete: everyone will learn from “those people who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life,” those people most “able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.” Keynes believed that people had “absolute needs” which could be sated, and could be morally improved to stop caring so much about “relative needs,” which are only enjoyed to the extent that we have more than others. As the marginal utility of commodities fell, people would react to the income effect of productivity gains by steadily expressing a preference for more leisure.

Wrong on all counts, says the neoclassical: our indifference curves are evidently not shaped in that way. People have taken their income gains mainly in commodities. For every satiable desire, new desires have arisen, and leisure is too costly in terms of these new needs. We could have done otherwise. Nothing prevents us from working a few hours a week and enjoying all the middle-class comforts 1930 had to offer. It is an affordable option by the very definition of “real income,” but we choose not to take it.

This is the baseline argument in a 2008 book of essays by eminent economists looking back on Keynes’s 1930 predictions. Around the baseline, a range of respectable opinion offers variations around it. Some contributions are interesting mainly as examples of Keynes’s continuing ability to provoke frothing at the mouth among the Right. Edmund Phelps’s essay seems to have been ghostwritten by a pompous secretary of the chamber of commerce in a mid-sized town, scattering names from Aristotle to Cellini to Cervantes to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, giving his sections titles like “Keynes Disdainful of the Quest for Wealth” and “Keynes Blind to the Intellectual Satisfactions in Business Life.” Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine are gracious enough to allow that Keynes was “perhaps not a fool . . . perhaps, indeed, he was brilliant, possibly so much so that he never had to bother with logical consistency and facts.” He was, “we are told” a “giant of economics,” and standing on his shoulders they at least “learned something about how not to theorize about human needs and their determinants.” If this is your kind of thing, you are in luck: technical progress delivered an infinitely elastic supply curve when it gave us the conservative blogosphere.

People may complain about their First World problems, but this shows only a lack of perspective on their part, or an expressed preference for bitching. As Benjamin Friedman points out toward the end of the collection, this way of thinking has a very long history: Adam Smith, in The Moral Sentiments, wrote that “all men, sooner or later, accommodate themselves to whatever becomes their permanent situation.” Alfred Marshall, more than a century later, remarked that “after a time, new riches often lose a part of their charm.”

With standard neoclassical choice theory it is easy to show that people are materially better off than they were a year ago if they could still afford everything they bought back then, and then some — and it is not much of a stretch to put a value on the “then some,” because market prices do it for us. If you can do it from one year to the next, it seems no problem to string the gains together across any number of years. Extend the chain long enough, and it seems you can quantify objectively how much better off the average person is today than the average person in 1930. You might argue that real income as a whole comes with diminishing returns of satisfaction — surely we are not really five times better off. But if that were so, would people not be moving along their indifference curves to enjoy more leisure? Evidently free time is not much more valued relative to the commodities that can be bought with a wage than it was in 1930.

Once you start to think about the trend to ever higher living standards, Chicago economist Robert Lucas once said, “It is hard to think about anything else” — anything trivial like stabilization or distribution. If the pie grows fast enough, even the people with the least will see their pieces expand faster than they could hope from a bigger share. Who cares about inequality in the rich world when just about everyone is better off than the upper classes of a hundred years ago and much better off than their contemporaries in poorer countries?

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Socialists would surely agree with Keynes that while there is no cure for the human condition, the economic problem can indeed be solved. We would disagree that the solution will emerge smoothly and naturally out of capitalism. Jacobin writers have repeatedly made the case that both equality and liberation from toil should be at the center of the socialist program. But how do we respond to the optimistic and pessimistic liberal positions?

The tendency of capitalism to awaken new wants even as it satisfies old ones has been discussed by Marxists since Marx himself. But rarely have we taken neoclassical choice theory seriously enough to dispute its implications. One exception is G. A. Cohen, deep in his Karl Marx’s Theory of History. He draws a distinction between the pursuit schedule — the standard neoclassical demand schedule, which reveals itself in actual market behavior — and the satisfaction schedule, which orders bundles of goods (including leisure) in terms of the satisfaction the individual would actually get from them — which may be unknown to the individual. What individuals demand is not necessarily best for the individuals.

Neoclassical demand theory abandoned reliance on concepts of “utility” for some good reasons — the impossibility of observing it, measuring it, or even saying clearly what it is. It was replaced by a conception of ordinal preferences: we can talk of what someone prefers to something else but not by how much they prefer it. Cohen’s suggestion looks like a throwback, and one with the unpleasant connotation that the researcher knows better than the individual about what’s good for them. However, the purported measurement of satisfaction had already been smuggled in the back door with the treatment of rising living standards in terms of real income per capita. The relative amounts of money individuals prove themselves willing to pay for each good implicitly becomes a measure of satisfaction. The rigorous neoclassical must admit that choice theory provides the grounds for no such move. All it can say is that in any given period, assuming rationality, everybody chooses the available bundle of goods and leisure which they most prefer.

The theory deliberately says nothing about the motivations for such choices. In practice, people express their preferences for certain things over others not necessarily because they bring more pleasure, but also perhaps out of habit, impulse or to avoid dissatisfaction. The other side of the Cohen argument is to emphasize that these reasons do not originate from some mysterious well deep in each individual’s soul, but arise in a social context which has formed the person’s norms. How the other people around us live affects our expectations for our own lives. It is difficult to resist the pull of norms around us, because we feel not only the satisfactions of the things we have but the lack of the things we could have. To live with the 1930 commodity bundle today is not to get 1930 satisfactions, but to feel a lack of everything we have come to expect since then — a lack which the extra leisure will not make up for. So hardly anyone chooses to do it.

Finally, capitalism is structured with an extremely strong bias to redeploying productivity gains towards output expansion. The other possibility, increasing free time, “threatens a sacrifice of profit associated with increased output and sales, and hence a loss of competitive strength.” It is no iron law. Differences between Europe and the United States make clear that social norms over vacations and working hours can diverge. But there is certainly a strong tendency towards productivism, which has nothing to do with individual preferences. It is imposed on individual firms by competition and on national policy by macroeconomic considerations: witness the pressure in the early 2010s on France’s thirty-five-hour working week, or the drive in Australia at that time to increase labor force participation, tapping hidden reserves of labor-power among mothers of young children, would-be retirees, and the disabled.

As my colleague Peter Frase has argued, drawing on the work of labor economist Lonnie Golden, many workers report a preference to be working fewer hours than they do, but the jobs on offer make it difficult to do without sacrificing income more than proportionately. A gigantic marketing effort aims to intensify feelings of want for commodities, while there are no ads for time off.

Cohen’s distinction between the pursuit schedule and the satisfaction schedule implies a possible gap between what we choose, given our social and historical positions, and what we would ultimately enjoy most. But it hardly entails a paternalistic imposition of new choices: he is simply urging a persuasive effort. It differs from the moralistic “over-consumption” argument in not blaming the individual, by recognizing that the shift will be a collective one or it will not happen at all.

Finally, what of the argument that rising living standards make inequality irrelevant? It follows from the above that inequality is directly relevant, because people’s conceptions of how they could and should live are influenced by the lifestyles of those around them — the standards of the wealthy filter down to the rest of us. But even if you believe that argument to be bogus, and that living standards arise objectively from goods consumed regardless of context, inequality matters a great deal.

The quantification of growth simply in terms of “real income” misleads by giving the impression of a homogeneous mass of stuff spewed out by the black box of the economy. Ultimately, income is a claim on the produce of our collective labor and on the natural resources we appropriate. Ever increasing abundance — even if it were ecologically sustainable, and even if it did bring ever-rising satisfaction — is no answer to inequality. Why shouldn’t people have their share of what they help to produce?

Further, because it depends on augmenting the efficiency of labor and capital inputs, technical progress is quite uneven in what it cheapens relative to the average wage. Some labor processes are much more susceptible to productivity increases than others. Economic development has meant large changes in relative prices as well as a general rise in real incomes. It is unlikely, for example, that the average person will ever be able to recreate Keynes’s own lifestyle of the 1920s, no matter how high real incomes grow. The reason is simply that it involved several large houses in central London, fully staffed with servants. The affordability of servants depends entirely on the ratio between their wage and their employer’s income. The value of large houses in Bloomsbury tends to rise with incomes: all the productivity improvement in the world will not cheapen them, but make them dearer.

More seriously, in early-2010s America, where middle and lower-class real incomes had stagnated, households had enjoyed not simply a boring but at least comfortably stable basket of commodities. As Larry Summers fretted in the Financial Times in January 2012, thinking simply in terms of real income misses the impact of major relative price changes:

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Measured via items such as appliances or clothing or telephone services, where productivity growth has been rapid, wages have actually risen rapidly over the last generation. The problem is that they have stagnated or fallen measured relative to the price of food, housing, healthcare, energy, and education.

To the extent that people care more about the cost of food, housing and healthcare than appliances and clothing, this is bad news. And the trend is likely to continue, because as manufactures become ever cheaper, demand shifts into areas where productivity growth is much slower. The technological cavalry is becoming weaker. This mattered even in early-2010s Australia, where the real wage had been growing: the cost of food, housing, utilities, petrol, healthcare and education had grown faster.

Thanks to the income effect of the cheapening of other goods, households had not on average had to cut back on necessities, but it was a close-run thing. Many households had reacted by supplying more labor. It is hardly surprising many Australians didn’t feel as well-off as the commentariat said they should.

Keynes’s utopian vision of the future was also a call for restraint in the present. It was a call for moderation and patience addressed to a generation tempted by radical challenges to capitalism:

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

We can now see how this works out. The same message could be given to us today. William Baumol, in his essay in the 2008 retrospective, pretty much does so: “I can now ask the audience to suppose that real US income will once again increase sevenfold in the next century. Can you imagine what luxuries average-earning Americans will have at their disposal?” Will we then say the economic problem is solved? More likely, it is not a problem that will solve itself.

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Mike Beggs is an editor at Jacobin and a lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney.

The Greek political thinker Nicos Poulantzas was one of those Marxists who attempted to think about fascism as a challenge that was both theoretical and strategic. His writings on fascism were not motivated simply by theoretical considerations but also by urgent political exigencies. He sought not only to describe what led to fascism but also to distinguish fascism from other forms of “exceptional state.”

Poulantzas rejected the liberal approach that presented fascism as an anomaly in the history of capitalism that told us nothing about the system in general. Yet he also challenged the economic determinism of those Marxists who depicted fascist regimes as a necessary function of capitalist development during the interwar period. According to Poulantzas, the potential for fascism existed within capitalist states, but the realization of that potential depended on the outcome of class struggles.

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With the rise of far-right political movements in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, the question of whether those movements will repeat the experience of interwar fascism, in whole or in part, is being widely debated. Poulantzas can be an important reference point for such debates. His warning that capitalist democracies were shifting toward a kind of “authoritarian statism” that would preserve the forms of liberal-democratic rule while trampling upon civil liberties now seems especially prescient in the light of contemporary trends.

The Coup in Greece

The experience of the 1967–1974 military dictatorship in Greece was especially important for Poulantzas’s turn toward the question of fascism. The dictatorship was a watershed moment for the Greek political system and the Greek left — in particular the communist movement. It represented the limits of the anti-communist state that took shape after the monarchist victory in the Greek Civil War of the late 1940s.

That state combined some formal elements of parliamentarism with the criminal penalization of communist political activity and the existence of a “parallel constitution” of authoritarian measures and power centers inside the state, such as the army and the monarchy. After a period of intense social struggles and political crises, the army took over as the “party of the state” after a coup that had backing from at least some elements of the US state and its agencies.

At the same time, the dictatorship was a moment of strategic crisis for the Left. The left parties were not really prepared for it — something that led to mass arrests — and it brought the conflicts inside the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to a head, acting as the catalyst for a split in the party in 1968. But there were other considerations for Poulantzas as well.

In certain segments of the post-1968 revolutionary left in France, such as the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne, there was a tendency to depict Gaullism as a form of fascism, something with which Poulantzas disagreed. Poulantzas wished to distinguish his position from those who extended the “fascist” characterization to forms of authoritarian rule that were in truth different from fascism.

At the same time, he wanted to examine how fascist and more generally “exceptional” state forms could emerge in conjunctures of political crisis or even a crisis of the state. This stood in contrast to the tendency, obvious in many mainstream readings of fascism, to view it simply as a kind of political “pathology” or “anomaly,” instead of treating it as something that is a latent possibility in capitalist social formations.

In a text that appeared in Greek in 1967, in the journal of the Union of Greek Students in Paris, Poulantzas insisted that the 1967 coup was not fascist, since one could not identify the “popular base” that was associated with classical fascism. Nor was it “Bonapartist,” since one could not see in the Greece of the late 1960s the catastrophic equilibrium that might lead to Bonapartism, following the analysis of nineteenth-century French politics developed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Rather, it was for Poulantzas a coup that corresponded to the international strategy of US imperialism. This was in a conjuncture marked by a serious escalation of popular struggles — which did not reach a point of equilibrium with the bourgeoisie — but also by divisions inside the dominant classes. The fact that parts of the state such as the Greek army had gained a relative autonomy was another symptom of this.

Poulantzas concluded that, since the army takeover in 1967 was not a fascist coup and lacked a popular base, the Left should boycott any attempt by the new regime to create mass organizations:

According to [Georgi] Dimitrov’s report, for instance, such organizations must be used — as was the case in Germany and Italy — for a revolutionary should be wherever the masses are. And Dimitrov pours endless ridicule on the “revolutionaries” who pose the question at the level of individual “honesty.” On the other hand, if, as I believe is the case, we are not dealing with a fascist coup, and certainly not with a stabilized one, then the line must be the absolute boycotting of the organizations that the regime might create to attract the masses, so that its isolation be maintained.

This was in contrast with Francoist Spain, where the underground left parties infiltrated the official state trade union that the regime had set up.

Fascism and Dictatorship

Poulantzas’s main theoretical confrontation with these issues was the book Fascism and Dictatorship, which first appeared in French in 1970, two years after his celebrated work Political Power and Social Classes. It continued the attempt to develop a coherent theorization of fascism and distinguish it from other forms of exceptional state while also returning to questions of revolutionary strategy in the aftermath of May 1968.

For Poulantzas, fascism was “one of the possible conjunctures” of the imperialist stage of capitalism. He theorized imperialism as a “stage in capitalist development as a whole” that was “not simply or solely an economic phenomenon; in other words, it is not determined by events in the economic domain alone, nor can it be located within it.” Poulantzas opposed this perspective to the economism of the Third International.

One feature of this stage in particular, apart from its economic modifications, was that it assigned a new role to the capitalist state, “giving it new functions and an extended field of intervention, and also a new level of effectiveness.” Poulantzas connected this to an accumulation of contradictions within the imperialist chain during the interwar period: “Although the revolution was made in the weakest link in the chain (Russia), fascism arose in the next two links, i.e., those which were, relatively speaking, the weakest in Europe at the time.”

Poulantzas insisted that fascism could only be explained “by reference to the concrete situation of the class struggle, as it cannot be reduced to any inevitable need of the ‘economic’ development of capitalism.” He rejected what he called the “economist catastrophism” of the Third International and believed that this faulty paradigm could explain many of the European communist movement’s strategic failings regarding fascism.

Poulantzas argued that it was both analytically and politically disastrous to portray fascism as a phenomenon that would bring revolution closer since it was an expression of capitalism’s catastrophic economic crisis. In Fascism and Dictatorship, he attempted to develop a theory that would treat fascism as “a form of State and of regime at the extreme ‘limit’ of the capitalist State.” This meant that it was neither a “pathology” of the bourgeois state nor an inevitable development of it but depended upon particular conjunctures that were determined by the outcome of class struggles.

Poulantzas stressed the importance of the analyses of fascism developed by communist thinkers such as August Thalheimer, Antonio Gramsci, and Leon Trotsky. At the same time, however, he criticized some of their arguments. For example, he thought that the notion of catastrophic equilibrium that Thalheimer and Gramsci had used, drawing upon Marx’s interpretation of Bonapartism, was not applicable in cases where the working class had already been defeated. He also believed that Trotsky had been wrong to perceive an imminent fascist danger in France during the 1930s.

Elements of Fascism

According to Poulantzas, the key elements for the emergence of fascism were as follows. First of all, there was a process of “deepening and sharpening of the internal contradictions between the dominant classes and class fractions.” Second, there was a crisis of hegemony, in the sense that “no dominant class or class fraction seems able to impose its ‘leadership’ on the other classes and fractions of the power bloc, whether by its own methods of political organization or through the ‘parliamentary democratic’ State.”

In this context, one could observe the “hegemony of a new class fraction within the power bloc: that of finance capital, or big monopoly capital,” as well as a crisis of party representation and of the dominant ideology. An “offensive strategy on the part of the bourgeoisie” coincided with a “defensive step by the working class.”

While setting out these elements, Poulantzas wanted to avoid any narrowly “instrumentalist” conception of fascism. He insisted that during and after their rise to power, fascist parties and states typically possessed a “relative autonomy” from both the wider power bloc and the specific fractions of big monopoly capital whose hegemony they had established.

Poulantzas was very critical of certain aspects of the analysis of fascism developed by the Third International. This included the formulations put forward by the Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, where he described fascism as the dictatorship of “the most reactionary, chauvinist and imperialist elements of finance capital.”

For Poulantzas, this was an unduly narrow summary of the economic interests that the fascist state represented. It also opened the way for a strategy of alliances that might include all fractions of capital with the exception of those Dimitrov had identified. Although fascism represented a new relationship of forces within the dominant classes, he believed, this did not mean that it exclusively represented the interests of finance capital.

In contrast to the rhetoric of the Third International, Poulantzas insisted that important defeats of the working classes and an ideological crisis of the working-class movement and its organizations were important aspects to the rise of fascism. He also stressed the inadequacy of the concept of “social fascism,” which presented social democracy and fascism as twin, potentially cooperative forces and underestimated the fact that fascist parties had developed a social basis of their own.

In addition, he addressed the particular attachment of petty-bourgeois strata to fascist parties. Poulantzas argued that in a period of economic and political crisis, certain elements of the ideology of fascist parties offered an outlet to these strata, such as “statolatry,” nationalism, elitism, racism, and militarism.

Poulantzas offered a very detailed analysis of fascism in power as an interventionist “exceptional state” that helped overcome an ideological crisis and expanded the scope of state intervention beyond the limits set by law. While the single-party system did not eliminate the contradictions between different fractions of the dominant classes, he insisted, it did offer

forms of “direct representation” typical of situations where the power bloc is politically disorganized, where political parties are cut out by the direct “organizer” role of the other State apparatuses, and where the masses are characteristically subject to the dominant ideology.

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The suspension of competitive, multiparty elections did not mean the suspension of legitimacy as such, Poulantzas believed. Fascist parties in power constantly invoked some form of “popular sovereignty” and engaged in regular mobilization of the masses.

Organic Crises

Fascism and Dictatorship was an important contribution to the debate. It certainly had its shortcomings, such as the author’s tendency to think that strategies articulated within state apparatuses were determined mainly by the relationship of forces within and between the dominant class fractions. This ran against his own insistence on the relative autonomy of the state. Poulantzas also underestimated the extent to which fascism was based on a form of mass politics.

Nonetheless, his analysis managed to strike an important balance. On the one hand, it treated fascism as an “organic” aspect of certain historical periods, linked to the transformation of accumulation regimes and state apparatuses alike. On the other hand, it stressed its contingent features, reflecting the conjunctural dynamics of class struggle in one country or another. In this way, Poulantzas underlined the potential for fascism to emerge while showing that not every form of state authoritarianism was fascist.

The same desire to avoid presenting all “exceptional states” as fascist was obvious in 1975’s The Crisis of the Dictatorships. This was a more “interventionist” book than his other works, written in an attempt to analyze the demise of right-wing authoritarian regimes in Greece, Portugal, and Spain during the mid-1970s. It included some very interesting observations about the role of US imperialism.

Poulantzas identified a “plurality of American tactics” in dealing with the regimes of Southern Europe that was “related to the contradictions of American capital itself” — contradictions that found expression within the US state:

The peculiarity of the American state is that its “external fascism,” i.e. a foreign policy that generally does not hesitate to have recourse to the worst types of genocide, is embodied by institutions which, while far from representing an ideal case of bourgeois democracy (one need only recall the situation of social and national minorities in the USA), still permit an organic representation of the various fractions of capital within the state apparatuses and the branches of the repressive apparatus. A regime of this kind, even though based on a real union sacrée of the great majority of the nation on major political objectives (and a lot could be said about this), is necessarily accompanied by constant and open contradictions within the state apparatuses.

At any given time, Poulantzas argued, Washington’s attitude could encompass “a number of possible solutions” that ranged from “various degrees of support to the more or less passive acceptance of solutions that it considers the lesser evil — up to the point of a certain break.” The different state apparatuses involved in US foreign policy could even work at cross-purposes to an extent:

The CIA, the Pentagon and military apparatus, and the State Department often adopt different tactics, as do the Administration and executive branch as a whole as opposed to Congress; this is quite apparent in the cases of Greece, Portugal, and Spain. What is more, these tactics are often pursued in parallel, giving rise to parallel networks that take no notice of each other and even combat one another.

Authoritarian Statism

In the 1970s, Poulantzas continued working on questions about the state, taking his studies in two important directions. On the one hand, Poulantzas developed a highly original, relational definition of the state, according to which the state was not an “entity” that possessed its own “intrinsic instrumental essence . . . it is itself a relation, more precisely the condensation of a class relation.”

On the other hand, he put forward a more elaborate theorization of state crisis:

This series of contradictions expresses itself at the very heart of the state (the state is a relation) and is a factor in determining the characteristics of the state crisis: accrued internal contradictions between branches and apparatuses of the state, complex displacement of dominance between apparatuses, permutations of function, accentuations of the ideological role of a given apparatus accompanying the reinforcement in the use of state violence, and so forth. These all bear witness to efforts of the state to restore a toppling class hegemony.

For Poulantzas, this was leading to an authoritarian turn “that could signify simply that a certain form of ‘democratic politics’ has come to an end in capitalism.”

Poulantzas identified a series of transformations of which this new “strong state” authoritarianism was comprised:

Prodigious concentration of power in the executive at the expense of not only “popular” parliamentary representation but also a series of networks founded on popular suffrage . . . organic confusion of three powers (executive, legislative, and judicial) and the constant encroachment on the fields of action and competence of the apparatuses or branches that correspond to them . . . accelerated pace of the state’s arbitrary policies that restrict citizens’ political liberties . . . precipitous decline of the role of bourgeois political parties and the displacement of their political-organizational functions (both from the perspective of the power bloc and from that of the dominated classes) in favour of the administration and bureaucracy of the state . . . accentuation of the use of state violence (both in the sense of physical violence and in that of “symbolic violence”) . . . creation of a vast network of new circuits of “social control” (extended police surveillance, psychological-psychoanalytic divisions, social welfare controls).

In his final work, State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas described these transformations of capitalist states as the emergence of “authoritarian statism”:

For want of a better term, I shall refer to this state form as authoritarian statism. This will perhaps indicate the general direction of change: namely, intensified state control over every sphere of socioeconomic life combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called “formal” liberties, whose reality is being discovered now that they are going overboard.

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Poulantzas was careful to distinguish this authoritarian statism from totalitarianism or fascism. This was not because he underestimated the extent of these transformations or their authoritarian character. Rather, it was because we were dealing not with some form of “exceptional state” but rather with the authoritarian mutation of the “democratic” capitalist states themselves:

The emergence of authoritarian statism cannot be identified either with a new fascist order or with a tendency toward fascism. The present-day State is neither the new form of a genuine exceptional State nor, in itself, a transitional form on the road to such a State: it rather represents the new “democratic” form of the bourgeois republic in the current phase of capitalism. . . . For the first time in the history of democratic States, the present form not only contains scattered elements of totalitarianism, but crystallizes their organic disposition in a permanent structure running parallel to the official State.

Poulantzas was concerned during this period with the authoritarian transformation of capitalist states as well as with the authoritarian or “totalitarian” character of “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet-led Eastern bloc. In a certain sense, the conception of a democratic road to socialism that he articulated in State, Power, Socialism was his way of dealing with both challenges.

Poulantzas believed that, thanks to the existence of strong social movements, it might be possible to impose profound changes within the state that condense the social relationship of forces. Through a strategy that combined the conquest of governmental power with autonomous social mobilization, one could open the way for socialist transformation. This idea of democratic socialism that would combine representative and direct forms of democracy was also his answer to the impasse of Soviet-style “actually existing socialism.”

Reading Poulantzas Today

Poulantzas has been strongly criticized for excessive optimism about the possibility of radical-democratic state transformation and for underestimating how the material dynamics inscribed in the state — precisely what he described as “authoritarian statism” — would impose their logic upon any attempt at left-wing governmentalism (as the experience of countries like France and Greece in the 1980s would show). His suicide in 1979 brought a premature end to his theoretical trajectory, leaving many open questions about the directions that his thinking might have subsequently followed.

However, Poulantzas did leave us with some invaluable insights into the transformation of capitalist states. Of particular importance was his identification of authoritarian tendencies and shifts that would become much more evident in the years to come. The authoritarian-disciplinary aspects of neoliberal states are now all too familiar to us, including the use of “anti-terrorist” legislation as a cover for repressive practices and surveillance mechanisms.

Poulantzas was also right to anticipate that the neoliberal agenda of privatization and pro-market deregulation would not involve the rolling back of the state. Instead, it would require the expansion of administrative interventions and machinery, most of which would be insulated against any form of democratic control or input from popular movements.

The proliferation of supposedly independent (and unelected) authorities and the increased power of central banks are typical examples of this. In the European context, the imposition of neoliberal policies under the auspices of European integration has meant expanding the authority of unelected European Union institutions and giving priority to European regulation over democratic decision-making processes at the national level.

The work of Poulantzas can help us to better understand the current wave of far-right political movements, which is linked not only to situations of political crisis — including the crisis of the Left in its various forms — but also to the authoritarian transformation of states, with new forms of state racism directed against migrants and refugees. In addition, and perhaps above all, his work drives home the point that we cannot separate resistance to fascism and state authoritarianism from broader anti-capitalist struggles.

Such resistance can only be effective if it is based on a bloc of the working classes with the other subaltern classes, rather than minimalist alliances limited to the simple defense of liberal democracy. After all, it is mainly the parties of the so-called constitutional arc that have orchestrated the current “postdemocratic” mutations of advanced capitalist states. Most far-right political movements have no problem declaring their full compliance with the current institutional framework of liberal democracy, including its transnational embodiments such as the EU.

This points to another important lesson that we can draw from Poulantzas. While his vision of a democratic road to socialism has been justly criticized for possible reformist readings, his assertion that “socialism can only be democratic” was not simply a question of distancing himself from the experience of the USSR and its allies. It also carries the implication that “democracy can only be socialist,” in the sense that there is no “organic” association between capitalism and democracy. The only way to achieve democracy as self-government of the subaltern is through a struggle to move beyond capitalism.

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Panagiotis Sotiris works as a journalist in Athens and teaches at the Hellenic Open University. He is a member of the Historical Materialism editorial board.

In November 2025, I joined international and Israeli activists in the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, a rural area in the South Hebron Hills. There and in other communities across the West Bank, Palestinians have responded to attacks from settlers and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) by inviting volunteers to stay in their homes, help plow their fields, and accompany them in their daily lives.

As Israeli violence in the West Bank has escalated alongside the Gaza genocide, there has been an influx of volunteers like me joining in a practice commonly known as “protective presence,” or more recently, “solidarity presence.” My time in Masafer Yatta was spent with a loose collective of Jewish activists in Palestine whose work can be found online under the moniker Kivsa Shchora, Hebrew for “black sheep.” I paid close attention as they spoke with particular venom about the most violent settlers harassing the Palestinian communities there.

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On our drive from the activist flat in At-Tuwani to the village of Az Zuweidin, where we had been called due to settler activity, an Israeli veteran of the solidarity movement told us about one notorious settler-terrorist we should be especially wary of: Shimon Atiya. In 2022, Atiya founded the illegal outpost Havat Shorashim between Az Zuweidin and the village of Umm al-Khair. In the past two years alone, he has shot a Palestinian resident in the leg, led an attack on Umm al-Khair that hospitalized six women and children, and run over a village dog with his vehicle. We stayed in Az Zuweidin for half the day watching and filming Atiya and his gang of youth shepherds construct a makeshift sheep pen from supplies stolen from a shed at the edge of the village. There was little we could do; when Magav (Israel Border Police) arrived, it was only to photograph our passports and manhandle us for filming.

The following day, Atiya was nowhere to be found in Az Zuweidin. One of his shepherds now led the gang in his place: Dror, around fifteen years old, well built but not particularly tall. It wasn’t Dror’s physicality that elicited fear whenever activists spoke about him but his eagerness for violence and the palpable joy he took in terrorizing others. He had, I was told, brutally assaulted multiple people in the past, foreign volunteers and Palestinians alike. Joining him and his fellow shepherds was a group of older, cleaner-cut young men, presumably students of Reuta Beit Midrash, a religious school in the settlement of Carmel where Dror and his fellow shepherds also live.

Violent Settler Youth

Dror, who grew up in a settlement bloc south of Jerusalem, is part of a group known as “dropout youth.” In 2023, the Israeli Civil Administration, which governs Area C of the West Bank, stated that “approximately 220 youths live cut off from formal education and family in basic field conditions, sometimes without running water and electricity.” According to activists I spoke with, many of these teens experienced abuse or behavioral challenges early in life, factors that ultimately led them to fall out of the education system in their hometowns.

These “hilltop youth,” like Dror, find support and meaning working as a dedicated vanguard of settlement expansion displacing Palestinians. Many of them live in these settlements or nearby outposts. The settlements are illegal under international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the outposts are often additionally illegal under Israeli law. Such informal residences, which are often not the homes at which they are registered, make their identities and violent activities harder to track.

For years, both Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police, and the Israel Ministry of Defense have acknowledged that dropout youth have become a problem. But under a government that brazenly proclaims its genocidal aims for a Greater Israel, their efforts to address the issue are dubious, to say the least. On June 4, 2025, Defense Minister Israel Katz appointed Colonel (res.) Avichai Tanami as the first ever civilian “project manager” charged with addressing “nationalist violence” among hilltop youth.

A former IDF intelligence commander and current West Bank settler, Tanami’s approach to the issue was, in his own words, to prevent “draconian administrative arrest warrants [against settler youth]” with a promise to lead his “national mission” with “sacred reverence.” The implication was clear: he would use his power to support violent settler youth rather than stop them.

Encouraging Hilltop Youth Outposts

Uri Blau’s September 2023 story for Shomrim, an Israeli investigative publication, revealed that the Israeli Civil Administration under Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich awarded 800,000 NIS ($258,000) of state funds intended for Palestinians in Area C to an organization by the name of Shivat Tzion L’rigvy Adamatah (The Return of Zion to the Foundation of Her Land). Rather than aiding Palestinians, the funds were granted with the express purpose of rehabilitating hilltop youth.

Despite the organization having no public-facing website, Shivat Tzion’s CEO, Yonatan Achia, was able to grow its budget to more than seventeen million NIS ($5.5 million) in 2024, including over four million NIS in Israeli state funds for activities like “volunteering in agriculture” and “Jewish studies in an informal setting.” Although Shivat Tzion refused to clearly answer questions from Shomrim, an anonymous source familiar with the organization was willing to explain that it operates among youths who are already on farms in the West Bank, “instructing them in agriculture and attempting to direct them back to their studies and enlistment in the IDF.”

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In addition to Israeli state funds, Shivat Tzion and another organization working with settler youth in the West Bank received a combined 2.5 million NIS from the Jewish National Fund (JNF) under its “Youth With a Chance” program, which provides financial support and programming for at-risk youth on a large number of farms across the West Bank.

Achia’s prolific activities, however, extend beyond Shivat Tzion. His email signature and Facebook page name him as the CEO of Artzenu, meaning “Our Land.” According to Artzenu’s website, the organization is “dedicated to bringing the pioneering spirit back to the forefront of Israeli society” and organizes over 1,280 “agricultural volunteers” and 400 “farm guards” per month across the West Bank, Galilee, and the Negev. Stranger yet, the group has achieved this success without a formal registry in Israel’s NGO system. Its domestic funding is instead channeled through Shivat Tzion.

Artzenu’s website claims dropout youth “have found a safe haven at these farms” and that the organization’s goal in working with them is to help “these teens to believe in themselves and their capabilities, and to re-integrate into Israeli society” through “guidance, trips and enrichment, preparation for the IDF, professional training, and teaching various life skills.” Its social media posts make it clear exactly what this means: encouraging youth to live and volunteer on farms in the West Bank, many of which are illegal outposts with a well-documented history of violence and harassment of neighboring Palestinians.

A recent post from January 5, 2026, praises the youth of Tirat Zvi, a religious Zionist kibbutz in the Galilee, for coming “to strengthen the nighttime guard shifts at Hagai Sharara’s farm.” Sharara’s farm is in the illegal outpost of Yad Hashomer-Tevetz in the northern Jordan Valley, and settlers associated with it have been responsible for the ethnic cleansing of ten families over the past two years from the neighboring village of Khirbet al-Malih, through assault, harassment, and sheep theft. Only twenty-four days after Artzenu’s post, Sharara himself led an operation to expel Palestinian shepherds from their grazing land.

When organizations like Artzenu and the JNF speak about “rehabilitation” and “reintegration,” they mean reintegration into the project of Zionist settlement and expulsion of Palestinians. Their “job training” refers to driving lessons, welding classes, and instruction in the skills for a shepherd to establish a new outpost. Those youths whom Artzenu convinces to serve in the Israeli military will likely return to their outposts as settler-soldiers, settlers operating with the authority of the IDF granted by a uniform and a rifle — a phenomenon I experienced firsthand when one notorious settler-soldier descended from his outpost above the village of Tuwani and, on a whim, detained me at gunpoint.

As left-wing activist and chemist Yoram Sorek explained, “Hilltop youth are not a problem; they are a solution: a solution devised by the settler leaders to the problem of the presence of Palestinians in Area C.” As he puts it, “To that end, it is necessary to recruit those who can be trained for the task, especially those whom the system does not care if they are injured or killed in the process.”

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Funding Illegal Settlements

While there are no public records of Artzenu’s revenue beyond its receipts from Shivat Tzion, its English-language website reveals that it also receives tax-deductible donations from the Boston-based 501(c)(3) the Ne’eman Foundation. In 2024, Canada revoked the tax-exempt status of the Ne’eman Foundation and the JNF for violating Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act through their funding of illegal settlement activities and the Israeli military itself.

Under Ne’eman’s CEO, Chaim Katz, who is now a resident of the notoriously violent settlement Shilo, the foundation brought in $6.2 million in 2024 to transfer to Israeli NGOs. Beyond Artzenu, those NGOs include a fund for Netzah Yehuda, a nationalist Haredi IDF unit, as well as the Beit Yatir Pre-Army Torah Academy in the settlement of Beit Yatir.

The Ne’eman Foundation is hardly the only such tax-exempt slush fund. The donation platform Jgive has US and Canadian tax-exempt status and is registered with the International Revenue Service at an address in West Jerusalem as “Friends of Asor Fund USA Inc.” Through Jgive, the Jordan Valley Regional Council, the regional government for Israeli settlers in the Jordan Valley, has raised millions of dollars to fund settlement activities, including $105,000 for security equipment for the settlement of Ovnat and $2.6 million to reconstruct a farm in the settlement of Mehola.

Colorado-based Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC) transferred millions of US dollars to illegal Israeli settlements and outposts across the West Bank in 2022 and 2023, such as funds for security devices in Avigayil, whose residents took part in a recent pogrom against neighboring Palestinian villages in Masafer Yatta. PEF Israel Endowment Funds, Inc., which was placed under investigation by US House Republicans in 2025 for allegedly donating $18 million (some of which may have come from USAID) to a centrist anti–Benjamin Netanyahu NGO, gave out a whopping $263 million in grants, including to Reuta Beit Midrash for, once again, the purpose of supporting “at-risk youth.”

While the Leahy Law prohibits the US government from funding foreign security forces implicated in gross violations of human rights, there has been continuous reticence from both the Joe Biden and the Donald Trump administrations to apply pressure to the Israeli armed forces or settler infrastructure. Until that changes, organizations like Ne’eman and the JNF will continue to use American dollars to fund a system that conscripts sadistic and unstable teenagers like Dror into a vanguard of violence and dispossession against Palestinians.

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E. A. Halevi is a fellow at the Center for Strategic Politics and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.