The defining element in the Palestinian struggle for liberation has been Israel’s overwhelming superiority in military and political resources. Much of the contemporary Palestinian movement’s history is explained by how it has adjusted to this salient fact. In its earlier stages, the movement’s approach was to settle for an emphasis on diplomatic strategies aimed toward partial reversal of Israeli colonialism and agree to a two-state solution. In this sense, it eschewed a more maximalist strategy of military confrontation and a full reversal of 1948 expropriation. But this moderate strategic perspective and minimalist definition of liberation disappointed, largely because of Israel’s intransigence. In order to avoid the fate of the PLO and Fatah of helplessly negotiating with Israel over a diminishing territory, Hamas distinguished itself by rapidly veering toward a more militaristic strategy, even while tacitly accepting the more moderate goal of a two-state solution.

In its heyday, the PLO and its factions carried out a guerrilla strategy that focused on avoiding heavy losses while inflicting what damage it could on Israeli forces. As its leading faction, Fatah exhibited an awareness of its limited military capacity as well as of an obligation to minimize damage to the Palestinian population. Hence it avoided major escalations, understanding the danger to political success and its own popularity. The underlying principle was to rely on attrition and the slow drain of Israeli resources rather than on a frontal assault. But the PLO was constrained by the fact that it was an organization in exile, dependent on Arab regimes, which had their own agendas vis-à-vis Israel, and with a very limited ability to plant roots in Israel’s Palestinian population. The organizational and political resources needed to carry out a mass strategy were simply lacking, and so the factions and organizations committed to a mass strategy were never able to dominate.⁶ This gave the more militaristic elements a permanent advantage in debates around political strategy and made the peace process with Israel a capitulation from the beginning.

Unlike the PLO, Hamas was physically implanted in the occupied territories. This provided it, at least in principle, with an opportunity to shift the balance toward ground-level organizing of the Palestinian masses and away from the guerrilla-oriented militaristic strategy. But rather than capitalizing on this opportunity, Hamas generated its own variant of a more vanguardist militarism. Where it could have directed its energies toward expanding Palestinians’ political capacity, it focused instead on its own organizational growth; it concentrated on its very particular cultural and political agenda, maintaining and even deepening its isolation from broader social forces. Its connection to Palestinians was mainly through social services and charity, not through political mobilization. This distinguished it from organizations like the Iran-aligned al-Jihad al-Islami, which never moved beyond the narrowest form of armed struggle. Hamas did develop a political machine of sorts, with a loose anchor in civil society, but never in popular forms of mobilization.

Nevertheless, the crux of its strategy remained fundamentally militaristic, and this largely owed to its conviction that the PLO had very little to show from the years of its diplomatic endeavors. That failure was crystallized in the Oslo Accords, which not only yielded paltry concessions but were soon followed by an Israeli settler’s massacre of Muslim Palestinian worshippers in early 1994. In its wake, Hamas announced that it would retaliate against Israeli violence, whether formal or informal, with the explicit aim of deterring further aggression. But even while it veered back to this more maximalist political strategy, it announced that it would accept a two-state solution if it was supported by a Palestinian majority — without abandoning the aim of liberating all of Palestine. These overtures toward a diplomatic solution were resoundingly refused by Israel, which set off a cycle of violence and retaliation that lasted into the early 2000s and the eruption of the Second Intifada. Throughout this period, Hamas continued to be willing to abide by Palestinian popular opinion. It halted its militaristic activities and participated in the 2006 elections, supplanting the PLO for the first time. But none of this amounted to a turn toward mass politics. In response to Israel’s escalation, Hamas’s energies remained focused on building its military capacities. The most decisive turn in this direction occurred in 2020, in the wake of yet another Israeli hardening of the siege of Gaza. Hamas initiated a popular uprising across the country into a war in May 2021, which Ismail Haniyeh labeled a “rehearsal for full liberation.”⁷ It was from this point onward that Hamas started preparing for a decisive confrontation with Israel, with expected support from its regional patrons in Iran and Hezbollah.

In sum, even though Hamas has had an anchor in the Palestinian masses, this has never translated into a reliance on mass organizing as the core of the Palestinian struggle. And even though the PLO and Fatah chafed against being overly reliant on regional Arab regimes, Hamas has not reversed this general predicament. In fact, their assault on October 7 was substantially planned under the expectation of support from regional allies.⁸ The question for the Palestinian struggle is whether this emphasis on militarism — be it in the form of guerrilla warfare, suicide bombing, or targeted attacks — has any possibility of success.

In their justification for the October 7 attack, Hamas’s public spokespeople have relied on a recurring series of arguments. One is that regardless of the sacrifices Palestinians have had to make, drawing Israel into a war would drain its economic resources and weaken it, forcing it to come to the bargaining table. Another is that any mass struggle involves sacrifice and casualties. In this, they refer to the experiences of other liberation movements, like those in Vietnam and Algeria, which also elicited violent responses from the colonial powers and caused mass casualties among the colonized population. For instance, Khaled Mashal, Hamas’s former political chief, abandoned his own previous position that every anti-colonial struggle must follow its own logic: “South Africa has its experience, Vietnam has its experience, and Palestine has its own experience.”⁹ After October 7, however, Mashal justified the attack on network television by invoking the cases of Vietnam and Algeria, among others, claiming that liberation always comes at the price of a hefty body count.¹⁰

In the wake of the horrific casualties and suffering inflicted upon the Palestinian masses by Israel, it is critical that we make a sober assessment of the calculations behind the attacks of October 7, and more generally on the strategic outlook of the Palestinian leadership, past and present, in its reliance on the military option. Surface-level similarities and rhetorical parallels aside, I will show that there is, in fact, little in common between the Palestinian situation and those of the Algerian and Vietnamese struggles.

The Palestinian struggle has for long periods moved in a parallel groove with other anti-colonial movements. It has been a common refrain among the more military-oriented Palestinian leaders that, in adopting a violent course, they are simply following the path of other liberation movements, chiefly those of the Vietnamese and the Algerians. There are certainly some similarities in background conditions and political dilemmas. Both those movements had a multiclass base and were spread out over vast geographical regions. Both faced off against far more powerful colonial overlords, making victory seem like a distant and unattainable goal.

However plausible the similarities might be on the surface, though, they break down upon closer inspection. First of all, the Vietnamese had an incredibly strong regional base for themselves in the north that was independent of American interference and provided them with infinitely greater resources — military, political, and demographic — than the Palestinians have to draw upon. The Palestinians have organized their struggle primarily from refugee bases, often spread out across different countries, which has hampered their ability to coalesce. Additionally, the Arab states supporting the Palestinians have had divergent geopolitical loyalties, some to the Americans and others to the Soviets. This ended up injecting those rivalries into Palestinian political groupings, compounding their geographical fragmentation with a political factionalism. In principle, Palestinian leaders might have been able to manage these centrifugal tendencies, but in practice, they only pulled the factions apart. Palestinians’ inability to overcome this dilemma contrasts with the Vietnamese, who were more independent in their outlook and also had fewer such obstacles to face.

Moreover, the Vietnamese movement was able to draw upon and coordinate with the struggles in Laos and Cambodia. The PLO, on the other hand, has found its regional allies pushed back and ultimately defeated, so that whatever promise there was for regional coordination with sympathetic movements has never come to fruition. The defeat of the pro-Palestinian camp in the Lebanese Civil War meant the loss of the most aligned struggle in the region, especially after almost all Arab states fully embraced peacemaking with Israel in the 1970s. Indeed, it is this inability to coalesce that made a moderate strategy seem more attractive, pushing Yasser Arafat and the PLO toward the Oslo Accords. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vietnamese and Algerian revolutionary leaders urged Palestinians to moderate when consulted.

Such urging is illuminated in the central figure of Salah Khalaf, a top Fatah leader while in exile from the 1960s to the 1980s. In his notes from a visit to Hanoi in March 1970, General Vo Nguyen Giap is quoted reminding the Palestinians of the importance of “unity, unity, and more unity,” and that is because such struggles (as they were in Vietnam, according to Giap) should be waged according to their own capacities, alternating between the political and the militaristic, and through stages that depend on national consensus.¹¹ A few years later, Khalaf was the main coordinator of the PLO’s response to Anwar Sadat’s push in Egypt for a comprehensive peace process in light of the partial gains of the 1973 war. Baffled by the set ceilings on Palestinians before even beginning negotiations, Khalaf met with Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algeria’s foreign secretary at the time, who urged the Palestinians to join the peace conference, which would concede something to them and could later be abrogated from a position of power. Otherwise Palestinians, according to the Algerian diplomat, would risk fracture under the immense Arab American pressure that would follow.¹²

With much inter-Palestinian polarization regarding how to move forward, the PLO leadership settled on a new doctrine of stages in 1974 that aimed to balance out both external pressures for concession and internal pressures for steadfastness.¹³ In fact, this balancing act by the Palestinian leadership started before the pivotal moment in which Vietnamese and Algerian figures urged the Palestinians to show flexibility. Fatah, the PLO’s leading faction, argued against the actions of other factions that fanned the flames leading to the civil war in Jordan in 1970¹⁴ and the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.¹⁵ In fact, Fatah was mired with this limitation of the Palestinian struggle against Israel to the extent of ultimately depleting its ability to leverage a negotiated settlement with any militaristic pressure, as the Vietnamese surely did in their rounds of negotiations with the Americans.¹⁶ Other Palestinians arrived at similar conclusions. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the PLO leadership’s main detractor, acknowledged (retrospectively at least) that perhaps an urban guerrilla strategy was more fitting for Palestinians than the Cuban foquismo methods that failed in the 1970s.¹⁷ Even Hamas acted in 2005 to end the suicide bombing campaign during the Second Intifada based on an understanding of the limits of violence.¹⁸ In 2008, Hamas’s leaders seemed to have come around to the view that the Palestinian struggle faced very different constraints than the Vietnamese and South Africans had.¹⁹

In short, the recent turn to a more militaristic approach,²⁰ or the enunciation of its virtues,²¹ runs against the conclusions that Palestinian leaders themselves came to since the 1970s, when they were forced to rethink their military strategies, and that Vietnamese and Algerian revolutionary leaders endorsed. To be sure, Hamas’s reversion to a singularly militaristic strategy in 2021 was at least in part motivated by Israeli intransigence, which actively undermined every peace and ceasefire negotiation after Oslo, but it was adopted at the cost of ignoring the even more profound limits on militarism, the recognition of which had driven the PLO into peace negotiations in the first place. During the October 7 attack, Hamas leaders invoked the sacrifices that previous struggles had had to make when they took up armed struggle, implying that by doing so the Palestinians might emerge victorious, just as the former had.²² But this simply ignored the very different landscape the Palestinians faced compared to the Vietnamese and Algerians.

First, the American public was far more divided on the Vietnam War than the Israeli public is in its state’s colonial mission. Although there had been general support for the Vietnam War during the John F. Kennedy and early Lyndon B. Johnson administrations, the cultural tide had decidedly shifted toward the end of the decade. By the late 1960s, public opinion was rapidly turning against American involvement in Vietnam.²³ In contrast, the level of support for the Israeli occupation and its ongoing expansion over the past three decades has been remarkably stable.²⁴ This steady and very deep public support is another resource for the Israeli state and a profound obstacle for the Palestinians. Unlike the Vietnamese, Palestinian militarism cannot rely on deepening the divisions in the domestic constituency, as those divisions are in fact difficult to find.

Second, the antecedent differences in capacity between the Vietnamese and the Palestinians are nowhere more apparent than in their most audacious military operations: the 1968 Tet Offensive and the October 7 attacks. On the surface, the October 7 attack shares striking similarities with the Tet Offensive: Both were surprise operations that were larger in scale and ambition than anything the respective movements had tried in the past. Both required enormous planning and preparation. And both failed to varying degrees in their ambitions to trigger a wider uprising in their regions, as the civil structures of the independence movement were either unprepared or incapable of mobilizing the masses while under fire. These similarities notwithstanding, however, the two attacks diverge where it matters most.

Even though the Tet Offensive was a failure for the Communists on a purely military level, it was a massive political success. This success derived from the fact that, in revealing Vietnam’s resources and the scope of its operational strengths, it dealt a hammer blow to public morale in the United States. In a US culture where support for the war was already declining, the Vietnamese operations of 1968 catalyzed the growing antiwar movement and for the first time turned much of mainstream American opinion against further troop involvement in Southeast Asia. It was because of this that President Johnson was forced to promise a rapid end to US troops’ presence in the region and was driven into greater secrecy, as was Richard Nixon, who expanded US military operations only through a campaign of lies and deception. In contrast, Hamas’s October 7 attack launched against the backdrop of massive and overwhelming support for Israel’s colonial venture among its Jewish population. There were no fissures in public opinion to draw upon. The brutality of the attack only ended up playing into the Israeli government’s hands. Instead of turning public opinion against the occupation, it galvanized it, and a culture that was already steeped in ethnonationalism and an ethos of racial superiority tipped over into supporting a genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.²⁵

Moreover — and again, because of their greater resources²⁶ — the Vietnamese were able to plan the Tet Offensive as not just one spectacular attack but a series of operations spread out across space and time. The initial offensive was followed by another set of actions months later, and even though the military faction responsible for designing the campaign was demoted after its initial rounds, they were able to regain momentum within the leadership by 1970 and recommence the military operations that eventually led to the liberation of Saigon in 1975.²⁷ The commitment to the military strategy was sustained over a long period, despite losses and setbacks, because of the ability to absorb them — to recover after tactical defeats, recapture the initiative, and continue to funnel resources to the forces located in the South.²⁸

In contrast, Hamas received limited aid compared to the Vietnamese. Palestinians in Gaza received, in the three years leading to the war, a lower nominal value of aid than the Vietnamese did in the three years leading to the Tet Offensive half a century earlier.²⁹ Moreover, the Vietnamese planned the attack in 1968 during a three-year ceasefire in the North. By contrast, the Gaza Strip had been battered by two Israeli offensives in 2021 and 2022, on top of the accumulated hardships of four previous wars and the sixteen-year siege on the eve of October 7.

It is an achievement for Hamas to have launched the attack it did in 2023, but it candidly admitted that it never planned for it to balloon to the massive size it eventually reached.³⁰ The proponents of escalatory methods in Vietnam were able to defend their position against criticism at multiple levels of the Communist Party after the first wave of the Tet Offensive, and they managed to launch the second and third waves despite American firepower. The following pause of large unit attacks in 1969 in Vietnam was due more to internal disputes than to evisceration by the American counteroffensive.

However, the similarity between Ho Chi Minh’s announcement of the Tet Offensive and that of Hamas’s top military commander, Mohammed Deif, on October 7 is striking.³¹ It revealed that the faction aimed for nothing less than liberation, with a call for mass marches and rebellions in Palestine and beyond to support the effort. This is the most that one can discern of the true aims behind the attack before it was reframed in light of the Israeli reaction that followed.³² Hamas most certainly believed that Iran and its network of allies would come to its aid,³³ and that is perhaps an acknowledgment of the constraints it faced and what the PLO had experienced before. Basing a campaign on allies who have different sets of interests is folly, no matter how ideological and principled those allies are. It is true that eventually all of Iran’s network engaged Israel. But they all did so on Israel’s terms, not on theirs or Hamas’s. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Hamas wanted to avoid the sort of war Israel launched and that the attack was its attempt to preempt it.³⁴ In short, Israel pushed Hamas over decades to build a fortress such that, even when the Israeli military stumbled for a few days after the attack, Hamas blamed the ballooning of the event on the spectacular failure of the Israeli military rather than launching successive waves to bring Israel to the negotiating table, as the Vietnamese had done with the Americans.³⁵ October 7 was planned as a one-event attack and depended extensively on allies, contrary to Vietnamese planning of the Tet Offensive.

Algeria’s divergences from the Palestinians are along other dimensions but no less important. The National Liberation Front (FLN) relied heavily on armed and guerrilla actions in the earlier phases of its movement, but this shifted rapidly. By the second half of the war, the emphasis had turned more toward popular mobilization and international pressure. The militaristic image of Algeria that Palestinians are encouraged to imitate is an exaggeration.

Algerians built their later independence movement on mass participation in political parties, demanding greater rights from the French colonial regime. Unlike Israel’s continuous political and physical erasure of Palestinians, France turned out to be more receptive to these demands and gradually assimilated Algerians as a means to quell the movement. Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, Algerians decisively moved from demanding greater inclusion to demanding independence.³⁶ The militaristic wing of the FLN emerged only decades after building mass campaigns. In contrast to the Palestinians, among whom a more militaristic element gained power early on, the militarists within the FLN always had to contend with the more mass-oriented factions.³⁷ If it had not been so deeply embedded in Algerian mass organizations after the earlier brutal years of the war of independence (between 1954 and 1958), the FLN would have had very few resources to draw on after the French colonial army pushed the Algerian National Liberation Army (ALN) to the border regions of Algeria, away from the population.

The baseline reliance on popular organizing and civilian infrastructure was complemented with a highly effective campaign inside France and on the international plane. Algeria’s leadership in exile carried out propaganda campaigns in the colonial heartland through the Algerian immigrant population but also through sympathetic French intellectuals and politicians. By the time of the installation of France’s Fifth Republic in 1958, it was announced that Algeria would be more integrated into France, and 80 percent of Algerians supported such a measure.³⁸ It was also acknowledged, however, that the Algerians would be granted some institutional form of self-determination. This was in no small measure because of a careful combination of military and mass struggle, marginalizing integrationists and mobilizing unions and associations for independence. But it must be said that it was greatly aided by a carefully crafted international campaign that ended up eliciting the support of not only the people of the Global South but even the Americans, who increasingly saw France as being disruptive of their agenda against the Soviet Union.³⁹ Significantly, French settlers left Algeria before the ALN arrived in the coastal plain — it was not a conquest that removed them.

The Palestinians have never developed an enduring and deep mass campaign the way the Algerians did. The First Intifada was certainly a colossal achievement, but instead of initiating a new civic and political infrastructure, it left only a paltry residue. As I will show later, this is part of a broader pattern wherein Palestinian organizational capacity has been repeatedly squandered in the decade or so leading to October 7, 2023. It was squandered due to the belief that an exogenous shock to the Israeli economy might serve as a substitute — an idea to which I now turn.

The Palestinian movement’s unique structural, demographic, and geopolitical disadvantages have played a decisive role in blocking its struggle against Israeli colonialism. Added to this has been Israel’s own intransigence and relentless aggression, which has systematically discouraged and undermined attempts at diplomacy. But another factor, which has enabled and even undergirded the ones just outlined, is the Israeli economy’s resilience. One of the hopes behind the October 7 attacks was that drawing Israel into a long and costly war would drain the Israeli economy and perhaps create fissures within the consensus favoring the occupation.⁴⁰ Rather than experiencing an economic collapse, though, the Israeli economy has remained stable, and even shown remarkable signs of robust growth. This stability has been layered on top of its preexisting insulation against any pressure points that the Palestinians might exploit. From the earliest stages of its colonial project, the Israeli state has been single-minded in insulating itself from any structural weaknesses to Palestinian mobilizations. It has been far less dependent on Palestinian labor than any other settler economy has been on its colonized population, and that autonomy from Palestinian contributions has only increased over time. The Israeli working classes were integrated into the colonial project very early and have been weakened by the descent into neoliberalism — making them not only unlikely allies for Palestinians but also very weak ones, even if they were to evince solidarity for the Palestinian cause. In short, there are very few points of economic leverage that the Palestinians might exploit.

Nonetheless, the October 7 attack was not without immediate repercussions for Israel’s economy.⁴¹ In the weeks that followed, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s benchmark TA-125 index, which tracks the 125 largest publicly traded companies, declined noticeably. Yet this downturn proved short-lived. The index soon embarked on a trajectory of exceptional growth, nearly doubling in value over the subsequent two years of war.

Remarkably, this wartime expansion has surpassed even the gains recorded during the post-COVID recovery, illustrated in figure 1. In 2020, Israel became the first country to reopen its economy following a rapid and comprehensive vaccination campaign. The fiscal stimulus deployed during the comparatively brief lockdown generated fewer inflationary pressures than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average. As figure 1 demonstrates, Israel maintained a strong external position in 2020 and 2021: foreign reserves expanded more rapidly than the domestic money supply, while government and corporate borrowing contributed to rising market capitalization and renewed economic dynamism.

By contrast, during the 2024–25 war period, also reflected in figure 1, comparable levels of indebtedness, combined with a similarly favorable external balance, produced an even more pronounced surge in capitalization — particularly within Israel’s leading sectors — than that observed in the post-pandemic recovery.

This dramatic surge in market capitalization reflects two fundamental dynamics within Israel’s political economy. First, its manufacturing and technology sectors have continued to expand at an accelerated pace,⁴² producing goods and technologies in strong demand across both international and domestic markets.⁴³ These sectors remain deeply integrated in global value chains while simultaneously anchoring domestic growth.

Second, institutional investors, most notably pension funds, have expanded their portfolios by more than $130 billion since the onset of the war.⁴⁴ In effect, Israel has sustained a virtuous economic cycle in which domestic savings are channeled into productive sectors and help reinforce a robust external position.⁴⁵ Crucially, a substantial share of these institutional investments has been concentrated in the financial sector. This configuration has enabled the government to rely primarily on domestic borrowing to finance the war effort and to subsidize sectors severely affected by the conflict — particularly retail, leisure, and industries dependent on a Palestinian-dominated workforce that was subsequently dismissed.

Rather than engaging in the type of expansive fiscal spending that belligerent states often adopt to stimulate aggregate demand during periods of economic strain, Israel has strategically directed resources toward its high-performing sectors — namely technology, communications, manufacturing, and financial services.⁴⁶

Indeed, scholars have long argued that Israel must address its pronounced intersectoral productivity gap in order to resemble comparable OECD economies characterized by multiple engines of growth.⁴⁷ Achieving such a transformation requires sustained resource allocation,⁴⁸ and it could emerge as policy. Robust growth rates have supported stable and buoyant tax revenues,⁴⁹ facilitating a rapid reduction in the fiscal deficit⁵⁰ and clearing the path for the restoration of public investments deemed essential for productivity enhancement.

At the same time, these revenues enable the state to finance its multiple wars in the region while channeling resources back into civilian sectors through paid military conscription. This dynamic, in turn, tempers the rise in working-class household debt. As a result, Israeli households remain among the least leveraged of OECD countries,⁵¹ allowing them a space to navigate the turbulence of shifts⁵² in the government’s fiscal priorities.

If the Israeli economy has shown resilience against an external enemy, it is even more impervious to the threat of internal dislocations brought on by Palestinian, or even Israeli, labor. As is well known, Palestinian working classes have always been structurally disadvantaged in the way of disruption in comparison to colonized working classes in other settler states. The most widely studied and well-understood contrast is with the South African experience.⁵³ In the struggle for black liberation in South Africa, the working class was able to play a central role because of its pivotal location in the economy, and even more so in its leading sectors. By the end of the 1970s, black South Africans constituted nearly a quarter of skilled labor and two-thirds of semiskilled labor located in the country’s strategic sectors.⁵⁴ This location in the nerve centers of the apartheid economy endowed the black working class with extraordinary leverage and, once mobilized, enabled workers to bring the white ruling class to the bargaining table.

In contrast, the Israeli economy was never nearly as dependent on Palestinian labor, even in its early decades. The entire colonial project had been geared toward insulating the Israeli state and ruling class from vulnerability to Palestinian labor. Palestinian workers never amounted to more than 10 percent of Israel’s labor force, and they were confined to unskilled positions in the agriculture and construction sectors. In addition to their marginal location in the economy, the economic ecology militated against effective organizing. Unlike the skilled black South Africans who worked in large units and remained in the cities, unskilled Palestinians worked in smaller units and had to leave Israeli locations on a daily basis, which forbade organizational capacity significantly. Even more, the insulation from dependence on Palestinian labor has accelerated over time. After every Palestinian mass mobilization or uprising, Israel has reacted by dismissing more Arab workers and largely replacing them with immigrants: from Eastern Europe during the First Intifada in the late 1980s, from East Asia during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, and from South Asia during the current war.⁵⁵ There is therefore no obvious class-struggle path to Palestinian liberation, following in the footsteps of their South African compatriots.

Nor is working-class support forthcoming from the Israeli side. Even though it had many of the functions of a trade union, the largest and most venerable labor organization in Israel, the Histadrut, also had a very close link to the colonial state. Its role was not only to bargain on behalf of newly settled workers but also to exclude indigenous Arab workers as a source of domestic competition in the labor market. Hence it was, from its inception, a labor federation dedicated to ethnic and therefore colonial exclusion. On top of that, however weak it might have been in its support of Palestinian workers, the Histadrut’s ability to defend even the Israeli working class has weakened after decades of neoliberalism. This is owing to the gradual evisceration of its organizational prowess and because the Israeli state has found other means of serving the material interests of Jewish workers. Chief among these has been the expansion of heavily subsidized housing in the occupied territories,⁵⁶ which, even though it is a significant drain under the public exchequer,⁵⁷ has harnessed much of the newly arriving Jewish working class to the colonial project.

Throughout the neoliberal era, the only form of support for some kind of resolution has been some NGOs, such as Kav LaOved, which have had some success in extending Israeli labor laws into the West Bank settlements, and some of the venerable human rights organizations like B’Tselem. But these organizations are too small and too marginal to make broad changes, as they lack any mass base within the Israeli population.

Taken together, these factors have positioned Israel to effectively withstand economic disruption, whether from the outside or the inside. There is no indication that the strategy of victory through attrition, dependent on slowly draining the Israeli economy, has any chance of succeeding. As an alternative, the South African experience does not hold much promise either, as its success rested largely on the strategic centrality of the black working class in the South African economy. Palestinians, on the other hand, started out weakly placed in the economy and have become even more marginal over the past few decades.⁵⁸ On top of that, Israel’s perceived utility to American geopolitical interests in the region has enabled it to secure military and economic aid in the event that its economic stability is threatened. So even while its internal economic resources are formidable, behind them stands the American juggernaut, ready and willing to step in whenever needed.

Israel’s economic bulletproofing is exceptionally resilient. The country’s vulnerability to mass movements is more apparent — and it is to this subject that I now turn.

Even while Hamas has relied on military actions to press their demands on Israel, Palestinians have also launched mass campaigns in the occupied territories. To be sure, they have offered a baseline level of support for military actions, because of their frustration with the abject failure of the Oslo Accords, with Israel’s repeated incursions into the occupied territories, with its resort to formal and informal violence on a routine basis, and with the supine response of the Palestinian Authority (PA). But parallel to this, there has been wave upon wave of Palestinian nonviolent mass action and popular protest over the decade preceding the October 7 attack. What is significant is that Hamas and other militant organizations have either failed to build upon these energies or have sidelined them in favor of their preferred strategy of violent confrontation. In fact, the public’s gradual acceptance of militarism is in large measure the result of Hamas and others neglecting the civic infrastructures that could have been built on waves of popular protest.

Israel’s erasure of the Palestinians over the course of the longest ongoing occupation in the world has taken the form of a prolonged strategy, but the scale of brutality in the 2008–9 war on the Gaza Strip was unprecedented.⁵⁹ In its aftermath, opinion polls indicated that a majority of Palestinians favored popular action against the occupation for nearly three years following the end of that war. During the same period, a majority also supported the confrontational diplomatic approach promised by the Palestinian Authority. Considerable hope was invested in joining a range of international bodies that might challenge Israel’s status quo. However, Israeli intransigence, the PA’s half-hearted campaign, and Barack Obama’s feeble approach to nudging Israel frustrated that majority and made it cynical.⁶⁰ More broadly, Palestinians tended to appreciate the enhanced capabilities Hamas demonstrated in successive rounds of confrontation.⁶¹ Yet that support often dissipated quickly in the wake of each new cycle of devastation inflicted by Israel on the Gaza Strip.

Frustration gave rise to the phenomenon of the Palestinian “lone wolf” attacker — stabbing and vehicular attacks in the West Bank and Jerusalem that peaked between 2015 and 2018.⁶² At the same time, however, Palestinian masses channeled their collective energies decisively into forms of popular action. A few of these movements succeeded in halting specific Israeli measures, even if only temporarily. Most, however, failed to extract concessions from either Israel or the PA — a structure that, in its current form, extends Israeli security control within Palestinian society. The methods Palestinians developed in the decade preceding the October 7 attack were almost entirely grassroots initiatives that Hamas and other factions either ignored or, worse, co-opted.

In the West Bank in 2016, the Palestinian Authority proposed a new social security law. A civil society campaign brought together a wide range of associations and unions to secure significant amendments through mass protests.⁶³ As the implementation of the law approached in 2018, however, Palestinian business elites backed a countermobilization calling for the law’s complete repeal. Hamas, which was competing for support among merchants and traditional business classes, supported scrapping the law.⁶⁴ In doing so, it helped bring to an end the largest popular campaign since the Oslo Accords — one that had the potential to evolve into broader civil disobedience, possibly challenging the PA and its contested security coordination with Israel.

Also in the West Bank, numerous direct action committees in towns and villages bearing the brunt of settler violence, such as the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, rely almost exclusively on international support. This segment of Palestinian activism has cultivated the deepest ties with international solidarity networks — relationships that hold significant potential for advancing Palestinian interests. It is also the form of struggle that Palestinians have consistently expressed broad support for, yet it receives limited backing only from leftist factions that were once major forces in Palestinian society and have since declined in influence.

By contrast, in the Gaza Strip — and independently of Hamas — activists launched a protest movement along the perimeter separating the enclave from Israel.⁶⁵ The aim was to draw international attention to the array of injustices confronting Gaza’s population and to reassert the political character of the conflict, rather than allowing it to be framed solely as a humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands of Gazans took part, and multiple encampments were established along the otherwise heavily militarized border. Families and women in particular found space within these encampments to participate on the front lines of a mobilization.

However, the marches that began in February 2018 were quickly subsumed under Hamas’s control through the establishment of a coordinating committee. When Israel responded with snipers, injuring and maiming thousands of peaceful protesters, the activists were unable to relocate the encampments farther from the perimeter, as Hamas sought to maintain maximum pressure on Israel.⁶⁶ Later, when al-Jihad al-Islami called for targeting Israeli soldiers in response to the continued shootings in late 2019, Hamas brought the movement to an end after roughly twenty months of sustained mobilization.⁶⁷ In doing so, it avoided a further level of escalation. Yet Hamas also relieved Israel of a mounting international embarrassment, trading the momentum of a grassroots movement for short-term gains in negotiations over easing the siege.⁶⁸ In the process, it dismantled the very mobilization that had provided it with leverage.⁶⁹ The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic a few months later erased whatever had been achieved. Israel imposed new border and customs regulations, and the ensuing lockdowns devastated Gaza’s already fragile economy. Hamas’s rhetoric highlights the failure to harness lasting concessions through this movement as a foundational moment in adopting the logic of a spectacular attack. Such an attack found its launching stage on top of another Palestinian mass movement.

In Jerusalem, Palestinians share the statelessness of their compatriots in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But they share with Palestinian citizens of Israel a degree of spatial incorporation within Israeli society. In their ability to resist Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies through protest and civil disobedience, they occupy a leveraged position that is not available to other Palestinians in the occupied territories. In 2017, a mass protest succeeded in reversing additional Israeli security measures imposed to suffocate Palestinian life in the old city. This achievement echoed the earlier success of a mass mobilization in 2013 that compelled Israel to shelve ethnic cleansing plans targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Negev region.⁷⁰ These two Palestinian wins paved the way for a new movement in 2021 in response to yet another Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign targeting a Jerusalem neighborhood. This mobilization was led by the two Palestinian groups that were in a position to organize mass movements within Israel’s urban centers, Jerusalemites and Palestinian citizens of Israel. It became a moment of grassroots coordination among Palestinians across the country not seen in a generation, drawing in participants from the West Bank as well and straining Israel’s security apparatus.

Rather than allowing this grassroots momentum to develop and broadening its scope, Hamas launched rocket attacks on May 10, 2021. The ensuing Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, coupled with a sweeping crackdown across the country, effectively brought the mobilization to an end. Israel resorted to militarized measures not only against Palestinians in the occupied territories but also against its own Palestinian citizens.⁷¹ The setbacks of the decade preceding the October 7 attack pushed a Palestinian majority toward the conviction that Israel’s invincibility would only crack under armed struggle (seen below in figure 2). Regardless of how little Israel changed its conduct, Hamas was steadfast in its beliefs, assuming it was synced with the Palestinian mass mobilization capacities that it expected to back up its attack on October 7. Those mobilizations obviously never materialized.

Instead of building the capacities of the mass movements that have proven most effective in confronting Israeli colonial practices in their various forms, Palestinian proponents of militarism have continued to prioritize armed struggle. Hamas, despite articulating positions in 2017 that more closely aligned with international legal frameworks,⁷² invested primarily in expanding its military infrastructure in the Gaza Strip⁷³ — a strategy explicable only through an ardent commitment to armed confrontation. However, Israel’s colonial violence at this juncture is reshaping Palestinian social forces in profound and extreme ways, exerting pressure simultaneously on those forces’ upper and lower segments. Historically, successive Palestinian generations facing comparable strategic defeats have revitalized their national liberation project by appealing to the new logic of the era. A similar process appears to be unfolding today. Whatever priorities the Palestinians land on, international solidarity will have to extend effective support to cover these limitations that cap Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

In the aftermath of the genocide, prominent Palestinian intellectuals and their allies are pointing to the path forward. Some argue that Israel has entered a decisive phase of systemic crisis that may open possibilities for justice.⁷⁴ Others have openly criticized Hamas for what they view as a catastrophic political calculus⁷⁵ — one that has facilitated the intensification of Israeli policy, undermined international solidarity through disregard for international law, and weakened Palestinian grassroots power by entrenching an authoritarian internal order.⁷⁶ Still others call for a rationalization of political conduct as a prerequisite for effective praxis,⁷⁷ while some advocate recalibrating Palestinian emancipation toward a civil rights framework, exploring again the potential for a civil rights movement in the country.⁷⁸

Palestinians will likely build a political project with an outward orientation, emphasizing international solidarity. Indeed, the millions who have marched across the world for Palestinian freedom are the only strategic asset they currently possess. However, building such a project will depend on securing the unequivocal endorsement of a majority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Only sustained struggles on the ground, under these pressing circumstances, will consolidate that majority and define its political project. At the same time, catalyzing international solidarity will depend on institutional networking, not merely on genuine human sympathies.

Here the South African example offers an actionable lesson for the Palestinian struggle. As discussed above, South Africans possessed disruptive capacities that Palestinians still lack today. Yet those disruptive capacities against the apartheid regime were also able to harness international solidarity through organized networking abroad. Black unions operated through the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which brought them into contact with trade unions overseas.

American unions, on the other end of this global network, pursued an active policy of challenging the emerging neoliberal order at the end of the 1970s. It was the United Auto Workers (UAW) that issued one of the first US calls to boycott South African apartheid in 1978, in part leveraging their domestic engagements with Ford and GM against those companies’ international investments there. Unions were instrumental in assembling a broad alliance in the United States, drawing on the institutional structures created by the civil rights movement — particularly the electoral power that gave rise to the Congressional Black Caucus, a key bloc within the Democratic Party. In other words, the structural capacity of South African trade unions converged with the structural capacity of American trade unions.

Against the backdrop of this lesson on international networking, Palestinians find themselves not only without the capacity to influence Israeli and international business interests but also confronting an American working class in a much weaker condition than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.⁷⁹ As a result, Palestine solidarity in the United States has grown primarily within student communities, with only secondary connections to the trade union movement, mostly located among the newer militant wave in services and logistics and those union chapters that maintain strong ties to activist milieus.

Nonetheless, Palestine solidarity can still play a role analogous to the networks of the anti-apartheid struggle, which were grounded in structural leverage and disruptive capacity. It should embed itself within the broader interests of the American working class by illuminating the contradiction between an imperial posture that sustains Israel’s colonialism, on the one hand, and the advancement of social welfare at home, on the other. The argument should be made that a peaceful resolution in the Middle East ultimately aligns with the interests of American elites — because American labor demands it.

Although unions may be latecomers in the case of Palestine, compared with their role in the South African struggle, their engagement would not be without significance. A broad social bargain may be emerging on the horizon in the United States. Grotesque levels of inequality are pushing the American working class further into the political arena, often with an increasingly hostile view of the status quo. At the same time, several major American unions are building coalitions aimed at the possibility of a general strike in 2028.

In short, the elements of a new social bargain in the United States appear to be converging. Those who have marched and protested for Palestine may yet find a viable path through which to pursue their aspirations for justice.

Milwaukee’s history is a useful natural experiment for testing the viability of competing socialist strategies in the United States. Both moderate and intransigent variants of Marxism were present, and the latter had nearly a two-decade-long head start. The Socialist Labor Party (SLP) was the only game in town from 1875 onward until Berger, a former SLP member, founded a more pragmatic rival socialist newspaper, Vorwärts (Forward), in 1893.

By the early 1890s, the SLP under the helm of Daniel De Leon had crystallized its strategy: propagate the fundamental tenets of Marxism in elections and build revolutionary industrial unions to displace the reformist American Federation of Labor (AFL). Had American workers been more radically inclined, the SLP’s strategy could have caught on — indeed, something close to this approach guided the early German Social Democracy as well as revolutionary Marxists across imperial Russia.³ Nevertheless, De Leon’s SLP never managed to grow beyond a small sect with a few thousand members nationwide. Time magazine’s 1936 cover story noted that without Berger’s relentless organizing initiative, Milwaukee “socialism might have remained no more than heady beer-table talk.” By 1900, the relatively moderate SDP had clearly eclipsed its radical rivals.

What were the politics of Berger’s new current? Its differences with further-left socialists fundamentally revolved around strategies and tactics, not principles or goals. Unfortunately, most of the literature has erroneously depicted Berger and his comrades as reformists opposed to revolution whose strategic horizons did not go beyond the welfare state.

To the contrary, Berger was — and remained — a committed Marxist who saw the fight for reforms as a necessary means not only to improve the lives of working people but above all to strengthen working-class consciousness, organization, and power in the direction of socialism in the United States and across the globe.

Here’s how Berger articulated this vision in the founding 1911 issue of the Milwaukee Leader, his new English-language socialist daily newspaper: “The distinguishing trait of Socialists is that they understand the class struggle” and that “they boldly aim at the revolution because they want a radical change from the present system.” His answer to the question “evolution or revolution?” was clear: “We declare for both.”

Reacting against the SLP’s doctrinairism and marginality, Berger consciously sought to Americanize scientific socialism. Writing in 1893, Berger argued that socialists in the United States “must give up forever the slavish imitation of the ‘German’ form of organization and the ‘German’ methods of electioneering and agitation.” The SDP’s first mayor, the woodworker Emil Seidel, later recalled that “Berger did not believe that the labor movement would develop according to one fixed pattern alike in all countries. That movement must naturally be different in the United States than in any other country, because all conditions were different.” The point, argued Berger, was not to reject historical materialism, but to reject what he called “hysterical materialism,” which wrongly suggested that revolutionary intransigence alone was sufficient to bring about socialist transformation.

Since the specifics of what to do in the United States were not self-evident, this strategic starting point facilitated a useful degree of political humility and empirical curiosity. “We must learn a great deal,” insisted Berger. The evolution of sewer socialism is fundamentally a story of this learning process, in which organizers iteratively adjusted their agitation and tactics in light of accumulated experience.

Starting out as an editorialist for socialism, Berger eventually realized that socialist propaganda would not widely resonate as long as most American workers remained resigned to their fate. This, he explained, was the core flaw in the SLP’s assumption that patiently preaching socialism would eventually win a majority:

The most formidable obstacle in the way of further progress — and especially in the propaganda of Socialism — is not that men are insufficiently versed in political economy or lacking in intelligence. It is that people are without hope. . . .  Despair is the chief opponent of progress. Our greatest need is hope.

It was precisely to overcome widespread feelings of popular resignation that the sewer socialists came to focus so much on fights for immediate demands, both at work and within government. Since “labor learns in the school of experience,” successful struggles even around relatively minor issues would tend to raise workers’ confidence, expectations, and openness to socialist ideas. That’s why socialists had to rigorously assess the current state of popular consciousness to pick winnable fights that would resonate widely among the broad masses of workers. As the first issue of Vorwärts put it:

In formulating our demands, we are obliged to take many things into consideration. To those who regard us as being too moderate, we reply that if you demand too much at one time you are likely to get nothing. . . .  A daily paper ought not let out of its sight even for a moment the real sentiment of the masses.

While it was important to continue propagating the big ideas of Marxism, what America’s socialists needed above all was “concrete political achievements, not theoretical treatises . . . less mouth-work, more footwork.”

Armed with this orientation, Berger and his comrades set out to win over a popular majority — starting with Milwaukee’s trade union activists.

Conditions for socialist growth were somewhat more favorable in Milwaukee than in the average turn-of-the-century American city. But we should not exaggerate this point nor — as is normally done in the literature — attribute it solely to the town’s German heritage.

By the 1900s, Milwaukee’s Germans were already assimilating and numerically declining, while the unskilled working class was becoming increasingly Polish. In 1910, about half of Milwaukeeans were either kids of German immigrants or German immigrants themselves. And while it’s true that most of Milwaukee’s early socialists were German, most of the town’s Germans were not socialists. A quantitative study of prewar US immigrant voting found that Germans were negatively correlated with socialist votes nationwide: “We cannot speak of an affinity between Germans and socialist voting.”⁴ Sewer socialism’s founder, Victor Berger, noted in 1910 that “as a rule the Socialists cannot get either the German or the Poles of the first generation [to vote for us]. . . .  We have to wait for the second, the American born generation.”

Unlike the early émigré veterans of 1848’s failed revolution, the big German immigration waves of 1880s and 1890s tended to consist of relatively conservative people from rural areas. Berger was born into a politically royalist, downwardly mobile family from rural Austria-Hungary. Upon arriving in America at the age of eighteen in 1878, Berger found work washing boilers and punching cattle, eventually converting to socialism in the 1880s. This political decision scandalized his parents, who, according to Berger biographer Edward Muzik, were “horrified at the radicalism of their son whom they thought would be hanged and perhaps deservedly so.”⁵

Nevertheless, it was a big boost to the sewer socialists’ rise that there was one large, relatively homogeneous working-class community (German Americans) to sink roots into, followed by another sizable group (Polish Americans). Workers in other American cities — including Chicago and St Louis, where German American radicalism was as strong or stronger than in Milwaukee up through the 1880s — tended to be balkanized into half a dozen or more ethnic, religious, and racial political blocs, which facilitated the entrenchment of ethnic-based machine politics and narrow craft unionism while undermining socialist efforts to assemble a majoritarian coalition.

Turning Milwaukee’s working class into a bastion of socialism, however, was far from automatic, rapid, or straightforward. It took many years before Berger’s current was strong enough to field its own candidates. And the first sewer socialist to ever run for mayor — a machinist named Robert Meister, in 1898 — polled only 5 percent of the vote. Figure 2 captures the party’s slow-but-steady rise over the coming years. Here’s how Berger described this dynamic in a speech following their big 1910 mayoral election victory:

It took forty years to get a Socialist Mayor and administration in Milwaukee since first a band of comrades joined together. . . .  It didn’t come quickly or easily to us. It meant work. Drop by drop until the cup ran over. Vote by vote to victory. Work not only during the few weeks of the campaign, but every month, every week, every day. Work in the factories and from house to house.

Nowhere else in the United States did socialists become so hegemonic in the labor movement as they did in Wisconsin. By the time Berger arrived on the scene, Milwaukee already had a rich tradition of workplace militancy and unionism, epitomized by a citywide 1886 general strike for an eight-hour day, during which six people were killed after the state militia opened fire on a crowd of strikers. Nevertheless, it took over a decade of patient work within the ranks and leadership of the unions to get their support for the SDP. Crucially, Berger’s current sought to transform established unions rather than enter into competition with them by setting up new socialist-led unions, as was the practice of the SLP and, later on, the Wobblies. Berger’s small but growing group of comrades — virtually all skilled blue-collar workers — would caucus together in his office ahead of union meetings to plan out their talking points and interventions.

This focus on winning union workers to socialism — and the ongoing challenge of doing so — was a significant factor pulling Berger and his comrades to foreground immediate demands. As the insightful SDP historian Marvin Wachman notes, “Without the support of the trade unions, the socialists were leaders without a following. Consequently, they stressed tact in their dealings with the trade unions and emphasized in their platforms the immediate things in which workingmen were interested.”⁶

Years of hard work within the unions paid off. In December 1899 Milwaukee’s Federated Trades Council elected an executive committee made up entirely of socialists, including Berger. For the next quarter century, the leadership of the party and the unions statewide formed an “interlocking directorate” of working-class socialists involved in both formations.

Whereas organized labor across the United States generally refused to build an independent political voice, Berger was correct in describing Wisconsin as now having “a two-armed labor movement — a labor movement with a political arm and with an economic arm.” The SDP and the unions were careful not to dictate to each other. But most unions henceforth only endorsed socialist candidates, and the Social Democratic Herald — a weekly edited by Berger from 1901 onward — was funded and officially sponsored by Federated Trades Council of Milwaukee and the Wisconsin State Federation of Labor.

A historian of Milwaukee unions notes the “inheritance Socialists bequeathed to the labor movement”: democratic norms, support for industrial unionism, the absence of corruption, support for workers’ education, and strong political advocacy.⁷ For its part, the SDP consistently centered labor issues, pushed all its members to join unions, helped lead strikes and boycotts, aided efforts to organize the unorganized, and, as we will see below, successfully fought for legislation to make it easier for workers to unionize. When it came to supporting unions, no stone was left unturned: in 1908, for instance, socialist aldermen refused to march in a parade dedicating a new auditorium because the parade was being led by a nonunion band.

The SDP could not have achieved much without its union base. And precisely because they had succeeded in transforming established AFL unions by “boring from within,” Wisconsin’s socialist union leaders fought a relentless two-front war nationally: against the self-isolating, revolutionary unionist efforts of left-wing socialists and the Wobblies, on the one hand, and the narrow-minded AFL leadership of Samuel Gompers, on the other. “The time to fight [Gompers] is all the time,” wrote Berger, “because the American labor movement will remain reactionary as long as he has any influence.”

Even the enemies of socialism in Milwaukee eventually had to tip their hats to its exceptional, well-organized political machine. The Milwaukee Free Press, for example, wrote in 1910 that “there would not today be such sweeping Social-Democratic victories in Milwaukee if that party did not possess a solidarity of organization and purpose which is unequaled by that of any other party in the county, or, for that matter, in the state.”

Building this machine took years of experimentation and refinement under the guidance of Edmund Melms, an affable factory worker. Wachman notes that “Melms hammered away at organization within the party, week after week. He stressed branch meetings, the paying of dues, getting subscriptions to the Herald, precinct organization, holding picnics, parties, etc.; and his work showed results. His attempts at making every member of the Social-Democratic party in Milwaukee a party worker, were successful to a great degree.” Such a focus on organizing, with its development of new working-class leaders, was crucial for helping the sewer socialists avoid the constant turnover and churn that undermined so many other SPA chapters.

Of Melms’s organizational innovations, two stand out in particular. First was the city’s soon-to-be-famous “bundle brigade.” During electoral campaigns, between five hundred and one thousand party members on Sunday mornings would pick up the party’s four-page electoral newspaper at 6 a.m. and deliver it to every house and apartment in town by 9 a.m. “The first thing the inhabitants of Milwaukee see when they open their doors to reach for the milk bottle or newspaper on Sunday for six weeks before election is the Voice of the People,” boasted one SDP member in 1911. No other parties attempted anything this ambitious; they lacked sufficient volunteer capacity, not just for delivery but also for determining the language spoken in each house. SDP members canvassed their neighborhoods ahead of time to determine whether the house should receive literature in German, English, or Polish.

Melms’s second innovation was to hold a socialist carnival every winter. These were massive events with over ten thousand participants, attracting (and raising funds from) community members well beyond the SDP’s ranks. In addition to these yearly carnivals, the party held all sorts of social events that helped grow and cohere the movement. These included picnics, parades, card tournaments, dress balls, parties, concerts, baseball and basketball games, plays, and vaudeville shows. Mayor Seidel fondly recalled that at their socialist parades “everybody who had a horn played.” As one observer put it,

At such social functions [party] members could offer their families, whether well- or ill-disposed toward the movement, the amenities of a normal social life, perhaps as compensation for the neglect enforced by their devotion to more serious party activities. To such events sympathizers and friends could be invited, to be exposed to the pleasures and comradeship as well as to the propaganda printed on the program and incorporated in the introductions of party leaders and candidates.

Though the bourgeois press constantly denounced “Boss Berger,” Milwaukee’s party combined the hierarchal discipline of a political machine with deeply democratic practices. A central committee made up of elected members from the branches deliberated and decided on all big questions; their decisions were binding on all members and party organizations, though such decisions could be overturned by membership referendums. The SDP’s nominees for office were also always voted on via membership referenda, as was true within the SPA from 1916 onward.

Though building a socialist political machine was a relatively autonomous and iterative process, the party’s organizational prowess cannot be separated from its political ideology. For instance, one of the most important differences between the SDP and most other SPA chapters nationwide was the absence of any major faction fights in Wisconsin. Whereas factionalism often made it difficult to recruit or retain workers elsewhere in the United States, the Wisconsin SDP’s cohesion reflected members’ strong focus on outward-facing work as well as the confidence (and responsibilities) derived from the party’s ongoing electoral wins and union leadership. As Berger noted, “Doctrinairism and dogmatism lead to splits and to the formation of political sects. But when people are constantly absorbed in doing things, and in preparing for still greater things, the petty jealousies and small causes for strife and dissension disappear.” Berger also felt that one of the reasons Wisconsin’s movement maintained such a high degree of unity and purpose was that it had so few middle-class members, with their tendencies toward excessively theoretical debates.

And whereas patronage and graft greased the wheels of other party machines, the socialists had to depend on selflessness derived from political commitment. Though most people who voted for the SDP were interested primarily in winning immediate changes, other motivations undergirded the decision of so many working-class men, women, and children to do thankless tasks like getting up at 5:30 a.m. on cold Sunday mornings to distribute socialist literature. Feelings of camaraderie and solidarity, amplified by the exhortations of branch leaders, were one big pull. But so was the party’s inspiring goal of a socialist future free of capitalism’s countless indignities. Like so many of his comrades, Berger believed it when he wrote that “fighting for the new world” is the “sublime mission of this generation and possibly also of the next.”

What kept so many members motivated to volunteer their time was a sense that even seemingly modest tasks and campaigns were part of something much bigger. Portrayals of the sewer socialists as purely pragmatic reformers miss this fundamental core of the movement.

Like churches at their best, the SDP provided working people an absorbing community and a powerful sense of purpose and meaning. As such, historian-participant Elmer Beck is right that “the dreams, visions, and prophesies of the [Milwaukee] socialists . . . were an extremely vital factor in the rise of the socialist tide.”⁸

With eyes on the goal of winning a majority of Milwaukeeans and Wisconsinites to socialism, the SDP was obsessed with spreading its message. Between 1893 and 1939, the party published twelve weekly newspapers, two dailies, and one monthly magazine as well as countless pamphlets and fliers — its 1912 election campaign alone published over six hundred thousand pieces of literature. And when new media opportunities arose, they seized them. Milwaukee in the early 1930s could listen to the Socialist Quarter Hour every Sunday at noon, hosted by a garrulous socialist plumber, Anthony King.

Class consciousness was the central political point stressed in all the party’s agitation and publications. This led David Rose — Milwaukee’s corrupt Democratic mayor from 1898 to 1906 and again from 1908 to 1910 — to complain that the SDP was always “pratting on about the rights of labor, always appealing for the down-trodden laboring man.”⁹ Rose wasn’t wrong: virtually everything was framed as a fight of workers against capitalists.

Linked to this class analysis was a relentless focus on workers’ material needs. For instance, one of the SDP’s most impactful 1910 leaflets was directed at working-class women: “Madam — how will you pay your bills?” The party’s 1898 platform included demands related to lowering water prices for consumers, providing work for the unemployed, extending free medical support, and taxing big corporations to pay for services. When Oscar Ameringer — Oklahoma socialism’s dynamic German American leader — wrote about lessons their state could learn from Milwaukee, one of the key points he flagged was that the SDP always “pushed the bread and butter question in the forefront.”

One of the inevitable limitations of any modest demand was that opportunist politicians from other parties could, and periodically did, try to steal the socialists’ thunder by adding similar planks to their campaigns. One socialist joked that the state’s Republicans “had stolen all the timber and timberlands in the state and now they have stooped to petty larceny and are stealing planks from the Social-Democratic platform.” Though this opportunist policy absorption sometimes made it more difficult for the SDP to differentiate itself from rivals, it was ultimately a mechanism of policy advance — and the socialists did not refrain from reminding the public who had come up with these ideas in the first place.

The SDP also differentiated itself by advocating class-struggle methods to win its demands and by openly espousing the end of capitalism. In 1902, Berger criticized the new Progressive Republican governor Robert M. La Follette as simply “a half-baked reformer.” And the SDP raised a number of broader radical reforms that other parties wouldn’t touch, like democratizing the US political system nationwide. Because America’s political setup had so many minoritarian veto points, Berger advocated abolishing the Senate, ending the Supreme Court’s powers over legislation, enabling Congress to call a constitutional convention, and abolishing the standing army by arming the people. And whereas Democrats and Republicans tended, at most, to say they would regulate industries, Wisconsin’s sewer socialists fought for public ownership of resources, industries, and services.

Corruption was another major point of differentiation. Milwaukee, like other turn-of-the-century American cities, was deeply mired in graft. Scandal after scandal lowered the public’s trust in local Republican and Democratic politicians. Socialists were untainted by this corruption, and they articulated a clear vision for how to end it. As the party put it in 1902:

The mainspring of corruption in municipal affairs is usually found in the fact that a few aldermen or officials have it in their power to give away or sell franchises to capitalists, who thereby make millions. The temptation thus afforded our public officials, to try and secure a share in the millions given away, is too great for the average man to withstand. If the city would operate its public utilities, the motive and the opportunity for bribery would be gone.

Though the SDP always placed more of a focus on immediate demands than its far-left rivals, the party also went through a shift in focus from its first race in 1898 to its big breakthrough in 1910. Early on, when the party was still mostly getting tiny shares of the vote, it did not place much of a focus on winning races — it considered that it had won as long as it recruited more workers to socialism and received more votes than during the race prior.

This approach partially shifted after the SDP experienced firsthand that winning office could give its message, membership, and legitimacy a major boost. Its first electoral wins came in 1904, when it elected nine aldermen to the Milwaukee city council and six members to the state legislature. Though SDP electeds were in a tiny minority, they leveraged their newfound bully pulpit to its full effect — for instance, by introducing the state’s first workers’ compensation law. This fight made it easier to show working people who was really on their side, even though the socialists’ bill was defeated every year until it finally passed in 1911, making it the first such law in America.

The SDP gradually began placing more of an emphasis on running to win. Berger explained that the party’s socialist convictions would remain steady “no matter whether we win elections or whether we lose them. However . . . I prefer to fight and to win.” Immediate demands also became more and more concrete — for instance, its 1910 platform included demands for “plumbing and sewerage to be done in all dwellings by the city at cost” and for the city to stop dumping sewage into Lake Michigan. Since Wisconsin state law preempted cities from municipalizing their streetcar lines and other utilities, the SDP chose to adjust its previous blanket opposition to granting any city franchises to private utility corporations. Instead, it now demanded that franchises only be accepted if companies agreed to a series of pro-worker, pro-consumer provisos. At the same time, sewer socialists doubled down on their fight for cities to be given “home rule” so that Milwaukee could municipalize its utilities.

Though the SDP continued to propagandize for socialism and to propose ambitious, not-yet-winnable reforms, immediate demands took on an increasingly central place in election campaigns. And in the hope of reaching wider numbers, the party began to more consistently frame both its short-term and long-term goals as accessibly and nonthreateningly as possible.

For the first time, the SDP’s 1910 mayoral campaign centered not only on the party’s principles and demands but also on the argument that Seidel — who had proven his worth to the city as alderman since 1904 — was “the most capable man for the position and that Republicans and Democrats should vote for him on that basis.” Similarly, it was partly on the basis of his practical achievements fighting private utilities as district attorney that Daniel Hoan, a former dishwasher and butcher, was elected mayor in 1916. From 1910 onward, SDP electoral campaigns consistently stressed the concrete achievements they had delivered to the city.

With his eye to winning statewide and congressional races in Wisconsin, Berger also fought for the SPA to incorporate a platform for farmers. His push in 1899 to convince the SPA to adopt such a plank was soundly defeated, since other tendencies — especially on the party’s left — subscribed to the orthodox stance that doing so would blur class lines.

In 1908 Berger revived his unorthodox push. And in 1912 the party finally adopted a farmers’ plank. In Wisconsin, the party made serious efforts to expand into rural areas — including by hiring Ameringer, organizer extraordinaire, to lead this outreach. Nevertheless, the SDP overwhelmingly remained an urban party.

Far more successful, eventually, was the SDP’s outreach efforts to Polish workers, the one remaining holdout within Milwaukee’s working class. Influenced by their priests and looked down upon by some German unionists due to their frequent use as strike breakers, Polish workers seemed, for years, destined to remain outside the movement. But starting in 1905, the unions and party began to organize unskilled Polish workers. And socialists on the school board waged a public fight to allow Polish language classes in the schools. In 1909 the SDP began publishing a Polish language newspaper, and a new crop of young Polish socialists took the initiative to convince their elders to vote socialist.

Ultimately it was the party’s huge gains among Polish workers, rather than its appeals to middle-class elements, that enabled it to sweep Milwaukee’s 1910 city elections and elect Berger to Congress the same year. As one study notes, “The Socialists were almost totally dependent upon the working class, both skilled and unskilled, for their electoral success.”¹⁰ The only wards that went against them were the richest and the very poorest. Mayor Seidel’s secretary noted that “we have never carried one rich ward, and neither have we elected anyone in the slum district of the city.”

Milwaukee’s 1910 “Social Democratic wave,” as the New York Times described it, electrified workers and socialists nationwide, inspired numerous socialist electoral copycat efforts, and contributed to the SPA’s big membership jump from about 58,000 in 1910 to roughly 113,000 in 1912.

Not all socialists were pleased with the rise of sewer socialism. Advocating the “death sentence of fake laborism,” the Wobblies’ newspaper suggested in 1911 that Berger and his comrades were “pseudo socialist[s]” interested only in “securely underpinning [their] political prestige.” And in the SLP’s organ, Berger’s old foe De Leon insisted that Milwaukee’s so-called socialism was in fact “the same old regulation bourgeois clap-trap of reform decked in the trappings of Socialism.”

It is worth taking their criticisms seriously, especially since so many socialists across the world ended up dropping their commitment to class struggle and socialist revolution in the name of electability. Had Milwaukee’s socialists gotten absorbed into the system? Or was Berger right to argue that differences with their radical critics revolved around tactics, not principles?

The evidence, overall, vindicates Berger’s case. Since everybody understood that it would be impossible to establish a municipal island of socialism in a sea of capitalism, debates over reform versus revolution did not have any immediate practical meaning. On a local level in a nonrevolutionary period, what would have been the political benefit of centering calls for revolution rather than immediate demands in the SDP’s electoral agitation? Leftist critics felt that doing so was essential for orienting workers to their historic mission of eliminating capitalism. But even from this one-sided criterion for assessing socialist tactics, there’s not much evidence that a supposedly more revolutionary approach was more effective at winning workers to the final goal of socialism.

Even though the SDP’s electoral platforms centered on immediate demands, it was still consistently oriented to pushing the envelope on transformative reform and winning individuals to Marxist ideas. Milwaukee’s sewer socialists believed that running to win in electoral contests — and seriously fighting to pass policy changes once in power — made it possible to recruit a larger, not smaller, number of workers to scientific socialism. And the comparative data on party membership bears out this hypothesis.

Not only did De Leon’s SLP remain marginal in Milwaukee and beyond, but the SPA’s left recruited fewer workers to socialism than their relatively moderate rivals. No sizable city in the country had anywhere near the roughly one-to-one-hundred ratio of socialists per capita that Milwaukee had already reached by 1912. The Cleveland Local, a bastion of the SPA far left from 1912 onward, only had one socialist for every five hundred inhabitants by mid-1917. Comparisons within cities bear out the same pattern: in New York City, only the SPA’s right wing proved able to build a solid base in the class. Indeed, the pragmatic Marxism and mass-union base of Jewish immigrant socialism closely approximated Milwaukee’s model.¹¹

The fact that Berger’s current was on the right-wing of American socialism says more about the SPA than it does about its Wisconsin branch. British historian Henry Pelling notes that the distinguishing trait of the SPA compared to socialist parties abroad was that it was “for the most part more dogmatically Marxist, and yet less closely linked to general working-class support.”¹²

Socialism’s difficulty rooting itself in America was neither ephemeral nor accidental. Rather, it was the product of deep structural factors, like America’s absence of a feudal heritage, its early granting of universal white male suffrage, the legacy of chattel slavery and white supremacy, widespread ethnic-religious divisions, exceptionally intense employer opposition to unionism, and a peculiarly challenging party system. This inheritance not only made it difficult for third parties to spread beyond a local level, but it made public opinion relatively moderate and pragmatic compared to a country like imperial Germany or tsarist Russia. And since US socialists had relatively few opportunities to experience the tempering influence of sustained union leadership or elected office — both of which oblige hardheaded assessments of popular consciousness — American socialism became exceptionally prone to further-marginalizing political sectarianism.¹³

The SDP in Milwaukee came to realize earlier and more firmly than most of its comrades across the United States that socialism’s growth in America depended to a significant extent on delivering tangible improvements by leading mass-based unions and running winnable campaigns for office. This required radicals to fight for immediate demands and run campaigns that resonated with most workers as they were, not as socialists might wish them to be down the road.

In short, Milwaukee socialists’ increasingly moderate tactics were imposed by circumstances more than ideology. One perceptive 1911 study of American socialism from the University of Chicago noted that there “seems to be a definite law of the development of Socialism which applies both to the individual and to the group. The law is this: The creedalism and immoderateness of Socialism, other things being equal, vary inversely with its age and responsibility.”¹⁴

It was a challenging task, requiring constant wagers and adjustments, to pull the mass of working people toward socialism without undermining this process by jumping too far ahead. “Never swing to the right or too far to the left,” advised Hoan, the party’s mayor from 1916 through 1940. But concretizing this axiom into practical politics was easier said than done. Since the party’s rank and file held distinct political views and motivations than the broader public, different political notes often had to be hit for different audiences. And this dilemma became all the more pronounced once the party had to govern.

Any balanced assessment of Milwaukee’s socialist administrations needs to situate its successes and limitations within the relatively adverse political circumstances in which they were forced to operate. The SDP lacked a majority in the city council almost every year, which prevented the passage of many of its policy proposals. Milwaukee, furthermore, lacked home rule — a city’s right to pass a wide range of policies without state approval — until 1924, making it initially illegal to fulfill much of the party’s proposed agenda. And by the mid-1920s, public opinion had largely cooled toward ambitious reforms.

Unsurprisingly, the political establishment and bourgeois newspapers resorted to all sorts of machinations to undermine and constrain socialist administrations. Some of this took the form of intense scaremongering. In addition to the endless refrain that socialist policies would ruin the city by forcing businesses to flee, the SDP’s main opponent for mayor during 1918’s wartime election suggested that if the socialists won, then the federal government would react by imposing martial law in the city.

Obstruction also found its way into law. Part of the reason it was so difficult to cobble together a city council majority was that, faced with a growing socialist threat, the state of Wisconsin in 1908 imposed a new law requiring that city councils be elected on a nonpartisan basis — undermining straight-ticket voting for the SDP — and through at-large, rather than ward-based, voting. To avoid splitting the anti-socialist vote through three-cornered mayoral contests, Wisconsin’s legislature in 1914 decreed that henceforth all mayoral races required an open, nonpartisan primary followed by a runoff of the two top candidates. Further undermining the socialist threat, in 1911 the state legislature reduced mayoral control over various city departments — including the police, whose chief openly antagonized the socialist administrations for many years. Similarly, the city’s nonsocialist tax commissioner sabotaged the Seidel administration on the eve of the 1912 election by pushing through an unpopular reevaluation of housing properties to make working people pay more taxes and the rich pay less. Low-information voters blamed the administration itself, paving the way for Mayor Seidel’s defeat that year.

Given everything arrayed against the sewer socialist administration, it’s remarkable how much they still achieved. Here are some of the highlights.

Under SDP rule, Milwaukee dramatically improved health and safety conditions for its citizens at work as well as on the job. Through new regulations and inspections, the rates of contagious diseases like smallpox and scarlet fever were dramatically cut down. Infant mortality plummeted as the city began providing prenatal and maternal support, visiting nurses, vaccinations, and basic medical services. And for the first time, health inspectors inserted themselves into the factories to assess conditions and demand reforms.

Milwaukee built up the country’s first public low-income housing cooperative and pioneered city planning through comprehensive zoning codes. Socialist mayors scaled up urban infrastructure, particularly by modernizing the harbor. And though the SDP did not advance as far as it wanted toward ending private contracts for all utilities, it succeeded in building a city-owned power plant and municipalizing the stone quarry, street lighting, sewage disposal, and water purification. Another crown jewel of sewer socialism was its dramatic expansion of parks and playgrounds, as well as its creation of over forty social centers across the city. The city leaned on school infrastructure to set up these centers, which provided billiards for teens, education classes and public events for adults, plus sports, games, and entertainment for all.

Milwaukee’s socialist mayors rigorously fulfilled their promises to end city hall corruption. Clean governance was one of the hallmarks of the new administrations, which is one reason why broad layers of city voters so frequently voted for SDP mayors. Not content to end graft, socialist administrations also did everything possible to ensure the city was better managed and more efficient. Hoan explained the ideological, anti-capitalist rationale for rejecting job patronage and strictly adhering to a merit system:

In making our selections we have combed the entire city, and nation if necessary, to find the most experienced man for the work, regardless of whether the man was a Socialist or not, if he was honest, and had not been politically active against the Socialists. This policy is absolutely necessary if you are to make good. You must show the working people and the citizens of the city that the city is as good as and better an employer than private industry if you are to gain headway in convincing them that the municipality is a better owner of the public utilities and industries than private corporations.

Aiming to improve city efficiency, the Seidel administration immediately set up a Bureau of Economy and Efficiency — the nation’s first. The bureau tapped the state’s foremost experts, headed by University of Wisconsin–Madison labor scholar John Commons, and quickly implemented their proposals, notably by establishing a comprehensive system of cost accounting into every city department.

These efforts paid dividends both fiscally and politically. Boosting the public’s confidence in governmental initiatives eventually made it possible for Hoan to push the limits of acceptability regarding city incursions into the free market. Before and following World War I, Hoan — without city council approval — purchased train carloads of surplus foods and clothing from the US Army and sold them to the public far below market prices at city offices. The project’s scope was ambitious: in January 1920 alone, Hoan purchased 72,000 cans of peas, 33,600 cans of baked beans, 100,000 pounds of salt, and 20,000 pairs of knit gloves and wool socks, among other items.

This initiative was as effective as it was controversial. Hoan basked in the project’s success: “The public sale of food by me has offered an opportunity of demonstrating the Socialist theory of operating a business. It should demonstrate once and for all that the Socialist theory in conducting many of our enterprises without profits can be worked out in a grand and beneficial manner if handled by those who believe in its success.”¹⁵ Buoyed by this experience, the mayor set up an ambitious city-run food kitchen and cafeteria during the Depression. At the program’s peak in 1934, the city provided food to one out of five people in Milwaukee.

The city’s exceptional provision of recreation, services, and material relief was, according to Hoan, responsible for it having one of the lowest crime rates of any big city in the nation. In his fascinating 1936 book City Government: The Record of the Milwaukee Experiment, Hoan writes that in “Milwaukee we have held that crime prevention [via attacking its social roots] is as important, if not more so, if a comparison is possible, than crime detection and punishment.”

This did not mean the city ever considered defunding its police. Hoan in fact pushed for better wages and working conditions for cops, in a relatively successful attempt to win away rank-and-file police from their reactionary chief, John Janssen. At the same time, however, socialist mayors year after year vetoed attempts to establish a mounted horseback unit, fearing these would be used to repress striking workers. Both Seidel and Hoan were intensely focused on restraining the cops from intervening in labor strikes. As the city attorney under Seidel’s administration, Hoan in 1911 refused to prosecute strikers arrested during a militant garment strike. For his part, Mayor Seidel threatened to swear in striking workers as police deputies if the police chief attempted to intimidate these strikers.

Such an approach to the police was just one facet of city hall’s support of the labor movement. Union labor was used on all city construction and printing projects. With city backing, a unionization wave swept the city’s firemen, garbage collectors, coal passers, and elevator operators, among others. The city even managed to leverage its contract with a private street paving company to get it to accept the unionization of its workers in Milwaukee as well as in the company’s hometown of Chicago. Parallel to this, the SDP passed a slew of pro-union, pro-organizing laws in the state legislature, and Berger used his platform in Congress to support high-profile strikes, most notably by shining a national spotlight on the 1912 “Bread and Roses” textile mill workers strike led by the Wobblies in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Prior to World War I, the SDP was made up almost exclusively of white workers, and Berger infamously advocated white supremacy. But, as I have written about at length elsewhere, he and his comrades after 1917 became exceptionally committed fighters against racial injustice and nativism. In turn, black voters overwhelmingly voted socialist, and militant black radicals, including from the local Garveyite branch, joined the party.¹⁶

On this question and many more, Milwaukee’s workers had by American standards a uniquely widespread class consciousness, class solidarity, and class pride. Since the city’s wide range of progressive improvements were seen as conquests from below, not handouts from above, one party member observed in 1911 that scores of working people took personal and collective pride in these achievements: “This is really the great thing that the election of the Socialists to power in the city and county has done for the workers, or rather that the workers did for themselves.”

Socialist advances in Wisconsin did not come easily. They were won through successive struggles during which SDP members and leaders had to assess which alliances and compromises were necessary or avoidable. Since the balance of class power expressed through legislative blocs normally precluded socialists from getting everything they wanted, this was always a frustratingly muddy terrain of trade-offs. Through this experience they learned that there are no timeless formulas for working-class political parties. Effective mass politics is always context-specific.

One recurring dilemma concerned compromises over proposed legislation. If Wisconsin’s socialists refused on principle to ever support watered-down versions of their bills, constituents might vote them out for failing to deliver. Yet if SDP electeds rolled over every time establishment forces pushed for a compromise, they risked demoralizing their party’s rank-and-file members while also undermining their leverage in future battles.

Obliged to assess potential compromises on a case-by-case basis, the party frequently stuck to its guns. For instance, when the embattled private streetlight company in 1916 proposed lowering its costs to the city by $1.4 million over the following twenty years, Milwaukee’s sewer socialists ultimately stuck with their push to municipalize the service.

But SDP legislators also often pragmatically accepted compromises when they didn’t have the votes or power for something better. By working with the Progressive Republicans led by Governor Philip La Follette, they were able in 1932 to help pass the country’s first unemployment insurance bill. Though it fell short of the most ambitious version of the bill socialists had been fighting for since 1921, they declared that the compromise “may, notwithstanding its weaknesses, be pointed to as breaking new ground in the field of legislation and as another pioneering achievement of labor in Wisconsin. . . .  [It] forms the basis for a future comprehensive act.”

A related dilemma was how to differentiate oneself from, and fight against, the old parties while also having to work with them to pass progressive policies. Hoan, for instance, could not afford to alienate all other politicians in the city council, since he needed some of their votes to get anything done. This dynamic was even more acute on a statewide level, since socialists were always a small minority in the state legislature. And unlike in Congress — where Berger focused on propagandizing for socialism and making ambitious proposals with no chance of immediate successes — the SDP needed allies on a statewide level to pass the pro-union legislation demanded by their union base. And they needed the legislature to pass home rule so they could successfully implement their agenda in Milwaukee.

Until the 1920s, the party’s balance between political independence and alliances was skewed almost entirely to the former. Though there was some division of labor, as Hoan was obliged to work collaboratively with politicians and administrators across the political aisle, but the SDP’s refusal to ever endorse candidates from other parties — or to not run against progressive allies — helped it build up its independent machine and political identity.

This strictness, however, eventually proved to be a liability when Berger and his comrades reacted coldly to the push in 1919–20 by the radical, rural-based Nonpartisan League (NPL) to build a worker-farmer electoral alliance in Wisconsin. This political abortion stemmed primarily from the SDP’s hopes to directly become the majoritarian party statewide by winning over farmers. And the SDP distrusted the NPL’s willingness to run insurgent primary campaigns on the ballot lines of the old parties. The NPL in North Dakota had used this tactic to capture the Republican Party statewide and to win the governor’s races in 1916, 1918, and 1920. And in Minnesota, the NPL and allied unions used this tactic for a few years to lay the groundwork for a new independent Farmer-Labor Party, which went on in the 1930s to govern the state. Things turned out differently in Wisconsin where, spurned by Milwaukee’s socialists, the state’s militant farmers’ movement after 1921 ensconced itself in the Republicans’ progressive wing.¹⁷

On a national level, Berger and his allies in the SPA similarly missed a ripe opportunity to support nascent labor party movements that erupted across the United States after 1918. For the first few years of this electoral insurgency, key national SPA leaders like Berger maintained a standoffish approach to the labor party movement, since they had long predicted that workers’ electoral radicalization would get directly channeled into their party. Socialist Party chapters in Chicago, Ohio, and beyond, in 1919–20, went even further by actively opposing local labor party efforts — as did the nascent Communist movement. Forced to choose between the SPA and union-based efforts to build a new mass party, many of Berger’s long-standing comrades outside of Wisconsin chose the latter.

Berger eventually realized that the SDP’s vision for winning over Wisconsin’s farmers was not going to pan out. Nor was the SPA outside of Wisconsin big enough to absorb so much third-party energy. Somewhat belatedly, he pushed to adjust the party’s tactics in a more alliance-friendly direction. From 1922 onward, Berger convinced the national party to finally actively support efforts to build a broad-based party of working people nationwide. Within Wisconsin, he shocked some SDP cadre in 1922 by pushing to not run a candidate for US senator, since this risked tanking the electoral chances of Robert La Follette. In response to sharp internal SDP disagreements, Berger argued that “this is not a question of principle but one of tactics. Until recently the Socialist party of America was the only one that forbade the thing we are considering.”

The SDP’s new approach proved successful in Wisconsin during the 1920s. As shown in historian Joshua Kluever’s excellent work on the state legislature, the SDP’s increased flexibility enabled it to be considerably more effective in passing statewide laws throughout the decade despite the fact that its own legislative caucus had shrunk.

With socialists functioning as a de facto junior partner to La Follette’s Progressives in the legislature, the SDP was able in an otherwise challenging period to continue delivering tangible improvements to its base, transforming Wisconsin into a bastion of progressive policy that pointed the way forward for the country as a whole. And the SDP continued to try raising workers’ expectations by pushing for transformative reforms unlikely to get passed anytime soon. Kluever notes that the SDP’s legislative caucus ultimately passed 525 out of its 1,904 proposed bills, a success rate of roughly 28 percent.¹⁸

Another central dilemma confronting the sewer socialists was how to combine left governance with outside movement pressure. One of the core differences between the socialists and even the best of progressives was that the latter were not accountable to membership-based political organizations like the SDP and the unions.

The SDP’s rank-and-file political machine, combined with its sway over organized labor, provided much of the party’s power to drive through legislation and shape public opinion. Indeed, Hoan in City Government underscored that if other cities wanted to emulate Milwaukee’s success, electing “honest and competent men” was insufficient: “A permanent political party must be formed to supply encouragement and active assistance to the current executive and his administration and to ensure that successive executives carry on the desired policies.”

One of the key reasons why some Wisconsin Democrats and Republicans periodically compromised with socialists in the legislature and city council was that they feared that failure to do so would enable the SDP and unions to convince their constituents to vote them out in the next election. This approach became increasingly urgent once the party lost its short-lived control over the city council. Given Hoan’s lack of a majority, historian Todd Fulda notes that as Mayor Hoan took “a populist approach to governing, appealing directly to the citizens of Milwaukee to support his reforms and pressure the nonpartisan aldermen to support them as well.”¹⁹ The same approach informed the party’s approach on a statewide level, leading the SDP to power-map the legislature to figure out pressure points to flip movable officeholders.

This inside-outside strategy was a precondition for sewer socialism’s success. But it also brought with it all sorts of tactical headaches, since the party’s ranks did not always see eye to eye with or defer to its elected leaders. For instance, many members demanded Hoan only appoint socialists to administration positions. In their view, it was unfair and unnecessary to grant desirable jobs to outsiders while so many socialist rank and filers, toiling away in grueling factory jobs, had proven their leadership abilities through party and union work.

Generally, the party ran a tight ship with its electeds. To discourage opportunist office seekers, the SDP required that all of its electoral candidates be party members for at least three years and that they sign undated resignation letters that the party could impose if the elected broke his campaign promises or broke with socialist electoral caucus decisions. Such a threat carried real weight since these men depended entirely on the party and socialist-led unions to get reelected. Accordingly, Berger repeatedly used the party press to criticize significant wavering among its electeds and to remind them that winning office was not an end in itself but only a means to more effectively fight for socialism. Berger practiced what he preached: due to his antiwar stance, the US Congress in 1918 and again in 1919 denied him his duly elected seat. And his opposition to the war in 1919 landed him a prison sentence of 20 years. (This federal court sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1921.)

Wisconsin sewer socialism’s deep roots in the working class allowed it to weather government repression as well as postwar political upheavals. But few other SPA branches survived. After 1918, many of the party’s relatively moderate union and political leaders joined broader Farmer-Labor Party movements. Meanwhile, the SPA’s left — buoyed by an influx of Eastern European socialists — was further radicalized by the Russian Revolution, wartime repression, and the First Red Scare. Reviving some of the old SLP’s doctrinaire methods, these leftists founded a new Communist Party that sought to import the intransigent tactics and insurrectionary strategy that the Bolsheviks had developed in the context of an autocratic, war-torn Russian. Inspired by Russia’s example and transfixed by unfounded beliefs that an armed workers’ uprising was imminent in the United States, significant layers of activists moved away from pragmatic Marxism. It wasn’t until well into the Depression, however, that Communists began to make serious inroads in Wisconsin.

It was no small achievement that the SDP survived the demoralizing 1920s. Yet by late 1928, Hoan was privately complaining to the SPA’s national party chair, Norman Thomas, that some of Wisconsin’s socialist electeds were getting too comfortable in office: “Good old comrades who have earned civil service and some elective positions have been chloroformed as far as Socialist activities are concerned by the fact that their economic environ-[ment] has been thus improved. . . .  We have been trying to hold the fort here [in Wisconsin] for years for its good influence on the rest of the national movement but it is slowly eating into our vitals.” Similarly, some older socialist union leaders slowly but steadily began drifting away from the party, as did organized labor as a whole. While the tradition of noninterference between unions and the party shielded the SDP from getting pulled far rightward by organized labor, it also made it more challenging for the party to check labor’s drift away from socialism in this period.

The Depression gave Wisconsin’s sewer socialists and unions a sudden jolt of energy and new members, including many young radicalized workers. Buoyed by this resurgence, in 1932 Hoan was reelected by a landslide and the party came within two votes of having a city council majority. Hoan’s inaugural mayoral address declared that they were living “in the midst of a world-wide economic and social revolution . . . [the] death agonies of a dying system and the birth pains of the building of a new and better world.” Capitalism, he announced, had to give way to “the next stage of human development which is socialism.”

Despite the moderate drift of some union leaders and some socialist electeds over the past decades, the party overall retained its radical spirit and in some ways deepened it during the 1930s. Sewer socialists pushed as hard and fast as possible to lead strikes, to organize the unorganized, and to win transformative reforms in the city and the state. Overcoming intense employer opposition, Wisconsin in 1931 passed the country’s first unified labor code, boosting workers’ rights to strike, boycott, and unionize.

Hoan consistently used all the powers at his disposal to support local walkouts — including during an explosive 1934 strike of the employees of the private Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company that paralyzed city transport, temporarily shut the power plant, and took the life of one strike supporter. Blamed by the mayor and the public for this bloodshed, management folded soon after. In the name of averting more violence, the SDP in late 1935 succeeded in passing America’s strongest labor law: the Boncel Ordinance, which empowered the city administration to close the plants of any company that refused to collectively bargain, resulting in crowds of over two hundred people two days in a row. Employers who refused to comply would be fined or imprisoned.

With boosts from above and below — including the rise of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) with considerable Communist leadership — Milwaukee County’s union density grew tenfold from 1929 to 1939. By the end of the 1930s, roughly 60 percent of its workers were in unions. In contrast, New York City at its peak only reached a union density of at most 33 percent.

Despite labor’s upsurge and the SDP’s continued efforts to educate the public about socialism, the movement’s forward advance was checked and eventually reversed by employer opposition; the allure of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to voters and union leaders; a “civil war” between the AFL and the CIO; the growth of Wisconsin’s Communist Party in the mid-1930s; the excitement, pull, and factionalism of building a broader Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation with Progressives; and, perhaps most decisively, by public opinion, which even during the Depression trailed well behind socialist hopes. Even after decades of socialist propaganda and policy wins, most Milwaukeeans — and most of the city’s workers — had not become socialists.

The socialists in Milwaukee and beyond wanted to go much further than improved governance locally and the New Deal nationally. But ultimately they did not have enough organizational strength or popular support to do so. Without a majority in the city council, the SDP lost its push to address mass unemployment by instituting a six-hour day and five-day workweek. Similarly, socialists and their allied unions failed to bring about their goal of establishing a robust cooperative hospital system to provide Milwaukee with cheap, quality health care and treatment.

Incensed by Hoan’s refusal to impose an austerity budget, employers waged a war to recall him in 1933. Though they lost that battle, Milwaukee’s bourgeois establishment succeeded in convincing a majority of voters to defeat the SDP’s 1936 referendum to municipalize the electric utility. That same year, the SDP suffered a “bloodbath” in the city council elections as voters punished socialists for their perceived radicalism on municipal ownership and the Boncel Ordinance. In 1940, Hoan lost the mayoral race to a handsome but politically vacuous centrist named Carl Zeidler. Sewer socialism’s reign was over. (Zeidler’s younger brother, Frank, a socialist, would go on to become Milwaukee’s mayor from 1948 to 1960, but by this time the party and mass movement was mostly gone.)

Unfortunately, backlash against militant sit-down strikes and political radicalism was the dominant trend by the late 1930s, not just in Milwaukee but in all corners of the United States.²⁰ Though radical historiography has tended to explain the late 1930s primarily through the lens of Democratic Party co-optation, socialists were booted from office even in places like Wisconsin and Minnesota, where they had built distinct parties and political profiles to the left of the Democrats. In 1938 — a midterm election defined by blowback against strike militancy and New Deal ambitions — the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party lost its control of the governorship to a Republican, as voters rejected the ambitious initiatives of socialist Elmer Benson, the most radical elected official to ever govern a US state. Wisconsin that year voted out third-party Progressive governor Philip La Follette and voted in a Republican.

Progressives and leftists within the Democratic Party did not fare much better in 1938. In Washington, where the Left’s Commonwealth Federation succeeded in becoming a dominant voice in the Democratic Party, its candidate for Seattle mayor lost badly. Pro-labor and pro–New Deal Democratic governors in Michigan, Colorado, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Kansas, plus eighty Democratic congressmen, were similarly defeated by Republicans that year. Seeing the change in political winds, President Roosevelt began to retreat from the quasi–social democratic vision he had articulated in alliance with a surging industrial labor movement. The fact that six-time Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas received only 0.4 percent of the vote in 1936 and 0.2 percent in 1940 further suggests that there was not a large reserve of mass political radicalism left untapped by sellout union leaders and reformists.

While the New Deal fell short of establishing social democracy in America, let alone socialism, it did give an unprecedented degree of economic security and workplace freedom to tens of millions of workers. That was no small feat on an exceptionally challenging terrain. Had it not been for pragmatic radicals, America wouldn’t have gotten as far as it did toward shifting power and resources to working people. And nowhere did workers go further than in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee’s experience shows not only that the Left can govern but that it can do so considerably more effectively than establishment politicians. That’s the real reason why defenders of the status quo are so worried about democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani.

While the history of sewer socialism provides a road map for radicals today aiming to build a majoritarian socialist movement, it would be contrary to the nondogmatic spirit of Berger and his comrades to try to simply copy and paste their tactics into today’s distinct context. The space in the United States for third parties, for instance, has shrunk due to unprecedented partisan polarization and the rise of far-right authoritarianism (increasing the risk of “spoiling” votes), the nationalization of politics (decreasing the space for local third parties), and a century-long consolidation of electoral primaries (increasing the ability of insurgents to act autonomously within existing parties).

But since so much pressure will bear down upon Mamdani to govern, at best, as a progressive solo operator, it’s important to stress that sewer socialism’s ongoing success depended on building and leaning on an independent radical organization rooted in a mass workers’ movement, one that was powerful and autonomous enough to credibly threaten mainstream politicians with electoral defeat if they did not get on board with socialist policy demands. Relying primarily on backroom deals and savvy communications today won’t be enough in New York City — or anywhere else — to sustain popular enthusiasm, build enough power to force centrist politicians to pass transformative demands, or fundamentally change the relationship of class forces.

That’s why today’s left mayors will need to leverage their platform and legitimacy to actively encourage working-class organizing and build independent political organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America. Whereas Milwaukee’s sewer socialist mayors were elected by a mass socialist party anchored in organized labor and working-class neighborhoods, today’s electoral insurgencies have leapt far past workers’ and radicals’ organized power on the ground. Everything hinges on whether our side can lean on our big recent electoral wins and public office to bridge that gap by rebuilding the bottom-up organized power of working people.

All this talk of sewer socialism will surely strike some radical critics as insufficiently revolutionary. But as Milwaukee’s experience suggests, the Left’s best bet to win more working people to socialism is to deliver real improvements to people’s lives in the here and now while simultaneously advocating for and organizing around anti-capitalist ideas. Even small wins wrested through organized struggle raise expectations, forge hope, and help build the party. We need working people to see and feel that socialism is in their interests. Ideological arguments, on their own, can only go so far.

Does running to win and deliver through the capitalist state carry a risk of co-optation? Definitely. But there’s no way to seriously grow the Left in the United States without trying to thread that needle. Comparative histories of US leftism have indeed shown that all of the most successful instances of mass working-class politics in the United States have adopted some iteration of this pragmatic radicalism, from Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party, to New York’s Jewish immigrant socialism, to the Popular-Front Communists of the late 1930s.²¹

A pragmatically radical orientation does not mean dropping goals for a socialist future or liquidating oneself into the muddy waters of progressivism. But it does require running in elections to win and deliver while simultaneously adopting Berger’s focus on building up workers’ organized strength: “We must have a moral, physical and intellectual strengthening of the proletariat, before all things.” Compromises that move us in that direction are helpful; ones that move us away are not.

To defeat the far right, win social democracy, and eventually overturn capitalism, what working people need, above all, is more organized power. Building that grassroots power can only happen if socialists inside and outside the state start delivering for millions.

The movement of solidarity with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa was a success. The 1980s witnessed global campaigns to boycott products originating in South Africa (wine, fruit, other agricultural and mineral products), impose sanctions on weapons and technology transfers to the regime, and isolate it diplomatically as well as in the cultural, educational, and sports arenas. These actions, undertaken by citizens in many countries, and later joined by their governments, formed part of a coordinated effort to force the apartheid state to change. They were led by South African political forces, in particular the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies, including the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

For the ANC alliance, the global boycott and sanctions campaign was one of four core strategies used to bring the regime to its knees. The other strategies included the work of movement activists who operated underground inside the country; the armed struggle of uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation, known as MK), which was launched in 1961 as a joint initiative by members of the ANC and SACP; and the internal mass movement that took different forms over the years and was consolidated in 1983 as the United Democratic Front (UDF).⁷ After its formation in 1985, the COSATU union federation’s cooperation with the UDF became known as the Mass Democratic Movement, though the affiliation was based more on their shared political concerns than on solid organizational structures.⁸

The ANC and UDF were not the only anti-apartheid forces operating inside South Africa and overseas, of course. Other movements, such as the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) were active too, together with their military and civil-society allies, notably the National Forum (formed the same year as the UDF, in 1983) and the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU). They challenged the ANC for political dominance and enjoyed substantial support initially. However, by the late 1970s, when the anti-apartheid struggle entered its last stage, the ANC had become the dominant mass-based opposition, dwarfing all other groups. It retained its dominance all the way up to the 1994 transition and beyond. This became evident in the first decade after liberation, with the ANC receiving consistently more than 60 percent of the vote in national elections, while the PAC hovered around 1 percent and AZAPO fell well below that.

ANC dominance was not just a question of numbers. Its leaders were well known and highly respected locally and internationally — Nelson Mandela, above all, became the global icon of the struggle — while leaders of other movements remained largely obscure. The exception was Steve Biko, whose Black Consciousness legacy survived his death in detention at the hands of the security police, but he was claimed as a martyr of the struggle as a whole rather than of any specific movement. There were additional reasons for the ANC’s ability to sustain its leading position: continuity of practice and solid organizational structures; effective combination of struggles in the streets, underground, and across borders; and consistent diplomatic and military support from regional African states, much of the Third World, and the Soviet Union and its allies.

This last element is frequently forgotten: South Africa was seen by many in Africa and the African diaspora, as well as the underdeveloped world in general, as a link in a global campaign to liberate remaining colonial territories and extend rights to those historically subordinated on the basis of race. The campaign against apartheid was a key instance of the anti-colonial and anti-racist wave that engulfed the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Solidarity with the campaign was embedded in a well-established tradition. It was a global cause at the heart of modern politics that was not based primarily on moral identification with people fighting for human rights. Rather, it was seen as a final act in the epochal racial-colonial liberation project, uniting people of different ideological agendas — liberal, humanitarian, radical, socialist — who shared a revulsion for colonialism and racial discrimination.

Given that background, we must not look at anti-apartheid solidarity as merely a set of tactics that can be adopted by campaigns operating outside the historic context that gave rise to them in the first place. To be sure, other struggles can acquire an iconic status in their own right, but they cannot do that by borrowing techniques wholesale from a distinct case.

The South African anti-apartheid movement was distinctive in another way too. It targeted the regime as a whole rather than a specific policy or government. It was meant to enable change in the structure of power, affecting not only the party-political system but also the boundaries of citizenship and the mode of operation of social, economic, and political institutions. In that sense, the transition to a new democratic order was not perceived as a normal transition, such as that between Labour and the Conservative Party in the UK or between the social democrats and the center right in Scandinavia. It was more fundamental than that, though it did not amount to the abolition of the entire state along the lines of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and East Germany. Some conceptualizations of the anti-apartheid struggle did envisage state transformation along such radical lines, but its goals were usually formulated more modestly as the extension of citizenship and civil rights to excluded groups and the deracialization of state institutions. The aim was to dismantle the apartheid regime, which consisted of racially segregated institutions and the legal framework that governed their operations, and in that way place the state on new democratic foundations.⁹

To examine this effort, we need to regard apartheid against its historical background: it was a link in a centuries-long chain of conquest and settlement processes in southern Africa that combined aspects of land dispossession, class exploitation, and legal discrimination. The fight against it centered on the goal of legal equality, exemplified in the opening statement of the 1955 Freedom Charter (“South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”) and the UDF call in the 1980s for a “one person, one vote” political system. Specific policies and laws — the Population Registration Act, the Natives Land acts, the Urban Areas Act — made sense in the context of the whole of which they were parts. There was no point in challenging discrete components; the task was to bring down the entire system. The goal of the boycotts and sanctions campaign followed this principle: to exert pressure on the regime to negotiate itself out of existence by abolishing racial legislation, legalizing banned political organizations, reintegrating the Bantustans (or “homelands”), and, above all, extending equal rights to all citizens.

The social and economic aspects of apartheid, including land and labor relations and access to housing and social services, featured in the solidarity campaign — for example, in the Sullivan principles meant to govern the conduct of US corporations operating in South Africa — but were not central to it.¹⁰ Inside the country, the struggle focused on the need to ensure equality and justice as well as to provide redress for past injustices. Political change was seen as central, but it was considered as a first step in a process of transformation that would see apartheid social relationships gradually give way to new realities made possible by a shift in power relations. From the anti-apartheid movement’s perspective, racial ideology was both a cause and an effect of the structure of South African society, which had to be transformed.

This point requires clarification. Apartheid was a system of domination based on the division of people into racial groups with distinct rights and liabilities. It was also a historical product of colonial rule, based on a division between European settlers and indigenous Africans. These divisions largely overlapped but had somewhat different implications. The racial distinction was internal to the country, though global in origin, separating residents according to pseudobiological criteria (shifting later to cultural and political ones). The colonial distinction separated people who were native to the country from those who were external to it. White settlers were a minority, but they stood out as the largest group with colonial origins in Africa, in both absolute numbers and as a proportion of the population. The only other group approaching that size was European settlers in Algeria, who, unlike politically independent white South Africans, were integrated into metropolitan France.

In theoretical terms, this combination of race and colonialism was defined as Colonialism of a Special Type (CST), a formulation developed by the SACP and adopted by the ANC in the 1960s. It referred to a colonial system that shifted the locus of control from external British forces to internal white elites. Racial language was used to legitimize the system, which was in essence a vehicle for the exploitation of black workers and peasants by white capitalists. They derived superprofits from the creation of a cheap and compliant labor force through noneconomic coercive mechanisms: land dispossession to force African subsistence farmers onto white-owned farms, mines, and industries, and the suppression of labor unions and political dissent in order to prevent workers from organizing to fight their exploitation.¹¹

From the CST perspective, all white people benefited from this exploitation, but the substantial middle and working classes were less privileged and could become allies — but not leaders — in the fight against apartheid. A combination of carrots (the offer of partnership in a free South Africa) and sticks (disruptions to their way of life and its comforts) could encourage members of these groups to sever their links to the oppressive regime and join the struggle, or at least not stand in its way. Their white or settler status would not be an obstacle to their acceptance as fellow South Africans, provided they gave up their legal privileges. Black people were at the forefront of struggle as the most exploited and oppressed section of the population, but indigeneity did not entitle them to an elevated status, nor was there any guarantee where they would stand politically. They had more to win from radical change and were therefore more likely to embrace it on pragmatic grounds. White settlers had more to lose and were therefore less likely to do the same, but they could change with the right incentives.

Sanctions and boycotts added external pressure on top of the civil disobedience and political protest that were prevalent inside the country in the 1980s and the armed struggle that was waged across borders. They were aimed to force beneficiaries of the system to pay a price for their support and to encourage them to turn against it. This worked less by exacting a direct economic price and more by creating a sense of isolation, shame, embarrassment, and discomfort. The discomfort was not only psychological in nature; it involved real difficulties in travel, imports of essential and luxury products, business transactions, sports and cultural exchanges, and education and training opportunities. All South Africans were affected, and white citizens in particular needed to cope with exclusion and reshape their self-image as Western, modern, and legitimate members of the global community.

Legitimacy was a key issue at stake — not only the legitimacy of the regime (which had been in doubt from its inception and was irrevocably undermined when South Africa defied the 1960s “wind of change” trend of decolonization and civil rights struggles) but the legitimacy of being a white South African person in that changing world. Regardless of how individual white people stood politically, the world saw them as complicit in human rights violations. Having to face contempt regardless of personal involvement gave rise to defiance and resentment but also guilty feelings and occasionally commitments to atone for their collective responsibility in order to counter their status as global pariahs. The solidarity campaign played a role in pushing some of them — a minority, but a growing one, especially among young students, professionals, and educated elites — to distance themselves from the regime.

Such responses would not have amounted to much in practical terms in the absence of a solid and trusted political force that could guide people in a different direction. Leadership was provided by the ANC alliance and boosted by the resurgence of labor and popular mobilization in the late 1970s and early 1980s, starting with the Soweto uprising of 1976. Anti-apartheid forces applied pressure on the regime through protest action, mass defiance, strikes, marches, disruptions, popular education, civic engagement, and various forms of struggle in streets, communities, schools, churches, and workplaces. In all these activities, white people were encouraged to participate by forming their own organizations or by joining broader structures. Pressure from outside the country reinforced the sense that South Africans were not alone, that their efforts were appreciated and supported by the world at large, that their cause was just and likely to win even if the challenges they faced seemed very difficult to overcome at the time.

In that sense, the boycotts and sanctions campaign served a dual purpose: to delegitimize the regime globally and thereby make it more difficult for it to develop diplomatic, military, and economic relations with outside forces, and to make life difficult for white South Africans and thus convince them of the need for change. Both these undermined the regime’s ability to gain and maintain support, and both depended on the rise of a powerful mass movement to make it clear that change was not only desirable but also likely, even inevitable. Projecting a vision of an inclusive, democratic, rights-oriented future helped the anti-apartheid movement consolidate support inside as well as outside the country. It used this to force the regime to the negotiations table and to position itself as the leading agent in the transition process.

Based on the discussion above, the main lesson to draw from the anti-apartheid campaign is that its success was based on its ability to take advantage of global conditions to undermine the regime from the inside and outside by distancing it from actual and potential supporters. This was made possible through the operation of a local mass movement that could present a credible alternative, inspiring different constituencies to work together for the shared cause. The framing of the struggle in inclusive terms that sought to overcome racial and colonial divisions was a crucial strategy that enabled key stakeholders to move from being part of the problem to becoming part of the solution. The solidarity movement played a role in the service of this agenda and thus contributed to the success of the struggle, which was carried forward by mass constituencies inside the country.

Can the analysis above be used to examine the Palestine solidarity movement against the Israeli regime in the 1967 occupied territories and beyond? The following discussion will examine the question with a focus on four dimensions:

1. The global political context

2. The target — is it the state, the regime as a whole, specific policies and ideologies?

3. The discourse of the movement — is it framed as a racial, national, or a colonial-type contestation? Is the settler-indigenous distinction used to define goals and practices?

4. The role of a local leadership in providing guidance to overseas activists and links to constituencies on the ground

On all these dimensions there are substantial differences between the South African and the Israeli-Palestinian conditions, as outlined below.

The Global Political Context

The period between the 1960s and the 1980s provided a context for the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. The 1960s saw the rise of the New Left and associated movements against the war in Vietnam, movements for racial equality in the United States and gender equality everywhere, and support for campaigns for social change in Latin America. Liberation movements in southern Africa fit this pattern, and so did the Palestinian resistance movement that created a popular alternative to oppressive, corrupt, and inefficient Arab governments. The following decade presented a more mixed picture. The early 1970s witnessed the US retreat from Southeast Asia as well as the first serious military setback to Israel in 1973. Radical forces gained with the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974, the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of the same year that led to the liberation of the nation’s colonies in Africa, and the Soweto uprising of 1976, all the way up to the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and Zimbabwean independence in 1980. The anti-apartheid movement rode this wave to 1990, when the government opened negotiations with the ANC and the transition process began. It was seen as both a liberal and a radical cause that advanced human rights, national liberation, and social transformation. Supported by centrists and leftists alike, the transition was sustained over a period of flux in global relations. This was not the case with the Palestinian movement.

The 1973 recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people by the Arab League and the speech of its chairman, Yasser Arafat, at the UN General Assembly in 1974 were important in establishing Palestine as a legitimate international player. This was accompanied by growing delegitimation of Israel: most African countries broke off diplomatic relations with Israel after its incursion into African territory in 1973, and it became isolated in the UN and international forums. Resistance in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself, especially on Land Day in 1976, grew as part of this process. There were negative developments from the Palestinians’ perspective too: Black September, in 1970, forced the relocation of resistance organizations from Jordan to Lebanon, a move that triggered the disastrous civil war in the latter country, and the defeat of guerrilla movements and the installation of right-wing military regimes in the Southern Cone of the Americas were a setback for the global left. Furthermore, the 1978 Camp David Accords gave Israel the most important diplomatic victory in its history: a peace agreement and diplomatic relations with Egypt, the biggest and strongest Arab country. This allowed Israel to embark on the massive settlement enterprise that dominated its policies in coming years.

The anti-imperialist tide of the 1970s had been halted and even reversed by the 1980s. The Sino-Vietnamese conflict, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and the Iran-Iraq War shattered hopes for any global alliance of forces opposed to US domination. By the early 1990s, Israel’s diplomatic fortunes had changed dramatically, with the establishment and renewal of relations with most African countries, Eastern Europe, India, China, and Russia. The rise of twenty new states in that period, with the collapse and fragmentation of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, gave the principle of ethnonational self-determination a boost, enhancing the legitimacy of both Israeli and Palestinian independent statehood.

In this changed environment, opposition to the State of Israel — not merely to its policies in the occupied territories but also to its dominant ideology, its legitimacy, and its very existence — began to look anachronistic. The new international consensus called for a negotiated solution that would result in two states coexisting alongside each other, in line with the principle of national self-determination. The PLO itself adopted that position in its Declaration of Independence for the State of Palestine in 1988, and it participated in subsequent diplomatic processes that culminated with the 1993 Oslo Accords and mutual recognition between itself and Israel.¹² It has not revoked this basic stance since, despite the series of armed hostilities that have plagued Israel-Palestine over the last several decades.

With the exception of Iran, possibly Libya, and some Palestinian forces — notably the Islamist movement Hamas — rejectionist positions that denied the legitimacy of Israel and its very existence in whatever form became increasingly marginalized. There was global support for a two-state solution that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state in the 1967 territories, but not for replacing Israel with a unitary state on the entire territory of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea,” or for replacing the Israeli regime altogether with a new, nonethnic democracy. This trend has strengthened in the last decade in particular, which has seen the rise of a reactionary populist wave in many countries, bringing to power the likes of Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and Javier Milei. Throughout the period, Israel has continued to enjoy almost unconditional diplomatic and military support from successive US administrations, backed by an even more enthusiastic Congress.

To what extent have things changed since October 7, 2023, given the Hamas attack on Israeli border communities and military bases, the brutal Israeli onslaught in Gaza, and the rising Palestinian solidarity movement? There is no doubt that the scale and ferocity of the Israeli military campaign, and the global revulsion with which it was met, damaged its reputation and diminished its popular and diplomatic standing. Accusations of practices of apartheid and genocide, of war crimes and ethnic cleansing abound, alongside calls for boycotts and sanctions. But are these directed at the State of Israel as a whole or at its policies in the 1967 occupied territories? Have protests led to a questioning of the legitimacy of the Israeli state, or only of its policies and practices toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank?

The current state of affairs is in flux and will continue to be influenced by developments on the ground. At this point in time, after the October 2025 ceasefire and the subsequent adoption of the Trump plan for Gaza by the UN Security Council and many key Arab and Islamic states, there is no real sign of a decisive shift toward identifying the entire set of institutions and practices under the State of Israel — rather than those specifically in relation to the 1967 occupation and Gaza — as the focus of the solidarity campaign, despite the intensification of criticism of Israel’s policies and its cruel and indiscriminate attacks on civilians. This is the case for support for sanctions by governments and international organizations such as the UN and the European Union. Without doubt, a shift in popular attitudes has taken place, in particular among young people. How it would translate into action in the longer term is not obvious, especially in light of the regional turmoil introduced by the renewed military assault on Iran by Israel and the United States, which started on the February 28, 2026, and whose impact cannot yet be seen with any precision.¹³

The growing criticism of Israel is important in its own right, of course, and it may eventually lead to the delegitimation of the entire regime, but this does not seem to be the case (at least not yet). Much would depend on how the Gaza ceasefire holds and whether it is followed by moves to de-escalate the armed conflict and allow for the reconstruction of civilian life there. To use imperfect analogies, Israel is widely condemned for its practices, similarly to Russia with regard to Ukraine, Myanmar with regard to the Rohingya, and Serbia with regard to Bosnia and Kosovo. These cases have given rise to global opprobrium and resulted in the imposition of sanctions on governments and indictment of leaders for war crimes, but without challenging the legitimacy of the state as a player in the international arena. In this sense, they are different from apartheid South Africa, especially during its late stage in the 1980s.

The main reason for the contrast between the widespread support for a unitary, nonracial South Africa to replace apartheid and the lack of such support for unitary statehood in Israel-Palestine (except on the activist margins) is the way in which each conflict has been defined by both direct stakeholders and outsides. South Africa was seen as a single society divided by race — an invidious distinction that is the historical product of colonialism and slavery, and that serves to elevate one group of people over others on the basis of imaginary biological differences. Israel-Palestine, in contrast, is seen as a conflict between two national groups, each with a distinct historical identity, language, culture, and religion. These groups are separated from each other due to their own self-definitions, which predate their encounter on the land of Palestine from the late nineteenth century onward, rather than through an imposition by some external (European, colonial, and settler) forces on locals (Africans, indigenous people).

Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs define their identities in national-territorial terms, which are considered legitimate, even normative, globally, rather than in discredited racial terms. This makes their relations potentially reconcilable through territorial partition. But other terms also fit the conflict, either alone or in combination. In apartheid South Africa, considerations of race and colonialism were combined in the CST perspective, while in Israel-Palestine nationalism has been combined with colonialism and settlement in a process whereby one group emerged, grew, and expanded territorially by displacing and replacing members of the other group. The current distribution of the population that could form the basis for the physical division of land — with Israeli Jews as a majority within the pre-1967 boundaries — is an outcome of the forcible dispersal of millions of people who had become refugees in their own land and neighboring countries as a result of the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948, known as the Nakba.

Further, the settlement of hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews in the 1967 occupied territories has made a solution by way of geographical partition very difficult. The definition of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and theirs alone, includes Jews who do not live there at present and have never lived there, and excludes non-Jews who do live there or used to. This introduces another complication into the picture.

And yet the dominant perspective internationally remains partial to a solution consisting of an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. This is premised on regarding the Nakba as irreversible, but regarding the post-1967 settlement process as reversible. It thus conflicts with the views of people affected most directly by such a solution: Palestinian refugees and Jewish settlers and their supporters. It treats the 1967 occupation as illegitimate and temporary and, by implication, the rest of Israel as legitimate and permanent. It removes Israel proper, in its original post-1948 boundaries, from consideration for sanctions and specifically targets its occupation and settlement policies, including in Gaza.

Importantly, the ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), lodged by South Africa against Israel in December 2023, deals entirely with policies pursued by Israel in Gaza, with hardly a mention of the regime or state as a whole. It notes in passing that 80 percent of Gaza’s population consists of refugees and their descendants “from towns and villages in what is now the State of Israel, expelled or forced to flee during the mass displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians or ‘Nakba’ during the establishment of the State of Israel,” a fact that “features prominently in the history and consciousness of Palestinians in Gaza, as it does for the wider Palestinian people.”¹⁴ This history does not affect the rest of the application, however, or play any role in the measures of intervention sought from the ICJ.

This approach has been expressed more recently in a series of bans and sanctions imposed by Western countries on individual Israeli settlers and their allies accused of violent actions against Palestinian residents. It is also manifested in the ICJ’s July 2024 ruling (in a case unrelated to the Gaza war) that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful; the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible; the State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The ruling calls on international bodies not to recognize the situation as legal and says that the UN General Assembly and the Security Council “should consider the precise modalities and further action required to bring to an end as rapidly as possible the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The ICJ observed that “Israel’s legislation and measures impose and serve to maintain a near-complete separation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between the settler and Palestinian communities.” This constitutes a breach of Article 3 of the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid. However, it applies only to the occupied territories and not to Israeli territory.¹⁵

Near the time of writing, the UN Human Rights Council released a report that, once again, documents Israeli practices across Gaza and the West Bank (but not inside Israeli territory itself) that amount to “a deliberate policy of physical and juridical separation intended to maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem” and constitute violation of international conventions that prohibit “racial segregation and apartheid.”¹⁶

In all this there is a clear conceptual distinction between Israel as a state, the existence and legitimacy of which are not contested, and the occupation regime that is challenged as illegal. This rests on the assumption that the two sides of the Green Line (the pre-1967 boundary) are separate, as if the policies of occupation and settlement were not inherently linked to the key features of the Israeli regime itself — the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the definition of Israel as the exclusive and exclusionary nation-state of the Jewish people. This regime grants ownership rights to all nonresident Jews and denies them to all resident non-Jews, including Palestinian citizens (20 percent of the population) who nominally enjoy rights as individuals but are not recognized as a collective with an equal stake in the state, which belongs only to Jews.

The focus on the 1967 occupied territories is crucial because it identifies the most pressing problem, which requires immediate action. At the same time, it is clearly linked to other features of the regime and is therefore difficult to address without attending to them, too, both conceptually and practically. How to retain focus on the regime’s most visible and vulnerable aspect without losing sight of its other dimensions is a challenge.

The BDS movement has sought to meet this challenge by putting forward three demands for Israel: “Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall”; “recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality”; and “respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.” These demands respectively address the 1967 occupation, the exclusive Jewish nature of the state, and the legacy of the 1948 Nakba.

The comprehensive nature of the BDS call avoids the failure of international bodies, including the ICJ and the UN Human Rights Council, to target the Israeli regime beyond the 1967 occupation. It thus provides a useful corrective to the global consensus on Israel-Palestine in theory. But by treating the issue as merely one concern among others, giving it no priority, it fails to capitalize in practice on the centrality it has acquired in discourse critical of Israel and its policies. While none of the demands enjoy support from a majority of Israeli Jews, large constituencies could be mobilized for the first two (the end to the occupation and equality for Palestinian citizens), but only a tiny minority support the third one (the right of return of the 1948 refugees). Lumping them all together makes sense in offering a comprehensive analysis, but not in terms of practical politics.¹⁷

Of course, the BDS call does not require that all three concerns it raises be addressed together in all situations, or that they all receive the same degree of attention. The BDS label has been deployed by local campaigns that do not seek a seal of approval from a central authority. The key question here is whether the focus on the illegality of the 1967 occupation and the need for sanctions to end it can be redirected toward the illegitimacy of the regime as a whole.

This is the core dilemma facing critical activists and intellectuals: a full understanding of Israel-Palestine requires the incorporation of notions of colonialism and apartheid into their framework and to move beyond the national framing of the conflict, with its focus on the 1967 occupation. In that way, they would be able to address the Nakba of 1948 and the structural features of Israel as a Jewish state. But when they campaign concretely, they do need to focus on the occupation (which includes, of course, the current situation in Gaza) as an issue that mobilizes significantly large numbers of people and governments around a common target. This focus does not require abandoning all other concerns but merely treating them as less urgent at this point in time. To be clear, the call to end the 1967 occupation is not a call for a two-state solution, let alone for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. What Palestinians would do after the end to occupation — form an independent state alongside Israel, enter a confederal arrangement with Israel or Jordan, fight for the liberation of all of Palestine — is a matter for another discussion.

This may be formulated as a rule of thumb for political action: the more focused the campaign is on clearly identifiable and contained issues — in other words, on a minimalist program — the more likely it is to appeal to a wider constituency and gain large-scale support. This comes at the expense of a maximalist program that seeks to address many concerns at the same time. A trade-off is inevitable because an overall radical program cannot unify many people of different backgrounds, interests, and priorities. The logic of political education, however, is different: a comprehensive understanding of political and social issues is essential in providing a context for engagement with more limited and well-contained questions.

The application of this rule to the Palestine solidarity movement means that the most immediate issues would be more likely to gain support and see results. Mobilization around Gaza, a permanent ceasefire, an end to the Israeli military offensive, and the restoration of civilian life have found widespread support in the United States, Europe, and much of the world. Calls for Israeli withdrawal from the 1967 occupied territories and in favor of Palestinian self-determination also enjoy support, but they have not given rise to the militant and enthusiastic action of those related to Gaza, given the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the Israeli siege. They should be pursued, of course, but not as an immediate focus of attention as long as the war continues.

However, calls for action to promote the 1948 refugees’ right of return and to transform Israel from a Jewish state into a nonethnic democracy are rare outside of small groups of young activists and unknown at the official level. The implications for solidarity movements are obvious: there is a need for careful targeting to mobilize, at the largest scale possible, around issues of immediate concern that generate wide public and official support and lead to concrete action, even if it means relegating other demands to the back burner for the time being. This is not a call for silence on those other demands — education remains essential regarding all issues of concern, whether in the short or long term. But action must follow clear priorities.¹⁸

The prospects for mobilization and solidarity actions depend on the discourse adopted by the movement. Is an issue posed in the name of a particular claim or a universal principle, in terms that are inclusive of different sides to the conflict or exclusive to one of them? The anti-apartheid struggle was waged in the name of a general cause: human and political rights for all people in the country. It was not a campaign conducted on behalf of a specific racial or ethnic group. Even though it addressed a colonial conflict, it aimed to reconcile indigenous people and settlers, black and white people, on the basis of a shared national identity and equal citizenship. The nation in that context consisted of all South Africans, regardless of their background: the “Rainbow Nation.”

This is not to deny that sectional identities played a role in South Africa’s campaign, but the dominant discourse took the “anti” in anti-apartheid seriously by rejecting the use of ethnicity and race for divide-and-rule purposes. “UDF unites, apartheid divides” was a core slogan of the 1980s, and it opened the gates to potentially all citizens. Obviously, the social and political circumstances of different groups in the population differed sharply, but the task was to bridge divisions through joint action and conscious rejection of the legacy of apartheid rather than entrench them. The inclusive discourse of the movement aimed to serve that goal.¹⁹

How does this approach compare to that of the Palestine solidarity movement? The general BDS demand of 2005, issued in the name of Palestinian civil society, invited “conscientious Israelis” to join their effort “for the sake of justice and genuine peace.” The specific calls for cultural and academic boycotts targeted institutions rather than individuals and carved out a space for Israeli activists to participate as well. But in contrast to the South African campaign, these calls were made by Palestinians in the name of their own liberation struggle, rather than in the name of a nation or an imagined community sharing an identity to which all people, whatever their ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds, could belong equally. That Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews are distinct groups is a deeply entrenched notion; some of their members may work together on specific projects, but they are organized on a separate basis that is principally expressed according to different and opposed nationalist consciousnesses.

The tension between national and nationalist discourses is crucial: one is unifying in the name of a shared territorial and civic identity, while the other is divisive in the name of distinct identities, defined through history in ethnic, linguistic, or religious terms. Israelis and Palestinians share a territory, of course, but they give it different names and attach different meanings to its history, which they tend to interpret in incompatible nationalist terms. The local Palestinian population generally lives under political arrangements imposed against its wishes, and the boundaries of settlement and residence are constantly subject to legal and political challenges between the two groups and, to some extent, within them too. The hegemonic global and local discourses treat membership in these groups as mutually exclusive; you belong to one or the other, with few crosscutting affiliations.²⁰

The struggle is conceptualized as waged by one group to liberate itself from the domination of another. This allows limited space for alternative (not contradictory) conceptualizations that focus on shared concerns about civil rights, democracy, and social and political freedoms. Israeli Jews are called upon to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for independence, but they are not expected to embrace it as their own and join as partners. They remain external to it, even though their attitudes and actions are central to its prospects of success. In contrast, white South Africans were invited to see the struggle as their own and join as equal partners, moving from being part of the problem to becoming part of the solution. Of course, most white South Africans did not actively join the liberation struggle, but the inclusive discourse of the anti-apartheid movement served largely to neutralize their opposition to change and to generate the good will that facilitated the transition process from apartheid.

It is important to recognize that the dominant Palestinian nationalist discourse since 1970 has defined the goal of the struggle as the formation of “a secular democratic state” for Muslims, Christians, and Jews in historic Palestine. That goal regarded Israeli Jews in religious rather than national terms, as they see themselves, but it was an important shift toward recognizing and accepting their presence as legitimate. The distinction between indigenous Arab people and foreign Jewish settlers that had been central to Palestinian nationalism in earlier periods seemed to have been laid to rest. The demand that Israeli Jews renounce Zionism to become eligible for citizenship in a liberated Palestine was abandoned. With that change the Palestinian movement took a crucial step forward, albeit one marred by retaining an Arab nationalist framework that was incompatible with Israelis’ own deep sense of distinct national identity.²¹

By the early 1980s, the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement had shifted its attitude toward accepting — first implicitly and then explicitly — that Israelis had a distinct national identity (not only an ethnic or religious identity) and that Israel-Palestine could be divided on that basis between the two national groups, regardless of their different historical origins and the indigenous-settler distinction. Initial progress toward such a solution was made with the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence and the 1993 Oslo Accords, but that process stalled due to ongoing Israeli settlement in the 1967 occupied territories and the denial of independent statehood to Palestinians there.²² Failure to satisfy the basic demands of Palestinians led, in the twenty-first century, to the global solidarity movement’s revival of the discourse of conflict between indigenous people and settlers — not just those in the 1967 territories but in the entire country. This is captured in the recent focus on Zionism as settler colonialism and the call “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

This move is problematic from the perspective of seeking to mobilize broad support for the campaign against Israel’s occupation and other aspects of its policies. The slogan “From the river to the sea” does not acknowledge Israeli Jews’ existence in the country, which is defined exclusively as Palestine. It is obvious why Palestinians would focus on their own quest for freedom — all groups do — but a view to the future cannot exclude a major group in the population, as if the struggle aimed to replace one type of domination with another. This is a retreat from the shift that the Palestinian movement made in earlier decades toward a binational vision of Israel-Palestine. The same trend is expressed in identifying the abstract and vaguely defined notion of Zionism (and its proponents, “the Zionists,” seen as a cohesive group united around Israel’s current policies) as the enemy, instead of focusing on specific agents: the Israeli state, its military and civilian institutions, and their organized supporters at home and abroad. The test of support should be what positions people stand for and what practical policies they advocate — on issues such as military withdrawal, free movement of people, land confiscations, access to services — rather than their ideological self-definitions.

We must note that such slogans are raised primarily by activists in the solidarity movement overseas rather than by organizations active in the country itself. What are the implications of this hardening of the discourse of solidarity? Discursive changes of this nature were taking place precisely at the time that conditions on the ground were worsening dramatically, with the intensification of Israeli occupation and settlement practices and, especially, with the brutal Gaza war and its devastating impact on civilians there. The result is a growing gap between the immediate demands for a ceasefire and a restoration of civilian life, focused as they are on concrete and limited goals that enjoy widespread support and are essential for the survival of people on the ground, on the one hand, and the far-reaching discourse of total liberation from Israeli domination in all of Palestine, on the other hand, which remains restricted to small groups of remote radical activists.

In the tension between immediate and long-term goals, the task of addressing the occupation and its effects on the population in the 1967 territories is in danger of being overlooked: if Zionist settler colonialism is indeed prevalent in the entire country, shaping all state policies and institutions throughout its history, why focus on any specific time and place within it? If we do focus on Gaza or the 1967 occupation, are we not neglecting all other issues that can be traced ultimately to the same source: the nature of the State of Israel since its inception? Would we not be dealing only with symptoms instead of the underlying problem?

And yet a focus on the 1967 occupation continues to offer the best prospects for a coordinated global campaign. Moving away from more comprehensive and radical demands toward a more focused campaign, however, is not easy. It inevitably runs against the logic of militant student activists and their allies. It was instructive to witness the April 2024 clash between veteran activist Norman Finkelstein, who emphasized the need to mobilize a broad constituency, and the protesting students at Columbia University, who had no patience for any suggestions to dilute their language. Finkelstein proposed: “Amend the slogan to: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.’ It doesn’t endorse one state; it doesn’t endorse two states. It doesn’t say: ‘All Jews have to go.’ It doesn’t say: ‘Jews can stay.’ It just doesn’t imply: ‘We’re trying to get rid of Jews.’” He added: “For me, the ideal slogan would actually be: ‘From the river to the sea, one person, one vote, Palestinians will be free.’”²³ The Columbia students responded immediately, of course, by doubling down on their call.²⁴

Finkelstein’s criticism was echoed in an article by the writer and editor Adam Shatz, who recently published an intellectual biography of Frantz Fanon, where he compared calls celebrating the intifada and “From the river to the sea” to “Defund the police”: they were appealing in their absolutism, he said, but also “dangerously ambiguous, fuel for right-wing adversaries looking for evidence of calls for ‘genocide’ against Jews.” He writes, “There was . . . a theatrical dimension to the protests, with some students imagining themselves to be part of the same drama unfolding in Gaza, confusing the rough clearing of an encampment (‘liberated zones’) with the violent destruction of a refugee camp.” But, he adds, the attacks on protesters were not a fair portrayal of a movement that managed to draw attention to crucial issues: “the obscenity of Israel’s war on Gaza; the complicity of their government in arming Israel and facilitating the slaughter; the hypocrisy of America’s claim to defend human rights and a rules-based international order while giving Israel carte blanche; and the urgent need for a ceasefire.”

Shatz predicted that the destruction of Gaza would be “as formative for them as the struggles against the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and the Iraq War were for earlier generations.”²⁵ He could not have predicted, of course, the hostile disregard of the United States for the “rules-based international order” that would follow only a few months later with the reelection of Donald Trump, accompanied by a crackdown on protest that sharply reduced the incidence of Gaza activism on campuses in the subsequent year. While Shatz may be right about the impact of the war on student protesters, the crucial question, rather, is their impact on the cause they seek to serve. And on that count, it is difficult to see what has been achieved on the ground in Gaza and other parts of Israel-Palestine. Even if student demands were met by their universities, the site of action and impact was elsewhere — in the corridors of power, boards of military-industrial corporations, software companies, and others working at the intersection of power and profit, not academic faculties in ivory towers.

It is no coincidence that radical demands become more common precisely when the chances of their realization recede. One reason for this is the sense of despair at the prospect of making gains under oppressive conditions by using diplomatic or strategic approaches. Activists may feel there is nothing to lose from ramping up the rhetorical militancy. The opposite may also be true: people get carried away by their own rhetoric and ask themselves, why stop, why not go all the way? This is unlikely to result in practical achievements beyond drawing public attention — an important achievement in its own right — of a limited and temporary nature.²⁶

There is no doubt, though, that the broad protests changed the debate in the United States and were one reason for the Democratic Party’s rhetorical distancing from its traditional support of Israel and its policies, motivated by the powerful images of total devastation in Gaza and their impact on public opinion. As limited as the Democratic criticism has been, it is notable against the background of the Biden administration’s unqualified military and diplomatic support for Israel and its offensive.²⁷ Ironically, it was the Trump administration, with its dismissive attitude toward any notion of international rights and obligations and its open rejection of Palestinian rights, that applied pressure on Israel to accept deals for a ceasefire and the exchange of hostages, which effectively ended the intensive stage of the war in October 2025.

Current discussions of global sanctions continue to focus on Israeli settlers in the 1967 territories and on the Gaza war. Stopping the genocidal military campaign in Gaza and the ongoing process of settlement and dispossession in the West Bank is unrelated to the question of a one- or two-state solution. These are urgent goals because they have direct impact on people’s lives and livelihoods. The campaign behind them is likely to continue to gain support internationally since the Israeli regime has no intention of ceding control, even if the intensity of the Gaza war decreased by late 2025. There is currently little external pressure, and it is unlikely to increase in the near or medium term, on the Israeli state as a whole, let alone pressure to establish Palestinian sovereignty over the entire territory from the river to the sea. Given the reluctance of the United States and Europe to consider even limited sanctions on the Israeli government for its current settlement and occupation policies, there remain serious obstacles to delegitimizing the state itself.²⁸

To enhance its impact, the global campaign needs to link up with and be driven by mobilization on the ground in the affected area. That was the case for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Throughout its history, and in particular since the mid-1970s, the dynamics of global solidarity were shaped by local action and activists (even if many of them were in exile). Anti-apartheid diplomatic and popular efforts, including boycotts and sanctions, started in the 1950s and gained momentum in the ’60s and early ’70s. But it was only through the rise and growth of the mass movement inside South Africa — independent trade unions, the Black Consciousness movement, the Soweto uprising, and eventually the UDF and COSATU — that the solidarity campaign expanded and became a powerful force internationally. It was guided by the ANC’s political leadership, but on-the-ground initiatives largely reflected the concerns expressed by mass constituencies inside the country. There were inevitable tensions between activists on the inside and the outside, but they managed to maintain a unified campaign against the common enemy.

The case for Palestine solidarity is different: there is no unified leadership for the struggle, nor is the overall campaign shaped by mass constituencies inside Israel-Palestine. Political forces with proven mass-based support (Hamas, Fatah, the Joint List) are divided not only by conflicting agendas but also by disparate geographical concentrations. All of them are in favor of solidarity efforts, of course, but none has institutional links to overseas movements led by the activists who adhere to BDS but decide on their agendas according to their own circumstances, with no central coordination. This gives their disparate initiatives an essential local flavor but deprives them of the power of unity and collective direction that characterized the anti-apartheid movement. In that sense, they are at a disadvantage compared to their South African counterparts. This is the reason why European governments and others have proceeded with their initiatives to sanction illegal settlers and individual enablers in the state independently of the solidarity campaign, and without even mentioning it.

This marks the key difference between the two solidarity movements. The absence of a powerful and unified movement in Palestine makes global activists less effective. Sanctions against oppressive regimes work best if they enjoy widespread support from affected constituencies and can be boosted by their efforts. Pressures from the inside and the outside must be combined for a positive outcome. External activists cannot create an internal mass movement themselves, but they can devise ways to link up with existing centers of resistance and follow their lead. For example, the US campus-based protest campaign of 2023–24 could have explored what student activists in different parts of Israel-Palestine were doing, what their priorities and concerns were, and how they could support their efforts and address their needs. The same goes for artists, academics, unionists, and activists, who could have shaped their agendas through consultation with their Palestinian and Israeli counterparts. Such grounded knowledge unfortunately played little role in their strategies.

In the final analysis, only Palestinians on the ground can liberate themselves from Israeli domination. External solidarity is essential for this goal to be achieved, but it can never be a substitute for grassroots initiative and action, led by Palestinians as the main stakeholders with support from critical Jewish Israeli activists and movements. How to make that possible remains an ongoing challenge.

In order to assess what impact Trump’s immigration policies have had and may have on the American political economy, it’s helpful to first lay out what those policies are. The changes have been many and rolled out in such a chaotic manner — challenged in courts but also modified at the whims of the administration — that it’s difficult to see the whole. During the 2024 campaign, the Republican Party’s immigration platform promised mass deportations and the ramping up of immigration enforcement, but its language was unclear about what exactly this would mean or which immigrants would be targeted. Trump discussed the problem of immigration as one of criminality — an invasion by drug cartels and roving gangs — and this language was reflected in the platform itself. There were also many indications that the mass deportation project would not exclusively target immigrants who had been convicted of or charged with criminal activity. For decades now, the status of undocumented or unauthorized migrants has been treated as a form of criminality in public discourse, if not always de jure. The Trump campaign did not correct this slippage. More important, most of Trump’s ire seemed to be directed toward migrants who were technically neither undocumented nor unauthorized but were admitted under temporary humanitarian programs or paroled into the country while awaiting adjudication of their asylum claims. Any mass deportation program would have to include some portion of these populations, because the rate of immigrants arrested for nonimmigration violations is too low to support a significant expansion of the deportation regime by targeting those immigrants alone.⁵

On his first day in office, Trump declared migration to be a national emergency, deployed the military at the border, and began an aggressive escalation of immigration enforcement. By the summer of 2025, the Trump administration had pushed through huge increases in immigration spending, including the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which allocated $170 billion to issue over four years. With this funding, ICE more than doubled its staff, from ten thousand to twenty-two thousand over the course of 2025. The population detained by ICE grew by over 68 percent, from 39,238 shortly after the inauguration to 65,735 by November. Many of these people are held in new facilities, like “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, that seem designed to maximize suffering. Deportations occur not only to immigrants’ countries of origin but sometimes to prisons in other countries, like El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. While there has been an increase in the number of immigrants with criminal convictions detained, the number of immigrants without criminal records in detention has also grown by 30 percent.⁶

The Trump administration’s moves in immigration have gone beyond enforcement. It has closed or curtailed programs that gave temporary authorization to millions of migrants and in so doing abruptly expanded the deportable population. Humanitarian programs have been specifically targeted: Trump has withdrawn or attempted to withdraw temporary protected status (TPS) — which grants temporary immigration relief to nationals of countries designated as unsafe to return to for some extraordinary and temporary condition, including conflict and natural disaster — from more than half of the countries that had held the designation under the Biden administration. In March 2025, nearly 1.3 million migrants had permission to remain in the United States under TPS. When Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced the withdrawal of Venezuela’s TPS designation, 600,000 migrants became subject to deportation essentially overnight.⁷ The Trump administration also ended a separate program that provided up to two years of immigration relief for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, affecting another 532,000 migrants.⁸

Pathways for obtaining permanent legal status have been curtailed as well. Humanitarian migration has essentially been closed: as one of his first acts, Trump suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program, and at the end of 2025 he announced a hold on all asylum applications.⁹ The executive cannot close other avenues for migration to the United States without congressional action, but the administration has imposed travel restrictions or bans (even for short-term visits) on dozens of countries, citing national security and public-safety risks. Most recently, it announced a suspension of immigration visa processing for applicants from seventy-five countries, citing the likelihood of immigrants from these countries to become public charges. On top of all this, the administration is pushing out immigration judges whom it considers friendly to immigrants, making the immigration apparatus even more hostile.

Finally, the administration has moved to reconfigure citizenship as well. It has challenged the principle of birthright citizenship, arguing to overturn a long-standing interpretation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The administration has also expanded denaturalization under a section in the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows for the revocation of citizenship from naturalized citizens.¹⁰

On paper, the changes to the immigration system have been considerable, going about as far as the executive branch can without rewriting the federal statutes on immigration, which the Republican Party does not have the majorities to do. The administration claims to have scored a number of victories, including 2.5 million deportations and the end of unauthorized crossings of the US border with Mexico. It is true that the number of Border Patrol apprehensions — a figure often used to estimate attempted crossings — has declined from over eighty thousand in January 2025 to around thirty thousand per month. The steady clip of anti-immigrant policy announcements, combined with the images of violent confrontations and seizures by ICE agents, has generated a climate of fear. The administration has been slow to release data in general, and on immigration in particular it is difficult to assess the actual impact of policies. The data that exist suggest that, despite the dramatic pronouncements and the funds invested, a radical transformation of the immigration system has not occurred and may not be possible through this route.

The Trump administration continues to be vague about how it defines its goals with regard to immigration. In December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made a social media post suggesting a goal of “100 million deportations.”¹¹ Even if the administration deported all foreign-born people living in the United States, including all naturalized citizens as well as noncitizens, it would reach only half that number. Even the more modest goal of deporting one million immigrants a year — a declaration from the OBBBA — is unlikely. Though it will take some time for all of the OBBBA-planned increases in immigration enforcement to come online, ICE has already more than doubled its staff.¹² Agents have been deployed all over the country, along with local law enforcement deputized for immigration enforcement. Yet it is not clear that deportations have actually increased. DHS has claimed 622,000 deportations in its first year, but unlike in previous presidential administrations, detailed data has not yet been made available to support these claims.¹³ Even if this number were correct, it would not represent an increase from fiscal year 2024, when the Biden administration deported 685,000 people. It is significant that a greater share of the Trump-era deportations are arrests and removals from the interior of the country rather than people apprehended and removed as they try to cross the border. The Migration Policy Institute has estimated that deportations carried out by ICE alone increased 25 percent, from 271,000 in 2024 to around 340,000 in 2025.¹⁴ These numbers are not insignificant, but they are not on a scale comparable to the funds spent: the ICE budget was tripled in 2025. Extrapolating from these numbers, the ICE budget would have needed to be increased by an order of magnitude — not three but thirty times — to seize and deport one million people. Even if the Trump administration succeeded in securing such a sum, it would have to find the staff to support this augment, which, again, would be an order of magnitude larger than the twelve thousand people hired in 2025. The agency has already had to lower its required qualifications and offer tens of thousands of dollars in signing bonuses to meet its hiring goals. CBP, under a similar mandate to grow and offering similar terms to recruits, failed to expand at all in 2025. And even if the one-
million deportation target could be met, it would take over fourteen years to deport the entire undocumented population currently in the United States.

The administration’s other changes to immigration are similarly unlikely to radically transform the existing system. Humanitarian migrations, which the administration has aggressively constricted, constitute only a small fraction of overall immigration to the United States. In 2022, fewer than fifty thousand people were granted asylum or admitted as refugees, compared to the 1,018,349 people who obtained legal permanent resident status, commonly known as a green card.¹⁵ The effect of the travel bans and the suspensions of visa processing is difficult to predict, as it will depend on how these changes are implemented. They will certainly have an effect on the national origins of new immigrants. Beyond that, a very rough estimation based on 2022 data shows that approximately 25 percent of the people who obtained green cards were from the seventy-five countries affected by the visa suspensions, and about 45 percent of those people received their green cards through the visa process rather than as residents already in the United States adjusting their status from some other visa to legal permanent residents. This means that, had the suspension been in place in 2022, between 100,000 and 150,000 would have been affected. This is not insignificant, but it does not represent a wholesale transformation of the immigration system or a closing of the border.

The administration has probably always known this would be the case. The ghoulishness with which the deportation regime has been implemented — abducting people off the street and sending them to be tortured, all the while celebrating this cruelty on social media — has been justified as part of a strategy to indirectly transform the immigration status quo by deterring new migrants and inducing the “self-deportation” of existing ones. It does seem that this strategy has succeeded in deterring some new migrants; as mentioned above, estimated border crossings have declined by over 50 percent.¹⁶ But the self-deportation of people already here is more difficult to induce or even to measure. The DHS has reported self-deportation numbers that, at 1.9 million, are three times greater than actual deportations. This number is extrapolated from survey data that, as mentioned above, becomes increasingly unreliable as the repression of immigrants intensifies.¹⁷ Immigrants may refuse to answer or lie about their status, resulting in lower reported numbers without any change in the underlying reality. While some voluntary departure is probable, especially given the risks immigrants face now, leaving is neither risk- nor cost-free. Immigrants who have settled in the United States, and have perhaps had children here, would have to consider being separated from or uprooting their families and securing livelihoods elsewhere. And for the humanitarian migrants whom Trump seems so determined to delegitimize and expel, what awaits back home might be as bad as arrest and detention in the United States. Those who have no viable option to leave will become an even more vulnerable, exploitable workforce. They will have to take jobs under worse conditions and for less pay, and their immiseration will cause collateral damage to native workers.

Despite the alarming escalation of violence, this is ultimately immigration politics as usual. Even with the Trump administration’s best efforts, an undocumented or otherwise pathologized immigrant population will persist, and the Right will continue to exploit its presence for political advantage. In the past, I have argued that this is the core function of the immigration problem in American politics.¹⁸ As many times as scholars have shown that immigration has positive economic and social impacts on receiving countries (or, at worst, a net-zero effect), these arguments fail to get traction in the public discourse because competition from immigrants is an easy, convincing scapegoat for workers devastated by decades of neoliberalism. And for capital, maintaining immigrants as a terrorized underclass who can be legally deprived of basic human rights is the ideal.

Capital benefits most from an immigration regime where the flow of immigration is unhindered or even encouraged but the rights of arriving immigrants are limited. This flow can drive down wages so that immigrants, without the same rights as citizens, can serve as a reserve of workers more desperate and thus more willing to work for wages that citizens might reject. Moreover, people with fewer rights are harder to organize, weakening the collective capacity of workers in general. Of course, capital cannot always obtain its ideal balance of flows and rights, because rights can affect flows. People are unlikely to voluntarily migrate into conditions of slavery. Depending on how much labor is needed, some concessions must be made with regard to rights. In all labor-importing countries, workers whose skills are in high demand (e.g., engineers, doctors, scientists) enter under generous conditions whereby they are granted access to most rights, up to and including citizenship, within a relatively short time frame. Immigrants with less bargaining power end up with fewer rights; in the United States, they enter as temporary guestworkers essentially indentured to their employers, or they become undocumented migrants with almost no rights at all who are constantly subject to the threat of deportation. Bargaining power is not only a function of skill; if even relatively unskilled workers are crucial to an industry and cannot be easily substituted, the rights regime can be relaxed in order to import them in the necessary numbers. The problem today is that, despite historically high rates of immigration, there are very few sectors for which this is true.

In 2024, 19.2 percent of the US civilian labor force was foreign-born.¹⁹ Of that number, more than half were naturalized citizens. About 5.6 percent of that labor force consists of the immigrants the Trump administration has most aggressively targeted: undocumented migrants and those with pending immigration claims.²⁰ These numbers are high — comparable to the waves of European migration at the turn of the twentieth century — but their distribution in the economy suggests why they have so few rights relative to the immigrants who arrived in the United States in previous eras. Whereas in the earlier waves immigrant workers were fed into heavy industrial production, the engine of a rapidly transforming American economy, immigrants today are concentrated in the least productive, slowest growing corners of the economy. Foreign-born workers make up 68 percent of all farmworkers, 35 percent of all domestic-service workers, 70 percent of house cleaners, 33 percent of hotel and motel workers, and 28 percent of construction workers.²¹ While these sectors are not insignificant — they are crucial to the quality of life of most Americans — they are not drivers of profit or growth in the American economy. Domestic labor, by definition, does not contribute directly to corporate profits. Farms make up less than 1 percent of the American economy, and construction only 4.5 percent.²²

While it is true that, politically speaking, the Trump administration drew much of its early support from employers in those sectors who stand to lose the most from mass deportation, it is much less reliant on that base the second time around. Trump may have fallen out with Elon Musk, but Musk’s embrace of MAGA during the 2024 campaign was a harbinger of a new approach from Big Tech and finance. From David Sacks to J. D. Vance, representatives of these sectors of capital have much more prominent roles in the new administration. It was notable how quickly Trump abandoned MAGA orthodoxy and sided with Musk to defend the H-1B guestworker visa that is primarily used by tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta to import engineers from India and China. For these industries, however, immigrant workers matter much less. In management, business, and financial operations industries, foreign-born workers make up 14.2 percent of the total workforce.²³ While foreign-born workers also make up a larger share of tech and manufacturing workers, production in these industries can be offshored if necessary. Moreover, these industries are undergoing dramatic artificial intelligence–driven transformations in their labor processes. We can see how little Big Tech actually cares about immigrant workers through its continued engagement with the H-1B visa question as it evolved over 2025. Months after the initial fight between Musk and the MAGA right over the visa category, the Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee on all H-1B petitions. Rather than complain, CEOs of major tech companies like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang welcomed the move, saying they could easily absorb
the cost and that it would remove competition for the H-1B’s quota spots from businesses and institutions with shallower pockets.²⁴

Nor is it clear whether Trump has actually abandoned the labor needs of those sectors that rely on undocumented immigrant labor. Take, for example, California’s agriculture industry. The state was targeted early in the deportation push; its cities were among the first to receive an influx of ICE officers, and its workplaces were disrupted by raids. The impact of these immigration enforcement actions is difficult to measure. Monthly employment and labor force data is collected by the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), but its sample is small (approximately five thousand for the state of California). Estimates are made more difficult by the fact that people under threat of arrest and deportation are less likely to respond to inquiries of any kind from the government. With these caveats, researchers at the University of California, Merced, estimated that there was a significant decline in the number of workers in the state — by hundreds of thousands — during the height of the immigration enforcement actions (May through June 2025), whereas a slight increase in workers was measured in the rest of the country.²⁵ This is consistent with media and trade industry reports of missing workers and empty fields from that period.²⁶ The Department of Agriculture (USDA) employment statistics for California show that there were eight thousand fewer farmworkers hired in April 2025 than at the same time the previous year, a decline of nearly 6 percent. However, these types of year-on-year fluctuations are not uncommon, and moreover, farm-labor hires have been steadily declining in general since the early 2000s (see figure 1). The USDA data does show an increase in farmworkers’ wages from the previous year, from $19.55 to $20.35 per hour, a greater difference than the 2023–24 increase ($0.45 per hour). Data produced later in the year also suggest more muted effects that might be short-lived. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates, which combine CPS data with employer surveys and unemployment insurance claims and are current to fall 2025, show a slowdown in the growth of civilian labor force participation in the summer months of 2025 and a return to growth in most areas.²⁷ These data are limited by the fact that immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, are less likely than native workers to file unemployment insurance claims. Still, the numbers indicate relatively small impacts on the labor force, not out of line with historical fluctuations, and relatively quick recoveries. Figure 2 shows the BLS estimates for the top three agricultural metropolitan statistical areas in California.²⁸ Bakersfield-Delano demonstrates this trend most clearly, with a definite but small decline in the labor force during the most aggressive federal intervention, followed by a return to growth.

This is notsurprising given how the Trump administration seems to have shifted the emphasis of immigration enforcement away from farmworkers as the year progressed. In June 2025, in response to complaints from agricultural employers, Trump ordered ICE officials to pause enforcement operations in sectors particularly hard hit by deportations: agriculture and food production, restaurants, and hotels.²⁹ Though this order was quickly reversed, observers from the United Farm Workers have reported that worksite raids clearly slowed after the June pronouncements.³⁰

More important, the Trump administration has eased other routes through which agricultural employers can hire immigrant workers — namely the H-2 guestworker program. This employment visa program allows for the recruitment of seasonal immigrant workers, and its use has expanded in the past fifteen years from around one hundred thousand in 2010 to over four hundred thousand today. The agricultural subset of this visa, known as H-2A, has no cap on the number of holders and represents the vast majority of H-2 visas issued. In 2024, more than 350,000 H-2A visas were issued.³¹ Researchers have found that, while the H-2 visas have not entirely replaced the undocumented workforce, it is increasingly seen as an alternative, both to replace workers that age out and as a source of workers who are more easily controlled than undocumented migrants. In 2010, California had fewer than three thousand H-2A workers. By 2021, that number had grown to more than thirty-two thousand.³² This expansion suggests that California’s agricultural employers had a means to replace workers who might be deported, as long as the Trump administration kept the guestworker program open, which it did. During the period for which we have 2025 data — from January to March — H-2A visa certifications rose slightly, from 157,427 to 160,159.³³

The Trump administration has explicitly stated its intent to use the H-2A program to mitigate the impact of mass deportation.³⁴ Its first move, in fall 2025, was to change the process for calculating wages in H-2A contracts. In California, this resulted in wage reductions of more than 17 percent, from $19.97 to $16.45 per hour. The administration also removed the requirement that employers provide housing to H-2A workers so that housing costs could be deducted from wages, an additional $3 per hour — though, because California’s minimum wage is $16.90, wages for H-2A workers will not go below this floor.³⁵ Further changes that have been proposed include removing the seasonal requirement of the H-2A, allowing it to be used to fill year-round positions (which the Economic Policy Institute estimates would lower wages in these jobs by $20,000 to $40,000 a year), and blocking funding for a program that would have made it easier for H-2 workers to switch employers and qualify for legal permanent resident status.³⁶ The wage rule changes alone will save employers $3 billion a year, more than making up for the losses agricultural employers have suffered under the immigration crackdown. Not all of that $3 billion will be taken from immigrant workers; native-born workers will be forced to accept lower wages or be replaced with the more intensely exploited workers of the H-2 program. It is a clear demonstration that the Trump administration’s immigration program has little to do with protecting American workers.

After the COVID-19 pandemic disruptions, there was a spike in the rate of migration to the United States. Part of this was the result of pent-up demand for migration caused by the pandemic lockdowns, combined with the economic and social devastations of the public health crisis. It was, undoubtedly, a crisis of sorts. But even at the highest estimates, these immigrants represented less than 1 percent of the existing US population, and in an advanced industrial country threatened with demographic decline, they should not have been a problem to accommodate. The Biden administration’s haphazard response to the increase — admitting migrants without clarifying their legal status or providing for their integration to American society — exacerbated the backlash. Even in some quarters of the Left, there were questions about whether it was possible to build a working-class movement without accepting the need for immigration restriction. And Trump won the 2024 election at least in part on his promise to somehow “solve” the immigration problem.

The news today is filled with the atrocities that his solution entails. While there is revulsion at the violence and cruelty of Trump’s tactics, there is also the perception that he is delivering on his promise. This is a mirage. It may be possible to slow the flow of migration through violence and terror, changing the reputation of the United States as a destination country for immigrants. But so far, the effects of what is, to the majority of Americans, a shocking expansion of immigration repression have been only marginal in terms of absolute numbers of immigrants in the country. And this repression has had no impact on the problems immigrants have been blamed for: unemployment, high cost of living, declining social order.

It is a mirage, however, not just because Trump was wrong in his diagnosis of the causes of these problems but because solving the problem of immigration was never in the cards in the first place. With much less fanfare than is accompanying his violent deportation regime, the Trump administration has in fact been expanding programs to import migrant workers for those sectors that can’t outsource or automate away their labor needs. American workers’ concerns about immigration are a real obstacle to organizing them; it will always be a tricky issue for the Left. As horrific as the second Trump administration has been, by demonstrating the extent to which the path offered by the nativist right is a chimera, it may have made this organizing a little easier.

One of the principal contributions of Garland’s book is to urge progressives to take crime seriously. This is in sharp contrast to those who argue that the public has been bamboozled by politicians and the media into fretting about crime.

Yet there is one issue that Garland elides. In The New Jim Crow, Alexander cites a widely accepted claim that the United States is not any more crime-ridden than comparable countries.¹² In part this traces to a well-known 1997 book, Crime Is Not the Problem, by the criminologists Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins.¹³ There Zimring and Hawkins suggest that the United States is not distinguished by the rate of nonlethal violence (bar fights, assaults, or muggings); ordinary crime in the United States occurs at the same level as in other developed countries. What differs is the incidence of lethal violence, due (probably, they say) to the prevalence of guns.¹⁴

If Zimring and Hawkins are right, we might doubt the big argument Garland develops. If the United States has an ultraliberal political economy, and ultraliberal political economies generate more crime than social democratic ones, how could the United States be no more crime-ridden than its social democratic counterparts? Garland sidesteps this challenge. He cites Crime Is Not the Problem but writes that his book focuses on lethal violence (which everyone agrees is higher in the United States) because it dominates public anxiety about crime. But this will not satisfy a skeptic of the “root-cause” explanation of crime that Garland defends. According to Zimring and Hawkins, a country that allows crime’s root causes to fester — the United States — is no more crime-ridden than the social democratic countries that have tackled those putative root causes more successfully. This observation, if true, would sever the link between the welfare state and crime, casting doubt on one of Garland’s main arguments.

Fortunately, I think Zimring and Hawkins are wrong. The verdict that crime is no higher in the United States is based on police records and international victim surveys. But policing capacity in the United States is very low (more on this below), and telephone surveys of thousands of people cannot reliably estimate crime (and especially serious crime), which is rare and concentrated in very hard-to-reach populations.¹⁵

As a result, comparative criminologists use the homicide rate as an estimate of the overall crime rate. This is more reliable for a few reasons: in modern states it is easy to measure well, it represents a significant share of the crime rate, and it is correlated with other major crimes.¹⁶ By this measure, in the early 1970s, the United States was almost ten times more violent than the average developed country.

Yet as Garland acknowledges, the prevalence of guns surely does have some effect on crime.¹⁷ Since the United States is estimated to have almost seven times more guns than the average developed country, there are two further issues to worry about.¹⁸ First, if guns affected the homicide rate but not the non-homicide crime rate — by, say, turning bar fights into shootouts — the homicide rate will overestimate the crime rate in the United States. This would imply that differences in the homicide rate cannot be cited to support the inference that the United States is more crime-ridden than other countries. Second, if the effect of guns is large enough, it might be that gun prevalence (and not its embrace of free markets) explains its exceptional crime problem.

One can make headway in these matters by estimating the effect of guns on homicide and crime. Garland doesn’t do this, but in ongoing work, I find that this exercise generally supports Garland’s arguments. The best estimates of the effect of guns on homicide rates suggest that a United States with European-level gun ownership would have around 24 percent fewer homicides, which implies that guns explain about 29 percent of the homicide difference between Europe and the United States.¹⁹ Importantly, the same methods suggest that guns also increase the prevalence of crime in general (i.e., they increase not just the lethality but also the number of bar fights). Though this effect is smaller, the overall implication is that the homicide rate only overestimates the real crime rate by 11 percent.²⁰ This supports the descriptive inference that the United States is in fact much more crime-ridden than its developed-world counterparts.

Next there is the question of why free markets generate so much crime. This thesis is compatible with different theories. Garland’s, which draws on canonical work by Robert Sampson, is quintessentially sociological. Societies mostly maintain order via informal social controls: the stern look of a parent, the reprimand of an uncle, the watching eyes of a neighbor.²¹ When unbridled, capitalism disorganizes families and communities and thus dissolves these controls. The result is poorly socialized and delinquent children and, eventually, crime.²² But a different theory is that individuals commit crime because for some (especially the poor) the benefits of defying the law outweigh the benefits of obeying it. On this view, crime is an understandable, or rational, response to deprivation.

These two theories need not be rivals. The rational-choice theory can absorb the sociological one, if by the costs of defying the law we include not just formal but informal sanctions. Garland hints at a synthesis like this one, but his way of doing so raises two concerns.²³

First, he emphasizes that informal (and especially family-based) sanctions are more important than formal ones.²⁴ In his telling, most crime is stopped by watchful parents: “The link between economic disadvantage and violent crime flows chiefly through the family.”²⁵ Here I must register some skepticism. In the long sweep of history, the development of capitalism seems to have radically undermined the authority of the family over children. Today, unlike 150 years ago, most children spend most of their waking hours in daycare and schools. But the homicide rate is much lower than it used to be, due principally, it would seem, to the growing sanctioning capacities of the modern state. Something similar holds across countries. Although the United States has the highest rate of single parenthood in the developed world, single-parent households are almost as common in the Nordic countries as in the United States (e.g., 23 percent in Norway versus 25.1 percent in the United States).²⁶ Yet these are the least crime-ridden countries in the world. Of course, life as a single parent in the Nordic countries is much easier, because social and economic policies are so much more extensive. But I suspect these policies matter not because they strengthen parental authority, as Garland argues, but because, thanks to them, the poor need not defy the law to live well.

Second, Garland sometimes presses a point that drives a wedge between the sociological and rational-choice theories. He argues that what matters most is not the present-day returns to a person’s options but the feedback they receive in childhood.²⁷ Children who aren’t disciplined by parents and neighbors fall under the spell of delinquent subcultures. As Garland accepts, this argument implies that any assault on crime’s root causes won’t yield immediate dividends. It will mostly reduce crime in the long run, via its effects on child development.

It would be unfortunate if this were true. If the best we can offer is relief in the next generation, it will be hard to prevent a panicking public from turning to punishment. Fortunately, here I think Garland overstates the case. There is plenty of evidence that people respond to immediate changes in the costs and benefits of crime. Both the certainty and severity of punishment (roughly, police and imprisonment) deter crime, which would be difficult to explain if people were forever tethered to assessments they made (or impulses they formed) as children.²⁸ Most of human history would make no sense if the threat of violence and unfreedom couldn’t affect human behavior. Fittingly, since it would be odd if people responded to costs but not to benefits, there is also sound evidence that individuals commit less crime when the labor market or social policy furnishes them with good alternatives to it.²⁹

America’s penal regime is distinguished not just by its scale but by its all-around severity. These are related, since the number of people in prison is in part a function of the length of prison sentences. But punishment in the United States is also severe in ways that the incarceration rate doesn’t register. Garland describes these in a powerful and harrowing chapter on America’s penal state. Prison life is worse here than in other wealthy countries: prisoners live in more uncomfortable conditions and at risk of greater violence and more awful sanctions (like solitary confinement). They have recourse to less programming and far fewer benefits. Moreover, before any sentence is pronounced, courts are more likely to run roughshod over suspects’ rights: a very large proportion of arrestees are detained before trial, and an extraordinary proportion of cases are pled out. Most defendants never get their day in court. Finally, and infamously, police are more violent. In 2025, they killed civilians at a rate that was several times the rate in other developed countries.

Why is punishment in the United States so severe? In part, the story is the one already given above. The underdevelopment of informal social controls gives penal controls overriding importance. In the United States, Garland writes, “Penal controls must be made to work all by themselves, unsupported by a functioning background social order. Consequently, they are ramped up and made more severe than would otherwise be the case.”³⁰ A state that won’t use its welfare arm will be forced to use its penal one.

But the problem runs deeper than just the weakness of American social democracy. As Garland describes in a brilliant four-page short course on American state formation, the public monopoly on the means of violence has here been exceptionally limited. “The American way has been for the national state to devolve power to lower levels of government and share it with private actors.”³¹ This has had several important consequences. First, police are locally governed, which shields them from oversight. Second, they’re locally funded, which leaves them at their most stretched in the poorest (most crime-ridden) parts of the United States. Third, private actors are more likely to be armed, which makes the police, in turn, more trigger-happy.

These are compelling and important arguments. The United States had far fewer police (and a much smaller military) than other developed countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Garland doesn’t share these figures, but his arguments strongly suggest them. Even though the rate of policing had caught up to the rest of the developed world by the second half of the twentieth century, the ratio of police to homicides today resembles ratios seen only in the developing world.³²

Yet Garland doesn’t press the conclusion that would seem to follow. If it is the weakness of the American state that explains its severity — if, like the early modern state, the United States responds to the underdevelopment of its infrastructural powers with the overdevelopment of its despotic ones — it would entail not just that the protesters in 2020 were mistaken in their demands but that they had the problem exactly backward. Activists seek to defund the police because they think that fewer police would mean fewer deaths at the police’s hands. One response is to concede the inference but note the tragedy that defunding might increase crime. But Garland’s argument implies that the path to taming the police state may lie in expanding rather than defunding it. (Garland does propose to give police more resources and training, but he refrains from suggesting that there should be more of them.)

This is, of course, a very difficult lesson to absorb. Someone who has watched the repulsive videos of police in action will rightly ask why we would ever want more of these police. (They might also note that the inverse relationship between police numbers and violence cannot be true in extremis, since zero police by definition means zero police violence.) I understand perfectly why activists resist it, especially when the state has been commandeered by the Right. But in the long run, we cannot benefit from ignoring the causal structure of the problems we hope to solve. And so this seems to me to be one of the most important lessons of Garland’s book: the viciousness of the state is a symptom of its weakness, not its strength.

The most common way of framing the puzzle of mass incarceration is historical. In the 1970s, someone will say, the United States incarcerated roughly as many prisoners as other developed countries. By 2010, they will observe, it had sustained levels of incarceration seen only in the Soviet Union and Rwanda. If this is the right way to pose the puzzle, the challenge is to explain why the United States went off the rails. But Garland suggests, as others have before him, that the United States was in fact never like other countries. In this case, the challenge is to explain why it was never on those rails in the first place. So is mass incarceration a historical or a comparative puzzle?

Garland’s answer is that it is both: the United States was always unlike other countries, only to become even more unlike them in the 1970s. Due to its peculiar history, the United States had an exceptionally decentralized and retrenched state, guns were abundant, and social democracy was weak. And then, when this weak welfare state was hit by deindustrialization in the 1970s, crime (and then punishment) rose in exceptional ways to exceptional levels.

But I’m not sure that this is correct. In fact, neither the postwar rise in crime nor the rise in incarceration in the United States was exceptional. In most comparable countries, homicide rates rose more rapidly than they did in the United States. In Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain, incarceration rates grew more (in relative terms) from postwar trough to peak.³³

Garland knows this history better than anyone else; twenty-five years ago, he wrote a field-defining book about the changes in crime and punishment that were common to all developed countries in this period.³⁴ There he argued that, everywhere, the passing of the “Golden Age” of capitalism produced new insecurities (and opportunities), and thus crime. In turn, everywhere, the rehabilitative ideal of an earlier penal-welfarist era gave way to a punitive “culture of control.”

Of course, the United States began from a different starting point, and so an almost fivefold growth in its incarceration rate gave us a world-historic leviathan. But that would still make mass incarceration mostly a comparative puzzle, thus neither a historical nor even a comparative-historical one. Beginning in the 1970s, the United States moved in a direction that was similar to the direction taken in other countries. Mostly, it ended up in a very different place because it began in a very different one. Thus the fixation in the literature on identifying what happened in the United States and nowhere else in the 1970s is a mistake. But so is, I think, the comparative and historical framing that guides Garland’s argument in this book.

Let me register a final point, which concerns the very purpose of social science explanation. Everyday analysts pin the responsibility for terrible outcomes on terrible people making dastardly choices. This is a typical register for activists; for those who seek to galvanize people to act, history will always be one damn scandal after another. And so the rise of mass incarceration is often told as a story of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, and Bill Clinton’s complicity.

Yet Garland wants us to remember the mission of the social sciences — to show that behind terrible social outcomes lie ordinary people with ordinary goals. As he writes, “[In this book I] refrain from dismissing the conduct of social agents as simply punitive, racist, or in bad faith. Instead, my analysis assumes that people — offenders, police, criminal justice officials, lawmakers, members of the public — generally respond, more or less rationally, to their material circumstances.”³⁵ To change the world, then, it follows that we must change these circumstances. We must go, as radicals, to the root. Anything less will be window dressing.

Or maybe not. On several occasions, Garland worries that this determinism will depress his reader. Reformers, he suspects, don’t want to hear that in order to make headway they must change the basic structure of American social relations — especially after reading that this basic structure springs from the bowels of American history. And so he goes out of his way to reject an overly deterministic interpretation of his argument. As he writes, “Significant, even radical, change in crime and punishment can . . . occur in the absence of broader political and economic restructuring.”³⁶ Yes, the “ultraliberal” political economy of the United States establishes an average level of penal control. But because the processes that determine this precise level exhibit “relative autonomy” from their structural roots, across place and time within the United States, we observe substantial variation around this average. Hence, Garland infers, activists need not despair.³⁷

I agree that activists need not despair, but not for the reasons that Garland gives. He is right that the American penal state is not a monolith but many different systems orbiting an average norm. But I suspect that most of this variation has political and economic causes as well. Mississippi’s penal state looks so much more “American” than the one in Massachusetts because, due to the uneven development of capitalism and American federalism, it has deeper social problems and less state capacity.

In his epilogue, to motivate activists, Garland recounts the myriad ways in which the penal state has shrunk in recent years, dwelling specifically on the changes in New York. I admire that he mines this history for hope. But the changes he describes seem to be the result of the three-decades-long decline in crime, which was itself probably the result of the prior expansion of punishment and (especially in New York) policing, a demographic dividend, and an economic boom.³⁸ We might not want to describe these as structural changes, but they are not levers that reformers can (or will want to) pull.

So where should progressives look for hope, if not to unexplained variation around the American average? Perhaps the mistake here is to counterpose determinism to freedom. It is possible, after all, to take comfort in determinism. Determinism is not fatalism. Political economy isn’t like the weather or the heat death of stars. The distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation is determined by human action. A better distribution will be won by ordinary people acting collectively to force it. Whether or not we manage to do this is not something we will decide, but it is still something that we will have to do.³⁹ (Moreover, and beautifully, it is something that our evolutionary history has left us naturally inclined to do.)⁴⁰ “Men make their own history, but not under conditions they select.”⁴¹

Furthermore, if people do one day manage to do these things, they will need to know what to fight for. This is the promise of a deterministic explanation. When those moments come — maybe one has, now that a socialist is the mayor of New York City — we will need to know which levers will usher in the world we’d like to see. The great gift of Garland’s book is to pull back the veil and to set our sights high. The problem is not racism, or bad apples, or a peculiarly American punitive culture. The problem is structural.

One reason that determinism seems depressing is that we’ve lost confidence in the idea that the arc of history bends toward something better. I cannot in this review give you reasons to recover it. But I can remind you that nothing, in capitalism, is fixed or frozen. As surely as night follows day, its further development will reorder social relations. Perhaps, one day, it will do so in a way that once again gives ordinary people leverage over their oppressors.

In the meantime, our task is to be prepared. And thus we can end where we began. The American penal state is one of the great indignities of our times. It is a symptom of a political and economic regime that combines great suffering for the least and extreme wealth for the few. Over the last few years, there have been several moments when movements have emerged to challenge it. Unfortunately, they have mostly been groping around in the dark.

Fortunately, an eminent scholar of the penal state has rushed to their aid. He has written a book that should, if heeded, spark a change in the way activists organize and in the demands that they make. One cannot ask an intellectual to do any better than this. The rest is up to us.

Once Joseph Stalin erased the last vestiges of Soviet democracy and consolidated his political rule, the “command” or “administered economy” (terms we prefer to “planned economy” for reasons that will become clear) was formed in an ad hoc fashion. The bureaucrats around the leader knew just their aim: rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization. Many of the institutions they wielded to these ends dated from an earlier period. The State Planning Committee, known as Gosplan, for instance, was founded in 1921 as just one of a myriad of planning organs. During the mixed-economy New Economic Policy (NEP) period, Gosplan developed calculations to help state-owned enterprises set production targets, allocate resources, and coordinate medium-term regional and sectoral plans.⁶

The system that emerged has been described by one scholar as “the most complex organization ever constructed by mankind,” so naturally we can only offer a simplified sketch of its operations. It began with the Communist Party leadership using information gathered about the country’s production potential and consumption needs to lay out high-level priorities for development. These policy directives were made real through the work of an economic bureaucracy. At the top of this hierarchy stood a council of ministers that issued decrees and oversaw planning agencies. Gosplan, which had morphed into the state’s vital planning commission, produced plans, translating the party’s multiyear goals into specific annual targets. Its bureaucrats relied on functional agencies, such as a state banks, the finance ministry, a price committee, and others, to create the “rules of the game” in areas ranging from financial guidelines to compensation agreements. Gosplan itself did not have the ability to prepare operational plans for thousands of enterprises producing millions of goods and services. Instead, it projected aggregate supply and demand for key commodities. It was up to individual ministries, like the ministry for steel production, to liaise with individual firms and eventually generate detailed instructions for them. After complex coordination and vigorous negotiations — between the party and Gosplan, Gosplan and the ministries, and the ministries and firms — these plans were eventually approved and became binding directives for enterprises.⁷

Since firms received directives for their output and had strictly allocated inputs, hundreds of indicators had to be managed. Working with firm directors, planners had to decide how many materials would be assigned to each firm, what employment levels they had to maintain, their volume of investment, and how much they had to pay their workers. Every decision created ripple effects throughout the economy.

The basic process was referred to as “material balance planning.” The resources needed for each sector for the economy was calculated in advance. The required production supply (plus foreign imports) was set to match consumption demands (plus foreign exports). Planning was largely carried out in physical terms, and while price was used, it had largely an accounting function.⁸

Above all else, the system was hierarchical. Though locally produced and consumed commodities could be sold by firms without authorization, for most commodities, producers could only sell goods to purchasers with allocation orders. In his pioneering study of the Soviet system, Factory and Manager in the USSR, Joseph S. Berliner describes a world where firm managers were forced to be incredibly resourceful to navigate bureaucracies and meet output expectations while facing a perpetual shortage of supplies and an environment where firm autonomy was incredibly circumscribed. In market systems, activities could be undertaken unless they were expressly prohibited. In the state socialist economy, activity was only allowed if expressly permitted.⁹

Following Berliner, to better understand how such a system functioned, let’s imagine the workings of an important 1940s-era factory. The state, naturally, is the lawful owner of the enterprise, and it would entrust its oversight to an intermediary body like the ministry of iron and steel. This ministry selects a firm director responsible for its overall performance. The director has a chief engineer by his side to guide the technical operation of the plant machinery and the design of its products. There is also a chief accountant to keep the books and prepare an all-important annual report. A planning chief is needed to record production results and calculate the degree of plan fulfillment. Finally, the executive management is rounded out by a figure entrusted with preparing the firm’s purchasing plan. This department head must not only map out required production inputs but make sure that the plant is getting these materials in the right quantities and in a usable form.¹⁰

The director relies on his management team to engage with state bureaucracies. As Berliner explains, “It is they who the director usually takes with him to Moscow on critical occasions; the chief accountant to present and defend the annual report; the chief of the planning department to negotiate for next year’s plan; or the chief of the purchasing department to press for an additional allocation of some critical material.” But naturally, to ensure the internal functioning of the enterprise, a set of middle managers are employed in a similar manner to capitalist firms — to help with product design, quality control, labor discipline, and more. Engaging most closely with rank-and-file workers is, of course, the foreman, a figure valorized by Stalin as “the junior commander of production.”¹¹

However, unlike the head of a capitalist firm, the director nervously awaits orders from Moscow, not sales figures from consumer markets. In late summer, those orders come in the form of control figures — tentative targets for the following year, like a call for a 5 percent increase in total output, the production of 150 tractors, or the establishment of a production line for a new product. The firm must respond to these directives with a draft production plan, laying out in detail how it might meet the ministry’s wishes (or why it may fall short of them).

The most important part of the overarching enterprise plan is a production plan presenting its target output. Next is its procurement plan, which lists the material and equipment inputs required, and then a labor and payroll plan, which not only encompasses a wage bill but labor productivity goals. Other parts relate to finances, organization, and capital investment. Creating such a document is a process that involves discussions at every level of the firm as managers try to grapple with the state’s desire for “tempo” despite frequent input shortages and low levels of productivity. Once it has draft production plans from all its firms, the ministry creates an overarching plan and sends it to Gosplan for amendment and coordination and the creation of a national economic plan.¹²

Later in the year, once this process is completed, the firm director receives a revised enterprise plan, based on input received from around the country, with far less room for negotiation. He’ll continue to plea, however, for more inputs and fewer output requirements. The final enterprise plan issued by the state is in theory binding, but in practice it is subject to revision through the year. The ceaseless process of administrative corrections during the year once led Polish economist Eugène Zaleski to wonder whether the “trial and error” system could even be considered planning at all.¹³

In Communist lore, Soviet managers like our firm director were selflessly committed to plan fulfillment and the state’s ideology and developmental project. As we’ll discuss later in this essay, the reality of supply failures encouraged them to hoard labor and materials and obtain scarce materials in a secondary economy, or otherwise wastefully devote resources to producing their own inputs. They concealed their true production capacity to obtain better plan targets, overreported output to move up the ranks of the nomenklatura, and had little real interest in ideology.¹⁴

As for workers in workers’ states, in many respects their lives differed little from those of their peers in capitalist countries. An account by Miklós Haraszti describes Eastern Bloc factory conditions in which managers demanded output above all else, and the gains of that output only trickled down indirectly to the workers themselves, though they were often employed at institutions with names like “Red Star Tractor Workers.” Not only did they receive a wage for their labor, but piecework — opposed by generations of labor activists — persisted in nominally socialist economies. State-controlled unions protected workers against gross abuses, but there was no shop-floor democracy. They were protected by welfare state guarantees, but that was true of citizens in the social democracies of Northern Europe too. Compared to them, socialist workers had an analogous relationship to the means of production, but with less robust union representation and far fewer consumer benefits.¹⁵

For Haraszti, the socialist system was marked not just by a lack of economic democracy but by perverse incentives that prized quantitative output over “producing useful goods of high quality.” He asks, “What immense force is capable of killing in the worker — who creates everything — the instinct for good work?” Just as factory managers concealed their capacity to produce from the ministries that drafted their control figures, managers couldn’t “count on any information coming from us who actually operate the machine.”¹⁶

A generally egalitarian income distribution prevailed under state socialism, though wage differentials were maintained and considered essential to the system. This was often done to encourage specialization, but also to shift labor from “nonproductive” sectors of the economy like education, health care, and housing to “productive” sectors like industry, construction, and mining. Workers could expect incentive pay, but for those engaged in piecework, the extra income often proved short-lived — regular overfulfillment of piecework just pushed target output upward. Such policies were the root of the popular saying “The government pretends to pay us — we pretend to work.” There were moral exhortations to encourage citizens to construct socialism, but workers saw themselves more as wage laborers in a hyperbureaucratic state and less as the collective owners of the means of production.¹⁷

How citizens ended up at their places of work — or in the mind of critics like Haraszti, their sites of exploitation — differed greatly from capitalist economies. In place of a traditional labor market, command economies had what we can call a quasi–labor market, referred to by the state bureaucracy as the “planned distribution of the labor force.” Some of the system’s oddities seemingly benefited workers: firms hired extensively and avoided job shedding as part of national job guarantees, part-time and fixed-term employment were virtually nonexistent, job security was ironclad, and workers had extensive fringe benefits.¹⁸

Even though most people — besides certain recent university graduates who were assigned to certain sectors and regions — were not told by the state where they had to work, Communist governments retained control over the internal migration of workers in a way that would be unimaginable in the West. After Khrushchev’s reforms, the USSR relaxed restrictions but still maintained a passport system that made moving to some cities, like Moscow, difficult. Generally, socialist planners relied on centrally administered wage rates to indirectly cut off or create movements of labor. As one contemporary text sensibly put it, “In those industrial branches where sufficient labor is not available, we have to make jobs more attractive by raising wages.”¹⁹

In most respects, however, it’s hard to overstate what a departure the command economy was from the market system that prevailed across the rest of the world. Production required administrative orders (and the state capacity to back them up) rather than horizontal exchange and contracts across the economy and, in theory, ex ante coordination of this production, as opposed to ex post market relations.

Now that we’ve explored the series of events that created this dizzyingly complex economy and sketched out its basic functioning, let’s examine its actual performance.

The Stalinist period, at an inexcusable human cost, saw notable economic gains. Administrative planning generated huge amounts of waste, but it more than made up for it through its ability to mobilize resources. Stalin in 1931 said, “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years.” And though his regime did not come anywhere near this mark, it made up significant ground, particularly in industrial and defense sectors. While the capitalist world suffered the Great Depression, growth figures coming out of the Soviet Union encouraged millions of workers around the world to see a rational, planned future being built in “the socialist sixth of the world.”²⁰

In its first few decades, the command economy was able to produce “extensive growth” by tapping into previous idle resources. Large numbers of workers were forced from agriculture into heavy industry, women were brought into the workforce, and new sources of coal, oil, and iron ore were lifted from the earth. The system not only harnessed resources but set clear priorities, diverting goods to construct vital infrastructure and develop key sectors. New sources of progress would have to be found once those reserves had been exhausted. By the time Khrushchev came to power dreaming of a more humane and prosperous system, the Soviet Union sought “intensive growth” through technological innovation and productivity and efficiency gains.²¹

There were early indications that the new administration was up to the task. Khrushchev’s “thaw” famously meant a reckoning with Stalin’s terror and a reduction of his police state, but it was also accompanied by economic reforms. The Sovnarkhoz reform shifted planning from all-Soviet industrial ministries in Moscow to regionally based ones made up of specialists convened to openly discuss production problems, and the planning process involved wider layers of the nomenklatura. The organizational changes were accompanied by lofty rhetoric that recalled a much earlier period of Bolshevism: “We must govern in such a way that nobody governs for society, but society itself does the governing.”²²

One of Khrushchev’s overarching goals was to rebalance the Soviet economy from a single-minded focus on capital goods to the production of more consumer goods. Improving agricultural productivity, that age-old aspiration of Russian leaders, was also on his agenda. Producers in that sector were offered higher prices and given access to better equipment and fertilizers. The agricultural laborers made redundant by farm mechanization found homes in cities, where tens of thousands of new Khrushchyovkas, prefabricated apartments that took just days to build, awaited them.²³

However, his well-intended schemes were, on the whole, failures. The production of consumer goods skewed toward products that most citizens couldn’t afford and created shortages where there was demand. The fleeting attempt at decentralization (the 1957 Sovnarkhoz shift) actually seems to have made coordination of these complex products even more difficult and exacerbated the planner-manager agency problems we’ll soon discuss in more detail. Some agricultural reform was undertaken, but it was dragged down by failed grand projects like a campaign to encourage farmers in Ukraine to grow corn instead of wheat.

Yet this period coincided with some of the Soviet Union’s greatest triumphs. The world’s first satellite, Sputnik, was launched in 1957; Yuri Gagarin traveled into space in 1961, and probes were soon sent to Mars and Venus. It’s no surprise that, between 1959 and 1961, the New York Times produced articles with titles like “Allen Dulles Sees U.S. Peril in Soviet’s Economic Rise,” “C.I.A. Forecasts Soviet Output Will Grow 80% in Next Decade,” and “Doubling of Output by Soviet Indicated.” What Western commentators didn’t know was that their rival’s agricultural industry was stagnant — indeed, grain production remained almost unchanged from the late 1960s until the country’s collapse — and that labor and low-cost natural resources were becoming scarcer, jeopardizing key sources of growth. This truth was apparent to everyday citizens of the USSR and its allies, who dealt with long lines and poor-quality goods.

Patience waned along with growth rates. The command economy was relatively successful in its first few decades, when progress could be achieved simply through investment (increasing the capital-labor ratio) without a need for technological improvements or other sources of productivity gains. It was “all thumbs and no fingers” — good at mass-producing steel and tanks during the period of rapid industrialization, while struggling thereafter to cope with the complexity of inputs for consumer goods. The system did deliver high-profile innovations, but only where prior technological knowledge was widespread (like in aerospace) and almost never in emerging fields (like computing). This technological lag and more general stagnation were the products of its very economic model rather than the authoritarian political system from which it grew.²⁴

The 1960s Soviet economy, one contemporary academic calculated, was now 1,600 times more complex than it had been just a few decades earlier. But its techniques of planning were virtually unchanged since the first five-year plan in 1928. The need for creative efforts to modernize command economies were apparent to many. We can call one school of reformers early “cybersocialists,” those who wanted to use mathematical optimization and new forms of communication to make planning more efficient.²⁵

No one was more important to this effort than Leonid Kantorovich. Kantorovich eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work pioneering linear programming, work that began from a desire to solve the problems of state socialism. In 1938, the young professor of mathematics at Leningrad University was approached by a plywood trust looking to answer a deceptively complex question: they had eight peeling machines that produced five types of plywood in varying quantities, and given the raw materials, they needed a work schedule to maximize output. To tackle the dilemma, first Kantorovich formulated an objective function (maximizing the output of finished plywood), and then he identified constraints (the availability of wood and the capacity of machines needed for processing). He developed a way to measure each machine’s output of one plywood in terms of all the other plywoods it could have made. Shadow prices — a figure assigned to inputs in place of market prices — were calculated from opportunity costs, taking into account constraints and thereby helping to show how much more output could be produced by relaxing one or another constraint.²⁶

Kantorovich’s method was meant as a way for planners to assess optimal pricing, a scheme in which these shadow prices would be calculated from opportunity costs without the need for the “total information awareness” that the likes of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek said were necessary for planning to work. As Kantorovich recounts in the plywood example, he was able to obtain “an increase in the output of the product of 5 per cent in comparison with the simplest solution (that is, if we assign work to each of the machines in proportion to the product mix).” Not satisfied, he explained how to use his method to do things like route freight transportation more optimally or improve the cutting of timber and the trimming of metal. All the examples used linear programming to minimize waste and maximize machine and labor power. Kantorovich was plagued by the problems of Soviet planning, and he sought a general method for solving them. Why, he and other optimal planners asked, couldn’t the mathematics that worked to fix problems at individual plants be extended to the economy as a whole?²⁷

In the Stalinist era, it was hard to make such a case openly. When Kantorovich’s work was discussed at Gosplan in 1943, one speaker noted that “an optimum has already been proposed by the fascist [Vilfredo] Pareto, a favorite of Mussolini.” A follow-up meeting was convened, where the arrest of the renegade mathematician was contemplated. Luckily such a measure was not deemed necessary, and after the death of Stalin it became easier to make the case for mathematical methods in economics.²⁸

In 1954, an early advocate of Kantorovich’s approach, Leningrad University’s Sergei Vallander, promised new premier Georgy Malenkov that the novel optimization methods would boost GDP by 50 to 70 percent. Yet the ideas were once again rejected on ideological grounds: the prices that emerged from linear programming seemed too incompatible with the labor theory of value, and all the talk of investment efficiency based on profitability and cost minimization smacked of the bourgeois notion of the profit rate. More practically, Gosplan officials claimed — ironically echoing the supreme bourgeois economist Hayek — that mass application of the method was not practical since it required too much information and impossibly large computational abilities. But this time authorities offered their critiques less harshly than before and even supported the use of the method at lower levels to shape transport and rationalize cutting. Meanwhile, Kantorovich waited for the chance to prove his ideas nationally, rebranding his work with invocations of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and more ideological phrasing; “objectively determined valuations” would be used, for example, instead of “prices.”²⁹

Under Khrushchev, the Soviet state was finally ready to embrace Kantorovich and his cothinkers, like Moscow mathematician Vasily Nemchinov. Together the two men were allowed to create a research institution that trained a generation of mathematical economists who labored toward an automated system of economic planning and management. Their dreams dovetailed with the aspirations of Victor Glushkov and others who aimed to create a nationwide computer network, a sort of Soviet internet, to share data between firms and planners. As mentioned, Hayek argued that effective planning was impossible, since it required that planners solve “a system of thousands or more simultaneous equations” and access information from across an economy. Combined, the work pioneered by Kantorovich and Glushkov seemed to offer the solution for a viable computerized planning — a cybersocialist utopia.

Kantorovich’s work was internationally recognized, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. In practice, however, linear programming in the USSR came to be nothing more than a minor planning tool among others. Why that is the case is a matter of debate. Some point to contingent political barriers: the technocratic nature of optimal planning would have disempowered the vast bureaucracy that ran the USSR and limited its discretion to wheel and deal. Yet a less cynical view would see that the apparent distortions of the Soviet system allowed it to function in practice. For example, excess material from unneeded inputs (“waste”) was often bartered elsewhere in the economy, preventing supply problems. Managers sometimes tapped into secondary markets or lied to planners, not necessarily to enhance their own position but out of an understanding of what their firms needed in order to function in an uncertain economy.

Ultimately it wasn’t optimal planning but this unplanned sector that kept the Soviet system trudging along. “Allocations from the ministry covered only 40 percent of what we needed,” one manager lamented. “You had to find the other 60 percent yourself.” As Kantorovich would himself concede, “Sometimes one has to reject models which were the most complete and precise in their design in favor of one which promises practical results.”³⁰

Soviet decision-makers understood that optimal planning faced not just a mathematical challenge but one of incentive. Managers had little reason to be forthcoming about their capabilities, and workers had little incentive to exceed expectations. These misaligned interests meant that accurate information was systematically withheld at every level of the system. But even if planners could somehow access perfect data, they would still face the staggering problem of computational complexity. As Cosma Shalizi points out, if a planned economy like the USSR had twelve million distinct goods (Alec Nove’s estimate) and planners needed to account for just one thousand locations, they’d be dealing with twelve billion variables. Solving such a system of equations would take even a modern computer a thousand years — not ideal for coming up with an annual plan.³¹

Just as significantly, János Kornai, a Hungarian economist whom we will soon return to, argued that what is determined to be mathematically optimal is inherently relative. It is “valid only under given simplifying assumptions, regarding definite political targets and expressed in the constraints and in the objective function of the model.” Calling the search for optimality the “blue-bird of economic theory,” Kornai says that the real use of mathematical planning was more modestly in “the exploration of feasibilities” and the “explanation of interdependences between conflicting goals.”³²

Other critics were blunter, saying that Kantorovich and his cothinkers had tried to build economic reform on the basis of microeconomics alone and confused a social system with a technical system. With a wider lens, they would have concluded that a more viable path to economic growth was “not by the reallocation of given resources with given productivity between alternative uses, i.e., the method of linear programming. It is by increasing the productivity of resources by increasing specialization, utilizing economies of scale, raising the qualifications of the labor force and fostering technical progress.”³³

It’s not that Kantorovich’s economic ideas didn’t work at certain scales. Capitalist firms regularly use linear programming tools to make decisions about supply-chain logistics and production scheduling. But it’s a massive leap to go from the needs of firms operating in a market economy to those of a state juggling an avalanche of outputs and the complex linkages between them.

Optimal planning and the related dream of cybersocialism, however, still spark imaginations today, especially through interest in Cybersyn, a promising effort by Salvador Allende’s socialist government to enhance coordination between Chilean state-owned industries and provide real-time information to planners. But similarly, if Cybersyn had merits as a planning tool in a mixed economy, it would have run into unresolvable problems if used on a wider scale.

In a forthcoming essay critiquing cybersocialism, Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman discusses the widespread adoption of networked planning in the most industrially advanced state socialist country: East Germany. The German Democratic Republic operated a computerized, networked planning system that collected data and plugged it into linear optimization models. Over 23,000 enterprises submitted 250 monthly reports consisting of thousands of key figures to the Central Administration for Statistics in Berlin. Planners immediately used the information to formulate and adjust plans. Kantorovich himself was impressed by developments in the country.

Ultimately, however, the East German economy suffered the same fate as those of its less advanced — and less computerized — peers in Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. As Ackerman notes, even more critical than the problems inherent in compiling information and making calculations (plan formation) were problems in plan execution. “Beginning with fires, we could draw up a long list of routine mishaps liable to disrupt production: bad weather, broken machines, delivery errors, someone ordering the wrong part by mistake — maybe even a pandemic. All of these are profoundly destabilizing to centrally planned economies. And yet none of them are problems computers can solve.”

What if a fresh aggregate plan could be generated every day or even every hour to take into account these changes? Ackerman says that this would only create a worst-of-all-worlds economy, “a system of pure ex post coordination, just like a market economy; except now every microeconomic adjustment, no matter how small the cause, would force systemwide changes affecting every household and business all at once.”³⁴

Other avenues of change received more support from state authorities in the Soviet Union. In 1962, economist Evsei Liberman wrote an influential Pravda article titled “Plan, Profit, and Bonus.” That a headline openly touting the importance of profit could be published in a mass-circulation newspaper in the USSR reflected both the relaxed environment Khrushchev had created and growing concerns about economic performance. Liberman explained the context of his proposals and the reforms that followed in an interview to the Western press a few years later: “Our planning machinery has remained the same as it was in the 1930s,” when it was able to build an industrial base and defeat fascism. But now, with rising living standards, “people are demanding not only more goods but goods of better quality. Now the country must produce high-quality goods in large quantities and at a minimum cost.”³⁵

Liberman, an elderly and previously obscure academic, became the face of Soviet economics to such an extent that his visage graced a 1965 cover of Time magazine. A staunch believer that central planning could be more effective, Liberman saw that, in pursuing their output targets, directors paid little heed to costs. In fact, they often tried to boost gross output by decreasing quality or changing their product composition. The story of the Soviet nail factory that first produced a lot of tiny nails when incentivized based on the number of units and then produced useless giant nails when judged by the output weight is apocryphal, but it conveys the dynamics at play.

Liberman wanted managers to have more autonomy to make investment decisions and find ways to lower costs rather than just build up stock. He wanted suppliers to better serve the needs of users and for weak producers to shutter. Workers, he thought, had a right to employment, but not necessarily at their existing firm or even their current sector. As for profits, a word once taboo in socialist thought, a text on his ideas explains that “Liberman proposed that bonus payments (after fulfillment of the planned output target) should be an increasing function of the profit rate (profit-capital ratio), thus encouraging the expansion of profits but the reduction of capital usage. Profitability norms established for each industry would serve as the basis for evaluating managerial performance.”³⁶

In the early 1960s, Liberman’s proposals were tested in select mines and factories to generally favorable results. Meetings at the USSR Academy of Sciences were held on cost accounting and financial incentives, and a few years later a new Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, instituted a set of reforms loosely along the lines of “Plan, Profit, and Bonus.” Efforts were made to eliminate slack plans, firms were given more freedom, and a new bonus system encouraged workers and managers alike to value efficiency. Planners and producers were meant to have their interests aligned, without constant monitoring and punitive interventions. By the end of 1968, 72 percent of enterprises were converted to the new scheme.³⁷

The Kosygin reform could have signaled a big shift in Soviet economic policy. In theory, reducing the number of centrally assigned targets from forty to just nine was a major change, especially since the gross value of output — particularly responsible for encouraging waste — was not one of them. Allowing firms to keep and reinvest more of their profits would have not just rewarded successful enterprises at the expense of less successful ones; it would have shifted resources from slagging heavy industry to more dynamic light industry. These changes would have had to be accompanied by price reform to make revenues and expenditure representative of firm performance (and not just administrative price fixing).³⁸

In practice, the shift was less significant. Price reform was limited, as were levels of firm-driven investment. There was only so much that could be done in an economy with administered prices: when more flexibility was offered to managers in the early years of the reform, they took advantage of prices that diverged greatly from marginal costs and avoided much-demanded goods that did not. As one economist recounts, “Some products that Soviet society needed were not produced because they were underpriced relative to social marginal cost, and producing them would have reduced enterprise profits and incentive funds.” There was no way profits could provide proper signals for investment decisions in an economy without scarcity prices. Allocative efficiency suffered, and planners were forced to intervene, essentially replicating the old system. Soon realizing the constraints still in place, firms again hoarded resources and paid less heed to efficiency.³⁹

The changes were less dramatic than expected for managers in other respects as well. The thirty-one eliminated targets still needed to be tracked and submitted as part of a firm’s draft plans. The problems created by the traditional model’s emphasis on gross output wasn’t obviated either. That figure might not have been mandated by planners, but it was still used to centrally determine a firm’s wage bill. The larger the wage bill, the more managers could draw from the new bonus fund, encouraging the expansion of employment rather than increased productivity. The wage bill was just one example of the contradictory nature of the reforms that suffered from problems of both design and implementation as well the overarching issue that plagued any attempt to solve the issues created by the command economy within the framework of the command economy: the autonomy of a firm that couldn’t decide what to produce, where to buy its inputs, or how to price its outputs.

There was little evidence that the halting reforms were delivering success, making them easy to undermine. After Czech “revisionism” bubbled into 1968’s Prague Spring, the Leonid Brezhnev wing of the Soviet leadership became even more wary of change, especially that which offered a reduced role for the party’s planners and the heavy industry it had so diligently built up. It was better to risk stagnation than political instability.

Those around Brezhnev had their own theory of progress: they looked to a “scientific and technical revolution” sweeping the world through the rise of new computing and information technology. By tailing these advances, perhaps Khrushchev’s promised superabundance could come about without fundamental reform. Planning technology, as we saw in the East German example, was already shaping command economies, and in the meantime soaring oil prices seemingly bought Communist parties time.

The promised growth never came, however. The Soviet system produced shortages and poor-quality goods by its very nature, and technocratic tweaks (seesawing between tighter oversight and more decentralization) proved ineffective. We now have a clearer picture of Russia’s economic dysfunction: perhaps 20 to 25 percent of Soviet GNP was spent on the military, and its agricultural output was not 85 percent of American output, as the State Statistical Committee of the Soviet Union had reported, but closer to 55 percent. One Soviet economist estimated that out of ninety million tons of potatoes harvested, only twenty-four million got to consumers because of transportation and storage problems. The real numbers were so jarring that the United States General Accounting Office felt obligated to publish a fifty-six-page assessment of how exactly the CIA had so grossly overestimated the size of the Soviet economy.⁴⁰

Stagnation culminated in demand for reform. After Brezhnev’s death in 1982, Yuri Andropov succeeded him as general secretary. During his fifteen months in power, Andropov sought to combat corruption and absenteeism, emphasize quality over sheer volume in production, and promote young reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev.

Andropov’s protégé would soon pursue a more radical course. When Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, he inherited an economy riddled with supply shortages, declining productivity, and growing dissatisfaction. His twin slogans — glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) — were meant to address both political sclerosis and economic stagnation. Under perestroika, Gorbachev introduced measures such as the 1987 Law on State Enterprises, which gave firms more autonomy and allowed them to retain profits. He legalized cooperatives, bringing in elements of private enterprise, and launched campaigns to reduce corruption and absenteeism.

But these changes unfolded within a system where prices remained centrally administered, inputs were unreliable, and state agencies still attempted to steer outcomes through outdated levers. Managers were formally empowered yet remained bound by planning norms that no longer functioned. As the state’s coordinating capacity eroded, no viable alternative emerged.

At the same time, glasnost eroded the legitimacy of the party. Censorship was relaxed, and criticism of the system — along with rising nationalist sentiment — flooded public discourse. By weakening the repressive and centralizing aspects of the old regime before constructing a durable replacement, Gorbachev cut through the red tape that had been tenuously holding a fragile superpower together. He intended to reform the command economy. Instead, he unmade it.

The Soviet Union entered the 1990s with no functioning plan and no functioning market. Food and fuel shortages worsened. Monetary instability spiraled. Nationalist movements gained traction. A failed coup in August 1991 by hard-liners weakened the center further. By December, the USSR ceased to exist. In 1977, about a third of humanity lived under socialist command economies of one type or another. By 1992, that figure was 0.6 percent.⁴¹

After its liberation from fascism by the Red Army, much of Eastern Europe was remolded into the image of the Soviet Union. In the official ideology of these war-ravaged countries, socialism meant a rationally planned economy, and capitalism was synonymous with a market economy and doomed for the dustbin of history. However, these economies quickly caught up to dilemmas plaguing their erstwhile Soviet comrades. The early years of state socialism saw the mobilization of untapped resources and impressive growth rates. Yet before long, the model’s problems became clear: low agricultural productivity, firm hoarding, shortages, an imbalance between heavy and light industry, and worker unrest over living conditions and rationed goods.

This discontent boiled over into outright revolt in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary and Poland in 1956. In Hungary, a revolution, with thousands mobilized in militias and worker councils, threatened to push the country out of the Warsaw Pact and provoked a bloody intervention by Soviet forces. A new Communist leadership, loyal to Moscow, had to restore legitimacy, and fast.

It wasn’t clear who the new Hungarian premier, János Kádár, really was. He was arrested and tortured by the Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi administration in 1951 and was only released from prison after the reformist Imre Nagy came to power. A couple years later, he supported Nagy and assumed a leadership role during the early days of the Hungarian Revolution, before deciding that things had gone too far and backtracking. After the Soviet invasion, Kádár repaid Nagy by ordering his former benefactor’s execution.

Kádár’s early economic moves hardly burnished his credentials as a reformer; he appeased hard-liners through a massive recollectivization program. During the chaos of the 1956 revolution, collective farms lost 60 percent of their members, most of whom became private farmers. But unlike Hungary’s postwar collectivization, Kádár offered peasants more carrots than sticks. Many peasants were pushed back onto state farms, but they were allowed private plots and their own livestock herds. Others were encouraged to form agricultural cooperatives that expanded their activities to construction and small-scale manufacturing. The new regime did away with compulsory deliveries and instead encouraged voluntary sales at good prices. Government investments in mechanization and fertilizer further encouraged growth. Hungary became the only command economy in history to see crop output increase along with collectivization.⁴²

With his position consolidated and a better climate for reform emerging in the Eastern Bloc, Kádár had space to chart a new course. His famous refrain, “Those who are not against us are with us,” signaled a degree of political and cultural openness. In the new environment, heterodox economic thinking thrived. Hard-
liners were dismissed, and reformers like new central committee secretary Rezso Nyers were appointed. They had long identified the command economy’s classic problems and knew that isolated changes would be subsumed — as with the Kosygin reforms — by the overarching logic of the old system. A whole package of measures would have to be rolled out at once.⁴³

On May 7, 1966, Communist Party leadership laid out its objectives for the next few years: “The laborious and bureaucratic system of centralized allocations” would give way to “commercial relations.” Producers would have autonomy and the ability to decide what and how much to produce and to purchase their required inputs. They’d be free to establish horizontal relationships with users within a regulated market and even foreign firms (within the bounds of national interest). Enterprises would have greater ability to direct investments. Profits would be the measure of their success and the source of incentive payments for managers and workers alike.⁴⁴

While maintaining state ownership of the means of production, this New Economic Mechanism (NEM) represented a shift from imperative planning to indicative planning. Whereas imperative planning relied on binding directives issued from central authorities, indicative planning sought to guide economic activity through indirect means such as prices, taxes, and interest rates — using financial signals to shape firm behavior rather than command it. Hungary’s version of Gosplan would still produce five-year and annual plans to guide national development toward light industry and the production of goods for export, but ministries wouldn’t break them down into granular firm-level targets. It would instead try to realize them through financial means. Crucially, unlike the Kosygin reforms, autonomy and incentives were accompanied by price reform so that differences in profitability actually influenced supply and demand. The prices of some key items remained centrally administered, some were left to market forces, while still others were allowed to bounce between state-set minimums and maximums.⁴⁵

The NEM was an immediate success. Unlike in the Soviet Union, firms became, almost overnight, interested in profit seeking through the meeting of consumer demand. They stopped hoarding resources and reduced waste. While controlling inflation, the economy grew, productivity soared, and trade increased. Hungary was fulfilling its plan — to become a competitive exporter, with thriving light industry and productive agriculture — with a greatly reduced role for centralized planning. Ordinary workers felt the benefits as well: the workweek was reduced from forty-eight hours to forty-four hours, shortages abated, and there was a more varied assortment of products to buy.⁴⁶

However, the NEM was wrought with contradictions from the beginning. The state, through branch ministries or local governments, was responsible for founding and deciding the scope of firms’ activities, but it rarely liquidated them for being inefficient. It appointed but rarely dismissed directors. The national bank was also a crucial source of funding. Directors waited for calls from the national bank, an industrial ministry, or a myriad of other officials they needed to be in the good graces of to get a government loan, a subsidy, or tax relief. Economic rules are always set by state authorities, but in Hungary dependence on vertical relationships with the state outweighed horizontal relationships with other firms and consumers.⁴⁷

These tendencies were strengthened by high market concentration in the Hungarian economy. The traditional model favored large, integrated combines. The size of these enterprises made them easier for planners to manage and provided economies of scale. Through the early 1960s, large campaigns of industrial mergers took place. The decade prior to the NEM’s inauguration saw the percentage of enterprises employing more than one thousand workers go from 10 percent to 34.6 percent. This composition meant that many firms felt weak competition. What’s more, just as directors relied on their state benefactors, party officials were wary of the political consequences of letting even unproductive firms that thousands of workers relied on for employment go under.⁴⁸ Instead of designing a properly functioning market socialist system, the Hungarians had seemingly just grafted some elements of a price system haphazardly onto a planned economy.

Four years after the NEM’s introduction, the Communist Party’s centralizing impulses returned to the fore. Certain hard-liners had always resented wholesale reform and hoped to just improve on the old system as their peers in Berlin and Moscow seemed to be doing. This was a path of far less resistance than the alternative: breaking up powerful conglomerates to allow productive competition and expressing state development preferences indirectly.⁴⁹

As the world plunged into recession following the 1973 oil shock, these leaders, reluctant to slow down economic growth and risk a fall in living standards, turned their economy inward to insulate themselves from a crisis of capitalism. Foreign loans fueled a large investment drive in the mid-1970s, wages were increased, and consumer prices often became lower than producer prices. Producers, in turn, bargained for subsidies from the state for which they had no repayment obligations. More products were subject to purchase quotas and more seller-buyer relationships were centrally determined. As production taxes and financial assistance became set on a firm-by-firm basis and the usefulness of price signals weakened, a key part of the NEM was undermined.

Within a few years, however, a new set of reforms were in place that not only returned to the original NEM course but addressed some of its defects. A December 1978 party resolution called for increased emphasis on the profit motive, less government interference, and price reform. The state structure interacting with firms was simplified and made less prone to micro-level meddling, many large enterprises were broken up to promote competition, producer prices were rationalized by aligning them more closely to world market prices, and investment decision-making was decentralized.⁵⁰

But even with the changes, Hungary wasn’t generating enough foreign exchange to service the debts it had taken on in the 1970s. As the 1980s went on, worker discontent with stagnant wages, housing shortages, and poverty grew. The measures needed to tackle debt and inflation were politically unpalatable, but efforts to preserve subsidies and consumption levels only fueled a balance of payments crisis. As the wider Soviet bloc crumbled, Hungary’s new leaders saw the restoration of capitalism as a palliative.

The Hungarian reformers’ revision of the Soviet model managed to solve some of its key deficits: its emphasis on quantity over quality (what East Germans called Tonnenideologie, the ideology of tons), its low productivity and incentive issues, and information problems that arose from the hiding of capacities and the hoarding of resources. It was no small feat to overcome the shortage economy. But weak producers were still not punished with bankruptcy, and the old bargaining over the annual plan was replaced with new forms of bargaining with state authorities for credits and subsidies.

The NEM has been described as “neither plan nor market,” and many Hungarians took to fittingly describing their system as “goulash communism.” Goulash, after all, was a stew made up of an amalgam of ingredients: onions, peppers, potatoes, noodles, meats. Despite its flaws, Hungary’s record holds up better than that of any other socialist state, and if not for contingent economic difficulties and its party-state’s fragile legitimacy (big ifs), it might have found a way to move toward democratic socialism. Still, one measure of its relative merits is a public opinion poll two decades after the transition to capitalism in which only 8 percent of respondents said that most people in Hungary were better off than they had been under communism.⁵¹

So how should we summarize the failure of actually existing socialist planning? The extensive history of command economies throughout the world tends to show the same issues. The first category of outcomes can be described as agency problems involving relations between planners and managers, managers and workers, and even state planners and the public writ large.

Command economies rely on accurate and honest information from firms about their production possibilities and their efficient use of allocated resources. But since the resources allocated to firms depend on the information they provide to the center, they have incentives to falsify information and hoard resources. We saw this in Berliner’s study of Soviet managers who almost universally underreported their capacity and overreported their output to obtain easier plans. Once they received those plans — just like the piecework workers in Haraszti’s account — they wouldn’t even respond to monetary incentives to radically overfulfill targets for fear of ratcheting up future targets.

Directors might have schemed to ensure the future of their own careers, but their firms’ survival was almost never in doubt. Kornai labeled a phenomenon we’ve covered in the Hungarian case the “soft budget constraint.” Weak producers were inevitably subsidized by the state and not allowed to fail. This was perfectly logical for policymakers, as allowing inefficient firms to collapse would cause destabilizing unemployment and impact other producers reliant on their outputs.

Capitalist systems aren’t immune to this tendency, but bankruptcy and limited liability softens the blow for firms. Bankruptcy law manages the process in a way that removes managers and restructures the firm and its assets to minimize losses to the creditors. For employees in social democracies, the social costs of unemployment are reduced through active labor market policies and generous insurance schemes. From the socialist perspective, with the right safeguards, there should be no ideological qualms about embracing closures — the process of less efficient producers giving way to more efficient ones is not a social ill but rather a key source of dynamism. Why should workers labor using inefficient techniques or outdated equipment if their peers at rival firms have found more productive alternatives?⁵²

We’ve already covered manager-worker agency problems through our look at Eastern Bloc workers who had no real incentive to work efficiently. However, managers also lacked incentives to take risks and innovate using new technologies or production techniques. In Hungary’s market socialist system — which saw incentives, decentralization, and price reform — this particular issue was mitigated, despite the problems of monopolization and the soft budget constraint.

Next, there is a category of objection that we can call the public-planner agency problem. Who plans the planners? In actually existing socialism, there was no democratic control, and feedback from civil society was stifled by political authoritarianism. Planners may have been trying to serve public interests, but poor information flows often forced them to resort to guesswork. They also were unable to take into account the externalities created by their actions — one reason why the Eastern Bloc environmental record, which featured lowlights like the destruction of the Aral Sea through poorly designed irrigation projects, was even more abysmal than its capitalist peers.

These are just some of the difficulties we encounter before getting to the second category of issues, the most common criticism of the command economy: informational problems. Lenin wrote in State and Revolution that “accounting and control” was the precondition for the proper functioning of the first stage of a communist society. “All that is required,” he contended, “is that [workers] should work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay; the accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations — which any literate person can perform — of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts.”⁵³

In practice this proved to be a difficult task even for highly trained technocrats with advanced calculational tools. The 1980s Soviet economic bureaucracy consisted of 38 state committees, 33 all-Soviet ministries, 28 republican ministries, and more than 300 regional ministries and authorities. Each of these nearly 400 organizations had sprawling bureaucratic departments within them. Together they oversaw 43,000 factories, 26,000 construction enterprises, 47,000 farming units, 260,000 service establishments, and over 1 million retail trade shops. The factories alone produced around 12 million different products or product variants, each of which required unique inputs and were dependent on each other through complicated supply chains.⁵⁴

It seems impossible that such a system could persist, let alone oversee growth, for over half a century. Yet hidden features of command economies meant that they were more resilient than early critics like Hayek and Mises expected. Despite Soviet boasts about the “scientific” planning process, Gosplan couldn’t have planned and priced millions of goods and services. To do such a thing would require accurate knowledge of the needs and abilities of every firm and household in the country.

Planners confronted informational problems by essentially guessing to determine production quotas. For example, they had to set targets for firms in their ministries without knowing what those firms could truly produce. They did know, however, that directors were understating the output that they could achieve. So they used a rule of thumb: they’d ask for what they produced last year and then add a little bit extra, thereby maintaining economic tempo while broadly accepting the production horizons laid out by directors. Every part of the Soviet economic hierarchy — from supreme party organs down to workers “pretending” to work — all seemed to have an incentive to hide their true capacities. Far from a totalitarian machine, with orders followed and enforced implacably through the hierarchy, we see a system composed of ordinary human beings improvising and navigating difficult trade-offs.

Rather than simply wait for promised inputs that were not forthcoming, firm managers, as we’ve discussed, exercised important degrees of control and discretion to reach their output targets. They bargained with state authorities and took part in the second economy, an informal sector where they joined other enterprises and consumers in bartering or buying goods that they couldn’t get through the planners’ official channels.

Even with these simplifications, Gosplan’s responsibilities were immense. It had to coordinate and amend draft output plans to make them coherent with each other and with material supply possibilities, estimated agricultural production, personal incomes, the budget, and other key items. But its authority flowed indirectly through the highest bodies of government, and much of its planning only involved setting aggregate output targets for planned commodities. Estimates of required inputs were aggregated by ministries and sent to Gosplan, but they essentially came from below, since enterprises were responsible for their own draft plans. “Many orders are written by their recipients,” a Hungarian economist remarked.

As the year went on, planners spent much of their time reconciling unfinalized drafts with actual results. It’s no wonder why Zaleski asked if the Soviet Union was actually planned at all.⁵⁵

The design flaws of the system yielded real-world problems. Take Tonnenideologie, the quantity drive we’ve covered: planners weren’t ignorant of the pitfalls of that approach, but they had few alternatives to it within the traditional model. They ended up producing an economy where paper growth often ruled the day. The Soviet steel industry is a striking example. The USSR’s steel production almost doubled the United States’, but it did so with far more waste of iron ore, and further up the value chain it yielded a volume of products lower than that of the US economy. Relatedly, the economist Michael Ellman notes that a reform experiment that instructed clothing factories to directly produce according to the needs of shops resulted in less output, since production runs were shorter and a wider array of items were made. By Soviet measurers, these facilities had become less effective even though they were more responsive to consumer demands.⁵⁶

This sort of planning developed a general tendency toward shortage. If consumption choices are different from what is anticipated in the plan, there will be shortages of some products and surpluses of others, and bottlenecks (shortages further up the supply chain) will delay adjustment. When people and firms come to expect shortages, they hoard, which makes the shortages worse. These complexities only grew over time as the Soviet Union tried to transition from investment-led growth.

What can get lost in an abstract and bloodless recounting of the command economy’s pathologies is how everyday people experienced the system. Even if we consider Stalin’s bloody terror and totalitarianism to be aberrations, the overall record isn’t good. State socialism will never shake its association with lines for groceries and yearslong waits for housing and cars. Long hours spent in queues were rooted in a shortage economy that was supply-constrained rather than demand-constrained, and resentment grew not only at the lack of goods and their shoddy quality but the fact that the nomenklatura, with power and status, could access things ordinary people could not.

Even when workers lived in countries with relatively high standards of living like East Germany, the political system that accompanied command economies was stifling. Lenin proposed that only a tiny repressive state apparatus would be necessary under socialism, since it required the suppression of just a minority by the great majority. Yet by the late 1980s — a time when, according to Khruschev, they would be living under superabundance — the Stasi had nearly 175,000 informants, 90,000 agents, and files on over 5 million citizens. All this was necessary to keep a nation of 16 million people, with a long communist and social democratic tradition, in check.

Despite everything just recounted, readers who share our egalitarian commitments might still believe that a different kind of planning — more democratic, more intelligent, more technologically advanced — could succeed where the Soviets failed. And to some extent, they would be right: macro-level planning is indispensable for any serious socialist project. Public investment, regulation, and strategic coordination will always be needed to guide development in socially useful directions. State planning already works in vital sectors of modern economies, where outputs and social goals are relatively clear and stable, unlike the vast and constantly shifting realm of consumer production. Take the British National Health Service, a supply-constrained, centrally administered system that in many respects resembles a Soviet institution, yet remains one of the most cherished and politically resilient features of the UK welfare state.

The lesson of the twentieth century, however, is that central planning cannot function as the organizing principle of an entire economy. Large organizations in both the private and public sectors are command economies of a sort, but they operate in a broader context of prices, budget allocations, and income-expenditure flows that they do not control. Planning an entity with these parameters given is a completely different order of problem than that of planning the parameters themselves. Central planning’s problems weren’t merely technical or circumstantial. They were structural.

The failure of Soviet-style planning wasn’t just a matter of missing computers or Cold War pressures. It was a product of an institutional structure that generated perverse incentives, suppressed information, and collapsed worker agency into bureaucratic command. These weren’t bugs to be fixed with better optimization algorithms; they were coded into the system itself.

If anything, the path to more effective planning runs through market socialism, not around it. A functioning market socialist system — with social ownership, worker control, and competitive allocation — creates the material surplus, the embedded information, and the dispersed initiative that make large-scale coordination and democratic decision-making in key sectors possible.

This socialism is not merely a nicer or more flexible variant of socialism — it may be the only viable socialism left. If we are serious about transcending capitalism, we have no choice but to wrestle with how to reconcile democratic control and social ownership with the logic of market coordination. And that’s how we ensure that socialism offers not only shoes for all but shoes that fit.

Fascism, or the fear of fascism, drove left-wing movements of the 1930s to coalesce with liberal bourgeois parties in defense of republican government. That collaboration was premised on the Left’s forgoing its socialist aspirations. Popular Front governments — embracing communists, socialists, syndicalists, and anarchists as well as reform-minded elements of the bourgeoisie — briefly ruled in France and Spain and for a longer period in Chile. In the United States, the Popular Front invested its energies in supporting the New Deal Democratic Party. Some attribute the Popular Front strategy to the Soviet Union and the Communist International; in 1935, the Comintern issued instructions to its affiliated parties to enter into collaboration with other left-wing parties and elements of the liberal bourgeoisie, who until that moment had been considered class enemies. As a matter of fact, however, popular fronts were already well underway in Europe as well as in the United States and Latin America years before the Soviet ukase.

The Soviet Union and the Communist International are long gone. But intimations of the Popular Front are with us still.

Familiar forces contend: reactionaries, authoritarians, and fascists face off against partisans of democracy and equality; Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the oligarchs vs. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the people. Should the armies of the people prevail, something resembling an updated version of the New Deal coalition will be restored to power. Socialists participate in this mobilization, but their socialism is not on the agenda. Scenarios of that sort characterize much of current “progressive left” thinking. There is a proximate recent history of this perspective.

Exactly a decade ago, Bernie Sanders came out of the wilderness. Prompted by the financial meltdown of 2008, the Great Recession that followed, and Occupy Wall Street not long thereafter, the country experienced the first organized expression of anti-capitalism in nearly a century. Sanders gave it a face as he inveighed against gross income and wealth inequality, stagnant and declining standards of living, predatory business, and the politics of big money. Even the mainstream media vividly described an upper-echelon orgy of greed.

Positively speaking, the movement that coalesced around Sanders offered an alternative vision that recalled the heyday of New Deal reform: income redistribution through tax and other policies, reinvigorated regulation of business, universal health care, a reaffirmation of workers’ right to organize, and, in an explicit gesture to the New Deal, a “Green New Deal” to address global warming, the severe deterioration in the country’s infrastructure, and its badly eroded and grossly inadequate housing stock.

Life would be much improved were these measures implemented. Moreover, in some important ways they go beyond what the New Deal accomplished or even imagined accomplishing. Emphatically true with respect to climate change, but also in the case of health care and housing, this would become the New Deal redux plus. Taken all together, the “revolution” would restore a democracy eaten away by decades of corruption and cronyism, much like the original New Deal had presumably achieved.

Outraged ranks of the movement single out greed as mainly responsible for the sorry condition of American society. However, images of greed — and the behavior of the 1 percent provides an endless supply of such images — better represent a Catholic indictment than a socialist one, which customarily zeroes in on exploitation (indeed, greed was a problem ages before the birth of Christ). As a diagnostic tool, greed is deployed by movements against the 1 percent to explain what’s amiss in modern capitalism. Replacing it with socialism is not their objective.

Although proudly a socialist, Sanders and the movement he helped generate never ventured into socialist territory. This seemed a bridge too far and still does. Instead, the insurgency aimed its wrath at the top strata of the Democratic Party — its elite managers and oligarchs. If they could be tamed or, better yet, expunged, the party might return to its Popular Front roots as a legitimate vehicle of popular grievance and redress.

Echoes of the earlier Popular Front were audible well before the more recent upsurge. Over the course of the last half century, it can seem as if the Popular Front, sometimes in weakened form, at other times with more vigor, never quite died. On the contrary, the ghost of the Popular Front has haunted the electoral cycle for decades in the form of the lesser of two evils. It’s hard to remember a presidential election in which the specter of reaction hasn’t provided the rationale for supporting, with eyes closed, some more liberal fraction of the political class. By the end of the 1980s, the boundary between what counted as left-wing and what as liberal had all but disappeared. This “popular front” mobilized to elect Barack Obama, for example.

Admittedly, that was weak tea. Today, however, the dramaturgy of the Popular Front is once again front and center; a confrontation of historic proportions grips the political imagination. Could we be revisiting the era that occupies a heroic space in the memory of the Left? And if so, what exactly is the role of the Left in a front so capacious that it embraces not only the ranks of the people (however broadly defined) but even elements of the bourgeoisie who oppose fascism?

In the United States, the Popular Front of the Great Depression and wartime years helped midwife democratic capitalism. It consummated a historic breakthrough not only as a form of political economy but as a cultural persuasion and in everyday life. Democratizing capitalism had for some time been included in the programmatic repertoire of the progressive and even socialist left. Proponents of various forms of industrial democracy, Catholic corporatism, social democracy, and offshoots of syndicalism worked at ways to temper prevailing forms of industrial autocracy.

Amid the Depression, populations long living on the margins effectively made their presence felt. This included, first of all, the industrial working classes, especially the immigrant industrial working classes. To a lesser degree, women and African Americans established a foothold.

Landmarks of this transformation are well known: industrial democracy, in particular in the form of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA); economic democracy, in particular in the form of the regulatory state; political democracy insofar as the organized working class exerted influence inside the Democratic Party; and social democracy in the form of the welfare state.

American culture absorbed that democratic impulse. Novels, songs, museums, dance recitals, films, theater, musical composition, painting and sculpture, regional arts and crafts, school curricula, photography, and the graphic arts all registered a newfound regard and respect for the working classes, the rural dispossessed, and the country’s ethnic communities. Popular Front iconography depicted an interweaved unity of class, racial, and ethnic identities (previewing some aspect of what’s referred to as “intersectionality” today).³

Characterized by one historian as the “laboring of American culture,” this cultural democracy accorded dignity where there had once been humiliation and opened up pathways to social advance once blocked off by the pretensions of class superiority. References to “the people” were even more common, a social category that lubricated whatever abrasiveness still attached to the nomenclature of class. Vice President Henry Wallace reached for the apotheosis of this universalism in his call for a new “century of the common man.” Much of this cultural metamorphosis was nonetheless combative as well as celebratory; Social Register types and Wall Street bankers were pilloried and ridiculed.

To the extent that this may be considered a revolutionary step forward in the struggle for equality, the more left-leaning elements of the Popular Front were in the vanguard.

Racial and gender equality were more elusive and impermanent, however. But the Fair Employment Practices Commission and the presence of women as policy executives throughout the New Deal welfare bureaucracy were not insignificant. And if the civil rights and Great Society legislation of the 1960s could plausibly be considered outcomes of the social momentum created during the heyday of the Popular Front, then its significance in these arenas is measurably greater.

The Political Chemistry of the Popular Front

To be sure, the democratic capitalism of the New Deal era had its limits. Much of its reform accomplishments were predicated on the patriarchal family — Social Security, for example. Racial discrimination marked its housing innovations as well as the Fair Labor Standards Act. Its political hegemony depended on an alliance with the Jim Crow South. Consequently, the Popular Front experienced its own internal tensions; inner circles of the New Deal did not always see eye to eye with their more radically democratic confederates. Massive federal relief and works projects only followed after mass mobilizations of the unemployed. Administration support for the NLRA only came after the mass strikes of 1934.⁴

Credit the Popular Front of that era for consistently fighting against injustices in the New Deal order, even if it was not always successful. The political chemistry at work was complex, dialectical even. On the one hand, there is no question that Popular Front activists moved conventional liberal organizations to the left. This was particularly true among preexisting women’s groups and African American institutions. Among black women, for example, Popular Front coalitions became alternatives to women’s clubs, church organizations, and older civil rights groups. Among women more generally, the Popular Front embraced more mainstream groups like the Young Women’s Christian Association, the League of Women Voters, and parent-teacher associations.

The front’s organizations were hardly artificial confections. The National Negro Congress, established in 1936, led the way in confronting the racist and fascist enemy. Whether first invented by the Communist Party or by other actors, these organizations expressed genuine left-leaning expansions of liberalism on matters of race, imperialist war, women’s rights, and other questions.⁵

Resisting the gravitational pull of the New Deal, however, proved difficult for the left wing of the Popular Front. This was the case within unions, often formed and led by radicals. It was true as well of political parties — including the once independent Farmer-Labor Party formations — founded by an assortment of agrarian and urban populists and socialists. By the time of the 1936 election, most of these parties were on their way to becoming part of the New Deal Democratic Party machinery.

Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) gubernatorial campaign in 1934 talked boldly about a new system of “production for use.” Nonetheless, this maverick Democratic candidate was deserted by the national party’s high command. And those elected to Congress and state offices on the EPIC platform essentially functioned to move the party left without making threatening noises about political independence. A similar enfolding of once independent political formations into the New Deal Democratic Party machinery happened in the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party under Governor Floyd Olson, in the Washington Commonwealth Federation, in Michigan under Governor Frank Murphy, and in Pennsylvania, where the United Mine Workers were especially responsible for turning what had been a conservative, anti–New Deal Democratic Party into a New Deal one under Governor George Howard Earle.⁶

Stratagems to realign the Democratic Party (they live on today) dead-ended in the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937 and the failure to purge the party of its Dixiecrats. Where there still existed robust socialist traditions — in the garment unions and the newer autoworkers union — it took some heavy lifting on the part of the leadership to consummate the marriage with the Democratic Party. In New York particularly, the American Labor Party was deliberately formed so that a loyal socialist rank and file wouldn’t have to stomach voting for a Democrat.⁷

A new equipoise emerged. Liberalism learned to embrace a more ecumenical sense of who should enjoy the rights and privileges of a democratic society. “Freedom from want,” FDR’s celebrated third point of his 1941 State of the Union “Four Freedoms” address, signaled the New Deal’s gesture toward economic democracy, however limited in reach. The Left felt increasingly comfortable not only defending but even participating in the administration of the new order, manning government social welfare and labor bureaucracies, urban and rural planning agencies, economic advisory boards, commissions on race, and the apparatus set up for domestic mobilization during World War II. Once beleaguered, the Left felt empowered. Capitalism was in charge but under surveillance. Whether this should be called social democracy or democratic capitalism has proven not to matter, as the former has long since jettisoned its original revolutionary intentions.⁸

All in all, the Popular Front was the vehicle of a great historic breakthrough. It enlarged the social universe of the bourgeois democratic revolution to encompass the proletariat. At the time, in fact, the phrase “democratic front” was more commonly used than “popular front.” In theory, that revolution had always broadcast its universalism. In reality, it had been far more parochial. At every juncture, the bourgeois democratic revolution resisted efforts by the lower orders to be recognized, to gain access, to secure rights, and to protect themselves against the predations of capitalist property. The proles lived as invisibles. This was true in much of Europe as well as in the United States.

Although the Popular Front was often led by socialists, its momentum did not move toward socialism. Instead, the Left became the vanguard party of an enlarged bourgeois democracy. It was a movement to extend the “Rights of Man” where they had never gained a real foothold. Struggles for equal rights, free speech, racial justice, the right to organize, civil liberties, fair labor standards, and labor defense — the focus of so much Popular Front organizing — moved within that orbit. Comintern representative John Pepper had anticipated what was to come as early as 1923, forecasting what he called a “third American Revolution,” which would “contain elements of the great French Revolution and the Russian Kerensky revolution. In its ideology it will have elements of Jeffersonianism, Danish cooperatives, Ku Klux Klan and Bolshevism.” But “the proletariat as a class will not play an independent role in this revolution.” Although not right in all the particulars, Pepper’s prophecy was a close approximation.⁹

Even without directives from Moscow proscribing any socialist revolutionary objectives, this orientation would have prevailed. It was already afoot before 1935. Communist Party cadre were shedding the ultrasectarianism of the “Third Period” in their reentry into already existing trade unions, notwithstanding the conservative leaderships of those unions, and in their willingness to participate in coalitions with reform-minded political formations surfacing in the Midwest and elsewhere. The 1934 strike wave, the uprisings of the unemployment leagues that had begun earlier, and the well-organized campaigns for racial justice that depended on broad-based coalitions were evidence of this more ecumenical approach before it had become party diktat. The Communist Party in particular showed signs of renewing its interest in the Farmer-Labor Party and in other cross-class political formations. Though it wasn’t made explicit, this was a ground-level return to the united front strategy of the 1920s, before Stalin’s fatal apparition of social fascism.¹⁰

Like all left-wing political movements, the Popular Front is rightly appreciated for mobilizing the struggle on behalf of the downtrodden, exploited, and disenfranchised. Before its formal creation and in its formative years, the front was composed of many from those social worlds: the working class, immigrants, the unemployed, and the black and brown poor. The front would continue to champion those populations, and they remained a large presence within its ranks.

As time went by, however, the social composition of the Communist Party, and of the front more widely, shifted. White-collar professionals, clerical workers, people with more advanced education, writers, artists, performers, and others recruited from the mass culture and entertainment sectors (including state cultural institutions), the middling ranks of the burgeoning welfare and trade union bureaucracies, mid-level government functionaries, academics, engineers, and lawyers all joined in growing numbers.

As the Communist Party expanded, it also became more native-born, younger, and more female; 44% of members worked at white-collar jobs. Their presence did not mean that the Popular Front was destined to betray the outcast. On the contrary, it signified that the front conjoined the democratic desires of the down-and-out with those of a rising middle-class milieu, both eager to find a voice and position of respect and influence within an evolving bourgeois order. Arguably, the Left was already in the process of redefining itself as it collaborated in the reconfiguration of capitalism.¹¹

Antifascism as Revolutionary Metaphysic

Yet there was more than a tincture of anti-capitalist passion arousing the legions enlisted in the Popular Front. Antifascism provided that energy and ideologically transcendent meaning. In Europe (especially in France and Spain), Latin America, Japan, and some parts of the Middle East — places where fascist movements were sizable and vying for power — organizing popular fronts to confront fascism made empirical sense. In Chile, a popular front ran the government for nearly ten years, from 1938 to 1947. The Chilean Communist Party believed that the revolution there would be a bourgeois democratic one.

Arguably, the Popular Front démarche may not have been the only strategic option available for fending off this noxious form of capitalism. But the mortal threat to democracy was palpable, and in some cases already an accomplished fact of life. Taking on fascism could become, for many, a confrontation with capitalism tout court.¹²

Antifascism in the United States, however, flourished in a political landscape lacking any muscular fascist movement. Nonetheless, it functioned as the universal bonding agent holding all the disparate elements of the Popular Front together. For the Left, it provided the élan that the quest for socialism once had.

Every form of social, economic, and political injustice confronted by the Popular Front was characterized as fascist. Corporate union busting and violence, racial injustice and lynching, the denial of rights to free speech and assembly, deploying local police to break up demonstrations by the unemployed, relegating immigrant workers to second-class citizenship, imprisoning political activists on trumped-up charges of conspiracy — all of this and more were reconceived as symptoms of an imminent fascist threat.

Yet these had all been features of normal capitalism, of bourgeois democracy, for a very long time. If anything, instances of violence directed against organizing and striking workers during the Gilded Age and on into the early twentieth century, both by private employers and various branches of the government, were more frequent and bloodier than what happened during the years of the Great Depression. Similarly, the judiciary was at least as subservient to the will of big business in the late nineteenth century, outlawing labor protections and issuing a flood of “Gatling-gun injunctions” to crush strikes. The courts’ defense of free speech was even more wanting, especially when it came to honoring the civil liberties of radicals. As for racial subjugation, it is only necessary to note that American apartheid was a well-ensconced system decades before the Popular Front labeled it as fascist. So, too, had official discrimination against immigrants and their exclusion been a commonplace feature of American history for a century. And the subordination of women, also perceived by the Popular Front as a harbinger of fascism, was a fact of social and political life as long as anyone could remember.

Today some elements of the Left, knowing that American society has forever been marked by vicious forms of oppression and exploitation, conclude that the country has always been fascist or in a state of incipient fascism. In this view, the thick armature of rights and liberties that make up the fabric of liberal democracy has not so much been inadequate but functioned as a kind of camouflage. Beneath the surface was a primitive, racially inflected drive for domination and exploitation. Sometimes hidden, sometimes breaking through to the surface of public life, fascism avant la lettre is the foundational American story in this account.

Popular Front partisans of the Depression years did not see things this way; indeed, they relied heavily on invoking the country’s democratic heritage for motivating their resistance to right-wing reaction. Heroes of the movement featured the founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson and of course Abraham Lincoln. Citing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was commonplace. Excoriating “Tories of industry” and “economic royalists” recalled the glory days of the American Revolution. Earl Browder’s extraordinary formulation — that “communism is twentieth-century Americanism” — summed up an outlook of populist patriotism shared widely across the ranks of the front. A veteran Communist Party member recalled feeling “like we were really part of the American scene. We were looking for some kind of legitimation of our being more American.” Democracy was not an insidious myth but a historical reality to be retrieved.¹³

But why should this crusade to preserve and extend democracy, long an axiom of left-wing movements, alchemize into an existential battle against fascism? In part, it lent the front a veneer of anti-capitalism, which, after all, had always been its reason for being. Although explanations varied, the Left generally agreed that fascism was an organic outgrowth of capitalism under extreme duress. Antifascism, then, was indubitably a form of anti-capitalism.

War and the threat of war bolstered antifascism’s status as the Popular Front’s overarching cause. Ominous aggressions by the fascist powers in Ethiopia, Manchuria, Spain, the Rhineland, and Eastern Europe lent credibility to the fear that the United States might be next. It was a belief that overpowered the absence of any substantial evidence of a fascist movement or political party here at home. And because the fascists abroad had come to power by decimating the labor movement and left-wing parties — and because, especially in Germany, the movement was premised on racial superiority — it was plausible enough to interpret analogous aspects of the American scene in the light of a fascist threat, no matter how insubstantial.

Consequently, a great deal of Popular Front organizing and agitation was directed against imperialist war. This was a version of imperialism now linked specifically to fascism. And the movement tirelessly made the connection between the battle against homegrown “fascism” — racial oppression, the denial of civil liberties, industrial autocracy — and the international struggle against global fascist tyranny and war.¹⁴

Like socialism had once done, antifascism supplied the inspiration for a movement that in its own way envisioned a new society. Great democratic advances, achieved and then lost by the Popular Front governments in France and by the Spanish Republic, were not to be forfeited in America. This was not the emancipation from capitalism dreamed of by socialism. However, a society without war, without racial subjugation, one where workers not only had a fighting chance of earning a living but commanded respect where there had once only been insult, where the overlords of business and finance could no longer plunder at will, a society that applauded a degree of social solidarity in place of the dog-eat-dog ethics of the old order, constituted in its own way the prospect of emancipation.

Mythologies often contain more than a residue of truth. In historical memory and as a strategy relevant to the present, the Popular Front lives on after socialism — perhaps even its worthy successor, or more gloomily, its only feasible successor. Antifascism served as a surrogate revolutionary mystique. Nowadays when the Left is only beginning to recuperate from a long, coerced hibernation, memories of the Popular Front can seem bathed in a glow of righteous militance and vanguard solidarity, nearest in time to when the Left was a force to be reckoned with. Nor is that illusory.

However, it is worth remembering that the achievements of the Popular Front were also vital to the renewal of capitalism. The New Deal order was undergirded by a political economy of mass consumption. Many of the basic accomplishments that the Popular Front can take some credit for — the Wagner Act, Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, relief programs, public works, Keynesian deficit spending, the Wealth Tax Act, regulation of finance and industry, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other instances of government planning and economic development — were essential in rescuing capitalism from what seemed to many a terminal crisis.

No apologies are called for. Civilizing capitalism in these ways made the lives of millions immeasurably better. Defending democratic rights is not only a political virtue but essential for the survival of mass movements resisting the predations and privations of capitalism. Moreover, a logic that long predated the Popular Front strongly suggested that the very struggle against the old capitalist order to win these reforms would open the door to socialism; the road to revolution ran through the hallways of reform school.

And why not? Confronting all the particular abuses and privations of the system provided an invaluable education in how the system worked and the ways it malfunctioned. More important than that was the practical education in how to organize, devise effective strategy and tactics, build coalitions, and so on. Far and away most important, however, was the profound experiencing of social solidarity that battling for even the most piecemeal reform would generate — the incubator of socialist sentiment.

This formula had circulated in left-wing circles for generations. It likely informed the thinking of the more revolutionary-minded activists of the Popular Front. Just as likely, it does so again today within the formative ranks of the next popular front. It made sense (and may still make sense), but it didn’t work out that way — not so far. In France, the inclusion of the bourgeois Parti Radical in the Popular Front ended in failure and right-wing triumph. The Spanish Republic fell to the fascists. In the United States, the outcome was quite different; democratic capitalism won the day. But that is not the way left theorizing had drawn it up.¹⁵

Ironically, today’s socialist left-wing movement finds itself in the position of defending what the original Popular Front created. It’s ironic because the Left today, as has been the case in the past, bears its anti-capitalist birthmarks proudly. Yet what it increasingly seeks to restore, especially in the face of a virulent authoritarian capitalism, is its democratic variant: in so many words, the New Deal order. Prophesying a future profoundly at odds with the past and present was always the defining feature of the socialist movement. But today that prophecy sounds more like heading back to the future.

Ironic or not, the Popular Front redux carries a certain appeal. After all, for decades the New Deal order has been under assault. Many of its more democratic achievements have been severely undermined or actually obliterated. Inequalities and exclusions accumulate. And the political economy on which the New Deal rested has been supplanted by a modern version of parasitic primitive accumulation that has gutted the country’s industrial infrastructure in favor of financial speculation. Trying to restore what once was makes sense.

Restoration, however, suffers its own dilemmas. Created amid an unprecedented systemic breakdown, the New Deal was in part fashioned by a fraction of the bourgeoisie that recognized the need for a fundamental reconfiguring of the political economy. Forging an alliance with the down-and-outs to accomplish that overhaul was by no means trouble free. Still, necessity prevailed and the front got built.

Similarly inclined milieus among the current corporate elite are hard to find. So battered by the counter-establishment, whatever remnant may remain of the New Deal establishment is too weak, too demoralized to matter. The liberal oligarchs and their political enablers running the Democratic Party don’t seem likely candidates. Business and financial circles invested in climate change innovation might comprise a progressive link to the upper bourgeoisies, but their weight and scope are not sufficient and are likely to grow even less so under present circumstances. Moreover, their inclination to address questions of inequality, dispossession, and labor’s decline is tepid at best; those sectors lack what, for the New Deal mass-consumption-oriented world of business, was an organic connection to such matters. And in that regard, the ideological deterioration of the bourgeoisie after decades of overmedicating on free-market self-indulgence leaves it a planetary distance away from the workaday anxieties of the 99 percent. The language barrier between classes has become virtually impassable.

More seems possible at the grassroots level. Decades of deindustrialization and “flexible” capitalism have left behind a downwardly mobile precariat. It is made up of various components. Some are refugees from the long-lost land of unionized, high-wage industry. Others are literally refugees from capitalism’s devouring of noncapitalist economies in the Global South. They make up a sizable portion of an economy that increasingly depends on low-wage labor. And they are joined by a largely black and brown and female service-sector workforce that has been living on the edge for generations. Add to that an expanding sector of well-educated but deeply insecure white-collar workers — the lower rungs of the professional-managerial class.

Also consider the fact that since the heyday of the Popular Front, the universe of peoples demanding recognition and respect for their unique needs and desires has mushroomed. Historically ostracized sexual and ethnic groups that rarely received attention in earlier eras insist on being heard. Corrosive environmental injury, especially in poorer communities, excites new forms of protest. Notwithstanding the major legislative reforms of the Great Society of the ’60s that elongated the Popular Front, racial and gender discrimination remains a chronic reality powering movements for equality. The potential constituency for democratic reform is striking.

Despite the lapse of time and space, there is a resemblance between these modern-day victims of postindustrial capitalism and those who comprised the earlier Popular Front: the dispossessed, the working poor, racial and ethnic outcasts, and the upwardly mobile blocked in their ascent. This is combustible human material. It is not that hard to imagine it exploding. Whether these populations would congeal in a unified movement is another matter. They may well be at odds, say, on matters of immigration or race. Weighty antagonism also exists amid the dominant culture of liberal individualism deeply rooted in the more middling layers of this hypothetical front.

Social divisions also plagued the original Popular Front and limited what it could accomplish. There was not one proletariat but many, bearing different and sometimes opposed traditions and attitudes about the family, religion, ethnic loyalties, the government, and so on. Something similar may be said about today’s social landscape.

Presumably, the role of a new popular front would be to find common cause, as was the mission of its ancestor. Once again, the overriding impulse might be to expand the borders of democracy and economic leveling and rein in the instincts for planetary vandalism that now run riot among empowered circles of capital. Complicating the picture, however, is the unnerving fact that, if domestic fascism as a mass movement was more fantasy than reality during the Popular Front’s ascent, today a considerable segment of potential recruits to a new popular front are, temporarily at least, under the sway of right-wing populism. And there the Left has no traction.

Still, a second coming of a popular front championing democratic capitalism (or social democracy, if you prefer) is not out of the realm of possibility, if not all that likely either. But it can never recur in the same way. Ample justifications for such a resurrection are available. But history makes far less tenable the faith that this is the road to abolishing capitalism, which (the first time around) had real credibility on the Left. In that sense, you can’t go home again.

Looking back, the Popular Front can seem inevitable — and so, too, the voluntary surrender of anti-capitalist and socialist perspectives. But matters were not so cut-and-dried at the time. There was not only theorizing by Leon Trotsky and his followers about forming united fronts of trade unions and left-wing political parties, free of bourgeois political entanglements. On the ground in France and Spain and in Latin America, such mass collaborations happened. Their lifespan was short, and here the power of the Soviet Union to abort them was instrumental. Still, another road beckoned.

That road seems closed today. The parlous state of the labor movement and the complete absence of any semblance of a mass anti-capitalist political formation dims its prospects, at least in the immediate future. On top of that is the long habituation to the politics of the “lesser evil” on the part of the putative left. This at a time when the lesser evil — the Democratic Party — seems evil enough to legions of potential recruits to a new popular front. Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate how weak a carrier of democratic desire the Democratic Party has become (who believed its candidates in the most recent presidential election?). Yet hollowed out as the party is, the Left wields very little leverage of its own outside it; the Left is therefore vulnerable to the pressures exerted by Democratic kingmakers and their corporate benefactors.

Reacting to every provocation of the newly empowered Right can put today’s nascent popular front in an insupportable position of defending the old order of things. But the Right finds itself calling the shots in part precisely because it voiced the legitimate grievances of millions who suffered dearly under the old neoliberal dispensation. Instinctually championing life under liberal democracy against the fascist threat is a devil’s game that a new popular front may not want to play.

The trap was laid long ago, and unwittingly by the original Popular Front. Its triumphs were remarkable and required remarkable bravery. Attempts by a new popular front to restore those triumphs are haunted by its aftermath, and by invented memories that may console but also evade the challenges ahead.

Moral panic campaigns gain resonance thanks to the embeddedness of moral panic entrepreneurs within various societal associations and pressure groups that exercise soft power to silence pro-Palestine positions. Although they have not been very successful in affecting public opinion (which in Germany, as elsewhere, is very critical of Israel), pro-Israel actors have succeeded in spreading the narrative of a new, imported form of antisemitism in a number of specific social environments. This narrative has found very little resistance in the more institutional parts of civil society. Generally speaking, relations with Israel at the level of civil society have always been strong and remain so, with the German-Israeli parliamentary friendship group being the second largest such grouping in the federal parliament. Trade unions, religious and cultural associations, and academic institutions all maintain extensive ties with Israel.¹² While there has been a long-standing tradition of providing public financial support to intra-ethnic cooperation in the Middle East, from the late 2010s onward, public funding, which is managed in accordance with the mainstream definition of antisemitism, has forced compliance among civil society organizations. What is more, as Masha Gessen has noted, the accusation of antisemitism has had especially far-reaching effects given the “German state’s customary generosity: almost all museums, exhibits, conferences, festivals, and other cultural events receive funding from the federal, state, or local government.”¹³

Moral panic campaigns are therefore effective in silencing criticism of Israel in the cultural and artistic fields. In the aftermath of the adoption of a parliamentary resolution declaring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) network as antisemitic, there has been a noticeable rise in government agencies investigating the credentials of artists by searching for their names on Google alongside terms like “BDS,” “Israel,” and “apartheid,” as cultural institutions have been pressured into canceling events that could be seen as sympathetic to Palestine.¹⁴ Since the early 2000s in particular, public institutions have sponsored programs that aim to promote the fight against so-called “imported” antisemitism with funds for civil society organizations that focus on the resocialization of Muslims and citizens with migrant backgrounds. These programs have often replaced those that previously existed for raising awareness among white Germans, who were no longer considered to be potentially antisemitic. This financing of educational programs has been a factor in the spread of anti-Muslim sentiment among civil society organizations. Since 2003, the educational material produced by these civil society programs has focused on the intifada and Islam as the main sources of antisemitism, contributing to the stigmatization of the migrant population.¹⁵

Even more striking is the fact that pro-Israeli narratives have even been adopted by the German branches of international human rights organizations. For instance, in 2022, Amnesty International released the 280-page report Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and crime against humanity.¹⁶ While the document notes the differences between the Palestinian and the South African cases, it also states that “massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law.” Unique among the national bodies of Amnesty International, the German branch took the decision to remove this statement from its websites, stating that “to counteract the danger of instrumentalization or misinterpretation of the report, the German section of Amnesty will not plan or carry out any activities in relation to this report.”¹⁷ It is only more recently that Amnesty International in Germany and other human rights organizations (such as Medico International) have started to express criticism of the Israeli genocide and cooperate with pro-Palestine initiatives. Criticizing apartheid in Israel likewise remains taboo for many civil society organizations. As Susan Neiman has noted, notwithstanding its broad use as a legal definition, any reference to apartheid in Israel has been repressed: “In Berlin the word ‘apartheid’ can get you cancelled faster than the N-word will get you cancelled in New York.”¹⁸

Among the explanations for the silence of a large section of civil society in the face of the ongoing conflict in Gaza is its dependence on public funding. In this respect, Streeck cites the presence of a dense network of state institutions and social associations that collaborate with “an armada of anti-Semitism commissioners in local communities, federal states and national government, in universities and, soon to be expected, the public broadcasting system, assisted by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and a plethora of state-funded anti-anti-Semitic non-NGOs, provided with quasi-official status by a series of legally unchallengeable quasi-law Bundestag ‘resolutions.’” This inevitably creates “a vast capillary substructure for state penetration into society, serviceable for communicating to the public what kind of society the state wants and needs to be installed.”¹⁹ Generally speaking, the dominant role of public institutions in the funding of cultural institutions, ranging from museums to political foundations, increases the number of instruments for political interference in the artistic and cultural life of the country.²⁰

In Germany, in contrast to most countries, social movement organizations that are generally considered progressive also assumed a role as moral panic entrepreneurs, supporting the silencing of solidarity with Palestinians in various ways. Many of them contributed to the stigmatization of protesters against the genocide in Gaza as antisemitic. Not only did they refuse to even mobilize in support of a ceasefire; they also remained silent about violations of human rights in Gaza and the repression of those criticizing such actions in Germany. Following the failure of the initial attempt to avoid any reference to the issue, the effect of the so-called Palestinian exception has brought about increasing polarization among feminist, queer, environmentalist, and anti-racist activists. The fact that even movement groups that have long stressed the importance of decoloniality and sought alliances in the Global South have refused to solidarize with Palestine “has not only fragmented social movements but actively cooperates with the racist State while using violence against pro-Palestine activists.”²¹

Both among the feminist movement and in queer initiatives, a clause of exceptionality relating to Palestine and Palestinians has not only been noted within liberal and white feminist groups but also in gender rights groupings that, having previously been critical of police repression, “can today rally behind an anti-policing critique, whilst being supportive or apologetic of transnationally operating military and policing structures against Palestinians.”²² Indeed, the celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8 has seen countermobilizations by women in solidarity with Israel, in opposition to an emerging young generation of pro-Palestine activists in the Alliance of International Feminists.²³

Within the environmentalist movement, the witch hunt against activist Greta Thunberg even saw an octopus stuffed animal from the background of a post being identified as an antisemitic dog whistle, not only in scandalizing articles published in the press but also within the German branch of the Fridays for Future student movement. Claiming to speak for the chapter, Luisa Neubauer stated in Die Zeit’s magazine that she was “disappointed that Greta Thunberg has not yet said anything concrete about the Jewish victims of the massacre on October 7,” announcing she would even consider ending the German branch’s current collaboration with the international leadership of the organization.²⁴ As Emily Dische-Becker puts it, the alignment of many German environmentalists in the anti-Greta campaign also points to their provincialism: “There have been many declarations that Greta has lost all relevance and that she’s completely discredited herself. This criticism prompts the question of whose opinion is being considered. It reflects a German megalomania — the idea that German media disapproval would have ramifications for someone who has an international profile and is trying to fight climate change not just in Germany but globally.”²⁵

Solidarity with Palestinians has also often been denied within the anti-racist movement. A prime example of this is the widely covered campaign of protest against the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in 2024. At these events, which were intended to oppose racists, Palestinian flags were banned and pro-Palestinian activists were often harassed. One Jewish American activist shared how she was spat on at an anti-AfD protest in Berlin because she was displaying signs in support of Palestine:

I had quite a bit of trepidation about going to this protest after the violent, racist and disturbing experiences of my Palestinian and pro-Palestinian comrades at anti-AfD protests over the past few weeks. Folks protesting the AfD while showing solidarity with Palestine have been ruthlessly harassed, attacked, reported to the police and violently removed by both demonstrators and cops all over Germany. . . .  An older German man with an aggressive expression approached me, stopped in front of me and half-shouted, “So what do you think the similarities are between the AfD and Israel?” I could tell he had no intention of engaging in a reasonable conversation but nonetheless began trying to explain. After a few words, he rolled his eyes and spat at me. It is hard to describe the particular shade of red I saw, the sourness of the blood pumping to my head, the bitterness of the fury on my tongue. It looked like the lifeless faces of my great-grandparents at the mercy of Nazis, deported and murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto as they have appeared in my dreams since I was a child. . . .  I ran after the man, shouting at him that my family was murdered because of fascism during a genocide — in response to which he spat at me again. He goaded me: “What do you know? The AfD is a fascist party. What does that have to do with Israel?” I began to state the obvious — “Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza as we speak” — but didn’t finish my sentence before he spat in my face for a third time. As I was shaking, incensed and disgusted, my final comment was, “You are clearly an anti-Semite.”²⁶

In this climate, accusations of antisemitism are deployed instrumentally in internal fights within social movements and civil society organizations. Indeed, reciprocal accusations “can break political groups, split social movements, and destroy the friendships, careers, and social standings of the accused — and the enemies of the Left know this. False accusations are cheap, and the accuser is generally forgiven, as the accusation itself proves the accuser’s vigilance and hence goodness.”²⁷

Even within the left-wing party Die Linke, there have been diverse positions on Israel and Palestine, with notable long-time support for the former — something that has been especially visible among the elected members of local, regional, and national parliaments. BAK Shalom, a task force dedicated to opposing anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and the “regressive criticism of capitalism,” was established within the party in 2008, and pro-Israeli positions have been particularly influential among the party leadership.²⁸ Die Linke partially changed tack on the pro-Palestine protests after its success in the 2025 federal parliament elections, which saw it gain an unexpected 8.8 percent share of the vote — a result that was linked to its capacity to attract votes from racialized groups (with especially high support for pro-Palestine candidates) and among young people (the party scored a very high 27 percent among first-time voters).²⁹ While this emerging support for pro-Palestinian protests remained highly controversial inside the party and was immediately attacked by the mainstream media, it was nonetheless voiced at the party congress in spring 2025, where the party issued the statement Antisemitismus, Repression und Zensur bekämpfen, which included a criticism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — used as a basis for the criminalization of pro-Palestinian protests — and resulted in a vote that approved, with a slight majority, the Jerusalem definition in its place.³⁰ Indeed, internal division is still strong within the party, which has been unable to take a unified stance even at the peak of the genocide in Gaza.

A quite specific element in the German case is the particular turn that has taken place within what was previously part of the left-wing milieu, one that explains the very limited presence of the German left in the global campaign for a ceasefire in Gaza. General criticism of the Nazi past and the slow path toward its recognition and condemnation was reflected, immediately after 1989, in strong opposition to German reunification on the far left, something that was expressed by the so-called anti-German (Antideutsch) groupings, beginning with their critique of Germany as a nation and culminating in “an Ersatz</cite> nationalism around one particular state.”³¹ Elements of this tradition include a hatred of Muslims, who are viewed as natural-born antisemites, not to mention a disturbing celebration of Israeli violence against Palestinians, which is framed as antifascism.

The anti-Germans were initially formed to contest German reunification and the participation of the Greens in the federal government, emerging out of a convergence of the remnants of the Maoist Kommunistischer Bund (Communist League) and the Radikale Linke (Radical Left) who were opposed to the Green Party joining the governing coalition. As has been observed, “Adherents of the burgeoning Antideutsche submovement warned that a reunited Germany would pave the country’s way to regain its hegemonic economic position in Western Europe — a scenario that would be tantamount to the establishment of the ‘Fourth Reich.’” In the midst of the reunification process, a demonstration was held in Frankfurt am Main in 1990 under the motto “Germany — Never Again,” mobilizing approximately ten thousand people. In the early 1990s, their pro-Israeli positions hardened around the Gulf War — in opposition to the pacifist positions that were widespread among the German left — in the name of the defense of Israel, while they also supported Serbia during the war in Kosovo. These positions became even more radicalized during the second intifada, which resulted in intensified internal competition between the anti-German faction and the more traditional elements of the German left. As a result, anti-German journals such as konkret and Bahamas focused their interventions on contesting the peace process and the establishment of a Palestinian state, calling for no concessions to be made to the “so-called Palestinians.” The attacks on September 11, 2001, further pushed the anti-Germans to support the US intervention against Islamic fundamentalists, with Bahamas and the group Initiative Sozialistisches Forum attributing responsibility for the “fascist massacre” to a broad coalition ranging from the Green Party to the Radical Left, who they accused of secretly celebrating the attacks. While these groupings remained limited in number, the influence of the anti-Germans on the Left peaked in the mid-2000s with support for moral panic campaigns against refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in general.³²

Among the peculiar positions adopted by the anti-Germans is the refusal to mourn civilian victims in Germany during World War II, something that was even expressed at countermobilizations against vigils held to remember the Allied firebombing of Dresden, which they disrupted by leading macabre chants such as “Bomber Harris, do it again.” In the name of anti-nationalism, anti-Germans have also aggressively contested concerts held by Irish bands that sing in Irish (Gaeilge). As early as the War in Iraq, anti-Germans congregating around the magazine konkret had started to carry US flags. Since the early 2000s, they have focused on support for Israel, including through physical attacks on a queer migrant housing cooperative in Leipzig that had hosted pro-Palestinian events — an action that was claimed in a post on the German forum linksunten.indymedia stating that “antifa means attacking antisemites.”³³

Anti-Germans have been a regular presence in counterdemonstrations, using confrontational tactics against pro-Palestinian protesters. As one pro-Palestinian activist recalls, “Arriving at a Palestinian solidarity gathering in a western Germany city [sic], friends and I were greeted by a counter-group. This group consisted of Zionists waving Antifascist and Israeli flags, some of which in Pride-colors. It was not long before we were separated by a police line and the self-proclaimed Antifascist group started calling us ‘Nazis’ for protesting the genocide in Gaza.” Similarly, a Jewish activist reported his puzzling encounter with “the uniquely German political current known as the anti-Deutsch or anti-Germans” and their pro-Israel propaganda, with their proclaimed opposition to nationalism and anti-Muslim stance very much at odds with their support for the highly ethnonationalist project in Israel.³⁴

Anti-Germans have also been responsible for verbal and physically violent harassment of student activists, especially students of color.³⁵ A group that forms part of the anti-German movement in Leipzig, the Conne Island Club, has banned Palestinian keffiyeh scarves and even went as far as inviting a member of the far-right AfD to speak about Islamic antisemitism in 2018.³⁶

A particularly paradoxical element of their activities has been their persecution of anti-Zionist Jews, as they have actively intervened as non-Jewish Germans to shut down events such as the Israeli-led School for Unlearning Zionism in Berlin for what they identify as antisemitism. Isabel Frey notes the paradox of “self-proclaimed anarchists waving the Israeli flag or Antifa groups chanting ‘fuck the police’ at protests while posting memes of Israeli fighter jets flying over Auschwitz on social media.” She interviewed Israeli leftist Michael Sappir, then based in Germany, for Jewish Currents in 2021, where he noted, “Jewish leftists are being accused of antisemitism by non-Jewish leftists. To me, these accusations are a way of denigrating our Jewish identities, of saying that we’re the ‘wrong kind’ of Jew. I keep asking myself, are these accusations themselves a kind of antisemitism?”³⁷ Indeed, anti-Germans are well known for flying the Israeli flag and wearing Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shirts, engaging in a fetishization of the Israeli armed forces as they conceive of themselves as proxies of the Israeli security forces. As such, their main slogans include “Street-fighting in Ramallah, the tanks are the antifascist action” and “What gets on the antisemites’ case — antifascist action, Mossad, and IDF!”

Political groups in the anti-German milieu are involved in surveillance, defamation, and denunciation. As has been observed, “A large portion of Germany’s civil society is aiding in this kind of internet policing by vilifying social media accounts and engaging in personal denunciations of those who support Palestinian causes or who speak out against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Taking screenshots and archiving posts of dissident voices has become an everyday activity for some Germans, promoting themselves as the ‘good anti-antisemites’ at the cost of many left migrant, Jewish, and Palestinian voices.”³⁸ Even in supposedly progressive spaces, anti-German groups have publicized the names, pictures, and addresses of those who have attended protests in support of Gaza, with a particular focus on people of color. Thus, “This tool, usually used to expose Nazis, is now used to expose those in solidarity with Palestine. Here, Anti-Deutsche is implicitly working as the extended hand of the state.”³⁹

Defamation work by anti-Germans has been aided by their penetration into various institutions. Examples include activists associated with the anti-German journal Jungle World who subsequently became journalists for the right-wing Axel Springer media or supporters of the AfD party.⁴⁰ Moreover, many of the founders of the anti-German Ruhrbarone blog — infamous for stating in 2018 that Gaza should be destroyed — have entered the mainstream media and political parties.⁴¹

Thus, in a very peculiar turn, the moral panic over the new antisemitism in Germany is fueled by groups that deploy “methods similar to the protest repertoire of antifascist movements when engaging far-right political marches. Several of the impeded events associated with BDS faced complaints and lawsuits or, most of all, counter-protests and were disturbed by loud, rude remarks or even blockades. Pro-BDS groups are pushed out of left-wing alliances.” Indeed, in discussing the repression of the BDS movement, Peter Ullrich singled out “the German-Israeli Society and its youth organisation, the Central Council of Jews, the Israeli Embassy, NGOs such as the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and the American Jewish Committee, some Antifa groups from the pro-Israel antideutsch current, journalists and politicians from diverse political backgrounds and the highly active Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism, Felix Klein.”⁴²

Therefore, although membership numbers are now declining (from about three thousand at its peak to a few hundred today), the peculiar anti-German faction has played an important role in the silencing of pro-Palestine stances. According to Leandros Fischer, as a fringe milieu that has moved markedly to the right, its consideration “as a legitimate component of left pluralism for many years, has led to the mainstreaming of racist postulates within the wider Left. . . .  By treating them as a necessary but over-the-top corrective to an alleged antisemitism of past German anti-imperialism, the mere existence of the Antideutsche has slowly but steadily shifted the entire Left’s discourse on Palestine to the right.” In this sense, the influence of the anti-Germans has contributed to the acceptance on the Left of a distinction between antisemitism and racism, making it “an issue separated from the wider dynamics of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and racism . . . the code enabling the accommodation of so many former radicals to the status quo, while allowing them to retain progressive and even radical pretences.”⁴³

Along with civil society, university administrations have often sided with the Staatsraison as part of a preventive obedience that has resulted in many of them becoming moral panic entrepreneurs active in the silencing of expressions of solidarity with Palestine. Universities have often — albeit not always — been arenas for critical thinking and the contestation of mainstream values and practices. In the past, student protests have targeted major political decisions affecting not only the higher-education system but also national and international policies. Students have represented the main constituencies of the largest waves of protest in solidarity with liberation struggles and against wars. While neoliberal reforms have brought about a deep transformation in the norms and practices of higher education, imposing depoliticization and the commodification of knowledge, the disputation of specific issues has often triggered broader resistance against such trends.

Among various public institutions, German universities have been especially biased in focusing repression on the alleged antisemitism of racialized people, even when the evidence suggests that the danger of violence primarily comes from the far right. In a decision that paved the way for the repression to come, the Conference of the Rectors of German Universities exploited a massacre — perpetrated by a white supremacist who shot and killed a passerby in front of a synagogue, a Turkish doner kebab shopkeeper, and another passerby in Halle on October 9, 2019 — to foment a moral panic around antisemitism, which targeted the Muslim victims of the massacre rather than the right-wing perpetrators. Published a month after the massacre, the statement released by the German rectors referred to the IHRA definition of antisemitism and called for a ban on BDS supporters in German universities. As late as August 18, 2025, the presidents of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service declared, “We stand in unbreakable solidarity on the side of the state, the people, and science in Israel.”⁴⁴ As Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes have observed, this is symptomatic of a wider social dynamic that projects racist deeds onto the racialized other, and “German/-speaking-induced fantasies of space and education continue to hinge on understandings of space-making as race-making. The latter unfolds within an institutional logic that views Palestinian politics qua political Palestinians as having little to no place on its academic territory.”⁴⁵

As the cases collected in the crowdsourced Archive of Silence illustrate, academic institutions and individual intellectuals have regularly supported the mainstream narrative of German exceptionalism.⁴⁶ Following the Hamas attacks, a number of university campuses flew the Israeli flag, and academic and research institutions emphasized solidarity with Israel in various official statements. “Academics speaking in support of Palestinians, analysing Israeli war crimes, or merely historicising the current escalation of violence are disinvited and de-platformed at an alarming rate,” writes Jannis Julien Grimm. “The number of researchers willing to expose themselves by contributing with their expertise to public debate has dwindled. . . .  This danger of being misinterpreted applies even more when academics are Muslim or have an Arab family background.”⁴⁷ A recent survey of two thousand academics revealed a common perception of censorship and self-censorship in academia, especially in addressing topics related to Palestine: 85 percent of respondents note increasing threats to academic freedom after October 7, 2023, and 76 percent report self-censorship, while more than half of those working on the Middle East say they have experienced personal consequences (such as hate speech, defamation, cancellation, or defunding).⁴⁸

The silencing of debate within universities has been justified by the specific positions of certain intellectual voices whose influence is expanded by the traditionally hierarchical organization of German universities. Jürgen Habermas in particular has supported the government’s endorsement of Israeli policies as a raison d’état for Germany, both prior to and especially during the war on Gaza. In a much-discussed statement titled “Principles of Solidarity,” four members of the Research Centre Normative Orders at Goethe University in Frankfurt, including Habermas, defend the Israeli war on Gaza as “justified in principle,” criticizing the protests against it as antisemitic. The document, which has served as “a formidable intimidation and denunciation machine ready to be used for character-assassinating anyone calling a mass killing a mass killing,” states that “Israel’s actions in no way justify anti-Semitic reactions, especially not in Germany,” warning that “all those in our country who have cultivated sentiments and convictions behind all kinds of pretexts and now see a welcome opportunity to express them uninhibitedly must also abide by this.”⁴⁹ As Moses has retorted, “It seems that genocidal intent can be attributed to Hamas alone, while Israel’s conduct can, at worst, be deemed ‘inconsistent with international law.’”⁵⁰ Also in response to Habermas, Asef Bayat has pointed to the chilling effect caused by the identification of the Jewish people with the state of Israel, stating in an open letter to Habermas that the “twisted moral compass is related to the logic of German exceptionalism that you champion. Because exceptionalism, by definition, allows for not one universal standard but differential standards. Some people become more worthy humans, others less worthy and still others unworthy.”⁵¹

The legitimization of the raison d’état by academics involved in various types of advisory boards plays a role in the repression of the supposed antisemitism of artists and intellectuals from the Global South. This is illustrated by the intervention of experts involved in a scientific commission appointed during the controversy that followed antisemitism accusations leveled against Documenta, the prestigious contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany. After a painting made by an Indonesian art collective was deemed to contain antisemitic caricatures, Documenta announced that an investigation would take place. On July 15, 2022, the supervisory board and shareholders of Documenta and the museum that hosts it set up a committee that was to provide expert scientific support “to assist the shareholders in taking stock of and coming to terms with the antisemitic incidents.” In an open letter published in 2022, the Documenta artists laid out a number of accusations against the scientific advisory board, claiming that they

unashamedly reproduce poorly researched claims from the media; likewise, the report lacks scientific proof, academic references, rigorous argumentation and integrity. . . .  In this hostile environment, actors with a coordinated agenda have been determined to find any indication of pre-assumed “guilt,” twisting any critical detail into a simplistic anti-Semitic reading and repeating the same accusation again and again until it became accepted as fact.⁵²

The work of the advisory board was also criticized by scholars of antisemitism such as Moses as being one-sided and badly researched, in addition to lacking proper expertise on Asian and African art. Thus, he argued, “The report mechanically applies a checklist about antisemitic visual codes based on partisan definitions of antisemitism. For example, the report’s discussion of the Guernica Gaza series of pictures routinely conflates Jews and Israelis and ultimately condemns the series for a ‘one-sided’ version of the conflict because Israelis are depicted as aggressors against innocent Palestinians.”⁵³ The adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism is particularly criticized, as it conflates criticism of the State of Israel and of Zionism with antisemitism by holding that “the anti-Israeli propaganda and its staged affirmation by the artists are likely to incite hatred against Israel and Jews.”⁵⁴

Within this repressive intellectual environment, moral panics have targeted fields of study that have been especially important for the development of critical knowledge. One of the most notable is postcolonial studies, which moral panic entrepreneurs have accused of promoting antisemitism cloaked behind the critique of settler colonialism. The attacks against postcolonial studies (framed according to the narrative surrounding critical race theory in the United States) had begun as early as the cancellation of a keynote speech by historian Achille Mbembe at the Ruhrtriennale festival in 2020. In an interview in Die Zeit, the German commissioner on antisemitism, Felix Klein, launched a campaign against postcolonial studies, claiming that there was antisemitic bias among the scholars of postcolonial theories, including Jewish scholars:

Obviously, some of these theories clash with our culture of remembrance, which I see as an achievement. It may be that people in other countries are less sensitized to this, but something that is wrong from a German perspective does not become right just because it comes from outside. . . .  I see that many postcolonial scholars associate the complicated founding of the State of Israel, the unresolved Middle East conflict, and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with racism and apartheid. . . .  This position comes into conflict with Germany’s stance on Israel’s side despite all justified criticism.⁵⁵

The statement criticizing the cancellation of Mbembe’s talk and the petition for the German government to replace Klein, which were signed by scholars (including Israelis) working on antisemitism, Nazism, colonialism, and genocide, remain unaddressed.⁵⁶

This campaign against postcolonial studies has continued as the very concept of settler colonialism has been stigmatized as a sign of hatred against Israel. Thus, for instance, an article in the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel titled “Left, progressive — and antisemitic, the secret power of Israel haters” notes that “by invoking the principles of postcolonial studies, critical whiteness and intersectionality, . . .  the hatred of Israel spread by supporters of anti-colonialism influences discourse at universities and in journalism, in online debates and in culture.” In a similar fashion, postcolonial studies has been accused of subversively confusing racism with antisemitism through “a conceptual de-specification of antisemitism and its dissolution into racism or Orientalism.” The accusation is that “the conceptual escapism of antisemitism, [Edward] Said’s concept of Orientalism, and the colonialist-theoretical relativization of the Holocaust and demonization of Israel result in a de-thematization of the antisemitism of the ‘others’ or ‘subalterns,’ i.e., primarily Muslim minorities in Western societies or of Muslim-dominant societies in the Middle East.”⁵⁷

Perhaps unsurprisingly, conspiracy theories have played a central role in the moral panic launched against postcolonial studies. This narrative often specifically targets Jewish intellectuals, including Judith Butler. According to this narrative, writes Heidrun Friese,

secret powers, perfidious “Israel haters” undermine the order, destabilize discursive agreement, instigate a worldwide postcolonial conspiracy, at the head of which is spotted a Jewish philosopher who “scatters,” “influences” the elite at universities, pulls the strings, directs and controls cultural life worldwide. Such accusation recalls the antisemitic narrative of subversive “Jewish cultural Marxism” and the Nazi slogan of cultural bolshevism. . . . 

 . . . The obligatory reference to post-colonial perspectives redirects antisemitic codes by taking up the topos of the rootless cosmopolitan, who dissolves (national) identity in an inexplicable penchant for the foreigner, alterity, diaspora, and difference.

Institutionalized boycott, denunciation, de-legitimization and sanctioning bans contextualization and comparison from the public sphere.⁵⁸

In Moses’s reconstruction, the campaign against Documenta in 2022 and 2023 was also characterized by a conspiratorial narrative that identified postcolonial studies as a major evil, which succeeded in crystallizing new tropes in German public discourse: “postcolonial antisemitism” and “antisemitism of all types,” meaning “Israel-related antisemitism” and “hatred of Israel.” The mention of “hatred” was designed to link antisemitism (hatred of Jews) to anti-Zionism (alleged hatred of the State of Israel). The purpose of this semantic stretching is twofold. The first is to insinuate that antisemitism is inherent in the Palestine solidarity widespread in the Global South. In this way, protest against the Israeli occupation is rendered as “hatred” rather than as legitimate political expression. The second is to decry and crush the supposed infiltration of Global South perspectives into Germany via the art and museum scenes and postcolonial academics.⁵⁹

Along with postcolonial studies, Palestinian studies have also been repressed due to a refusal to address the Palestinian question. As Palestinian scholars Al-Taher and Younes have observed, academic “ghosting” has been used as “a technique of boundary drawing, policing, and exclusion in academia, which mirrors exclusive politics in other institutional settings, as well as an overall societal condition of political ghosting as and within structures of power.” The erasure of Palestinian studies “creates emotional and material insecurity and precarity in an already precarious academic political economy and general neoliberal landscape”; in addition, “exclusions in academia reproduce exclusions in the ideological structures of the state and vice versa.” The silencing of Palestinian knowledge in German-speaking institutions of higher learning is connected with the absence of institutional support and with a personal de-solidarization. Thus, “the hostile reactions Palestinians often receive when speaking about Palestine lead to an absence of Palestinian knowledge in academic institutions. Not only in taught classes at the undergraduate level are Palestinians policed, but also the research of Palestinian scholars is institutionally restricted.” The scholars add that this exclusion “also points to a history where Palestinians are perceived as disruptions or alien invaders, repeating the trauma of expulsion over and over again, even in the academy.”⁶⁰

A good part of the German left has failed to mobilize against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. While history has played a role, this has not happened because of guilty feelings for Nazi crimes against the Jews but rather through a form of elite antisemitism that has used the accusation of imported antisemitism to scapegoat non-white citizens. The “consciousness-washing” on large parts of the Left converged with the racist position of the far right. The electoral strategy of the center-left and centrist parties against the AfD was to imitate the racism of the latter rather than oppose it. As racism spread, especially against Arabs and Muslims, any denunciation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was considered an attack on Western civilization by an all-party supermajority. This was expressed in the Social Democratic Party and the Greens often voting together with the AfD on parliamentary resolutions intended to proscribe all expression of solidarity with Palestine as antisemitic. This narrative dovetailed with the growing economic and military exchanges with Israel, including arms transfers, that led trade unions and civil society organizations toward a blind philosemitism that denounced even anti-Zionist Jews as antisemitic.

This was built on a variety of mechanisms. Social movements — including feminist, environmentalist, and even anti-racist organizations — were tamed by their dependence on public funds. Sectarianism characterized the anti-Germans, who emerged from small groupings on the far left to later embrace IDF idolatry and the harassment of Palestinian solidarity activists. And conformism led to a lack of critical positioning among intellectuals and academics, given the hierarchical academic structure of the German academy and intellectuals’ increasing precarity.

It is important to note, however, that other components of the German left have resisted these trends. Protests in Germany erupted quickly after October 7, 2023, especially in areas of Berlin with significant immigrant populations like Neukölln and Kreuzberg, leveraging preexisting activist networks. Because 25 percent of the population has a migrant background and there is a significant Palestinian community, Germany saw frequent protests in support of Palestinian freedom, particularly after key events like the October 21 bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital. Mobilizations spiked again in May 2024 with student encampments, divestment campaigns, and teach-ins in cities such as Hamburg, Cologne, and Berlin. At the Free University and Humboldt University’s Institute of Social Sciences, encampments and occupations were swiftly dismantled by police. While the protests varied in form, they tended to remain peaceful, even in the face of frequent police intervention.

The protests included antiwar coalitions calling for a ceasefire and the release of hostages; however, these had only limited interaction with protests focusing instead on solidarity with Palestine. But Palestine solidarity movements in Berlin actively built alliances with groups involved in climate justice, Sudanese and Congolese struggles, Kurdish liberation, and anti-border movements. As Grimm et al. note, in Berlin,

public media accounts frequently describe protesters as “aggressive” or “confrontative,” yet tangible evidence of violent behavior is rarely provided. Instead, the protests are more accurately characterized as “unruly” or “angry” rather than violent. For example, demonstrations often involve loud chanting, the symbolic display of flags, and confrontational rhetoric, but these do not escalate into outright violence in most cases.⁶¹

Although protests in Germany were smaller and less frequent than in other countries, repression — particularly in Berlin — was severe. This transformed protests into spaces where emotional solidarity and emotional bonds were forged within marginalized communities, bonds that have become central to sustaining mobilization. Protest spaces became sanctuaries for mourning the victims of the genocide and for mutual support, as expressed through communal chanting, silent vigils, candle-lighting, banner-making, and the reading of the names of dead Palestinians. Rituals and narratives sustained a strong emotional commitment in the face of serious repression.

Although securitization has not halted protests in Germany, it has pushed movements toward more inward-facing strategies such as care provision, knowledge production, and legal defense. Moreover, the movements “actively reinforced the bonds between individuals who often felt isolated or marginalized within broader German society.” In this context,

each banned march, each confiscated keffiyeh, mirrors the larger impasse in Gaza and confirms to participants that they are embroiled in the same moral struggle, only refracted through different arenas. Paradoxically, every failure to secure a permit or sway public opinion deepens activists’ conviction that demonstration is no longer about immediate efficacy but about refusing complicity, in the sense of activists knowing through these repercussions that, at least, they “will not be numbered among the silent.”⁶²

The intensification of the genocide in Gaza, however, has also affected part of the German left, evidenced by a huge demonstration on September 28, 2025, in which more than one hundred thousand people mobilized in protest against German support for Israeli crimes. Organized by Medico International and Amnesty International and coordinated with Die Linke, the event shows the potential for a broad alliance, with some limitations. Celebrated as a turning point in the discourse of German exceptionalism, the protests were nonetheless confined to left-wing groups and did not involve either the unions or mainstream civic society organizations.⁶³ It remains to be seen to what extent the coalescence of solidarity with Palestine can address the central issue for the German left: the capacity to mobilize and represent the increasing calls from non-white citizens to fight the racism of the elite.

The retreat from class carries over into cultural studies’ treatment of the climate crisis. Prominent postcolonial theorist Robert Young highlights the well-publicized case of Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa’s military execution in 1995, after he led a campaign against environmental degradation in the Niger Delta resulting from crude oil extraction perpetrated by the multinational petroleum industry — in particular Shell.² Young’s study details the close collusion between Shell and the Nigerian military regime in which the latter aided the company’s activities, which amounted to massive environmental wreckage and suffering for the local population. Shell actively colluded with the dictatorship, even drawing its own armed police from the Nigerian forces. Young produces archival evidence showing that the death of Saro-Wiwa and his compatriots, who were organizing effectively against Shell, was a desirable outcome for the company. In the conclusion to his study, Young points out that the issue of corporate degradation of the environment and the accompanying wanton violation of human rights goes far beyond this one instance and is in fact progressively getting worse.

What lessons does the eminent postcolonial critic draw from this instance of egregious collusion between a state and a giant corporation that speak to a general phenomenon?

Among the many lessons that have to be learned, the first is that all people in all countries in the world, whatever their standard of living or degree of ‘development,’ have a right to expect companies and governments to observe the same ethical standards that would be expected anywhere else. If companies are ethical, and individual governments not, then those companies should exert what power and influence they have to change them (just as governments also have a duty to ensure that companies operate ethically). . . . 

With the transition to civilian rule, Shell has now the opportunity to demonstrate definitively that its actions match up to its words. It has initiated a ‘debate’ on ‘Profits and principles: is there a choice?’³

What we have here is essentially a call for — and a statement of faith in — the ethical operation of corporations. It is as if Shell only failed to do the right thing, and there are somehow no structural reasons why the interests of such companies are fundamentally inconsistent with any responsibility toward the communities and environments in which they operate. But it goes beyond that. Young would also want multinational companies to exert their “power and influence” over sovereign states to “change them.” Corporate influence over governments signals a fundamental inversion of democratic principles in all instances, and the fact that Young would advance this view in the context of the operation of First World megacorporations in the Global South is especially shocking.

A more ambitious intervention on the planetary crisis, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses” offers an analysis of climate change that centers the role of historical contingency, positioning the transition to fossil fuels as a sequence of accidents and unplanned turns rather than a result of deliberate social and economic decisions.⁴ By attributing the rise of coal, oil, and industrial infrastructure to a chain of coincidences and unpredictable developments, he effectively disperses responsibility across a generalized historical field. Deemphasizing structured power and strategic decision-making, Chakrabarty commits to the idea that humanity inadvertently found itself in a geological condition — what he calls the Anthropocene. This framing displaces the central fact that the shift to fossil fuels was not an arbitrary or unconscious process but a calculated and systematic transformation driven by the ruling classes in pursuit of profit, control over labor, and geopolitical dominance.

In privileging accident and unpredictability over intention and structure, Chakrabarty undermines the central role of capitalism in producing the crisis. Capital’s pursuit of fossil energy was not an outcome of blind evolution but of deliberate choices made in full awareness of their social and ecological implications. While Chakrabarty acknowledges capitalism in passing, his overall framework decouples the crisis from the operations of capital accumulation and instead presents it as a generalized human predicament. It is a narrative in which the systemic logic of profit-
driven expansion — one that has subordinated both labor and nature to capital’s imperatives — is rendered secondary to the supposed randomness of history. Such a reading not only misrepresents the genesis of the crisis but also forecloses the political clarity needed to confront it. By collapsing structural responsibility into species-wide vulnerability, Chakrabarty’s account absolves the very actors and institutions whose interests, decisions, and policies have led us to this point.

The tendency to displace material analysis in favor of epistemic or cultural critique is a defining feature of postcolonial and decolonial engagements with the climate crisis. Thinkers like Walter Mignolo and Boaventura de Sousa Santos frame ecological collapse as the outcome of Western rationality and knowledge systems, proposing remedies in the form of “epistemic disobedience” and “epistemologies of the South.” Vandana Shiva, while more critical of corporate power, similarly emphasizes spiritual and cultural reconnection with nature. Yet across these approaches, the structural logic of capital is persistently sidelined. By ascribing primacy to knowledge systems rather than production relations, these frameworks misidentify the root of ecological degradation. Even when calling for plural worldviews and indigenous resurgence, the political prescription is aimed at civilizational and epistemic alternatives rather than dismantling the global capitalist system that drives environmental destruction.⁵

Figures such as Young, Chakrabarty, and Mignolo represent the cutting edge of cultural theory. If we turn to the issue of cultural production, a similar weakness is equally evident, especially in the works of postcolonial writers. In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh notes that what is driving the climate crisis is not just policy but a failure of the artistic imagination. Ghosh suggests that policymakers, scholars, and writers alike have failed to reckon with the most pressing crisis of our time. Signaling a kind of collective derangement, he traces the roots of ecological devastation from colonial-era exploitation to the operations of contemporary fossil capitalism and contends that a global order structured around nation-states is fundamentally ill equipped to address a planetary emergency. Crucially, Ghosh sees this civilizational crisis as stemming not just from an institutional paralysis but from an imaginative one. He maintains that art in general, and literary fiction in particular, has largely turned away from the climate crisis. Fixated on the ordinary and the everyday, literature has relegated climate change to the realm of science fiction. “It is as though in the literary imagination,” Ghosh observes, “climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.”⁶

Ghosh’s position, like Chakrabarty’s, attempts to universalize responsibility for the climate crisis. In a telling passage, he writes,

Anthropogenic climate change . . . is the unintended consequence of the very existence of human beings as a species. Although different groups of people have contributed to it in vastly different measure, global warming is ultimately the product of the totality of human actions over time. Every human being who has ever lived has played a part in making us the dominant species on this planet, and in this sense every human being, past and present, has contributed to the present cycle of climate change.⁷

This framing, while acknowledging differential responsibility in passing, ultimately collapses historical specificity and structural causality into a generalized anthropocentrism. By attributing ecological catastrophe to the aggregate impact of the species rather than to specific political and economic systems, it obfuscates the central role of capitalism, particularly fossil capital, in generating the crisis.

This perspective underpins Ghosh’s views on contemporary fiction. He narrates his own experience with an unexpected tornado in Delhi, and extrapolating from that he avers the reason contemporary realist novels fail to capture climate change is because of the mode’s aversion to strange and unlikely phenomena — weather events, floods, tsunamis, wildfires, coral bleaching, and so forth. He believes that the focus on the quotidian cannot represent the various dimensions of the climate crisis as they manifest in these cataclysmic events. Ghosh is certainly right that these “highly improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real” and therefore must be addressed in contemporary literature.⁸ The trouble with Ghosh’s analysis is that he reduces climate change to these occurrences, instead of treating them as one aspect — if the most palpable and visible one — of the impact of climate change.

Interestingly, Ghosh himself has poignantly represented the climate crisis in his 2005 realist novel, The Hungry Tide.⁹ The novel is set in the Sundarbans, a region of India bordering Bangladesh that is threatened by rapidly rising sea levels and has taken center stage in climate change discourse. The Hungry Tide vests its sympathies with the indigent, victims of an elitist social order and the vagaries of the natural world. It grapples with questions of accountability toward others and the natural world through the actions and relationships of its characters: a poor fisherman with profound knowledge of his environs, a Marxist scholar and his wife living and working among the impoverished communities in the Sunderbans, a marine biologist singularly devoted to her research, and a well-intentioned narrator. At the heart of the story is a retelling of the Marichjhapi massacre of 1979, a dark moment in postcolonial India. Around forty thousand Bangladeshi refugees had settled on the island of Marichjhapi in the Sundarbans, a region designated as a wildlife reserve. Citing conservation concerns, the government used this designation as a pretext to remove the settlers — first by cutting off access to drinking water and essential supplies and then, when that failed, by unleashing brutal state violence that led to the deaths of thousands. Through the experiences of the novel’s main characters, we are forced to grapple with fundamental issues of climate refugees all over the world, the evolving texture of human relationships with the environment, the conflict between human and animal rights, and, most crucially, human agency and accountability toward one another and toward nature.

But Ghosh now seems to believe that realist novels like The Hungry Tide fundamentally fall short of representing the enormity of climate change. More specifically, such novels do not capture his position, which, while attributing the ecological crisis to humanity as a whole, remains centrally focused on the global cataclysms that pose an existential threat. And he believes that to address the actuality of the crisis, writers need to move away from the realist mode. It is this conviction that drives Ghosh’s more recent work, evidenced by his novel Gun Island.¹⁰

“No, caro, no. You mustn’t underestimate the power of stories. There is something in them that is elemental and inexplicable. Haven’t you heard it said that what makes us human, what separates us from animals, is the faculty of storytelling?”¹¹

Let’s start with what is defensible. Storytelling — or the human reliance on narratives to make sense of the universe — is undeniable. Research in cognitive science and psychology testifies that narratives are fundamental to human experience. And Cinta may well be right that the faculty of storytelling is a crucial marker of the uniqueness of the human mind. However, the focus of Cinta’s intervention is not simply to elevate the power of storytelling; it is the implicit claim that the narrative mode is more reliable than scientific discourse in making sense of the ecological crisis. She privileges the symbolic and affective force of narrative over the analytical clarity of science, suggesting that what matters most in this moment of planetary crisis is not empirical explanation but the deeper truths that stories are uniquely equipped to reveal.

When Deen complains of an uneasy feeling of malaise, a loss of will, Cinta relates to him that in her research on the Inquisition in Venice, she had read hundreds of case files that described people with symptoms similar to that of Deen’s — “cases of possession.” Shocked, Deen asks, “Cinta, are you really trying to tell me that I’m possessed?”¹² While Cinta’s immediate response is to assure Deen that it’s not what she was suggesting, her longer explanation points to her belief that the contemporary world indeed shows signs of “demonic possession.” She explains that the idea of possession held sway in the medieval world because the assertion of the will was much more central to that world compared to the mechanized contemporary universe. In the past, people had to assert their presence to survive in a world full of unpredictable forces — nature, animals, other people. Losing that presence meant a deathly vulnerability, akin to possession. Today, surrounded by impersonal systems that require little effort or will, we’ve lost that active sense of engagement. She suggests that this passive, automated way of living resembles a kind of modern possession. In the face of the climate crisis, we know what must be done but remain paralyzed, acting as if controlled by forces beyond us. For Cinta, this widespread inaction and surrender reflect the symptoms of demonic possession in a secular, systemic form.

Now, if the paralysis of the will to tackle the climate crisis can only be explained as a form of demonic possession, what could be the recourse? Just as with the bubonic plague in medieval Venice, the way out of the predicament could only be the result of a miracle. The narrative’s climax offers us precisely such a miracle, even as Piya, the marine biologist, attempts unpersuasive rational explanations.

The concluding pages of the novel stage a confrontation between two opposing forces: on one side, a blue boat carrying refugees from various parts of the Global South attempts to reach the shores of Venice, met by a vessel of anti-immigrant activists who seek to prevent their landing. Deen, Cinta, and their companions travel on a third boat, aligned with the refugees in a show of solidarity. The impoverished passengers of the blue boat — climate and economic refugees — embody the human cost of global warming, and their uncertain fate becomes a symbolic measure of what lies ahead: either the possibility of collective redemption or deepening despair.

Amid the aggressive anti-immigrant chants on one boat and the trepidation on the other, a series of seeming miracles occur involving migratory birds, dolphins, bioluminescence, and an Ethiopian spirit. In the end, an admiral orders a rescue operation of the blue boat, ensuring the safe landing of the immigrants. When the admiral is later questioned by the media on why he decided to contravene orders to prevent the refugees from landing in Italy, he responds:

“I would like to set the record straight. What the Minister has said, in public, was that only in the event of a miracle would these refugees be allowed into Italy. . . . 

“And I believe that what we witnessed today was indeed a miracle.”¹³

The novel’s recourse to miracle as the only way out of the climate crisis is not incidental. On the contrary, it makes a certain sense for a writer deeply invested in confronting the crisis but unwilling — or unable — to connect it to capitalism. Cinta, the historian, repeatedly invokes the role of mysticism in the medieval world; in the absence of scientific knowledge, it was hardly surprising that people turned to supernatural explanations for everything from epidemics to failed crops. If one rejects the rational account of climate change as rooted in the logic of capitalist accumulation, only two options remain. One is to look away — to ignore the crisis altogether and turn to other subjects. For Ghosh, that’s not viable; he insists the climate emergency must become a central concern for literature. The only remaining path for writers determined to foreground the crisis but reluctant to name its systemic cause, then, is to rely on nonrational or mystical frameworks.

But the retreat from the underlying logic of capital doesn’t only lead to a turn toward mysticism; it also produces other distortions in how the sociopolitical terrain of the contemporary world is mapped. In the novel’s climactic scene, the blue boat and the vessel carrying anti-immigrant activists come to represent the wretched and the privileged of the earth, respectively. The narrator isn’t wrong to suggest that the migrants aboard the blue boat — fleeing poverty and desperation in the Global South — embody the oppressed within the current global order. The trouble arises when he casts the anti-immigrant activists as the privileged class in a world he understands as fundamentally shaped by slavery and colonialism.

They were mainly young men, many with their faces painted in the colours of their football clubs. Many appeared to be drunk. . . . 

I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the upending of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents. . . . 

This was why the angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them.¹⁴

What we have here is a well-established postcolonial framework marking the haves and have-nots in terms of the Global South and North, thus displacing class with colonialism. In this picture, the “angry young men” — the fanatical football fans — clearly represent the white working class, and their antagonism to poor immigrants derives from their anxiety of loss of privilege in a world shaped by forces they don’t control.

The narrator overlooks the crucial point that a genuinely privileged group would not feel threatened by a derelict boat of desperate migrants. It is equally unclear what “vast privilege” was ever extended to the Western underclass through colonialism and slavery, or whether its members ever placed their trust in these institutions to safeguard their well-being. If the white working class feels endangered, it is because they too are dispossessed and subject to a reactionary discourse that casts immigrants as the source of their precarity. And while the narrator’s sympathies lie with the migrants, his worldview in many ways mirrors that of the angry young men he derides. Like them, he sees the global divide in terms of geography and race rather than class. And more damagingly, like them, he fails to grasp that the cultural and climate crises he narrates are rooted in a profit-driven system that thrives on turning underprivileged peoples against one another.

Thus, the obliviousness to the underlying logic of capital generates two related sets of distortions. First, since it dispenses with what Cinta calls the “simple” perspective of identifying the underlying logic of capital, it relies on a culturalist trope of dividing the world along the color lines established by colonialism. In erasing class conflict within a capitalist order, it views oppressed people from the Global North and South as antagonists rather than fellow beings suffering and struggling against the same forces. Second, since there is no identifiable antagonist in a world at the precipice of an existential crisis, the only deliverance it can imagine is a mystical one.

In the final moments of the story, Deen reflects on the inscription outside the church in Venice he had visited with Cinta: Unde origo inde salus, or “from the origin salvation comes.” Following the miracles at sea and Cinta’s final words, the phrase, for Deen, comes to signify the wisdom of returning to faith and mysticism in a world on the brink of extinction. “From the beginning salvation comes,” he recalls, “and I understood what she had been trying to tell me that day: that the possibility of our deliverance lies not in the future but in the past, in a mystery beyond memory.”¹⁵

But what if we do not obscure the roots of the climate crisis in mysticism and instead locate its origin in the rapacious logic of capital? Then Unde origo inde salus might take on a rather different and genuinely emancipatory meaning. If capitalism lies at the heart of the climate crisis, then any real salvation lies in fighting a system destructive to both human life and the planet.

I now turn to a text that captures just such a vision — not from the postcolonial canon or even the realm of literary fiction, but from popular literature. In The Life Impossible, Matt Haig, the author of the best-selling The Midnight Library and other novels, subtly implicates capitalism, even while delivering an eminently engaging story.¹⁶ There are some striking points of convergence between Ghosh’s and Haig’s novels. Both are animated by a clear commitment to engaging with the planetary crisis. The Life Impossible, like Gun Island, is set on a real island — Ibiza, Spain. Each novel explores the life and history of its island setting as a kind of microcosm for a world in collapse. But the most telling point of overlap also reveals the sharpest divergence between them. While both texts move away from the realist mode of narration, they do so for entirely different reasons.

The Life Impossible centers on Grace, a retired math teacher navigating grief, disorientation, and the quiet unraveling of her former life. In search of a reset, she travels to Ibiza, where a chance encounter with a mysterious force alters the course of her life. What follows is a slow, deeply interior journey as Grace begins to experience strange and inexplicable abilities — telepathy, heightened empathy, an uncanny awareness of the nonhuman world. Though she at first resists, her rational mind eventually yields to the possibilities opened up by this new way of being. Set against the backdrop of a threatened island landscape, the novel weaves together personal transformation with ecological fragility. While a looming resort development introduces clear external conflict, the heart of the novel is a meditation on grief, connection, and what it might mean to live differently in a world on the brink.

The Life Impossible diverges from Gun Island by explicitly identifying the antagonist of the ecological order: rapacious capitalism. Its central conflict revolves around a corporate developer threatening to desecrate the natural landscape of Ibiza, and there is no ambiguity about the role of capitalist extraction in precipitating ecological collapse. Whereas the magical occurrences in Ghosh’s novel signify the need for faith, serving to displace structural causality with epistemic disorder, the mystical presence in Haig’s narrative signifies a utopian possibility, a future beyond the destruction of capital. And this clarity of diagnosis also gives shape to a collective imperative — of resistance, care, and the defense of the natural world against commodification.

The nonrealist element in Haig’s novel is “La Presencia,” a force embedded in nature — specifically, beneath the waters off the shore of Es Vedrà, near Ibiza. Characters who encounter this force are granted transformative powers. The extent of each encounter is determined by La Presencia, and the abilities conferred are proportional to the depth of the experience. Grace has the most profound encounter, and she emerges with extraordinary abilities like telekinesis and clairvoyance.

A rationalist by training and instinct, Grace is initially in denial of her powers and struggles to make sense of them. She grapples with her new ability to effortlessly slip into the minds of both people and animals, sensing familiar emotions of fear, guilt, anxiety, grief, and joy, regardless of the situation. As she enters the mind of an attending doctor, Grace is reminded of how she had once felt at the Louvre looking at Greek sculptures, and of her husband’s interpretation of that moment:

Everything was there, instantaneously. I understood it all but didn’t know how. It was like a feeling I’d once had at the Louvre, when I walked into the gallery of antiquities, full of Greek sculptures, with the Venus de Milo there at the far end of the hall. It was a sudden absorption of intensity. It was too much but also, somehow, entirely natural. Karl had a theory that art and music and everything that ever existed were somehow inside us. A good song or a good piece of sculpture was good because it spoke to something already there within us. Well, that was what it was like. Staring at that doctor’s face was like walking into a gallery of thoughts. And I knew every single one of them like I knew my own.¹⁷

This, too, marks a departure from the kind of magic realism in Gun Island, which is invested in the magic but offers little by way of explanation; the narrative leans heavily on mysticism and faith. In Haig’s novel, by contrast, logic isn’t abandoned. Grace doesn’t passively accept her new abilities. Instead, she keeps trying to make sense of the unknown through the lens of the rational and the familiar. She recalls her husband’s belief that art resonates because it gives form to something already present within us, and she gradually extends that insight to her own experience. The powers she acquires, she comes to see, aren’t supernatural or external — not to her, and not to anyone else either. Without naming him, she gestures toward Carl Sagan, using her scientific instincts to make sense of what she once would have called impossible.

It was the interconnectedness of everything made visible. It is all there if you know how to see it. . . . 

. . . .  The whole universe is inside us. Every element within us was made in a star. . . . 

We have the universe in our blood and bones.

And once I’d had my contact with La Presencia, it was as though I was waking from a slumber. . . .  into a new kind of sentience where I just wasn’t formed of everything but could see and understand it too.¹⁸

Grace comes to appreciate that her new self is akin to “waking from a slumber.” But how is that pertinent to a planet in deep crisis mode? Grace’s “slumber” is, I believe, similar to Deen’s feeling that he’s “fading away” in Gun Island, losing his will and freedom. In both cases, the protagonists’ conditions speak to the narratives’ commentary on cultural paralysis in the face of an existential threat to the planet. How else to explain global inaction under such a crisis? As Cinta says to Deen, “Everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a livable place. . . .  and yet we are powerless.”¹⁹

But if Gun Island suggests that the only possible awakening from this paralysis lies in mystical faith, Haig’s novel gestures toward another kind of possibility — one that begins by tracing the crisis to its material roots. Art Butler, the transnational luxury hotelier, represents unregulated capitalism and personifies the root cause of planetary destruction. He arrives in Ibiza to build yet another massive resort — much like his other “green” hotels and eco-retreats that offer meditation, cryotherapy, and charcoal smoothies — marketed as the future: “Capitalism and ecology, side by side.” Meanwhile, he dumps raw sewage into the Mediterranean. As one character bluntly tells him, “There is a species of flower — the Nolletia chrysocomoides — that was last seen on Earth here in Ibiza, but it was made extinct when you opened your first hotel at Cala Bassa and poured cement over the wildflower meadow there. . . .  You go to delicate places and disfigure them.”²⁰

Alberto, Grace’s guide and friend, explains how the arrival of La Presencia on the shores of Ibiza in the 1850s was not a random occurrence but directly connected to a longer history of capitalist extraction, of which Butler is a contemporary manifestation. Between the industrial revolution and the wars that followed, the 1850s saw four times as many species go extinct as in the previous decade. Cities were blanketed in smoke, and there was a growing sense of crisis. “So you get all the great writers writing their great stuff because everything is turning to shit,” Alberto says. “Dickens and Flaubert and soon after our very own Mr Galdós. It was the start of the conservation movement. And then La Presencia arrives. A healing force.”²¹

If the unbridled power of capital, embodied by Butler, is responsible for the crisis, then La Presencia signals an emancipatory possibility. Precisely because the logic of capital alienates people from one another and from the natural world, the powers bestowed by La Presencia guide Grace in the opposite direction. She becomes radically open, able to connect and empathize — endlessly — with others, human and nonhuman alike. “La Presencia is basically an intergalactic activist,” observes Marta, Alberto’s astrophysicist daughter. “It is here to protect things. It also has organised itself. Just as we need to. That is what the protest against this stupid hotel will be. People organising themselves like atoms for the sake of life.”²²

Grace, Marta, and Alberto, all marked by their encounter with La Presencia, rise up against Butler and begin to organize. They rally the people of Ibiza as well as its politicians. Grace, empowered by her abilities, also mobilizes the island’s animal world against Butler. Between actual organizing and a kind of magical solidarity among all beings under threat, Butler is defeated. In the aftermath of this climactic victory, the novel lingers with Grace and her friends, focusing on relationships grounded in care and reciprocity. Taken together, these moments suggest that the way out of the planetary crisis lies in collective resistance, sustained by a culture of solidarity and an ethic of love and care toward both humans and the natural world.

The difference between Gun Island and The Life Impossible highlights the importance of narrative perspective in discussing the climate crisis. Ghosh, an eminent postcolonifal writer, embraces a theoretical tradition that disperses causality across culture, identity, and knowledge, often at the expense of materialist analysis. This ecological approach ultimately downplays capitalism’s role. The result is a story driven by urgency and grounded in mysticism, where natural disasters symbolize broader critiques. In contrast, Haig, free from the cultural demands of postcolonial theory, clearly portrays the violence of environmental destruction and the structural forces behind it. His novel works not because it abandons realism but because it ties its speculative elements to a clear sense of political conflict and collective possibility.

This doesn’t mean, however, that meaningful literary portrayals of the climate crisis must reflect the battle between capitalism and the environment. It also doesn’t follow that a nonrealist narrative is the only way to capture the complexities of the crisis. Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide shows how realistic fiction can effectively address environmental harm through a moral lens of responsibility. What truly matters is not the form of the narrative but the perspective it offers on the crisis. Ghosh’s recent work, influenced by a framework that confuses symptoms with causes, turns to mysticism instead of structural analysis. Haig’s novel, though not framed as a critique, acknowledges both culpability and the need for resistance.

This divergence between the novels is symptomatic of a deeper theoretical fault line. As long as cultural theory continues to turn away from the mundane reality of capitalism, it will fail to apprehend and represent the real experience of climate change. The novels examined here not only illustrate the analytical shortfalls of cultural theory but also the potential of contemporary literature, when unencumbered by that framework, to imagine both the causes of and responses to planetary breakdown.

The functions of the US Supreme Court spring from its location in the wider institutional structure through which national ruling elites exercise their power, in particular the minoritarian representational logics of the Senate and Electoral College. At the same time, the court’s role has shifted as polarization and geographic sorting have driven the two parties further apart and as the specter of either endogenous threats or geopolitical instability has abated. Rather than merely protecting the structures that underpin hegemony from external threat (e.g., from labor), the court has recently taken a more active role as a venue and instrument of intra-elite competition. This changing judicial functionality, however, cannot be perceived clearly if the court is taken in isolation, cut off from wider institutional dynamics. Its role in intra-class conflict, moreover, is not a matter of indifference to those on the Left. Not least, it means that supposedly representative political institutions are becoming increasingly impermeable, deferring yet again hopes for an equitable and sustainable political order.

The lesson for reformers here is not necessarily straightforward. But at a very minimum, this analysis suggests it’s a mistake to think of the court as distinct from its political surroundings. Given our imperfect or failed representational mechanisms, whose flaws are nurtured by judicial subventions both discrete and blatant, the court is better understood as presently acting as a sort of flywheel for the stresses and energies generated through conflict within our neoliberal elite. Its tasks now involve dissipating democratic energies into ugly reactionary postures while also shoring up favored dominant elites against the weak medicine of electoral challenge.

Just as it would be foolish to fix an engine by focusing on one gear, ignoring all the ways it interacts with the wider machine, so too would it be wrong to think the court’s malign effects can be diagnosed, let alone resolved, by considering it in splendid isolation. Judicial power cannot be juxtaposed mechanically against democratic institutions — as if the two were acoustically separate in the American case — or, indeed, as if those democratic bodies did not suffer from their own great surfeit of pathological deficiencies and vulnerabilities to elite capture. To be meaningful, reform instead needs a wide-angle lens that accounts for how the court interacts with other institutions so as to maintain the neoliberal economic order and, increasingly, a narrow partisan monopoly. Examination of these combinatory effects might have surprising implications, suggesting a latent potential for an enlarged coalition that understands court reform not as an end in itself but rather as part of a larger democratic, and even emancipatory, agenda.

The slogan of the day, in other words, should not just be “Fix the court.” It should be “Win the war for democracy.”

Critics have argued that the abundance movement in general, and Klein and Thompson in particular, simply advance a rebranded neoliberal political project based on deregulation and the derisking of private capital.³ As Sandeep Vaheesan puts it, Klein and Thompson’s view is that “private actors will deliver abundance — at least when goaded by sufficiently high levels of public subsidy” — so long as zoning and environmental restrictions are lifted.⁴ Similarly, Brian Callaci argues in Jacobin that their approach echoes what Daniela Gabor calls the “derisking state”: “Abundance places its faith in the idea that private capital, finally freed from onerous regulation, will spring into action and undertake the massive investments required for broad prosperity.”⁵

It is true that Klein and Thompson do not oppose the use of government to enable the private sector. They are clearly quite optimistic about Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and other forms of industrial policy that use public planning to spur private investment. But it is fair to assume that Vaheesan and Callaci also don’t oppose such policies outright. Do they seek to repeal the IRA like some in the GOP? In any case, it is a serious oversimplification to reduce Klein and Thompson’s entire argument to a derisking playbook.

Klein and Thompson explicitly position themselves as liberals interested in state capacity and effective government action. Specifically, they think the government will be central to the technical innovation needed to achieve their vision of abundance. When markets fail to account for the costs of climate pollution, the “government can,” they insist; when markets find certain investments too risky for shareholders, the “government must” step in and fund such technologies.

Examples of this state-centered logic run through the book. The authors lament, for instance, that it’s often cheaper to build affordable housing with private rather than public money. “Shouldn’t things happen faster when they are backed by the might and money of the government?” they ask. They applaud Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s streamlined process to rebuild the section of I-95 that collapsed near Philadelphia and the popularity of that state-led success. “Turns out people like it when their government gets things done.” Contra Barro, they also celebrate that this project was completed so quickly with union labor.

On the question of innovation, their focus is squarely on the role of government. They cite the positive cases of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Health, while also criticizing the state’s failure to fund Katalin Karikó’s breakthrough mRNA research.

One might argue that their discussion of the COVID-19 response program Operation Warp Speed lends support to the charge of neoliberalism. The authors state unequivocally, “OWS solved problems by enabling the private sector rather than commanding it.” It was produced by private pharmaceutical companies, distributed by the likes of UPS and FedEx, and made available at private pharmacies such as Walgreens. But surely OWS was also a triumph of public planning and public finance — none of these private capitalists would have signed off on making the vaccine free to all without the government picking up the bill.

Perhaps the most common charge that Abundance is neoliberal rests upon its alleged promotion of deregulation. But this is either a willful misrepresentation or, more generously, a result of not reading the book. Much of the text concerns how various bottlenecks — regulatory, process, and otherwise — inhibit the public sector from acting itself. Why, they ask, has California failed to complete a five-hundred-mile high-speed rail system since 2008, while China has built more than twenty-three thousand miles in that same period? Why does it cost an average of $609 million to build a kilometer of rail in the United States, compared to $384 million in Germany, $295 million in Canada, and just $96 million in Portugal?

“We looked into it,” they write, “and it turns out that all those countries also have governments. So the problem cannot simply be government.” This point, contra the fantasias of libertarians, is followed by another: “Nor is the problem unions — another favored bugaboo of the Right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States.”

The deregulation agendas of Carter and Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand — in finance, transport, energy, telecoms, and labor — were not just destructive in their time. They also laid the groundwork for deep pathologies in political economy decades later: from housing bubbles, offshoring, and deindustrialization to the 2008 global financial crisis and eurozone meltdown. The Left’s opposition to those deregulatory agendas in the 1970s and ’80s has, in hindsight, been vindicated.

So the real question when it comes to the removal of production bottlenecks, regulatory or otherwise, is whether such removal is progressive or regressive. And crucially, why these regulations were introduced and whose interests they originally served.

If Klein and Thompson are only offering a new version of “warmed over neoliberalism,” they go to great lengths in the book’s conclusion to argue the opposite.⁶ They situate their abundance framework as a contender to replace the crumbling “neoliberal world order,” deploying the analysis of historian Gary Gerstle.⁷ They also point to the state-led expansion of solar technology in the 1970s — an effort crushed by Reagan’s form of slash-and-burn neoliberal austerity — as a lost opportunity for a more abundant future.

Another common critique from the Left is that Klein and Thompson’s approach is explicitly opposed to the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor and working class.⁸ But more accurately, they are simply pointing out that redistribution alone is not enough unless the public sector can actually reliably deliver and build real public goods cheaply and efficiently. As Klein recently put it in an essay for the New York Times, “If Democrats are taxing people to build high-speed rail, that high-speed rail should exist; if they are taxing people to build electric vehicle chargers, those chargers should get built; if they are promising lower drug prices in Medicare, those lower prices should show up quickly.”⁹

This concern isn’t just theoretical. Since the book’s release, an analysis found it cost $1.2 million per unit for the government to build housing in the Washington, DC, area.¹⁰ Left-wing Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson boasted of delivering ten thousand units at a cost of $11 billion, but as Klein points out, this “nets out to $1.1 million per unit.”¹¹ In Chicago, as of June 2025, the median sale price of homes is less than half of that: $400,000.¹² In Washington, DC, it’s quite a bit higher ($679,000), but still far lower than Johnson’s public provision.¹³ These figures don’t undermine the case for taxing the rich to fund public goods, but they do suggest that without serious reforms to how public goods are planned and delivered, redistribution alone won’t be enough to meet vital social needs.

From all this, it should be clear that Abundance is not an argument for a neoliberal model of deregulation and private sector supremacy. As Klein himself puts it, the book is “about making the state more, not less, powerful and capable of doing big things.”¹⁴

An Age-Old Conflict: Jefferson or Hamilton?

The most vocal critics of the abundance agenda have come from the antitrust or anti-monopoly left, and it turns out this kind of rift has deep historical roots. Marc Dunkelman’s book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back, a text often compared to and reviewed alongside Abundance, opens with a discussion of the conflicts among progressives and liberals in the early twentieth century.¹⁵ On one side were the anti-monopolists, who believed society’s problems were a result of “corruption running rampant atop society — among robber barons, political bosses, corporate boards, and snooty lawyers.” Their solution was to break up concentrated power and restore competition among smaller-scale enterprises, like the farmers and artisans who made up the class base for this Jeffersonian vision — one that prized decentralized economic life and local self-sufficiency and held an aversion to centralized authority.

Others, however, saw the emergence of large-scale capitalist enterprises as not only inevitable but progressive, offering undeniable efficiency and productivity gains. Even as early as the mid-nineteenth century, Marx and Friedrich Engels had predicted that the small-scale production of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie was destined for the dustbin of history.¹⁶

Yet these reformers shared the anti-monopolists’ concern about concentrated corporate power. As Dunkelman states, their answer was less about “taking them down and more inclined to building government up.” For these Hamiltonian reformers, the vision of small-scale competition was actually highly anarchic and inefficient. The goal should instead be to establish “a new vanguard of competent centralized authority” and “public power” to keep the power of business in check.

If the Jeffersonians struggled with nostalgia for a long-gone era, the Hamiltonians faced another problem: the widespread suspicion that centralized government bureaucracy was bound to descend into abuse and ineptitude. As Dunkelman explains, public sentiment saw bureaucracy as the domain of “champions of incompetent public bureaucracy.”

Here is exactly the dilemma Klein and Thompson identify as the core problem for the liberal left: profound popular distrust in the capacity of the government to solve society’s big problems, from climate change and the housing crisis to pandemics and antibiotic resistance. Or to put it a way socialists will understand, if our answer to every problem of capitalism is public ownership or “nationalize it,” how convincing can those proposals be without a demonstration of effective state capacity?

Of course, it is the anti-monopolist critics who insist that Abundance fails to seriously address corporate power and corruption as the causes of society’s problems.¹⁷ But in doing so, they overlook — or even oppose — the Hamiltonian impulse at the core of the book.

More fundamentally, the anti-monopolist critique nearly always points in the direction of decentralization — of devolving power downward toward small business, local control, and community governance. Yet as Klein and Thompson show, this “small is beautiful” vision is hostile to building up the state’s ability to deliver universal goods. More troublingly, it opens the door to a proliferation of local veto points, with neighborhood or community groups empowered to block or slow public action.

In sum, while much of the post-1970s left has been shaped by a Jeffersonian suspicion of centralized power — as wary of big government as it is of corporate power — Abundance seeks to recover the Hamiltonian tradition. That tradition, as Dunkelman shows, was foundational to the New Deal era of massive public works, infrastructure projects, and the construction of government agencies that served the public good. That it falls to liberals like Klein and Thompson to make the case for state capacity ought to give the socialist left pause.

As early as 2022, Klein dubbed this vision a “liberalism that builds” — that is, builds housing, energy, and other key infrastructure.¹⁸ But if the Left confines itself to critiques of corporate power or blanket suspicion of large-scale industrial projects, it risks ceding the terrain of state building to liberals. What’s needed is not just a liberalism that builds but a socialist left that builds, and that builds differently — with democratic planning, redistribution, and working-class power at its center. There is much to learn from Abundance, not because it is socialist but because it points toward the conditions that socialism would require in order to succeed.

If Klein and Thompson make a convincing case that we are living through a crisis of productive stagnation — particularly in state capacity — they are less persuasive when it comes to explaining how this stagnation came about. Some of their analysis comes close to the mark, but the democratic socialist left offers a different story of what happened in this crucial period.

The authors lean heavily on the ideas of economist Mancur Olson, who argued in the 1980s that stagnation is an inevitable feature of complex, stable, affluent societies.¹⁹ As these societies mature, they give rise to increasingly powerful interest groups that fight over the distribution of resources. The result is a proliferation of lobbying, bargaining, paperwork, and regulation — “making it difficult to get anything done.” On top of this, Klein and Thompson note the peculiarly American predilection to pursue policy goals through adversarial legalism rather than legislation. Quoting Berkeley law professor Robert Kagan, they argue that “in the United States, lawyers, legal rights, judges, and lawsuits become functional equivalents for the large central bureaucracies that dominate governance in the activist states of Western Europe.” Kagan reckons that this is because Americans have always been uniquely mistrustful of government, compared to citizens of the Old World. (Although one might note that government by politicians is at least in principle democratically accountable, unlike what Ben Burgis has called the “antidemocratic monstrosity” of de facto government by Supreme Court judges.)²⁰

Finally, Klein and Thompson argue that a transformation of political culture occurred within the liberal left in the wake of the 1960s and ’70s, triggered by a torrent of revelations about state and parastate misconduct. While they don’t list these revelations in the book, they are well known: the atrocities of the Vietnam War, the deceptions and lies of Watergate, and the intelligence abuses of three-letter agencies investigated by Senator Frank Church’s 1975 select committee. These scandals marked the end of the deep trust in government born of the New Deal and the “muscular wartime exercise of state power.” By the 1970s, the authors argue, liberalism was “slow[ing] the system down so that instances of abuse could be seen and stopped.”

And so the simple story of small-government conservatism and big-government liberalism isn’t quite correct: the liberal left has, in many ways, proven to be every bit as obstructive to the public sector as the Right. In other words, progressives shifted from their New Deal, Hamiltonian core toward a decidedly more Jeffersonian direction favoring local control.

One of the most illustrative examples in the book — echoing what online debates have termed “the Groups,” a catchall for NGOs, academics, lawyers, and property-owning NIMBYs seen as choking abundance — is the story of lawyer Ralph Nader and his movement of public-interest law firms.²¹ Often referred to as “Nader’s Raiders,” these activists routinely sued government agencies in court, and in doing so helped reshape the regulatory landscape.

The authors are torn on this legacy. They acknowledge that the early efforts of Nader’s Raiders and other NGOs, especially with respect to the environment, were good. It’s true, they write, that government permitting was allowing refineries to dump toxic chemicals in low-income neighborhoods and oil spills to pollute waterways. And the rise in permitting processes and litigation worked: “Apart from greenhouse gases, which effectively have been unregulated, every major air pollutant has decreased significantly over the past five decades, from carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide to airborne lead and others. Surface water quality has similarly improved substantially since the 1970s.”

But over time, the legacy of the Groups — the legal rulings, legislation, and procedural norms that they established — have choked off development, not least with respect to the very clean technology and low-carbon infrastructure that environmental NGOs are supposed to favor. Klein and Thompson give the example of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project, a Wyoming clean energy project that would be the largest wind farm in the United States. Navigating all the permitting and siting authorities and environmental legal challenges — the very product of Nader’s revolution — has meant the project will be completed a full eighteen years after being proposed.

Klein and Thompson, however, neglect a key problem with the proliferation of procedural barriers: they slow down development even when the public sector is doing the work itself, not just permitting it. That problem is also neglected by leftist critics of Abundance who, like us, would rather see the state engaged in muscular New Deal–style public development.

Vaheesan’s review praises the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and other New Deal institutions providing “electricity for all” as the kind of public abundance that the authors purportedly cede to private forces. Indeed, the TVA remains America’s largest public power system today, and it’s the only federal public utility actively building new power generation. But the TVA as a public developer faces hurdles that private utilities don’t.

As a federal entity, the TVA must clear all projects through the gauntlet of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a requirement that no other electric utility in the country faces. These procedural demands compound an already lengthy and complex grid interconnection procedure that the TVA, like all grid operators, must follow.²² In fact, almost every single major planning decision at the TVA — not just developing a new land-altering hydroelectric facility or a pollution-spewing fossil plant, but also releasing a new integrated resource plan or updating its price methodology — must undergo the NEPA process.²³ Even solar farms built by third parties that connect to the TVA’s transmission system must undergo a full environmental study, usually taking one to two years.²⁴

The TVA’s most recent financial report revealed four different lawsuits from the Groups over new power projects.²⁵ Two of the four are predicated on NEPA, and one of those, a NEPA challenge to a gas-fueled power plant at the site of a retired coal plant, dragged the TVA into a lawsuit for almost two years before a judge threw it out. Meanwhile, a rising MAGA hostility to the TVA is partly rooted in the perception that it is no longer building reliable power to meet needs.²⁶

Another New Deal example of public abundance is the Public Works Administration, which helped build public infrastructure like housing, schools, hospitals, airports, and power plants all across the country. Today each of these projects would trigger NEPA and other such laws. Even if we assume progressives would get behind such an agenda, could they also defend it against vetoes of individual projects by the Groups — or from obstruction by private firms empowered by the very procedural mechanisms they support?

Efforts to combat these procedural barriers are further complicated by the political capture of progressive politics by the Groups. For example, the growth of the TVA’s carbon-free energy is held back, in part, by a constellation of environmental nonprofit groups that oppose nuclear power and prefer the status quo of privately financed renewables.²⁷ Though labor unions vociferously back such expansion at the TVA, the Groups are the ones that wield influence with the liberal members of Congress who oversee the TVA’s finances. Senator Ed Markey, for example — who sits on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (a critical body for the TVA) and who once dismissed the authority as “disgusting” for preferring nuclear power to renewables — has proven a reliable voice not for New Deal public power but for the Groups’ vision of it.²⁸

A new New Deal program of public abundance would face procedural barriers that the original never encountered, like NEPA and the Administrative Procedures Act. The Hamiltonian progressivism that delivered the New Deal simply isn’t the one that has congealed institutionally in the Groups. “That’s the thing that progressives don’t understand,” Dunkelman tells us. “[Even] the progressivism of 1967 and the progressivism of 1977 were totally different animals.” The earlier Hamiltonian progressivism “had wanted to build up centralized power so that it could accomplish big things,” while the Jeffersonian one was, “for good reason, deathly scared of public authority, and wanted to box it in.”²⁹

So where do Klein and Thompson stand on this new thicket of rules and institutional blockages? Their answer is the familiar story centrists tell about pretty much everything: the pendulum and its dastardly propensity for swinging too far one way, then another. What is needed to correct the problem, they say, is to strike the right balance. Just dial it back a bit.

Socialists have good reason to be wary of the narrative of pendulums and striking balances. Not only does the logic of balance invariably cast left politics as the pendulum swinging too far; it also fails to explain anything. It’s the analytical equivalent of a shrug. It says humans will always tend to go too far with things and that’s just the way things go. It doesn’t tell us anything at all about why something has happened, who drove it, or whose interests it served.

In place of this, socialists can offer a materialist explanation: the explosion of NGOs, legalism, and NIMBY blockages to development — and the extra-democratic politics that this ecosystem embraces — is itself the product of the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and ’80s. They represent the shift toward a technocratic, highly undemocratic form of governance that cedes power to unaccountable bureaucracies.

This materialist, socialist explanation of post-1970s stagnation must begin with a brief recounting of the Left’s own critique of bureaucracy.³⁰ The socialist defense of the public sector is not a defense of government per se but rather a defense of self-governance — that is, of democracy. If Enlightenment liberalism was right to critique the unaccountable power of kings, lords, and bishops, then it follows that the unaccountability and domination exercised by capitalists — or, more accurately, by markets — must be subject to the same critique. When a capitalist decides that a certain good or service will or will not be produced, they are commanded to do so by the imperative of profitability, a commandment no less unaccountable than that of a king or a queen, even if the entity that issues the order is unconscious and amoral.

If not by unaccountable commandment, then the only viable alternative for deciding what is to be done — what is to be produced and how — is collective deliberation and voting. This requires allocating tasks to individuals (elected representatives and civil servants) to carry out the mandate of the majority.

But if capitalist power (that is, private enterprise) is inherently unaccountable, it does not follow that state power is as well. The most obvious case of unaccountable state power is a state-owned enterprise under an authoritarian regime. Unaccountable market coordination has merely been replaced by unaccountable coordination by the ruling party, little different from domination by feudal lords.

This latter phenomenon is precisely why socialists dating back to the 1920s and ’30s — figures such as Leon Trotsky, Yvan Craipeau, Lucien Laurat, and Hugo Urbahns — were among the first to develop theories of bureaucracy to explain the horrors of Stalin’s USSR. While their analyses differed, they broadly shared a materialist argument: that a bureaucratic elite can arise when cut off from mechanisms of accountability and will, over time, develop interests of its own.

This theoretical analysis of Soviet bureaucracy would go on to inform broader socialist critiques of bureaucracy. By the 1970s, the Left had developed internal critiques of both welfare state and trade union bureaucracies — critiques that owed a great deal to these earlier attempts to theorize Stalinism. In both cases, even though Western welfare states and trade unions were democratic, institutional arrangements arose that increasingly sheltered actors within them from accountability. These actors in turn began to act in their own interests, distinct from any mandate they had been given.

Today the Left tradition of anti-bureaucratic critique can be extended further. It applies just as well to the contemporary ecosystem of NGOs, academics, lawyers, and property-owning NIMBYs who can apply the brakes to production and abundance. This ecosystem functions as a social group, operating largely outside of democratic control, in its own self-interest, and often at odds with the general good.

The neoliberal revolution did not just break the strength of trade unions. It also empowered new bureaucratic organizations, sending many left-liberal intellectuals scurrying away from organized labor, where they had been based for decades, and off into sinecures in the newly emerging NGO as well as in academia and law.³¹ These other social locations lack the explicit mechanisms of democratic accountability and the daily proximity to production that unions and labor parties maintain. They are cut off not only from workers themselves but also from the tacit and formal knowledge workers possess about how production actually functions.

This is how, for example, a green climate NGO can believe that an electricity grid entirely dependent on variable renewable energy sources is viable (the slogan “100% renewables”), while any union member in the energy sector could quickly explain how such a system would fall apart.³² (As it happens, Klein and Thompson are themselves much too optimistic about renewable energy — a trait common to many journalists and other knowledge workers like them.)³³ It’s also how a once reasonable critique articulated by left-wing academics and development NGOs of how postwar foreign aid was tied up in neocolonial and Cold War imperatives transmogrified into an anti-modernist critique of development tout court.³⁴ Ironically, this turn can be just as neocolonial and condescending in its indifference to the actual desires and aspirations of people in the Global South.³⁵

In the case of the public developer TVA, the group that’s spent decades as its leading antagonist, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, has been headed by the same executive director for over thirty years.³⁶ When one of us asked whether his organization has any democratic means by which members could change its opposition to nuclear development at the TVA, the answer was simple: no.³⁷ Maybe the regional billionaire whose foundation funds their work doesn’t approve.³⁸

New York presents another example. As one of us recently reported for Jacobin, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a groundbreaking initiative of public abundance: the state’s public power authority would lead the development of a new nuclear plant to boldly go where capitalists are not.³⁹ Unfortunately, the state’s environmental NGOs are nearly unanimously opposed to the prospect of new nuclear power. Even the Public Power NY coalition that unites NGOs and the Democratic Socialists of America won’t get behind the project, despite its vociferous backing from the state’s industrial labor unions. The NGOs’ hostility to nuclear power is too strong.

Like any unaccountable bureaucracy, NGOs can begin to operate in their own self-interest. That does not always happen, but often enough the survival and growth of the organization becomes its primary purpose. What is to be done when the original aims of an NGO are all met? Tie up the organization and lay off all those thousands of staff members and executives? Of course not. New missions are invented.

The pivot toward adversarial legalism in the 1970s can also be said to be a product of the neoliberal revolution’s successful breaking of the power of mass organization — not just trade unions but all forms of mass politics.⁴⁰ In a world where mass mobilization had become far less feasible, it made sense for liberalism to shift from trying to win popular electoral mandates to winning legal victories. But over the long term, this extra-democratic strategy undermines public faith in government itself. Voters are not wrong to ask, “But wait, who voted for this?”

This left critique of bureaucracy, wherever it emerges, does not replace the left critique of private power; it complements it. The origin of critique is the same for both: democratic opposition to unaccountability that inevitably results in domination.

At the same time, we cannot place all of the blame on the unaccountable, freelance bureaucracy of the Groups. Nuclear power is often held up, as in the aforementioned case of the TVA, as a representational example of how NGOs successfully block abundance.⁴¹ It’s true that antinuclear campaigns have contributed to stalled deployment of this ultra-low-carbon, energy-dense source of electricity. But that’s only part of the story. The primary obstacle, as Vaheesan’s critical review identifies, is market failure: the enormous up-front costs of nuclear infrastructure make firms nervous about the long-term risks. It is thus fairer to say that it is neoliberal privatization and deregulation of the electricity sector — not just NGOs — that explain the slowdown of nuclear deployment in the 1980s.⁴²

Those of us who have long worked in climate, clean energy, and extraction — who come from the Left and remain connected to industrial labor — can tell you plainly: it’s both unaccountable markets and an unaccountable NGO-academia-legal bureaucratic class that are stalling public progress. In some cases one pathology dominates, and in others the reverse. Usually, it’s some combination of the two. Either way, the result is dysfunction and stagnation.

Any serious left program has to tackle both problems. A muscular, social democratic program of build-it-now abundance — one that tackles market and bureaucratic obstruction alike — is the only real inoculation we have against global Trumpism.

Apart from the endorsement of Marx’s fettering thesis near the end of the book, Abundance is clearly not a socialist text. It is a manifesto for a broad tent of liberals and centrists, aimed in part at what the authors call “the pathologies of the broad left.” We share concern about these pathologies but argue the solution is not a retreat from the left — it is, if anything, a more full-throated socialist politics. Here we can reassert some of those fundamental socialist arguments.

First, socialists understand that the main barrier to abundance is not bottlenecks or the Groups but capitalism. Supply-side liberalism can sometimes rely on a naive neoclassical assumption: supply goes up, price goes down, and voilà — abundance! But this theory ignores the fact that there are very powerful class forces with vested interests in maintaining artificial scarcity of key goods to maintain their profits. Landlords and real estate developers, for example, do not have an interest in an abundance of housing because it would collapse the price of the commodity they wish to sell for a profit. The history of energy is likewise a history of cartels — from the Seven Sisters to OPEC — whose prime goal is withholding supply to maintain prices, rents, and profits for owners.⁴³ And these are only the class interests in the sectors covered by Klein and Thompson, not the larger political economy that, as Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway note, “has too much riding on a perpetual rise in the value of financial assets.”⁴⁴

Second, given this reality, achieving abundance requires confronting the power of these vested class interests. In other words, abundance requires class struggle. Many have argued the abundance agenda lacks a theory of power — so much so that Ezra Klein attempted to clarify that theory elsewhere.⁴⁵ A serious theory of power demands class struggle to tax the wealthy, break elite resistance, and reclaim resources to fund an abundance agenda for the public good. (It is painful to write this at a time when US tax policy is going in precisely the opposite direction.) And this same class struggle also must confront unaccountable power wherever it manifests, which can sometimes mean taking on the unelected freelance bureaucracy of the liberal-left NGOs funded by billionaire foundations, not solely tackling the democratic illegitimacy of corporations.

Third, a theory of power must include a plausible social force capable of and with an interest in shifting the balance of power. For socialists, of course, that force is the working class — about whom Klein and Thompson have very little to say, even as this class drifts toward Trump in the United States and toward the populist right the world over.⁴⁶ The closest thing to an abundance society is arguably the Nordic model: plentiful, socialized housing, cheap public electricity, and effective and inventive public bureaucracies.⁴⁷ These gains are not accidental. They rest on the power of trade unions and the historical legacy of labor and social democratic political parties.

Fourth, and finally, we insist that it is not only that the abundance agenda needs socialism; socialism also needs abundance. There is a current on the Left, often associated with the degrowth movement, that is convinced that there is already more than enough wealth in the world — indeed, there is too much! — and so all we need is redistribution of that profuse wealth.⁴⁸ Redistribution is of course necessary, for all the reasons socialists have always insisted. It is a moral abomination that Jeff Bezos can “rent” Venice for a wedding.⁴⁹ But we also must confront material reality: humanity simply hasn’t yet produced enough core goods for everyone to have a good life even if we expropriate every billionaire. The fact is that roughly eight hundred million people still lack access to electricity, and even more lack basic access to potable water and sanitation services.⁵⁰ If socialism means anything, it means the abolition of poverty for all of humanity — and that cannot happen simply by moving numbers around. It requires building basic infrastructure: electricity grids, sewage treatment plants, high-speed rail, hospitals, and schools.

The barrier to this kind of liberalism that builds in the Global South, or indeed anywhere, remains capital’s inability to produce something if it isn’t sufficiently profitable. And we must also reckon with global finance, whose stranglehold on poor nations’ budgets limits even the most modest investment plans. One might say that socialists — provided we are serious about industrial policy, public sector innovation, and democratic planning — ironically make better builders of capitalism’s promised abundance than capitalists themselves.

For over a century, socialists of every stripe — from Bolsheviks and Spanish anarchists in the 1930s to the right wing of postwar social democracy — understood how capitalism irrationally limited production. The anarchists planned to take over the mines, not shut them down. Sylvia Pankhurst, the Suffragette and left communist, wrote in the Workers’ Dreadnought newspaper in 1923 that production and consumption are “artificially checked” by private ownership. She complained that land usable for agriculture was instead kept as deer forests for the pleasure of wealthy hunters and that capitalists diverted funds to more profitable but less socially useful ends. In a line that could be ripped from any contemporary flame war on X between YIMBYs and NIMBYs over homeowners arguing for the need to protect green space to protest the construction of apartments nearby that might shade their view and thereby lower property values, Pankhurst writes, “Country landowners refuse to build cottages on their estates in order to preserve their own privacy.”⁵¹

We applaud Klein and Thompson’s advocacy of a liberalism that builds through effective capacity. But they underplay the extent to which capitalism and class power will prevent their agenda from yielding the political fruit they envision. Ironically, as we were writing this, an explicitly socialist abundance agenda just won a major victory in the mayoral election in America’s largest city.

During the primary, Zohran Mamdani called for an “abundance for the 99 percent,” pledging to deliver free buses, childcare, and more abundant public housing for New Yorkers.⁵² It appears a real test of democratic socialist abundance has come sooner than expected.⁵³ The lesson of Abundance is that the constraints on delivering such public goods may not come solely from the Right. They are just as likely to come from inside the left-liberal coalition itself.

Empirical analyses of SDT are few and inconclusive. Existing studies focus in the main on the redistributive policies of different governments. At least part of the intuitive support for SDT derives from the failure of governments elected with radical programs in the 1970s and ’80s (e.g., Salvador Allende’s in Chile, Michael Manley’s in Jamaica, and François Mitterrand’s first government in France). Yet contrary to the received view, it is unclear that these historical episodes confirm the validity of SDT.

First, the limiting cases of governments with vast reform programs implemented in a short period of time might at most provide insights into and qualify the weak version of SDT. Second, and perhaps more important, while these historical episodes at best prove the failure of radical attempts to transform capitalist economies, they hardly validate the specific mechanism highlighted by SDT. These experiments have been heavily influenced by Cold War dynamics that are only indirectly related to the economic logic of SDT. Remarkably, using a newly digitized dataset of stock market prices, a recent empirical paper by Daniele Girardi has shown that the ambitious pro-labor program implemented by the left coalition after the 1981 electoral victory in France produced no negative effect on aggregate private business investment, which continued to move in line with other industrialized economies in 1981–83.¹⁰

According to Adam Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein, such empirical analyses of SDT are uninformative because they “cannot speak to the issue of limits and possibilities.” On the one hand, the issue of possibilities “cannot be determined on the basis of limited historical experience.” What happened in a handful of historical episodes may be fully determined by the specific conditions in which individual countries found themselves at a given time and may well tell us nothing about the general mechanisms at play in capitalist economies. On the other hand, even if they were to focus on less radical (and therefore more frequently observed) attempts to redistribute income in favor of labor, studies on the differences in policies across governments would not prove much about “the existence of structural constraints that bind all governments,” as “we cannot know whether the observed differences exhaust the realm of possibility.”¹¹ In other words, we can observe actual choices made by governments, but we do not know whether such choices were forced by the structural constraints of capital or whether alternative options existed that would have had better outcomes. Is the failure of an attempt to redistribute income the product of mistakes, or is failure inevitable due to the inexorable logic of capital?¹²

These concerns about the empirical tests of SDT are cogent. Trying to test between actual and possible choices generally involves counterfactual statements about what could have been done, and these are notoriously difficult to pin down. Yet to move from these problems to advocating a purely theoretical analysis of SDT by constructing “a formal model with which the internal logic of the theory can be explored” is both doubtful and unwarranted.¹³ It is doubtful because, while SDT is a theoretical construct to explain the empirical world, Przeworski and Wallerstein’s claim suggests that it cannot be subjected to empirical scrutiny. Taken literally, this claim would place SDT in the realm of metaphysics: a transcendent truth that cannot be empirically falsified. It is unwarranted because the examination of isolated historical episodes and of government choices does not exhaust the content of possible empirical tests. Indeed, although limiting cases of radical redistributive policies are interesting, it is the “more routine political-economic interactions that serve as a crucial test of the generalized form of [SDT].”¹⁴

We argue that to properly appraise SDT, one should focus on the set of economic claims concerning the feasible distributive outcomes within a capitalist economy. Is income distribution tightly constrained? Is there a steep distributive trade-off? Can the profit squeeze dynamics be observed? What are their characteristics? In other words, rather than looking at the choices made by actors in the economy and trying to determine, counterfactually, whether alternative choices were available to them that could have led to different outcomes, we suggest looking at the outcomes themselves. In a given historical conjuncture a government may make a mistake. In a certain situation the labor movement may adopt the wrong strategy to obtain substantial distributive gains for the working class. However, over a sufficiently long period of time, it should be possible to observe ex post the effects of the structural dependence of labor upon capital on income distribution without ascertaining the full set of choices available ex ante to economic actors at any given point in time. For if SDT is correct and relevant, then any attempts to redistribute income should only yield temporary, short-run effects, and the range of income distributions attainable in capitalist economies should be narrowly circumscribed, especially in the long run.

We implemented this approach in a 2021 study focusing on UK data from 1892 to 2018.¹⁵ The analysis casts doubt on SDT: income shares are much more variable in the long run than SDT suggests, and class struggle and the power resources available to social classes are among the key determinants of distributive outcomes.

The UK data, however, do not allow one to unpack the wage share, which is defined as the ratio of employee compensation to national income. This notion of wage share encompasses all employees: the statistical definition of employee compensation includes the labor income of the highest-paid executives on the same basis as the labor income of the lowest-paid unskilled worker.

This is a major limitation, because it may be objected that SDT concerns the wage share as a class share. For example, Przeworski’s formulation of SDT focuses on the working class narrowly defined as “manual wage-earners employed in mining, manufacturing, construction, transport, and agriculture, persons retired from such occupations, and inactive adult members of their households.”¹⁶ Granting that this is a very restrictive definition of the working class, it is hard to deny that, in general, a notion of wage share that includes CEOs and top management is highly inaccurate if one wants to capture income distribution from the viewpoint of class analysis.

But this data limitation is also problematic more specifically if one wants to test the economic logic of SDT. To see this, suppose the wage share (defined to include all employee compensation) increases as a consequence of a surge in the compensation of firm managers. It is rather unclear that this would activate a profit squeeze mechanism of the kind postulated by SDT, let alone an investment strike.

In this paper we extend, and improve on, our 2021 analysis by focusing on US data, which allow us to unpack the wage share and identify a closer proxy of the share of income that goes to the working class. Two issues are of considerable interest in evaluating SDT and its widespread popularity in academia and policy circles as well as in wider debates: first, whether there has in fact empirically been a profit squeeze mechanism of the sort postulated in the literature; and second, the behavior (and determinants) of the long-run income distribution.

There are many ways of formalizing the economic mechanism at the core of SDT by considering specific causal links between the variables. However, we do not wish to analyze a specific version of SDT, and so we keep our analysis at a general level. We focus first on the simplest possible two-class model and assume that the wage share accurately measures the share of national income that goes to the working class, while the rest goes to the capitalist class in the form of profits. (We discuss the complications arising from unpacking the wage share below.)

In order to capture the logic of SDT, we focus on just two variables: the aggregate wage share and the aggregate employment rate. We can map movements of these variables in terms of class-struggle outcomes. The working class benefits when the wage share rises (because of more income) and when the employment rate rises (because employment is better than unemployment, and more employment strengthens the working class). Conversely, capital benefits when the profit share rises (i.e., the wage share falls) and when unemployment rises (i.e., the employment rate falls, weakening the working class). These two variables lie at the core of the profit squeeze mechanism postulated by SDT, and their link can be described based on the model developed more than fifty years ago by the economist Richard Goodwin. Goodwin noted that the structure of the argument was similar to one put forward by Karl Marx a hundred years earlier and formalized it using a well-known model in mathematical biology originally formulated by Alfred J. Lotka and Vito Volterra.¹⁷

Suppose that, perhaps by virtue of a tight labor market (a high employment rate), the labor movement manages to obtain a general increase in the wage rate. As wages rise, profitability falls. So capitalists cut back on investment and reduce their demand for workers. This puts downward pressure on the wage rate, which increases profitability. As profitability increases, capitalists invest more, which increases the demand for workers, putting upward pressure on the wage rate. And so it goes on in an endless cycle that, in a diagram with the employment rate on the vertical axis and the wage share on the horizontal axis, appears clockwise.¹⁸ Despite its abstract and stylized nature, we can use this basic cyclical model to formalize the key empirical questions of our analysis.

Consider a simple diagram with the wage share on the horizontal axis and the employment rate on the vertical axis. SDT postulates the existence of two possible scenarios. Either the economy is in equilibrium, with a stable income distribution that emerges from the inner functioning of the unfettered capitalist economy, or it gravitates tightly around that equilibrium in clockwise cycles. In both cases, the income distribution would be highly constrained. However, the economic mechanism underlying the relative stability of income shares would be rather different. As we argued in 2021, “The latter pattern would derive from attempts to redistribute income by trade unions or social democratic parties when in power; the former would emerge in the absence of such attempts (because for example of an awareness of their futility given SDT).”¹⁹

In summary, if SDT is correct and relevant, a connected scatter graph with the wage share on the horizontal axis and the employment rate on the vertical axis should depict a set of points closely clustered around the equilibrium — possibly with some clockwise cycles in the short run. How closely clustered should the income distribution be in order for the empirical evidence to validate SDT? Our analysis in the next section is largely descriptive, and therefore it is not possible to identify a statistically precise threshold of significance. However, we believe that the descriptive statistics we derive are sufficient to raise doubts about SDT and motivate our econometric analysis in section 4.

The data we use are more precisely defined in appendix B; here we give a brief overview.²⁰ The data describe the nonfarm private sector of the US economy; they are annual and cover the years 1948 to 2022. Because we focus on the class struggle discussed in the previous section, we consider the wage share and the employment rate. For the employment rate, we simply take the ratio of nonfarm private-sector employees to the total civilian labor force.²¹ The wage share is the ratio of wages to output (i.e., value added), where output is the sum of wages and all nonlabor incomes over the whole economy. Graphing a connected scatter of the wage share and the employment rate generates figure 1.

Based on figure 1, it is difficult to draw clear conclusions on SDT. On the one hand, the data ranges are quite wide on both axes, thus rejecting the hypothesis that the income distribution is tightly constrained. On the other hand, however, one might argue that much of the observed variation reflects either random deviations or perhaps short- to medium-run cyclical movements around a reasonably stable equilibrium.

But the wage share variable merits further consideration. For wages (or more properly, compensation of employees) is too broad a category, since it includes the wages of all employees, whether top corporate executives or the low-paid cleaners of their offices. We want a category that describes (or at least approaches the description of) the labor income of the working class. One way to do this is to focus on power relations, as capitalist production processes are typically organized in hierarchical and authoritarian structures. Within those structures, some predominantly supervise and others (most) are predominantly supervised. Using US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, we are able to empirically distinguish these two categories so that, combined with data from the US National Income and Product Accounts, our working-class wage share is the ratio of the wages of production and nonsupervisory employees to the sum of total wages and profits.²²

A first take on a working-class wage share in this manner, against the employment rate, generates a connected scatter shown as figure 2. It is striking how different figure 2 is from figure 1. Stripping out supervisory wages and focusing on the wages of production and nonsupervisory employees generates a connected scatter that may, at the same time, help explain the popularity of SDT, while calling into question its empirical validity.

First, there seems to be evidence that a profit squeeze mechanism of the sort postulated by SDT is indeed operating. Although two cycles are counterclockwise (1951–55 and 1971–75) and two periods display not even a hint of any cycle at all (1982–86 and 1991–2000), in the raw data displayed in figure 2, nine clockwise cycles of the kind described in section 2 can be identified.

Yet, second, it is implausible to interpret these as cycles around an equilibrium position. In no way are they centered on some average wage share and some average employment rate over time. Rather, they jump around through time and the patterns displayed are highly variable. The production and nonsupervisory employee (PNSE) wage share and employment rate do not display the stability that SDT requires, and this severely limits SDT’s explanatory efficacy — there is rather more going on than SDT allows.

In order to investigate this further, we consider each of our time series as a combination of trend and deviation from trend. Technically, we filter the data using a standard statistical procedure (the Hodrick–Prescott filter) to determine the trend, and the results are displayed as figure 3. Deviations are then determined simply by subtracting the raw data from the trend data for each year. Consider the following connected scatter plots of deviations from the trend, again with the employment rate on the vertical axis and the wage share on the horizontal axis.

We show one example of a clockwise cycle as figure 4. Of the nine identifiably clockwise cycles in the raw data, eight remain clockwise in terms of deviations from the trend, and the other (1959–62) displays no cycle at all in terms of deviations from the trend; in addition, one (1982–86) shows no cycle of any sort in the raw data but becomes a clockwise cycle in terms of deviations from the trend. So in deviations from the trend, nine out of eleven cycles display a clockwise shape, two counterclockwise, and two periods show no cycle at all. The cycles are more or less centered on a zero deviation from the trend. Again, this is tentative evidence for a sort of modified SDT in terms of cycles of deviations from the trend, but it is not strong evidence because it ignores long-run trends in income distribution.

The foregoing discussion of cycles as deviations from the trend suggests that the underlying long-run trend in income distribution can be shown as a connected scatter plot of the trend series. This is shown as figure 5. The trend employment rate rises for the whole period. The trend PNSE wage share is 59.7% in 1948, rises to a maximum of 60.2% in 1959, and then falls below its 1948 level by 1967. Indeed, it falls for the whole period from 1959. If a rising trend PNSE wage share is seen as an unambiguous working-class gain, the 1950s were the only post-1945 years in which this occurred (which might have something to do with the rose-hued nostalgia with which the years of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency are sometimes viewed). If one interprets trend values as a proxy for the equilibrium income distribution, a trend wage share ranging between 40% and 60% is prima facie inconsistent with SDT, which cannot explain the dynamics of the long-run political-economic equilibrium configuration of the United States.

The ratio of an average supervisory employee’s annual pay to an average production and nonsupervisory employee’s pay can provide more insight into this history. There is no trend in this ratio — and indeed little difference in average annual pay — through the postwar economic boom. In 1973, the ratio was 1.04, meaning that supervisors were only paid 4% more on average than production and nonsupervisory employees.²³ But from 1973, this changes, as shown in figure 6. From 1.04 in 1973, the ratio rises to 1.34 by the end of the 1970s. These were the years of stagflation and the intensification of class struggle with no clear outcome. But the rising income differentials were a foretaste of what was to come; by 1979, an average supervisory employee was paid a third more than an average production and nonsupervisory employee.

Everything began to change in the fall of 1979, with the Paul Volcker interest rate shock, the election in the UK of the Conservatives led by Margaret Thatcher, and the election of Ronald Reagan in the United States. Pay differentials began to increase more steeply, with the ratio peaking at almost 3 by 2007. These were the years of neoliberalism and continuing and sustained working-class defeat, culminating in the financial crisis of 2007–9. But the financial crisis was resolved through a bailout of Wall Street rather than Main Street, so there was no return to the greater equality of the pre-neoliberal era. After the shock of the financial crisis, the upward trend in the ratio continued, as figure 6 shows.

But in this context, averages are highly misleading because of the way income distribution is skewed toward the top. In the data used thus far, since the mid-1960s between 17% and 19% of private-sector nonfarm employees have supervisory functions, while between 81% and 83% do not.

In a broader study, considering all employees and using tax data, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have emphasized this skew.²⁴ Some of their results are collected in table 1.²⁵

Piketty and Saez divide the number of households (more technically, tax units) into one hundred percentiles, where P1 is the bottom one-hundreth of households, P0–90 is the bottom nine-tenths, P90–100 the top 10%, and P99–100 the top 1%. The top half of table 1 shows the total growth in real income over the twenty-five years of the so-called golden age of capitalism (1948–73), the years of transition (1973–79), the neoliberal era up to the financial crisis (1979–2007), and the post–financial crisis era (2007–22). The “golden age” saw a mild compression of income distribution, with the real average income of the top 1% growing much less than all other percentiles. This trend begins to reverse during the 1970s and then spectacularly so through the twenty-eight years of the neoliberal era. While for 90% of households, those twenty-eight years saw a feeble total of 3.7% growth in real income (real GDP growth was 130.4%), the experience of the top 10% was rather different. Within that 10%, the bottom half saw growth of 32.6%, P95–99 growth of 56.6%, and the top 1% growth of 194.7%. Clearly the top 1% did rather well. These trends continued in the post–financial crisis years, with average real income from 2007 to 2022 for 90% of households falling by 5.7%, but fractions of the top 10% experiencing positive growth, the more growth the higher up in this bracket.

The bottom half of table 1 shows average incomes in the top 10% relative to the average income of the bottom 90% of households. During the postwar boom and the years of transition, the top 1% received on average ten to twelve times the income of the bottom 90% of households. By 2007, it was 30.4 times, and by 2022, 35.1 times.²⁶ There has been much casual speculation about the underlying sources of right-wing populism in recent times. One thing is certain: the “left behind” constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and in the neoliberal era and the post–financial crisis years, they really have been left far, far behind. It is this historical experience that underlies the trend scatter plot of figure 5.

The empirical evidence presented in section 3 shows that there exists no equilibrium income distribution around which the economy tightly gravitates, contrary to SDT. The data show some short-run cycles of the kind predicted by SDT, which may explain its popularity, but the significant variability of the long-run income distribution is inconsistent with it.

Lacking an explanation of the source of long-term variability in the distribution of income, however, this evidence is only suggestive. If the long-run dynamics of the distributive shares were entirely or mostly driven by factors that were completely independent of class struggle, then one might defend a qualified version of SDT: the long-run distribution of income is not fixed, but its dynamics are exogenously determined so that any attempt to redistribute income generates a profit squeeze cycle around the (exogenously) moving trend.

Yet it is unclear that a convincing explanation of the long-run distribution of income based on purely exogenous factors can be provided. While economists sometimes adopt the fictional assumption of exogenous changes in institutions, technology, demographics, and culture, these are hardly independent of class struggle. Changes in the institutional and legislative framework, the cultural and education system, and the basic structural features of the economy, including long-term trends in technological progress and labor supply, skills, and so on, are hardly independent of distributive conflict and government policy.²⁷ There is robust historical evidence that political actors intentionally act to modify the structural and institutional features of the economy in order to change the balance of power between classes.²⁸ Indeed, Tali Kristal shows empirically that class conflict, power, and institutions matter, even when controlling for technical change, research and development, and productivity.²⁹

In order to provide further evidence against SDT, however, in this section we directly analyze the relation between the long-run distribution of income and the power resources at the disposal of the working class. If SDT were correct, then a stronger working class would be unable to reap anything more than temporary gains at the bargaining table.

Capitalism is based on labor-market transactions between those who sell their ability to work and those who possess (either by ownership or through loan contracts) the nonlabor means of production. In principle, these are individualized contracts. But those in possession of the means of production have a common interest in defending their property rights, whereas those in possession of nothing except their ability to work have only the commonality of that possession. This at least potentially pits each worker against the other in the competition for jobs.

Consequently, in parallel with the formation of an industrial urbanized working class, the growth of trade unions was motivated by the realization that only some sort of collective organization could wield a significant countervailing power to capital. That countervailing power is measured by trade union density — the proportion of total employment that is unionized. For particular struggles, the density in the particular industry will be important, but for the economy as a whole, overall union density gives some indication of actual or potential working-class power. Union density measures the power resources possessed by the working class, and if SDT is correct and relevant, there should be no long-term relation between union density and distributive shares.³⁰

We test whether there exists a relation between the wage shares of supervisory and nonsupervisory employees, the employment rate, and trade union density in the United States since the mid-twentieth century. In the profit squeeze mechanism described in section 2, economic activity plays a key role in linking distribution (the wage share of the working class) and the employment rate: when the share of income going to the working class increases, capitalists reduce economic activity, which eventually affects the employment rate. Therefore, in our analysis, we also include the logarithm of net domestic product (NDP) attributable to business.³¹ Our annual data (described in appendix B) comprise seventy-five yearly observations, from 1948 to 2022.

Figures 7a and 7b display the long-run picture of the five variables in the United States.³² The employment rate displays a clear cyclical movement along a mildly increasing trend. Union density and the two wage shares have the same qualitative dynamics: they remain reasonably constant during the first three decades of the postwar period and then experience marked trends either upward (the wage share of supervisory employees) or downward (union density and the wage share of nonsupervisory employees). As noted in section 3, focusing on the wage share for all employees is rather misleading, as its constancy hides the more significant movements within the set of employees. The main stylized fact is arguably the large gains of supervisory employees — whose interests coincide or at least align with those of the capitalist class — at the expense of the working class, something that cannot be detected by focusing only on the profit share.

Figures 7a and 7b suggest that union density is negatively correlated with the wage share of supervisory employees and positively correlated with that of the working class, as expected. Eyeballing the diagrams, however, will only get us so far. Moreover, we are not generically interested in the relation between the variables; as argued in sections 3 and 4, in order to test SDT, we need to examine the long-run relation between union density and distributive shares. To this end, we need to use econometric techniques.³³

To present the results, we use impulse response functions (IRFs). These are used to describe how the system’s variables react over time to external shocks or impulses using our preferred model specification. They show the estimated reaction of each variable to a onetime shock in one of the variables, providing a time path of the effects that helps in understanding the short- and long-term dynamics within the system and captures the interdependencies and feedback loops between variables. IRFs help visualize how deviations from long-run equilibrium are corrected over time. In figure 8, we shock the union density variable and look at the estimated response of the wage shares, the employment rate, and the log of the NDP, holding everything else constant for a time lag that goes from one to ten years.

Figure 8 shows a positive and permanent effect on the wage share of the working class (top-right panel) and a negative and permanent effect on the wage share of the supervisory class (bottom-left panel). The effect on employment is negative, but with some delay (top-left panel), while union density seems to have no effect on economic activity (bottom-right panel). This is consistent with our description of union density as being a power resource of the working class: union density and the working-class wage share move together, so that as density declines, so does the working-class wage share. Correspondingly, the supervisory wage share rises.

The structural dependence thesis is widely held, and it provides theoretical foundations to the capitulatory posture of much of the Left. While it is certainly true that not all income distributions are feasible within a capitalist economy, our results raise significant doubts about the economic mechanism that lies at the foundation of the strong version of SDT. We find a long-run correlation between the wage share and union density, and we interpret this as evidence that the strong version of SDT offers no explanation of long-run trends in income distribution. This matters because those long-run trends have been of dramatic importance. While it might seem paradoxical to rest our critique of the strong version of SDT on the long-run defeat of the US working class and its association with collapsing union density, that association nevertheless points a way forward for progressive struggles.

Our evidence supports the view that the history of the US economy is a history of class struggle, determined by the power resources that each class has at its disposal. Even when class struggle has limited effects in the short run, the long-run distribution of income is not cast in stone, and the balance of power between the two classes — including the power resources at the disposal of capitalists, primarily their control over investment and pricing (which we have not explicitly considered in this paper) — has a major impact. Of course, we do not choose our immediate circumstances and the constraints they carry, but the future course of class struggle is always open and not predetermined.

Indeed, we can interpret the period under consideration as one characterized by major shifts in the power resources at the disposal of the two classes, consistent with our econometric analysis. For the United States, in broad-brush terms, the Great Depression and subsequent war destroyed the power of finance and led to an accommodation between industrial capital and the unions representing the working class. That accommodation, against the background of a recast postwar international order under US tutelage, was very successful and has come to be characterized as the golden age of capitalism. But it began to break down in the mid-1960s. Japan and Germany, among other European economies, had recovered from postwar impoverishment, and the international economic order was under increasing strain. This was then exacerbated by borrowing (necessary in the absence of extra taxation) to finance both the reforms coming out of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. This had two effects. First, currency crises forced the US abandonment of the system of fixed exchange rates against the dollar, with the US dollar linked to gold. And second, offshore dollar accounts (facilitated through the City of London) became much more important as dollar-holders sought to insulate themselves from the domestic controls of the US Federal Reserve System. Finance, that is, was seeking a comeback.

The 1970s were an era of instability, characterized by high levels of unemployment and inflation relative to the postwar boom. Industrial capital wanted low interest rates and high levels of aggregate demand to support profitability, whereas finance wanted high rates of interest above all to resist the ravages of inflation on bond portfolios. The stalemate of stagflation that then ensued undermined the ideology of social democracy and in so doing began to undermine the alliance between organized labor and industrial capital. Finance became stronger and launched its coup in the fall of 1979 with the Volcker shock. In short order, Reagan began his term in 1981 with the destruction of the air traffic controllers’ union, and Thatcher in the UK began laying the groundwork for a raft of anti-union legislation and the mid-’80s destruction of the National Union of Mineworkers; that is, industrial capital lined up with Wall Street and ushered in the era of neoliberalism, whose effects on income distribution we have described above.

While the economic logic of capitalism constrains the set of feasible income distributions, the boundaries of the feasible are much wider than is commonly assumed. The last four decades have witnessed a major shift in the balance of power against the working class, which has experienced a decline in the power resources at its disposal — first and foremost, its collective force — while the power resources of the capitalist class have increased, thanks to the elimination of restrictions in the movement of capital across borders, the weakening of antitrust legislation, and so on. But none of this is cast in stone. There is no iron law of distribution that makes class struggle and activism redundant. The actual history of capitalism and class struggle is more complex and underdetermined than the strong version of SDT suggests.

Yet if socialist and social democratic parties and the labor movement more generally want to improve the conditions of the working class and reverse the current trends in distribution, they must shift the focus of their action back to measures that fundamentally alter the balance of power between classes. In other words, campaigns for more progressive taxation and other redistributive measures must be combined with strategic thinking about the long term and how to create the (power-based) conditions for a major, permanent shift in the distribution of income between classes. This does not mean a return to the social democracy of the golden age of capitalism; conditions today are very different. Rather, it entails rebuilding a collectivism for our era, without which a working-class revival will not be possible. The future remains open, and it is not predetermined by any strong version of SDT.

In November 2019, after 580 days behind bars, Lula was released from prison. He had been jailed on feeble grounds as part of a larger judicial effort known as Operation Car Wash, which, in the name of fighting corruption, was found to have violated key constitutional precepts. Lula had maintained his innocence of any wrongdoing as an international solidarity campaign galvanized progressives the world over. Suddenly the Brazilian left had its most effective spokesman charging back into the fray as the country withered under Bolsonaro’s implacable and incompetent reactionary leadership. Lula asserted that he left prison further to the left than when he went in, suggesting that he would be stepping up his rhetoric against the entrenched conservative forces in the media, finance, and government that laid the groundwork for Bolsonaro’s ascension.⁵

In March 2021, when the Federal Supreme Court ruled that Lula could run for office in 2022, markets panicked. His renewed political eligibility “sent stocks and the currency cratering, deepening some of the worst performances [that] year,” Bloomberg reported.⁶ Investors told Reuters that “the prospect of Bolsonaro running against Lula pits two ‘populist’ candidates against each other, hollowing out the center ground, which is more fertile for the economic reforms Brazil desperately needs.”⁷ Such hand-wringing ignored the obvious differences between the incumbent and the would-be challenger who unsuccessfully ran for president three times before finally breaking through in 2002. Indeed, two years into Bolsonaro’s disastrous term, even center-right figures noted Lula’s ability to build bridges, a dig at Bolsonaro’s inability to do so. As in 2002, when Lula promised a plausible social democratic alternative to the deprivations of neoliberalism, there appeared an opening for his singular appeal.

In a speech at the metalworkers’ union headquarters in São Bernardo do Campo where Lula’s public life began, he struck a conciliatory tone. Making clear he intended to seek the presidency once again, he emphasized the need for common sense and basic governing skills. “It is always important to reiterate whenever you can,” he declared, “the planet is round . . . and Bolsonaro doesn’t know it.”⁸ He outlined all the steps he would have taken had he been in office when the pandemic struck, each measure more sensible than the last. When asked about the notion of a broad front against Bolsonaro, Lula made a familial analogy: “Anyone who sits at a dinner table with five children and sees them fighting over one more steak and has to compromise to make them happy knows that there is no difficulty in building an alliance when the time comes.” Widespread political support would follow, he argued, “if we have the ability to talk to other political forces that are not on the left end of the spectrum. Is it possible? It is.”⁹

Soon an electoral strategy came into view: Lula would not be running as a leftist firebrand but as a consensus builder staking out a broad swathe of the electorate from the center-right to the far left. It is unclear whether any other political figure in the broad progressive camp could plausibly pull this off. But Lula, who combined hard-fought credibility among the poor and working class with a record of responsible, market-friendly governance, seemed well positioned to assemble an eclectic coalition as Bolsonaro lurched from crisis to crisis and torched Brazil’s international standing. Both the then speaker of the house, elected to his influential position with Bolsonaro’s support, and the previous one, a center-right figure whose party had hinted it might endorse Bolsonaro in 2022, signaled an openness to Lula’s rehabilitation.¹⁰ Whatever one thought of his political views, Lula was an eminently reasonable figure compared to Bolsonaro.

As the 2022 race got underway, Lula placed defending democracy — rather than radical redistribution — at the center of his campaign. In the face of Bolsonaro’s frequent anti-institutional outbursts, rank homophobia, and obscurantism, Lula sought to position himself as a unifier, capable of transcending traditional partisan divides in the name of a democratic system less than forty years old. The centerpiece of this strategy was the choice of his running mate, former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin. A deeply conservative Catholic, Alckmin had sought the presidency twice before as a member of the PSDB, facing off with Lula in the 2006 runoff. In 2017, as Lula contemplated a presidential run before being arrested, Alckmin accused the former president of wanting “to return to the scene of the crime.”¹¹ Now, with Alckmin switching to the Brazilian Socialist Party, they found themselves on the same side. This arrangement was the product of discreet machinations of Lula allies in the PT and beyond and became Exhibit A in the case that he could work productively outside his ideological silo.¹²

Alckmin, by all accounts, abhorred Bolsonaro and wanted badly to associate himself with his most plausible challenger. His presence on the ticket likely also helped other, decidedly nonleftist figures make their way to endorsing Lula. After it became clear that Lula and Bolsonaro would face each other in a runoff, the former president assembled the largest partisan coalition of his career; eleven parties backed him to Bolsonaro’s five. The framing of the race as a binary choice between democracy and authoritarianism become even clearer in the second round and resonated with the country’s political center and center right, not just the Left. With time, the PT could point to a wide range of prominent political actors who one by one set aside their past animosity toward Lula to support him against Bolsonaro. “There are many people who were never part of the PT and who participated in my government. And that is how it will be,” Lula asserted. “It will not be a PT government; it will be a government of the Brazilian people.”¹³

But Lula’s appeal was not merely popular. He recognized the need to placate powerful constituencies linked, for example, to the country’s highly capitalized agricultural sector — a pillar of Bolsonaro’s well-organized and deeply funded support — and the virulently reactionary Evangelical faith leaders who hold enormous sway in a nation where Catholic influence is on the wane. During the campaign, Alckmin served as Lula’s personal liaison to Big Ag, which has always distrusted Lula’s decades-long ties to the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), while Lula himself expressed an eagerness to win the support of conservative Christians by highlighting his own traditionalist views on issues like abortion and legalizing drugs.¹⁴ Other than generic references to the need for depoliticization, Lula had relatively little to say about the armed forces, empowered politically by Bolsonaro like no president in several decades. Lula made clear that he would not be out for revenge against members of the military brass who flouted convention by cozying up to his political rival. Naturally, not everyone was won over. As André Singer observed, “The layer of the ruling class that acts as the central nervous system of the Brazilian bourgeoisie — and whose interests (in banking, manufacturing, heavy industry, culture) are most directly related to the nucleus of global capitalism, especially through financial intermediation — was reluctant until the very last to join Lula’s cross-section of supporters.”¹⁵ Bolsonaro managed to maintain considerable support from both elite and grassroots sectors, but Lula’s electoral coalition proved larger and more diverse.

That heterogeneity carried the seeds of future dilemmas. How hard would Lula push on the issues that most animated his longtime base of support given the eagerness with which he accepted the backing of more conservative actors? Was he setting himself up for an inevitable betrayal of at least one part of his coalition? Would it really be possible, for example, to reconcile the urgency of a robust ecological agenda with the economic imperatives of large-scale agricultural production? Furthermore, as one columnist put it at the time, “The broad front in the second round was so large that it will be impossible for Lula (or any PT candidate) to repeat the feat. In an electoral context, the PT believes that people will be led to conclude that support for Lula has melted away in four years.”¹⁶ These are debates the party entertained but rightfully put to bed almost immediately. After all, given the stakes of the election, the priority was winning. The party could wrestle later with the messy implications of precisely how it had won.

“It is time to put down the arms we never should have picked up,” Lula said on election night once it became clear victory was his. He insisted that “Brazil is back” and promised to “work tirelessly for a Brazil where love prevails over hate, truth over lies, and hope is bigger than fear.”¹⁷ As the traditional jockeying over cabinet nominations and other federal appointments began, it was too soon to wonder how Lula might maintain the support of individuals with widely varying ideologies over the next four years when the central narrative of defending democracy inevitably waned in importance. It was easy to imagine that things had more or less returned to normal concerning politics.

By treating the dawn of a new Lula administration as essentially the same as previous terms — with positions routinely doled out to various allied parties in rough proportion to their representation in Congress — the government missed an opportunity to impress upon the new political landscape a point that had been made incessantly during the campaign — namely, that this perilous moment for Brazilian institutions required pro-democracy parties to act in concert rather than as individual agglomerations with distinct motivations. In hindsight, Lula should have created a concrete structure around the broad front, “with personalities, with an address, with positions of support for the government, with proposals and criticisms. With the face of a broad front. Like the parties have.”¹⁸ So argued Dirceu, perhaps the most important strategic thinker in the PT’s history, in July 2024. The failure to institutionalize the broad front meant that the PT lost its hold on the coalition narrative it had managed to construct in 2022. Critical support was often forthcoming from centrist forces in Congress, but the optics of the third Lula term quickly devolved into PT actors negotiating with everyone else in service of Lula’s agenda. The broad front became a relic of the last campaign rather than a fixture of the new conjuncture characterized by an enduring threat from the far right.

To be fair, such machinations seemed unnecessary early on, as political developments seemed to assemble leaders in a pro-democracy direction organically. During his campaign, Lula had argued that the country needed cooler heads in power; the week after his inauguration made clear that a significant segment of the country rejected reconciliation. On January 8, 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration, Bolsonaro supporters staged an insurrection in Brasília, drawing instant comparisons to the US Capitol invasion by Donald Trump supporters two years prior. Enraged by Bolsonaro’s defeat, rioters clad in the national colors stormed key government buildings and did millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Proving the point of Lula’s victorious campaign, the attack revealed a long-standing authoritarian streak in Brazilian politics that contested not just a failed election or presidential bid but democracy itself.

Lula responded forcefully, denouncing the rioters as “fascists” and invoking federal intervention to restore order and investigate security lapses.¹⁹ Many prominent Bolsonaro supporters decried the violence even as they accused the government of overreaching with mass arrests. Nevertheless, Lula seemed invigorated by the challenge. His righteous indignation was on full display in the days that followed as his administration pushed forward with an aggressive legalistic response to defend Brazil’s democratic institutions. International leaders, including US president Joe Biden and French president Emmanuel Macron, rallied behind Lula, celebrating the country’s democratic resilience. While deeply unsettling, the moment underscored the far right’s challenge to Brazil’s democratic framework, with Lula positioning himself as a defender of democracy against its dogged enemies. The lack of unity and clear direction among Bolsonaro’s supporters post-riot reflected the political disarray on the Right, which promised to strengthen the president’s ability to respond to future threats against democracy.

But the salience of January 8 has ebbed with time. Lula’s government has had notable successes, including passing a simplification of the country’s arcane tax code and presiding over both the largest post-pandemic real wage increases among major economies and some of the lowest unemployment rates on record.²⁰ Yet inflation remains stubbornly high, which has led to a drop in Lula’s approval rating steeper than any he had previously experienced in office. Diagnoses abound for this turn of events. Some point simply to the incumbent fatigue afflicting leaders all over the world. Like Joe Biden, for example, Lula is an aging longtime politician struggling to adapt to a new political media ecosystem, and his positive economic story is not translating into robust popular support.

Others, from differing angles, fault Lula’s handling of the critically important broad front that delivered him the presidency.²¹ Expressing the view of many market-oriented analysts, economist Fabio Giambiagi lambasted Lula’s spending and foreign policy as a betrayal of the trust moderates had placed in him. “Lula gave some somewhat decorative positions to people not linked to the PT. Then he met with Nicolás Maduro and began to attack [Central Bank president] Roberto Campos Neto and ‘Brazilianize’ the prices charged by Petrobras, undermining the company’s yearslong efforts to put its accounts in order after the dramatic situation experienced in the mid-2010s.” From Giambiagi’s perspective, “The PT had a second historic opportunity to form an alliance and wasted it. We can be fooled once, twice. But in life’s learning, we will hardly be fooled a third time. I believe that there is zero chance of reestablishing a broad front in the future.”²² As of now, many of the centrists who held their nose and voted for Lula last time because they found Bolsonaro so objectionable seem ready to support supposedly moderate right-wing alternatives.

Some on the Left, by contrast, argue the problem is that Lula has actually been too enthralled by the broad-front mentality. In a memorable late-2024 interview, Gleisi Hoffmann, the president of the PT, asserted that the party would not sacrifice its left-wing identity to appease its governing partners. “We had political dialogue with the center during the campaign and expanded it in government. They tried to kill the PT and failed,” stated Hoffmann, who took over the party in the wake of Rousseff’s ouster and steered it through the trying years of Lula’s trial and imprisonment. “They cannot now ask the PT to commit suicide, breaking with the social base that brought us here.”²³

This was interpreted as a shot across the bow at Finance Minister Fernando Haddad, who, while overseeing a concerted effort to pass a more progressive tax system in one of the most unequal countries on earth, has pursued moderate fiscal policies to placate market actors. There is a history of behind-the-scenes tensions between Hoffmann and Haddad, the PT’s presidential nominee in 2018.²⁴ But Haddad is only in his current position because Lula put him there. Critics of Haddad’s approach are actually arguing about Lula’s ideological orientation. Rather than focusing on the demobilizing spending cuts that market actors would like to see, for example, PT congressman Lindbergh Farias argues that “we have to change the subject, we have to get involved in the people’s agenda. My line now is that 2025 is Lula’s year. It’s Lula being Lula. It’s Lula talking about people’s lives” and all the new social programs implemented since his return to power.²⁵ No matter how big the tent, it can be hard to move inside if you let too many people in. At some point, Lula has to act like Lula.

To what extent might the major policies of Lula’s third term be presented as a unified political argument? First, the obvious: Lula has acted as a consummate democrat, fulfilling the basic promise that he would not constantly test the country’s political institutions as Bolsonaro had. More substantively, the administration can credibly claim to have advanced on its priority of lessening inequality. The comprehensive tax overhaul enacted in December 2023 consolidates multiple consumption taxes into a streamlined system featuring the goods and services tax, the subnational tax on goods and services, and a federal excise tax. The new system is designed to lower the average consumption tax rate from 34 percent to approximately 26.5 percent, thereby reducing the tax burden on lower-income households and promoting economic equality in a highly stratified society. Many presidents have tried and failed to pass a reform of this kind, yet it will not take full effect until 2033, which will likely blunt some of the political benefit for the current administration.

The government has also made a point of increasing the minimum wage above the rate of inflation, contributing to real income gains for the lowest earners, retirees, and beneficiaries of other public programs that use the minimum wage as a benchmark for benefits. Additionally, the government has expanded the income-tax exemption threshold, raising it from R$1,900 per month in early 2023 to R$2,824 by February 2024, effectively removing millions of Brazilians from the country’s tax base and increasing disposable income for low-wage workers (this move is supposed to be offset by increased taxation on the richest Brazilians, but that matter is currently stuck in the legislature).

Haddad also oversaw passage of a fiscal framework to replace the more austere spending-cap system introduced under former president Michel Temer. The arcabouço fiscal, as the new arrangement is known, allows for modest growth in annual public spending in accordance with revenue performance. Crucially, it exempts key social expenditures from spending caps, safeguarding essential services. This design aims to balance fiscal responsibility with Lula’s redistributive agenda, enabling ongoing investments in welfare, education, and health care. It has nevertheless drawn fire from both the Left, which argues that by fetishizing fiscal restraint the government gives too much ground to neoliberal thinking, and the Right, which insists the measure does not go far enough in reining in government spending.

There is no doubt that Lula’s third term will end on more solid economic footing than it began on, in no small part because of the policies the government has pursued. But the administration’s aversion to courting any kind of conflict means that many of the most tangible benefits of the various economic measures are years away from being felt. Further complicating matters for Lula this time is the fact that Bolsonaro handed enormous amounts of discretionary power over the federal budget to individual lawmakers, a dynamic that has been hard for Lula to reverse. Traditional politicking has become more difficult for the president as members of Congress wield more power than ever. Lula’s government has struggled to maintain high levels of public support in this deeply polarized political climate. In a post-Bolsonaro context, it is no small thing that Lula revived the major pieces of his social agenda from twenty years ago. But there is a dearth of creative new thinking, which speaks to the novel constraints of this moment. From where will fresh ideas emerge? The broad front painstakingly assembled in 2022 was premised on the notion that Lula was the most viable candidate to defeat Bolsonaro and that, as a committed democrat, his return would benefit all players. What happens if powerful actors reject these fundamental premises next year?

Lula may well have become a victim of his own past political success. Given his personal and ideological style, he has always governed as a pragmatist, including in his orbit representatives of the traditional political elite that has benefited from proximity to power since the early nineteenth century. This approach was not called a broad front twenty-two years ago, when Lula first took office, but it was widely understood that in order to govern — to begin delivering on what André Singer has called a “Rooseveltian dream” for Brazil — Lula and the PT would have to make substantive concessions to a panoply of political forces to their right.²⁶ For the sake of winning and holding on to power, the PT deemphasized a radical wide-ranging redistributive agenda even as it managed to implement a host of genuinely transformative social policies. This approach, messy and transactional as it was, delivered. Now, however, whenever Lula displeases this or that coalition partner, he is accused of either failing to meet the high bar of consensus implied by the broad-front strategy pursued in 2022 or displaying insufficient concern for the health of Brazilian democracy. The political onus is apparently on the president to keep everyone happy rather than on the coalition as a whole to defeat the far-right threat that united them in the first place. By making so much of the urgent menace of Bolsonarismo, Lula has inadvertently placed himself in a politically precarious position.

Lula has insisted that he is eager to run for president one last time in 2026, but both he and the First Lady have seemingly left the door open to withdraw for health reasons.²⁷ If Lula’s standing in the polls does not improve, it is easy to imagine him backing out. Still, the same electoral question will be put to the PT whether or not he is the candidate: Whither the broad front? Notwithstanding the sui generis appeal of Bolsonaro in 2018, a broad coalition is key to electoral victory in a country with as many active political parties as Brazil. But the articulation of a broad front goes beyond a simple partisan alliance. It signals to voters that something greater is at stake than sectarian advancement. Bolsonaro has been barred from running for office until 2030, by which point he could well be serving a lengthy prison sentence of his own for his alleged role in a plot to overthrow Lula’s elected government. It will be enormously challenging, if not impossible, for the PT to make the case to potential partners that any of the aspiring Bolsonaro stand-ins represent the grave danger that he did.

This does not mean they won’t try. Placing Lula’s government at the center of the political spectrum, Haddad last year described the president’s strategy as “a coalition to prevent the greater evil.” Furthermore, he posits that “as long as the far right has this strength and these instruments of attack, this alliance will be a protection for the country. . . .  Repolarization around healthier and more democratic perspectives will require, first, the ebbing of the extreme right in Brazil and in the world.”²⁸ First we must defeat right-wing extremism, those beyond the bounds of acceptable political discord, Haddad suggests. Then we can worry about besting the regular conservatives.

This logic is sound. After all, Bolsonaro may not be running, but he remains the face of a larger corrosive movement that will very much be vying for power under the guise of a moderate alternative to Lula’s supposed radicalism. The need for a broad front against democratic erosion remains. “I want to establish the best possible coexistence [with other parties], because I believe we should have a broad front for the election of President Lula, even larger than the one we had in 2022,” Hoffmann asserted in her new role as minister of institutional affairs, a position to which Lula appointed her in March.²⁹ Dirceu has made a similar argument, insisting that the PT must at the same time strengthen its ties with other left-of-center parties and reanimate the broad front put together three years ago.³⁰ Less than a year into his third term, Lula himself reportedly told interlocutors that he wanted an even broader front next time.³¹ But it’s unclear what kind of pull he will have in 2026 compared to 2022.

Prominent PT leaders agree on the desirability of a broad front in next year’s campaign, but it is worth asking what end it serves beyond winning an election. If and when the PT embarks on a fresh attempt to cobble together a heterogenous coalition to support Lula in the name of restraining the far right, it should be clearer about the president’s vision to defeat radical reactionaries beyond the time horizon of the next election. There is something to be said for the balancing act Lula has undertaken in office as the face of a broad front after beating Bolsonaro. Crucially, it worked. But that broad-front strategy does not, and cannot, mean that Lula is held hostage to the positions of his most conservative voters over the course of the next four years. Lula has delivered a bevy of good economic news, but criticism of government spending has been a fixture of mainstream news coverage in Brazil. Next year, Lula’s campaign should insist that a broad front cannot mean that he must embrace draconian budget cuts, as market actors have urged since his inauguration. Austerity was not the agenda the broad front assembled to implement in 2022. This should be made explicit in 2026.

Despite stylistic differences, any candidate seeking Bolsonaro’s blessing next year would almost certainly be as right-wing as the disgraced former president himself. Would the Right’s candidate conspire with high-ranking men in uniform to subvert the will of voters as Bolsonaro did? Probably not. But a successor would be willing and able to oversee a draconian economic agenda that leaves many worse off. In response, pragmatism, as always, will be Lula’s order of the day. “I am a union leader who believed in all or nothing,” he told university professors who went on strike to demand a raise and better working conditions in June 2024. “For me, it was 100 percent or it was nothing. And many times I was left with nothing.”³² He urged the striking members to accept the deal the government had put forth, insisting that the strike had run its course and its leaders had an obligation to recognize as much. They did soon thereafter. This case reflects Lula’s temperament as much as his political strategy in this polarized moment. Lula the radical has been glimpsed at times during this term, but the conciliatory Lula who would mediate rather than stoke class conflict has been the most consistent presence.

We will, however, almost certainly see both sides of Lula in ample measure during next year’s campaign: the bridge builder in pursuit of a new broad front and the populist firebrand attacking whichever Bolsonaro ally picks up a head of steam. Indeed, in recent months, the contours of Lula’s potential reelection pitch have come into focus. In the first round, when several candidates are likely to compete, his campaign will probably focus on economic justice and a progressive nationalist discourse. On economic justice, he will emphasize his proposal to phase out income taxes for poor and working-class Brazilians and increase them on high-income earners and on profits and dividends sent abroad. On nationalist discourse, he will likely hammer the Brazilian right for its infatuation with Trump and Elon Musk, who has flouted Brazilian law and criticized members of the government in extremely harsh and puerile terms.³³ These are sure to be potent electoral cudgels. The fact that the governor of São Paulo, a leading pro-Bolsonaro presidential contender, has gone notably quiet on Trump’s tariffs after celebrating the Republican’s election last year is a case in point.³⁴ Despite a bevy of unfavorable polling in recent weeks, Lula cannot be counted out.³⁵ He draws the ire of many, but he has managed remarkable political turnarounds before. He would not have won in 2022 were he as objectionable as his most ardent opponents believe.

It is ultimately because of Lula’s enduring electoral strength, built up over decades, that Brazil today can serve as a model in the global struggle for institutional democracy, rather than being held up as a cautionary tale of catastrophic civic decline. His political resilience, forged in the crucible of dictatorship and economic turmoil, remains a vital counterweight to the authoritarian impulses that continue to threaten democratic norms across the globe. At stake next year is whether Brazil will remain a broadly pluralistic, open society with a government attuned to the material needs of the poor and working-class majority, or settle into a more exclusionary vision of social life. A broad front should be assembled in service of the former, and not to simply ease the country into the latter more gently than Bolsonaro or his acolytes would.

No party likes to lose elections, of course, but Lula and the PT have nevertheless always kept an eye toward the next race. They successfully forged and wielded a broad front to beat back the far right at the national level in 2022. A broad front, however, should not be seen as an end in itself. The PT has spent Lula’s third term attending to the picayune demands of this or that coalition partner while diluting the effects of its substantive policy successes. While the results are not negligible, there has been a conspicuous lack of ambition, innovation, and, yes, aggressiveness from the PT’s fifth presidential administration. Ironically, by walking on eggshells in an attempt to displease no one, the party could find itself in a position where it inspires too few in the ongoing struggle against transnational reactionary obscurantism. As it plots its political future, the PT must not allow the broad front it built three years ago to become a gilded cage.

India’s capitalist class is large and heterogeneous, and it suffers from a long-standing collective-action problem.² It consists of big industrial capital, manufacturing capital that is tied to particular regions and has relatively limited mobility outside them, and a mass of small manufacturing capitalists and agrarian capitalists. Each faction has distinct short-term interests, none is able to decisively impose its own interests, and no political regime has succeeded in brokering a long-term agreement between them.

The power of big and regional capital over state policy derives from their control over investment and their ability to bankroll favorable political vehicles. Agrarian and small manufacturing capitalists influence policymaking through their electoral influence, which derives from their own significant numbers and their ability to build wide electoral coalitions — with medium, small, and marginal peasants in the case of the former and petty traders in the case of the latter.

Although capital accumulated in agriculture has been invested in regional manufacturing, especially since the 1990s, and some regional players have broken into the ranks of big capital, divergent policy preferences persist.³ In the 1960s, the defection of agrarian and regional capitalists precipitated the first major downturn in the INC’s electoral fortunes.⁴ Its marginalization as a serious contender for national power since 2014 stems from the big industrial bourgeoisie deserting it in favor of the BJP. The BJP has only recently shifted allegiance from its traditional base of small capitalists and traders to recast itself as a party of big capital.

Though big capital is unquestionably the dominant faction in India’s ruling coalition, two factors constrain the capacity of the state to act in its interests. First of all, the adoption of political democracy based on universal adult franchise in 1947 empowered classes that might have been dispossessed by an industrial transformation — small manufacturing and agrarian capital, small and marginal peasants, and a large mass of people surviving through petty commodity production, trade, and services — to influence state policy.

These classes are a durable presence in India’s capitalist economy, partly due to their political empowerment. Of these groups, small manufacturing and agrarian capitalists have been the best organized, even managing to rise, albeit briefly, to national dominance in India’s era of coalition governments.

Agrarian capitalists in particular have exercised a great deal of influence over policy, particularly at the state level, winning huge concessions under wide electoral coalitions decrying urban bias. Although sharpening class differentiation has fractured these coalitions, and the political clout of agrarian capitalists has declined since its peak in the ١٩٨٠s, especially following extensive pro-business reforms in the 1990s, they continue to limit the state’s space for maneuver.⁵

Second, the Indian state has little presence in India’s sprawling informal economy, which accounts for between 90 and 95 percent of livelihoods and 50 percent of GDP. For much of India’s history since 1947, the state and the Congress party, which acted as a key integrative institution, have relied on patron-client ties with locally dominant elites to carry on the business of government, away from urban centers and the regulated economy.

The informal economy, comprised of agriculture, small manufacturing, and assorted forms of petty production, exists entirely outside state regulation and taxation. This is the result of both historically limited state capacity rooted in patterns of colonial state formation and the deliberate creation, by omission and commission, of zones of nonregulation to create new opportunities for capital accumulation.⁶

This strategy has worked especially to the advantage of electorally significant sections of the capitalist class. The minimum threshold of “small” enterprises has repeatedly been revised upward, allowing more proprietors to access state patronage in the form of subsidies, licenses to produce goods, exemption from taxation, and labor law. Agrarian capitalists are similarly exempt from taxation and labor and environmental regulations, although they continue to claim a significant, if declining, portion of public wealth.

After independence, the influence of big capital over the Congress leadership ensured the adoption of a strategy of state-led industrialization. This was no small task. Outside of pockets of industrial development, the overwhelmingly agrarian economy was dominated by forms of capitalist accumulation that squeezed high rents and interest rates from a large pool of labor working at very low levels of productivity with very little bargaining power.⁷ Even industrialists moved capital to rural trade and moneylending in pursuit of quick returns.

To address the endemic capital and technological constraints that plagued the Indian economy, the state created a protected domestic market, invested in infrastructure and capital goods, and provided subsidized inputs and cheap credit to capitalists. Land reforms were supposed to increase agricultural productivity, expand the domestic market, and generate investable surpluses for industrialization.

However, the state lacked the capacity to discharge the substantial burdens of investment and social engineering that it assumed.⁸ Land reforms were defeated by a war of attrition waged by agrarian capitalists who dominated government and the Congress party at the local and state levels.⁹ The agrarian constraint on industrial development therefore remained in place.

Far from ensuring an efficient use of scarce public resources by big capitalist firms, the state ended up acting as risk absorber and guarantor of profits. The twenty-odd firms that dominated the regulated economy enjoyed assured profits without any compulsion to raise productivity.

The 1960s and ’70s witnessed the substantial accumulation of capital outside the regulated economy and the emergence of new factions of capital.¹⁰ In the 1970s, directed credit and the reservation of hundreds of product categories for small industries led to an increase in the number of small-scale industrial units. The adoption of the New Agrarian Strategy (NAS) greatly accelerated capitalist growth in agriculture. A new section of the big industrial bourgeoisie nurtured by copious state patronage also developed in this period.

The failure to execute land reforms and engineer an agrarian transformation meant that the demand constraint persisted. The state struggled to maintain the levels of investment required to sustain accumulation in industry. As an alternative, the NAS promoted energy- and capital-intensive agricultural methods by incentivizing private investment through input subsidies and guaranteed output prices.

This dramatic reversal in patterns of patronage led to a serious deceleration in industrial growth, as public resources were diverted away from industry to pay for subsidized fertilizers and pump sets, cheap credit, cheap electricity, and above-market output prices.¹¹ Electricity subsidies for agricultural users were offset by higher tariffs for industrial and commercial users, while the former also enjoyed preference in the allocation of scarce supply.

With profitability thus guaranteed, substantial capital accumulated in agriculture, which in turn financed the development of regional capital. The political clout of agrarian capitalists ensured that attempts to divert a portion of this surplus through taxation or adverse terms of trade were defeated.¹²

Capital accumulation in the Indian economy depends on the state, not only to secure the conditions of exploitation but also to ensure profitability through routine direct transfers of public wealth. Competition for state patronage is thus a central point of conflict between different factions of capital. From 1956 to 1967, the big bourgeoisie’s disproportionate claim over public investment was virtually uncontested, thanks to the INC’s firm grip on power in national government and in all the states.

The party enjoyed a great deal of legitimacy during this period, and India’s electoral system was not truly competitive. Intra-elite conflicts were handled within the Congress, political opposition was fragmented, and the bulk of the rural electorate was managed through the agrarian capitalists who acted as linkmen. These “all-in-alls” often controlled local markets in land, labor, credit, inputs, and outputs, delivering the votes of the rural poor under their sway in exchange for patronage.

During the 1960s and ’70s, this arrangement unraveled as the Congress faced stiff competition from regional and right-wing parties, including the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (precursor to the BJP), representing factions of capital outside the charmed circle of direct patronage. The defection of agrarian capitalists eroded the Congress’s electoral machine at a time when the political terrain was becoming increasingly fractious.

The result was that fiscal populism — promising subsidies for votes — became commonplace, effectively institutionalizing the tendency to prioritize short-term spending over long-term public investment. From 1977 to 1980, the Janata party government established a regime of patronage that favored its base of rural, small, and regional capitalists — one that outlasted its short stint in national government.

The political clout of agrarian capitalists ensured that governments left agricultural incomes untaxed, abolished land taxes, waived agricultural loans, condoned mass defaults on dues to public power corporations, maintained input subsidies, and kept output prices artificially high. In the 1980s, the intersectoral terms of trade shifted in favor of agriculture. With its inelastic tax base, the state paid for this with dangerous levels of deficit financing. This laid the basis for recurring fiscal crises, the worst of which provided an alibi for economic liberalization in 1990.

In the early 1990s, the Congress government substantially changed trade and industrial policy to deregulate investment and markets. These were pro-business yet not pro-market reforms; they supported accumulation by existing firms rather than creating a competitive market economy. This was done by redirecting credit from public-sector banks toward big capital. This reckless lending drove much of India’s post-liberalization growth and created a regime of “riskless capitalism” where capitalist profits were guaranteed while public-sector banks absorbed huge losses.¹³

In anticipation of a political backlash, agricultural reforms were delayed until 1998, when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) took power. The implementation of reforms was left to state governments as a way of dividing opposition, but the general trend was one of declining government procurement prices and quantities, a contraction of formal credit, and falling agricultural prices.

Nevertheless, agricultural incomes remained untaxed, and input subsidies, which disproportionately benefited the rich, remained steady despite large cuts to welfare spending. The backlash came in 2004 as the NDA lost rural voters and the general election. Mindful of this, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which won two consecutive terms in office, from 2004 to 2014, slowed down reform in politically controversial areas. It also halted the disinvestment of public corporations and increased welfare spending to unprecedented levels.

The dependence of the Congress on its coalition partners was a factor in this slowdown. These allies included an assortment of regional parties representing rural and regional capitalists and, in its first term, India’s communist parties. The Congress was seen as a party unable, if not unwilling, to discipline farm lobbies and decisively push the reform agenda. Remarkably, from 2004–5 to 2013–14, the terms of trade moved further in favor of agriculture, owing to rising procurement prices.

By 2011–12, the global recession and a bad loan crisis made the extravagant public expenditure that had guaranteed profitability for big capital unsustainable. Furthermore, in 2013, the INC’s reputation as a party friendly to big capital took a major hit with the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act.

Under pressure from a nationwide movement against displacement and the forced cheapening of land through the state’s use of eminent domain to benefit large corporations, the law introduced protective provisions that made the acquisition of land more difficult.¹⁴ This was especially odious to big capital since accumulation relied heavily on ventures that required large swathes of land, such as mining and real estate speculation.

More generally, the regionalization of politics, reflected in the decentralization of economic policy and the reliance of national parties on regional coalition powers to form governments, created a heterogeneous policy environment that was unfavorable to big capital. Furthermore, state governments are vulnerable to the influence of competing factions of capital, particularly rural interests, irrespective of the party in power.

The support of the big bourgeoisie was a key element in the BJP’s victories in the general elections in 2014, 2019, and 2024. This period has seen an unprecedented concentration of capital and skyrocketing inequality.

The BJP’s parliamentary majorities in the first two elections enabled it to aggressively pursue its campaign promises to big business.¹⁵ It has cut welfare spending, introduced long-desired reforms in labor law, and vigorously accelerated the asset-stripping of publicly owned corporations. It has also forgiven a much larger volume of bad debts owed by large corporations to public-sector banks than the UPA — a bailout in all but name.

In addition, the BJP government has unexpectedly moved against its traditional base of traders and small capitalists and reversed the policy of deliberate nonregulation by enacting a goods and services tax, purportedly to formalize the economy and expand the state’s tax base. A general trend toward centralization in India’s already asymmetrical federal structure works to the advantage of big capital.

The goods and services tax creates a unified indirect tax system and further curtails state control over taxation. The ability of state governments to evade central financial controls through off-budget borrowing that does not manifest itself in fiscal deficits has been curbed, preventing them from making good on loan waivers and other concessions promised to rural lobbies during election campaigns.

In the changed policy climate, a number of states, not all of them ruled by the BJP, have amended land reform laws and accelerated the deregulation of land markets to favor industry. They have removed land ceilings (a key obstacle to corporate agribusiness) and eased the conversion of agricultural land for nonagricultural purposes.

Although the neoliberal policy consensus is shared by forces across the political spectrum in India, including the communist, socialist, and social democratic parties, the present BJP government has pushed it further than any regime since the 1990s. However, it has also hit familiar limits thanks to the electoral weight of the rural sector. This remains significant, even though the wide coalitions of the 1980s, led by agrarian capitalists that managed to draw in middle, small, and marginal peasants, have crumbled in the meantime given sharper class differences in the countryside since the 1990s.

After losing national elections in 2004, the BJP used an amended policy of narrowly targeted subsidies promoting labor-displacing technology in the cultivation of high-value crops for export to bring agrarian capitalists back into the circle of beneficiaries in states where it ruled. Fertilizer and food subsidies (which benefit surplus-producing farmers) have remained substantial, with the former even rising to an all-time high in 2022, when the government increased subsidies to absorb a price surge. Political opposition has stalled a law intended to reform the power sector and help recover the $75 billion owed to public power corporations.

At the state level, the BJP, like any other party, has also promised loan waivers in the run-up to elections. A bid to further deregulate agricultural output markets and weaken minimum-support-price guarantees was defeated by a movement led by left-wing farm unions that represent middle to marginal farmers — the only time in the last two decades that the BJP has had to concede defeat on a major policy move. In the end, the consolidation of the BJP’s hegemony appears to have ameliorated, although not resolved, the crisis of bourgeois leadership precipitated by the decline of the Congress.

On a frosty day in January 1995, Ted Kennedy — then beginning his sixth term as the “lion” of the US Senate — was speaking at a lunch at the National Press Club, and he was on the warpath. His party had just suffered severe losses in the 1994 midterm elections, and its leadership, now under the helm of the conservative New Democrats (a group that included President Bill Clinton), was preparing to tack further to the right. Kennedy would have none of it. Liberals enjoyed wide public support on issues like universal health care, cash benefits for the poor, and the issues that mattered to working families in Massachusetts towns like New Bedford and Fall River. If Democrats ran for cover, “sheepishly acquiescing” to Republican caricatures of their values, they would lose, and would deserve to lose. “The last thing this country needs is two Republican parties,” Kennedy said.¹¹ He would lose this battle for the soul of this party, as Democrats would play a leading role in the assault on anti-poverty programs and the growing privatization of much of the welfare state.

Afoot here was something more than an ideological battle between the last vestiges of the New Deal coalition and the neoliberals gaining ground in center-left parties in rich democracies around the world. Rather, the Democrats had been organizationally hollowed out. In the decades that led up to their loss in the 1994 midterms, Democrats — via a combination of institutional reforms and ruptures in the New Deal coalition — could no longer play a leading role in organizing democracy. Following changes in nomination procedures and campaign finance laws, the party effectively delegated candidate recruitment and campaigning to well-heeled outside organizations. Policy planning was now the object of an increasingly dense network of think tanks and narrow, memberless interest groups. This rendered the party not only an increasingly marginal presence in voters’ lives but incapable of solving coordination problems and setting a broadly appealing public agenda. That Kennedy’s causes enjoyed wide public support while his party did not was thus one foreseeable outcome of these changes.

Still, hollowness was not the only distinguishing characteristic the Democratic Party acquired during the closing decades of the twentieth century. As the New Deal’s loosely patched-together coalition of Northern white-ethnic urban political machines, labor unions, and Jim Crow enclaves gave way, the party attracted a booming base of educated and increasingly affluent professional-class liberals. These were quite literally the children of the same postwar labor-market institutions, housing policies, and arrangements for the financing of higher education that had given birth to the sprawling suburbs in which they dwelled.

If professional-class liberals left a stamp on the Democratic Party — both as an electoral base and a leadership cadre — their legacy has been a highly contradictory one. In recent decades, public opinion has reflected an enduring proclivity toward operational liberalism, with broad swaths of the population supporting policies ranging from universal health insurance to universal prekindergarten programs. Nevertheless, liberalism itself — as social identity and public philosophy — has become increasingly associated with an admixture of paternalistic tone-policing and technocratic or economistic policy fixes that fail to deliver on lofty promises of shared prosperity. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a perfect embodiment of these policies. Despite resulting in significant gains in health insurance coverage for nearly nineteen million Americans, the policy’s infrastructure hinged on a combination of clunky, opaque market mechanisms and means-tested programs that were difficult for consumers to navigate. The program’s individual-market reforms also initially relied on a tax incentive that, rather than providing the uninsured with a generous state source of insurance, imposed a penalty for those who did not purchase private coverage — a working example of neoliberal paternalism. Little wonder that the program’s approval rating failed to crest 50 percent until Republicans threatened legislative repeal in 2017.

At the helm of the Democratic coalition, professional-class liberals can be counted on to design programs that bury popular benefits in a web of complex tax credits and public-private partnerships, awash in abstruse policy concepts that few voters — even reliable party supporters — can recognize. But these critiques of technocratic thinking could just as easily be applied to the consultant class of the Clinton and Obama administrations as they could to the more patrician architects of the New Deal. The difference of course is that professional-class liberals have — whether knowingly or not — shed even the pretense of reforming capitalism that their ancestors maintained. In a pair of bracing histories of the party, Lily Geismer has illustrated that the managers and policy wonks who increasingly dominated the upper ranks of Democratic leadership have retooled New Deal commitments to address poverty and material insecurity as instruments for labor discipline and capital accumulation.¹²

Yet as Geismer ably demonstrates, if the Democratic Party’s transformation did not happen from the top down, nor did it simply emerge from the bottom up. It was instead a transformation of the meso-level, one rooted in a vast coalition of professional organizations that came to define the Democratic Party’s coalition — both as intense demanders of public policy and as a training ground for the party’s future elected officials, fundraisers, and top managers. These organizations were at the core of what came to be known, in the parlance of 1970s political science, as the New Politics.¹³ Narrow, issue-specific activist organizations supporting environmental regulations, consumer protections, and social justice not only upended the old politics of party-driven brokerage; they hauled in new, postmaterialist concerns — the province of professional-class voters and issue activists. In place of the quiet, transactional bargaining of prior decades, these organizations injected a new serum of moralism into the public sphere. This tone was communicated not through interactions on doorsteps or at factory gates but via new technologies of direct mail, polling, and, within a few short years, cable television. At the mass level, smaller but more informed “issue publics” became the target of political communication, while large swaths of the party faithful could be enrolled as consumer-members of groups like the Sierra Club, the National Association of Rail Passengers, or the National Low-Income Housing Coalition.¹⁴

The two major parties, however, attracted two different kinds of issue networks. Whereas Democrats assembled a fragmented assemblage of group-based interests, Republicans’ organizational coalition was built around a more coherent set of ideological groups whose stated goal was to limit the scope of the federal government. This asymmetry has much to do with the policies Democrats themselves had created. To understand why, it is helpful to trace how these groups emerged in the first place. During the early postwar years, American politics was defined by a relatively limited and stable interest-group system, dominated by peak business groups and trade associations. The ratio of profit to nonprofit groups established in Washington, DC, was three to one. Yet by the 1960s, a growing number of social movements, activist networks, and policy professionals coalesced to produce a landmark series of policy changes — what the political scientist Bryan Jones and his collaborators call a “great broadening” of government’s role in American life.¹⁵ The expansion of government programs underwrote an explosion in the number of organized groups. For the first decade of the broadening, the thickening of the interest-group system was defined by policy clientele organizations in the mold of AARP but on a far smaller scale (see the solid line in graph below).

Union Membership Density and Interest-Group Formation, 1966–2001¹⁶

Capital’s agents in Washington — initially caught flat-footed by these developments — soon caught up. Between 1975 and 1985, the number of organizations representing the finance and domestic commerce sector increased by a third. These organizations soon proved far more effective in the political arena. Between 1998 and 2012, the ratio of business lobbying expenditures to the expenditures of diffuse interest groups and labor unions increased by two-thirds.¹⁷

These changes in the system of organized interests were mirrored by a decay in union density, the most reliable indicator of working-class power (see figure 1). Union membership declined from 24 percent of wage and salary workers in 1973 to just above 10 percent in 2023. The imprint of this change on the political arena was significant. Between 1969 and 1982, the AFL-CIO received the most TV news coverage of any group or association in American politics, and the United Auto Workers was sixth. Neither was in the top twenty in 1995, nor was any labor union, save the Major League Baseball Players Association.¹⁸ While union members number in the millions today, the national political arena is increasingly dominated not by labor coalitions but by organizations speaking on behalf of narrow slices of policy beneficiaries. Of these, only a small handful have a mass-membership base. Even where they do exist, these membership bases are largely treated as passive donors or consumers rather than participants in political struggle.¹⁹

Labor was an enduringly important part of the Democratic coalition through the early decades of the twenty-first century. Yet union leaders confronted a newly fragmented bargaining environment where it was far easier for other groups in the party’s coalition to develop greater independence, preventing labor from playing a central role in interest aggregation. In this context, labor struggled to build congressional majorities to support far-reaching social programs, to say nothing of legal changes to shore up labor’s vulnerabilities. As labor’s disruptive capacity waned, the Democrats now faced the challenge of brokering a coalition whose member organizations had few points of intersection with one another, limited ties to large swaths of the electorate, and, perhaps most important, no access to sources of structural power.²⁰

That Democrats have become the party of the policy clientele organizations has not, all things considered, attracted much notice as a source of political vulnerability. In fact, the explosion of groups that have grown in the shadow of the policy state is more routinely cited as evidence of the party’s political successes. Among political scientists it has become an article of faith that policies have the potential to remake politics. Arguably the first to articulate this formula was E. E. Schattschneider, whose 1935 book, Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff, illustrated how protectionist policies helped to grow the industries that became its “fighting legions” when tariffs came under attack. Policies could just as easily destroy interests, Schattschneider wrote: “The losers adapt themselves to the new conditions imposed upon them, find themselves without the means to continue the struggle, or become discouraged and go out of business.”²¹

This insight has had profound implications for theories of economic democracy. If a national pension plan creates its own powerful support constituencies, its existence will no longer depend on the labor unions, social movement organizations, and left parties that created it in the first place. Thus, as Paul Pierson was later to show in his seminal Dismantling the Welfare State?, even as “left power resources” — unions and electorally formidable mass-membership left parties — were depleted in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the social programs that left parties had helped to create stood firm in the face of neoliberal governments’ efforts to destroy them.²² Less than a decade later, Andrea Louise Campbell’s How Policies Make Citizens uncovered a wealth of evidence on how Social Security shaped political behavior at the mass level.²³ Following the expansion of the program’s benefits between its passage in 1935 and the early 1960s, senior citizens’ resources and incentives for participating in politics exploded, as did membership in new organizations like AARP. These organizations helped to solve seniors’ collective-action problems, reducing the costs of political participation and providing members with selective incentives that ranged from the material (discounts on goods and services) to the solidary (social engagement) and purposive (political advocacy). Not only did the policy transform seniors from a relatively inert voting bloc into a powerful one; the “senior lobby’s lightning quick reflexes” laid to waste countless efforts to cut benefits.²⁴

This formula — new policies create new politics — contained at least a few wrinkles, as its exponents freely admitted. First, all policies make a new politics, but not always in a way that promotes political efficacy and social citizenship. Means-tested programs whose primary beneficiaries were politically weak and could be framed as undeserving do not create a powerful base of supporters at the mass level. Instead, their political endurance hinges on coalitions with more powerful economic actors. In the case of food stamps (later renamed SNAP), this was the agricultural lobby. Where Medicaid — the largest source of health insurance for low-income and disabled Americans — was concerned, this was a combination of state governors, health care providers, and, increasingly, private managed-care companies that mediated the relationship between the patient and the state.²⁵

Second, policies can also be designed in a way that prevents winners from recognizing their gains. As major social benefits in the United States are concerned, direct social programs like Social Security are the exception to the rule. While the American state came to have a far more important role in the lives of citizens during the course of the twentieth century, it was not through the highly visible Works Progress Administration–style projects of the New Deal but via indirect means: grants in aid to state and local governments, tax deductions for the interest on home mortgages, subsidies for employers who provide employees with health insurance and for college students who take out private loans. By the early 2010s, Suzanne Mettler had given a name to this vast but invisible archipelago of programs: the submerged state. Its invisibility meant that its beneficiaries did not become politically mobilized. If anything, Mettler concluded, the submerged state only helped to depress public support for government, especially where redistribution was concerned.²⁶

Third, if new policies created both winners and losers, the experience of losing rarely meant being knocked out of the competition for good. While the Tax Reform Act of 1986 may have nixed special tax privileges for hundreds of narrow lobbies, it did little to prevent them from getting back in the game.²⁷ Within a decade, the losers had regrouped and secured new tax breaks. Similarly, while the Obama administration and congressional Democrats carefully crafted the Affordable Care Act to garner support from the insurance and health care industries, its passage only animated opposition from the losers: conservative ideological groups and organizations representing the small-business sector, which spent the next decade attempting to hobble the law’s implementation and erase it from the statute books.²⁸

Fourth, to the extent that policies create new politics, they tend to be defensive politics, as the beneficiaries of existing policies fight to preserve gains they have already made from attempts at retrenchment. Yet as Pierson’s student and later collaborator Jacob Hacker first argued in a landmark 2004 American Political Science Review article, the status quo is not a fixed point. Rather, policies must be routinely updated in response to changes in their environments — not only must Social Security payments be adjusted for inflation; they must be modified to account for fluctuations in the landscape of private pension benefits. Failure to do this results in what Hacker calls policy drift.²⁹

Since the 1970s, employers in the US largely shifted away from providing defined-benefit pension plans to offering defined-contribution plans, whose benefits are contingent on worker contributions and the rate of return. Because Social Security now stands as the only source of guaranteed retirement income insulated from market pressures, it has become a far more important source of income for retired workers than it was initially intended to be. For one in seven retired workers, Social Security now represents 90 percent of their annual income. For four in ten retirees, it provides at least 50 percent.³⁰ While AARP and other senior organizations have been successful in preventing cuts to Social Security, they are far less successful at articulating a positive vision for adapting the program to prevent its slow erosion.

Arguably the most common interpretation of these four complications to the “policy makes politics” formula is a technocratic one: if they are designed correctly, emancipatory social programs can create a landscape of organizations that help to compensate for the decline in the Left’s traditional power resources. As this theory goes, when policies confer adequate levels of benefits to a sufficiently large (hence politically powerful) constituency, they will trigger an endowment effect that mobilizes beneficiaries against efforts to retrench the welfare state. Those benefits will also provide beneficiaries (and the organizations that represent them) with material resources that can be converted into political action in the form of campaign contributions as well as the time necessary to attend meetings and the requisite level of canvassing and phone banking. And when social programs are highly decommodifying — when they emancipate workers from a dependence on the market — they have the potential to generate a sense of solidarity that strengthens social cohesion and allows for the endurance of left party coalitions for the longue durée.³¹

There is a great degree of truth in this interpretation. If the voluminous literature on comparative social policy has taught us anything, it is that the United States government’s allergy to universalism and decommodification, as well its fetish for means-tested programs, low-profile tax credits, and indirect service delivery, has tended to accentuate the passive, anti-political character of American median voters.

Yet a preoccupation with policy and program among scholars, pundits, and political strategists comes at a cost. In particular, it oversells policy clientele organizations’ capacity to sustain the class compromises contained in social policy arrangements. Like all participants in the political arena, policy beneficiaries can only succeed in accomplishing their goals if they can solve the collective-action problem. That is to say, because they wish to protect a public good — say, adequate Social Security payments — they must find ways to coordinate action, mobilize resources, and sustain engagement despite having diverse interests and incentives to free ride. For several reasons, their ability to face these challenges will not stretch far beyond the maintenance and defense of narrow programmatic gains in the course of normal politics. Policy clienteles are less disposed to broad-based political action to stake out new terrain by pushing against the status quo to expand the range of available benefits or broadening eligibility. Nor are these organizations well designed to respond to frontal assaults that transcend normal politics — the sort of lawless gutting of benefits on display in the actions of the second Trump administration.

There are several distinct problems here. First, policy clientele organizations rarely possess a mass-membership base. Only about 10 percent of organized interest groups in Washington even have dues-paying members.³² Those that do are virtually never member democracies. While AARP boasts thirty-eight million members, these individuals have no ability to vote for leaders or to shape the organization’s policy decisions. This stands to reason, as members’ low, $20 annual dues payments make up only 15 percent of the organization’s annual revenues, which are drawn largely from royalties and partnerships with businesses that provide products and services, including insurance plans, to its members.³³ AARP thus largely functions as a consumer organization. Even when it can mobilize a portion of its members to take collective action, it has virtually no monopoly on their loyalties. Medicare beneficiaries can be persuaded just as easily by AARP to phone their representatives in Congress as they can by managed-care companies that run Medicare Advantage plans, which routinely threaten that seniors will lose coverage if Congress tries to more tightly regulate the plans’ more predatory behaviors. Where public pensions are concerned, any cross-class solidarity AARP has managed to create has been punctured for the last five decades by the rise of private individual retirement accounts. While the organization helped to hold off attempts at privatizing Social Security during the George W. Bush administration, the political landscape for pensions remains fractured along class lines. Low-income retirees are far more likely than their high-income peers to support enhancing the generosity of Social Security benefits.³⁴

Second, policy clientele organizations’ disconnection from a member base enables them to pursue policy agendas that contradict their members’ interests. There is no better example of this than the AARP’s support for the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, which provided a limited privatized add-on prescription drug benefit and accelerated the penetration of private managed-care companies into the Medicare program.³⁵

Third, even when policy clientele organizations can defend the interests of their members, they have incentives to do so in a narrow, risk-averse fashion. As analyses of disease-based advocacy organizations suggest, groups with large patient bases can and do aggressively leverage their numbers to advance key congressional committees. Nevertheless, these groups still tend to seek out “noncompetitive, distributive political environments.”³⁶ Rather than forming coalitions with other organizations to push for structural changes in the US health care system, these organizations mobilize for narrow boosts in allocations within the National Institutes of Health budget.³⁷ Similarly, when confronting proposals to introduce Medicaid work requirements during the first Trump administration that had the potential to disenroll millions of program beneficiaries, disease-based organizations were far more likely to push for narrower exemptions from the requirements for their members than to call for blocking the introduction of the requirements completely.³⁸

Fourth, regardless of the design of the program that they exist to defend, policy clientele organizations lack an obvious source of structural power. When compared to workers, policy beneficiaries have less capacity to disrupt economic activity through strikes or work stoppages. Unlike capitalists, broad policy beneficiaries have no control over investment or production. If anything, the power of policy clientele groups rests on their ability to rally beneficiaries to engage in the electoral arena by flooding the phone lines and inboxes of legislators and, in some rare instances, camping out in front of their offices to protest. Because they lack access to important choke points in the economy, the costs of successful collective action for these organizations exceed those of either firms or unions.³⁹ Those costs are higher still when a benefit that a clientele organization seeks to preserve does not face an immediate threat, and the organization instead attempts to secure access to new benefits or to alter a policy in response to drift.

Relatedly, the benefits that policy clientele organizations seek to protect can be more diffuse than those located in a collective bargaining agreement. When compared to wages, working conditions, and fringe benefits, changes to even relatively simple universal social programs can be more difficult for voters to trace. The problem intensifies when benefits are delivered through a complicated web of public-private partnerships, as any survey researcher who has asked respondents whether they are on Medicaid surely knows.

In sum, even if policy clientele organizations can defend the programs that brought them to life, they lack important organizational advantages that both parties and unions — the traditional power resources of the Left — have long possessed. Whereas labor unions no doubt face challenges associated with organizing and mobilizing mass memberships, policy clientele organizations not only lack labor’s structural power; they are often disarticulated from a mass base and have organizational incentives that promote risk aversion and the pursuit of narrower policy gains.

Although policy clientele organizations constitute important parts of the Democratic coalition, they have a difficult time exercising political leverage within the party. This is because they are rarely able to bargain with the most valuable chips on the table. While these organizations may be able to subsidize legislative activity with information and expertise, they rarely have access to mass-membership bases. Even when they do, their relationship with those members is often quite limited; few have the committees on political education long relied upon by organized labor. As a result, clientele groups cannot easily promise Democrats that they will be able to unlock important voting blocs in exchange for favorable action on their policy agendas. And those claiming to represent mass constituencies lack extensive campaign war chests that the most powerful organized interests in Washington possess. As a result, they have proven largely incapable of keeping the Democrats from drifting to the right.

The case of health financing reform is illustrative here. In the decades that followed the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, Democratic Party leaders continued to advocate for what was then called a national health insurance plan — a precursor to the Medicare for All proposals of recent years. Yet by the initial years of the Clinton administration, Democrats had abandoned this approach in favor of a market-based, employer-centered system that aimed to expand coverage through managed competition among private insurers. When that proposal proved no more capable of swimming through the maelstrom of insurance-industry countermobilization, the policy failure reinforced Democrats’ shift toward market-based health care solutions that became the backbone of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, otherwise known as Obamacare. Yet even on this more limited terrain, progressive health advocacy organizations like Physicians for a National Health Program and Healthcare-NOW were incapable of successfully lobbying for a modest but politically popular public option, which was rejected by the Obama administration and centrist gatekeepers within the party. A decade later, during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election cycle, a similar fate met grassroots efforts to place a Medicare for All plank on the party’s platform. While Bernie Sanders’s delegates to the 2020 Democratic National Committee DNC did manage to secure a compromise plank on “Achieving Universal Affordable, Quality Healthcare,” this plank did not live to see the party’s 2024 convention.

Even when policy clientele organizations have proved themselves capable of changing the Democrats’ ostensible agenda, the party has taken advantage of what the political scientist Kathleen Bawn and her colleagues refer to as the “electoral blind spot” to treat symbolic victories as if they were substantive.⁴⁰ During negotiations over the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration cut a deal with the pharmaceutical industry to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices. As prices rose over the next decade, patient advocacy organizations continued to push progressive Democrats to introduce price-control legislation. Gradually, Democrats began to take up the issue of prices but embraced legislation in which effects on prices were guaranteed to be muted at best. The language eventually incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 allowed Medicare to negotiate the price of only a handful of drugs on an implementation timeline that was highly delayed.⁴¹

Of course, policy clientele organizations did have some role in preventing the legislative repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017. Yet defensive coordination proved an easier task. First, it did not require persuading Democrats to shift their positions to the left. Indeed, Democrats were predictably unified in their opposition to repealing one of the party’s signature legislative achievements. Second, the coalition to defend Obamacare was composed not only of the policy’s direct beneficiaries but a phalanx of state governors, providers, and insurers that mediated the relationship between beneficiaries and the federal government. Finally, these support efforts benefited from the fact that, even when using the budget reconciliation process, Republicans had narrow margins in both the House and Senate as well as extensive internal conflict over the precise contours of the repeal legislation.⁴²

One could tell a similar story regarding the effectiveness of policy clientele organizations in altering the Democratic Party’s positions on any number of issues. Another set of examples can be drawn from efforts to reform higher education financing in the wake of the Great Recession. During the Obama administration, student interest groups pushed for regulations of predatory lending practices of for-profit colleges via the so-called gainful employment rules. Yet not only did industry pressure water down these regulations prior to their publication; they were rolled back almost entirely during the first Trump administration. Congressional Democrats failed to mount a serious pushback. While the Biden administration managed to reinstate some of these regulations, they were as good as dead by the time Trump returned to office in 2025.⁴³

By this point, a new and arguably far more politically savvy cadre of organizations succeeded in bringing the issue of student debt cancellation to the Biden administration’s attention. Debtors’ unions, notably the Debt Collective, were successful at winning a scaled-down debt-relief plan via an executive order.⁴⁴ Yet these groups differed from traditional policy clientele organizations in a number of ways. Rather than organizing individuals around a benefit, they organized individuals around the shared economic condition of indebtedness. Perhaps more important, they framed their claims on the state not in terms of narrow policy gains but on the abolition of debt and structural changes in the political economy. Finally, whereas policy clientele organizations rely on lobbying and legal action, the tactics of groups like the Debt Collective were movement oriented, ranging from political education to debt strikes. In the near term, the victory proved to be short lived. Joe Biden’s plan became the subject of a lawsuit that eventually made its way to the US Supreme Court, which struck it down. By 2023, Democrats lacked the legislative majorities to make more enduring change possible. In the end, Biden’s approach to student debt was to expand the existing system of income-driven repayments but cap monthly payments at 5 percent of discretionary income. Nevertheless, at a critical juncture, the public debate about debt relief had shifted, with cancellation becoming a credible option. Survey results revealed that majorities of Americans supported plans for debt forgiveness.⁴⁵

Despite defeat in the courts, the Debt Collective’s relative success in appealing to the Biden administration helps to illustrate both the strength of membership-based organizing and, in turn, the weakness of traditional lobbying. Policy clientele organizations’ lack of strong ties to mass bases of members robs them of leverage with Democrats. Yet it also means that Democrats’ policy-based electoral appeals do not yield the returns that the “policy makes politics” formula is assumed to imply. The proof of this can be found in the considerable list of states whose electorates handed Trump at least a plurality of votes while also approving, among other things, expanding Medicaid coverage (Nebraska, Montana, Idaho, and Utah in 2018; Missouri in 2020; South Dakota in 2022) and guaranteeing abortion rights (Missouri and Montana in 2024).

Indeed, absent extensive organizational work to assist voters in making the link between party and policy, programmatic gains cannot substitute for party building. It is a long-standing feature of American public opinion that voters’ operational preferences for public expenditure can coincide with philosophical preferences for limited government.⁴⁶ These disconnects have only been strengthened by the hardening of partisan identifications, which are now a stronger and more enduring source of identity than religious confession.⁴⁷ For a policy victory secured by Democrats to result in electoral benefits, it would need to blast through the concrete of party identification. This would mean that the policy would need to have legible material benefits that voters would realize quickly.

The late programmatic style of the Democratic Party has yielded policies with the opposite effect. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are only the most recent examples of this submerging of public benefits. Consider the IRA’s low-profile tax subsidies for electric vehicles and clean energy, barely recognizable to consumers as a benefit resulting from a federal program, or the IIJA’s extensive support for broadband expansion as well as roads, bridges, and public transit investments — all of which are delivered through the private sector or state and local governments. As the political scientists Dan Galvin and Chloe Thurston have argued, even when policies have visible benefits, converting those benefits into party support would require voters to understand and favor the benefits of a new policy, link that policy’s benefits to a party, develop durable attachments to that party, and then vote accordingly. Even in the face of a Works Progress Administration–type program, this is simply unlikely.⁴⁸

In the wake of Democrats’ 2024 election losses, it is tempting to interpret the attenuated link between policy benefits and partisan electoral returns as proof that efforts to eke out progressive policy gains were not worth the effort. But this would misapprehend the reason for the disconnect. The kinds of policy feedback effects necessary to stabilize vote share across elections cannot be generated by parties that lack extensive connections to mass electorates. Neither the constellation of no-membership clientele groups nor the party apparatus itself is designed to build a party-policy linkage in voters’ minds. This not only makes it difficult for clientele organizations to tug Democrats away from their drift rightward but blunts the electoral impact of any working-class policy gains the party ultimately can sustain. These returns only help to underwrite a belief among the party’s leadership cadre that there is little electoral percentage in policies that advantage working-class voters, allowing Democrats’ retreat toward affluent suburbs to continue unabated. As the states that have historically made up the party’s strongholds lose population relative to Republican redoubts, there are obvious — and grim — implications for narrow presidential contests.

Beyond abject horror at the administration’s authoritarian flex, professional political observers confronted the first few weeks of the second Trump term with a sense of outrage at the absence of more visible signs of outrage among Americans. By April 2025, even conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks could be found calling for a “national civic uprising.” In the face of Trump’s “shackling” of the “greatest institutions of American life . . . we have nothing to lose but our chains.”⁴⁹ Yet even as protest activity ticked up to levels not seen during the first Trump administration, many of the most consequential actions unfolded in federal courtrooms, whose dockets swelled with challenges to Trump’s activities coordinated by states, local governments, federal employees, nonprofit organizations, and the policy clientele groups most directly affected by the administration’s blitz. The legal strategy ran into some immediate problems as it soon became apparent that the Trump administration had little intention of complying with some court orders directing the return of immigrants who had been wrongfully deported to an El Salvadoran mega-prison or preventing Musk and his team at the nebulous shadow agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from illegally halting federal grant payments.

Yet for all its limitations, litigation had one advantage: it did not require the same level of collective action as other actions in the public sphere. Professional organizations scrambled to organize national Zoom meetings and “Days of Action.” Yet coordinating these responses proved difficult, especially given the reticence of Democratic leadership to take on a central role. Within a few weeks of the chaos, activist organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible had coordinated thousands of phone calls to House Democrats’ offices. Party leadership bristled at the implication that they were standing passively by. Rather, they wished to convey the image that the blame for government failures belonged with the majority party. According to one Democratic House member who declined to be named, “There were a lot of people who were like, ‘We’ve got to stop the groups from doing this.’ . . . People are concerned that they’re saying we’re not doing enough, but we’re not in the majority.”⁵⁰

By this point, “the groups” had become a kind of all-purpose epithet for the loose web of activist organizations that had developed over the previous several decades to challenge party leadership from the outside. Yet with the decay of traditional parties, such activist organizations — whatever their ideology or orientation to party politics — were now perennial features of the political scene.⁵¹ The emergence of professional-class social movement organizations, the sort that organized the 2017 Women’s March as well as a number of subsequent protests and campaigns, was a defining feature of the first Trump term. The organization known as Indivisible, founded in 2017, offers an object lesson here. Its roots can be traced to a PDF guide prepared by four former congressional staffers, each of whom had roots not only in the Democratic Party itself but in the complex of policy clientele organizations and nonprofits within the party’s orbit. Despite their relatively high levels of political and social capital, these policy professionals rejected institutional politics in favor of loosely coordinated grassroots strategy. This involved only a limited amount of formal organization. The group’s guide — widely circulated thanks to several celebrity Twitter accounts — provided a template used by nearly four thousand local organizations that outlined tactics ranging from demonstrations at congressional town halls to sit-ins and die-ins at congresspeople’s offices in response to Republicans’ 2017 bid to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Soon after claiming victory on the defeat of the ACA repeal, however, local and national Indivisible organizations began to splinter, and they proved incapable of organizing around what became the most significant driver of growing income inequality during the Trump era: the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It was by then time to begin preparing for the 2018 midterm elections, an effort in which local Indivisible groups came to be highly engaged. In contrast to the national organization’s sheen of progressivism, the greatest beneficiaries of Indivisible organizations’ energies were moderate Democrats. Here, then, was a pattern: new grassroots organizations could provide valuable defense against shambolic legislative efforts to eliminate social programs. Yet on offense, they found themselves pulled in many directions at once. Despite Democrats’ success in the 2018 midterm elections, a positive agenda for defeating Trumpism proved elusive.

There is now a small literature devoted to debating the apparent depth, durability, and political imprint of the professional class’s movement awakening during the first Trump administration. And in the fashion of the social scientists who were highly enmeshed in these organizations, these books and articles merely suggest that the legacy of “resistance” politics is a matter for debate. What seems beyond question, however, is that these movements emerged out of the failure of the policy clientele organizations that supplanted the old politics of parties and unions. The invitation-only world of Democratic Party politics could now no longer suffice even as an acceptable career prospect for its leaders in waiting.

But if the likes of Indivisible represented a rejection of existing political forms, they nevertheless struggled to transcend their role as Trump antagonists, a role that their heterogeneous internal memberships practically made their destiny. Political expedience necessitated the formation of fluid, informal networks that had no obvious way to propel the simultaneous tasks of fundraising, grassroots mobilization, and agenda formation. Local Indivisible chapters could not count on regular showers of cash from deep-pocketed donors, which were concentrated at the national level.⁵² Once Biden took office, movement organizing could more easily be absorbed or held in abeyance until the unthinkable happened for a second time. Yet such organizations could not be expected to perform a purpose they were not built for. They lacked the scale and brokerage capacity to solve the coordination problems the Democratic Party had been incapable of solving. And though they likely helped to animate the Democrats’ midterm successes, they could not resolder the party’s links to large numbers of working-class voters.

Thus, as the chaotic weeks of Trump’s second term wore on, the clash between Democratic Party elites and activist groups over how best to respond to the increasingly lawless sacking of the administrative state and the assault on civil rights would continue. By late spring, a coalition that stretched to two hundred organizations, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Communication Workers of America, planned a day of protests that would ultimately mobilize millions of Americans. These events had been planned for months to coincide with Trump’s June 14 military-parade-cum-birthday-celebration, but they accrued new meaning as the administration attempted to juice its deportation numbers by snatching undocumented workers off the streets of Los Angeles and as it commandeered the California National Guard and deployed hundreds of marines to Southern California to quell the protests that followed. As public support for the protesters rose, some Democrats — including the mercurial California governor Gavin Newsom — seized on the moment, locking in on a more coherent message of opposition to authoritarian overreach.

Just the week before, however, a coalition of centrist Democrats gathered in Washington, DC, for a billionaire-funded WelcomeFest, an event whose central purpose was to admonish any principled opposition to the Trump administration in favor of a politics anchored by the careful fence-sitting, poll-watching, and triangulation that have been the Democratic leitmotif for decades. As speaker after speaker emphasized, it was not the party’s billionaire financiers or the last vestiges of the New Democrats but “the groups” that had led the party to electoral ruin. Whatever the outcome of this intraparty conflict, it may prove to have little bearing on the administration’s path of destruction or its political endurance. Neither the organizers of WelcomeFest, nor the network of traditional policy clientele organizations, nor indeed “the groups” are, at present, poised to easily reorient the conflict to make legible the consequences of tariffs, the DOGE coup, and the devastating implications of Trump’s budget for millions of working-class voters.

On February 18, 2025, Ken Martin — fresh from a victory in a hotly contested race for the chairmanship of the DNC — issued a five-page memorandum with the subject line “Democrats Will Fight Against Trump’s War on Working People.” Released on the same day Martin began a multistate tour to meet with state party leaders and local candidates, the memo laid out what he saw as Democrats’ most urgent task: “Repairing and restoring the perceptions of our party and our brand.” “It’s time,” Martin said, “to remind working Americans — and also show them every day — that the Democratic Party always has been and always will be the party of the worker.” The scene for this new beginning was a diner in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, where Martin met with members of the United Steelworkers.

That restoration hinged on refiguring the political calculus, Martin suggested. In a stark contrast with Democrats’ 2024 presidential rhetoric, the new chair ditched the ambiguous banner of democracy (a word that did not appear in the memo) for a more materially grounded alternative: “union power.” “As an organizer, I know, alone, no one person can take on the ultra-wealthy and the powerful,” Martin said. “But by joining together in a union, working people have secured better wages, workplace protections, health care, and the weekend. Because here’s the thing: unions expand opportunities for all workers — not just those who are members.” Consistent with this formula, Martin’s memo reinterpreted the first weeks of the new Trump administration as class warfare by enumerating the ways in which the president “and his billionaire backers are hell-bent on attacking working families and dismantling the unions that protect workers in order to enrich themselves.”

Martin’s pivot toward the material consequences of the Trump–Musk putsch reflected what was becoming the top-line interpretation of Democrats’ electoral struggles. “Too many people right now feel like our party has forgotten them, that they have been left behind,” he told steelworkers at the diner in Pittsburgh. “They’re working their asses off, and they can’t get ahead, and that’s what we have to really recognize. My brother who’s a union carpenter, he voted for Democrats his whole life. And then in ’16, and ’20 and ’24, he voted for Trump. My father-in-law who’s a beef cattle farmer in southern Minnesota — same deal.”

This opening was much in keeping with Martin’s pitch to the DNC during the race for chair. In his public appeals during that contest, he had gone so far as to quote Florence Reece’s 1931 labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” “Are we on the side of the robber baron, the ultra-wealthy billionaire, the oil-and-gas polluter, the union buster?” he asked. “Or are we on the side of the working family, the small business owner, the farmer, the immigrants, the students? Let me tell you: I know which side I’m on.”

If articulating this new look (or rather the rehabilitation of an old look) for Democrats was ultimately to become Martin’s most visible signature, his presentations to DNC members also made clear that he saw branding as somewhat meaningless in the absence of broader organizational transformations. Of the ten elements listed in Martin’s proposed “New DNC Framework,” “Democratic Brand Identity” was the last. In what could easily become a postscript to Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s Hollow Parties, Martin’s priorities centered on party building. This meant, among other things, reinvigorated funding to state party organizations via Democrats’ existing State Partnership Program, a new effort to build community-level party organizations as well as new youth-oriented clubs. Rather than describing the party as a means of brokerage for existing policy clientele organizations, Martin’s framework imagined a party composed of its own local organizations capable of connecting voters to leadership.

Martin’s call for party renewal was in harmony with what is becoming a conventional wisdom among political scientists. Having been reduced to the status of a brand and an election-season vote procurement operation, the theory goes, parties have divested themselves of their most important capacities: the ability to mediate the relationship between the rulers and the ruled and to organize a number of voters adequate to the task of bringing about substantial change. The Democrats’ renewal thus requires more than replenishing the resources of withered state and local party organizations. It demands regular face-to-face engagements with voters on a regular basis to root the party in daily life through meetings, speaker series, and leisure activities. To generate meaningful participation, these activities must be pursued in conjunction with local civic infrastructures. These newly revived party organizations must also have channels that link public opinion at the grassroots to the national party agenda.⁵³

One might suppose that Martin’s election as DNC chair signals something about party leaders’ understanding about the urgency of organizational renewal. This remains to be seen. Yet even if Democratic power brokers were uniformly sanguine about the need to build up associational strength at the local level, the DNC is but one facet of the Democratic Party. While Martin appears to be more ambitious in leveraging the committee’s fiscal and ideational resources than his predecessors, it would still take a generational transformation at all levels of the party to build new associational structures across more than three thousand US counties.

Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, any renewal project will have to grapple with the numerous functions that have, for the last half century, been delegated to organizations outside the formal control of state and local party leaders. On the one hand, a significant share of financial contributions that would otherwise go to party organizations are now spoken for by a battery of advocacy organizations, nonprofits, and think tanks that constitute the political universe of each major political party.⁵⁴ At the local level, it is nonprofit organizations, not political parties, that play the predominant role in service provision and political incorporation.⁵⁵ The task of mobilizing voters between elections — especially, though not exclusively, working-class Americans — has also grown more formidable as voter identification with the Democratic Party has sunk in recent years. In a 2024 Gallup poll, the largest political bloc in the United States — roughly 43 percent of US adults — identified as independents. By contrast, 27 percent of adults identified as Democrats, a new low for the party in Gallup’s data.⁵⁶

In sum, any party reform or party building that occurs will play out on a political terrain already dense with activity, where competition for resources, loyalty, and energy will remain intense. Proponents of associational party building are well aware of this challenge, which is why they emphasize that parties must forge “robust links to grassroots associations in civil society.”⁵⁷ One can no doubt locate cases of partnerships between local party organizations and civic associations. But a few fine days do not make a summer. To revive local party organizations will require serious consideration of how to offer voters, donors, and organizational partners enticing incentives for participation they cannot obtain elsewhere.

That assumes, of course, that the leaders of local party organizations are in fact interested in renewal and a robust network of interorganizational partnerships can be summoned to support such a project. In many American cities, however, the largest reserves of political energy reside in organizations and coalitions external to the Democratic Party, and often in competition with it. In Pittsburgh, for example, a rusted-out party committee could not, for all its efforts, prevent the election of Sara Innamorato, the progressive challenger in a 2023 race for Allegheny County executive. In a tightly contested primary, Innamorato relied on a robust network of support from service workers’ unions and local advocacy groups whose turnout operation Democrats simply could not match.⁵⁸ Strong associational parties will no doubt contain internal divisions on policy and strategy, yet they cannot operate without the capacity to organize voters. In cities where the party organization is moribund, any effort at renewal will likely begin externally rather than internally, via conflict rather than collaboration.

It is too early to say whether the Trump–Musk assault on the state will be a deus ex machina for Democrats. If the first months of Trump’s second term are any indication, individuals’ understanding of the relationship between the president’s actions and disruptions to their access to social programs (or the operability of government writ large) is limited.

This cannot be attributed solely to the submerged character of many social programs in the United States, delivered through the tax code or through networks of third-party providers. Nor is the state’s invisibility the result of the complex, taken-for-granted features of government, like the quality-assurance measures thought to protect Americans’ Social Security benefits from a horde of Silicon Valley marauders. Rather, the state’s invisibility in Americans’ lives — the very thing that makes it possible for Trump to assault public programs without an immediate political crisis — has at least as much to do with the disorganization of political parties into loose networks of policy claimants and the absence of clearly articulated political programs. Illustratively, some of the largest public protests and rallies to raise public consciousness about Trump’s power grab were coordinated by individuals and organizations outside of the Democratic Party.

The events of these initial months of Trump 2.0 provide further indications that organizational renewal is likely to result from external pressures on the Democratic Party as opposed to conscious recalibrations within its ranks. The labor movement has the potential to play a leading role here. Federal workers are on the front lines of Trump’s purge, which has itself occasioned a flood of over fourteen thousand new members into the ranks of the American Federation of Government Employees in just five weeks. Greater militancy among these workers could have benefits that redound beyond federal agencies by clarifying the material stakes of the Trump assault for workers across the country. Trump’s executive orders could also animate new forms of mobilization outside the state. Attacks on federal funding at research universities, for example, could help to create new opportunities for cross-class solidarity within the ranks of academic workers. Finally, a renewed assault on the National Labor Relations Act — which has ironically come to represent a pair of shackles for the labor movement — could also lubricate experiments with alternative approaches to expanding the labor movement via sectoral bargaining at the state level. These social and economic perturbations, as much as any episode of party reform, highlight the urgency of creating a culture of solidarity that has for so long been missing from the American left.

Whether the effects of Trump’s assault on the state and the countermobilizations it animates will be cumulative is impossible to forecast. What seems far more certain at this point is that, left unchanged, the organizational structure of the new politics — which has proved incapable of playing offense at the ballot box — will find its defense outflanked as well.