The introduction of Holloway’s study opens with a summary of a “remarkable short essay” published by George Orwell in October 1945, just over two months after the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine, Orwell speculated, if the few countries that prove capable of producing nuclear weapons “make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate?” Those countries — the United States, the Soviet Union, and later China — would become empires, each of which would be “unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.” The bomb was likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely ‘a peace that is no peace.’” Orwell — the first, according to Holloway, to put the notions of cold war and atomic weapons together in this fashion — in effect anticipated the deadly connection between nuclear weapons and interventionist superpowers that preoccupied Forsberg and her fellow activists from the 1970s onward. Unlike observers who tout the “long peace” between the countries of the industrialized North as a benefit of a world bristling with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, Orwell understood that it would be no peace at all.

David Holloway’s name might be familiar to some peace activists of the early 1980s. Irish-born and Cambridge-educated, he was teaching at the University of Edinburgh when he was invited to publish his essay, “War, Militarism and the Soviet State,” in a collection edited by the founders of the European Nuclear Disarmament movement E. P. Thompson and Dan Smith, with contributions by other prominent antinuclear activists such as Mary Kaldor and Ken Coates. The US edition of Protest and Survive, published by Monthly Review Press in 1981 with an introduction by Daniel Ellsberg, like the British original, became a valued resource for the activist community. Holloway was a highly respected scholar and teacher — he eventually became a professor at Stanford University in both the history and political science departments — whose work also appealed to a public readership concerned about the nuclear danger. His collection of essays, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, published by Yale University Press in two editions with multiple printings in the early 1980s, was something of a bestseller for an academic press. His next book, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956, also published by Yale, benefited from the opening of Soviet-era archives and the possibility of interviewing veterans of the Soviet nuclear program and retired political and military figures. Holloway demonstrated extraordinary skill and perseverance in mining these sources to produce an award-winning masterpiece that has been translated into a half-dozen languages.

Stalin and the Bomb was a hard act to follow, and this time Holloway set his sights on a more ambitious goal, “an international — and transnational — history of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.” It is international in both its research base and its scope, treating all of the states that developed nuclear weapons during that period, with particular focus on the United States and the Soviet Union. Holloway draws on archival, memoir, and secondary sources in English, French, German, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian (among the languages he reads) as well as documents that his research assistants translated from Chinese. For Holloway, “the focus of international history is the relationships among states and their interactions with one another.” Unlike many scholars of international relations who treat states as “billiard balls,” Holloway, as a historian, also pays attention to individuals — particularly political and military leaders who represented states. Moreover, he devotes attention to nuclear strategists such as Thomas Schelling (thirteen entries in the index), Bernard Brodie (six entries), and Herman Kahn (seventeen mentions in the text and notes) and the degree to which their ideas influenced national policies. Forsberg and Myrdal merit a mention each, but this is not a book about peace activists. Much of the history of antinuclear movements has been well covered in outstanding international histories on the Nuclear Freeze and END, and Holloway cites these most recent books as well as standard references such as Lawrence Wittner’s comprehensive trilogy.⁸

Holloway sets out to ask a number of questions:

What role has technology transfer played in national atomic projects, whether through assistance programs or espionage? How did states adjust their strategies to the strategies of adversaries? Did thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war differ fundamentally from one country to another? Does deterrence work in the same way in different settings? Why did negotiations in the 1940s on the international control of atomic energy fail, while arms control agreements could be negotiated from the 1960s on? Can we talk of nuclear learning on an international scale? How effective was the “nuclear order”?

One of his goals is “to look critically at different concepts — deterrence, brinkmanship, proliferation, and escalation, for example — in the context in which they have arisen, and to ask how much light they shed on the historical evidence and what light the evidence throws on them.” Rather than engage in what some have called the gladiatorial approach to international relations, pitting explanations focused on power against those emphasizing norms and law or ideas, Holloway attempts to encompass all three approaches: “the destructive power of nuclear weapons, obviously; cooperation among states in the form of alliances, treaties, norms, and practices relating to nuclear weapons; and the role of ideas and concepts — about nuclear weapons and military strategy, for example, or about strategic stability.”

Holloway acknowledges and regrets “gaps — the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.” But even a study limited to states cannot address them all, not even in a book of 708 pages, with notes and index. Perhaps the biggest challenge — aside, one assumes, from keeping to the publisher’s word limit — was organization. In covering the development of nuclear weapons in several countries, strategies for their use, efforts to bring them under control, and crises where they brought the world to the brink of disaster, the author adopts an approach that is both “chronological and thematic” with remarkable success. There is little repetition, and the few slipups can easily be fixed in a subsequent edition.⁹ Still, leaving out discussion of Latin America and Africa, in particular, means less attention to hopeful initiatives that rejected nuclear weapons, on the one hand, and less consideration of the grave humanitarian harm inflicted by the nuclear arms race, on the other. In the first category, the 1968 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (the Treaty of Tlatelolco) does get a mention, but not the step-by-step denuclearization of regional rivals Argentina and Brazil during the last years of the Cold War.¹⁰ There is brief discussion of nuclear collaboration between South Africa and Israel, but no detailed account of how the former came to give up the several nuclear bombs it had built in the 1980s. In the second category, Africa is also relevant to an international history of nuclear weapons: the earliest source of uranium for US atomic bombs was the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo, and access to uranium evidently played a role in the CIA-linked murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961.¹¹ Fortunately other scholars have devoted sustained attention to the effects of the nuclear industry on Africa and the humanitarian consequences of French nuclear testing in Algeria and the Pacific.¹²

For students of the history of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, Holloway’s book covers familiar territory but also introduces fascinating new details, and for many episodes (especially regarding the USSR) it will likely remain the definitive account. A major theme of the book is the development of “common knowledge” among the leaders of nuclear-armed states about the disastrous, potentially planet-destroying effects of nuclear war. Holloway borrows the concept of common knowledge from a 1969 book by David Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study, and uses it to suggest that, despite apparently inconsistent statements and behavior, the leaders of the states possessing nuclear weapons in the 1950s — the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom — “came independently to the view that a general nuclear war was unacceptable.”

Other leaders did not recognize that knowledge. Fidel Castro urged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to launch a nuclear attack against the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. “We were completely aghast,” Khrushchev recalled. “Castro clearly has no idea what thermonuclear war is.” Mao Zedong was another such leader who did not share the common knowledge. Holloway reports on private conversations between Jawaharlal Nehru and Mao in 1954, when the Indian prime minister sought unsuccessfully to persuade his Chinese counterpart of the danger of nuclear war. Three years later, at a conference in Moscow, Mao recalled the conversation and the possibility that nine hundred million people could die in a future world war, a third of the earth’s population at the time. Mao wasn’t worried: “If half of the human kind is destroyed, the other half will still remain, but imperialism will be destroyed completely, and there will just be socialism in the entire world, and in half-a-century or a whole century the population will grow again, even by more than a half.”

The leaders who did share common knowledge about the consequences of a nuclear war did so mainly because of the invention of the hydrogen bomb, the weapon based on thermonuclear reactions — fusion rather than the fission that powered the original atomic bombs. Holloway is particularly adept at explaining for nonspecialists the technical characteristics of the weapons and the developments that influenced each country’s progress toward creating thermonuclear arsenals. As he explains, “the explosive yield of a fusion bomb could be made indefinitely large, depending only on the amount of thermonuclear fuel it contained.” A 1952 test of an early US model (not yet a deliverable bomb) called the “Ivy Mike shot, produced an explosive yield equivalent to 10 megatons of TNT — about 500 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.” The explosion completely obliterated Enewetak Atoll in the South Pacific, where the US conducted its tests in an area inhabited by human beings (who were evacuated prior) that it administered as a “trust territory” on behalf of the United Nations from 1947 to 1986. On March 1, 1954, the US Castle Bravo test detonated a bomb on Bikini Atoll with an “explosive yield of 15 megatons — more than 1,000 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb.” Radioactive debris from the explosion contaminated the crew of a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, about 130 kilometers away and touched off a worldwide campaign to end nuclear testing and abolish nuclear weapons, a campaign in which India’s Nehru played a prominent role.

Holloway calls attention to the testimony of scientists involved in the nuclear weapons programs of the United States and the Soviet Union who persuaded their countries’ leaders of the devastating consequences of a nuclear war. Some of them, such as Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe, had denounced the hydrogen bomb, before it was developed, as a weapon of genocide, and then went on to help build it. Others evinced no qualms about their roles, such as Andrei Sakharov in the USSR, who helped create the Soviet hydrogen bomb but then became alarmed about the consequences of atmospheric nuclear testing. In February 1954, Sterling Cole, chair of the US Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, described the destruction wrought by the Ivy Mike test more than a year earlier. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was evidently shaken by Cole’s description when he read the report about it in The Manchester Guardian. In March 1954, following the Castle Bravo test, a group of four Soviet nuclear scientists, led by Igor Kurchatov, the head of the bomb program, sent a report to the Soviet leadership warning that a war using the existing stockpiles of weapons would create “on a significant part of the surface of the earth doses of radiation and concentrations of radioactive materials that are biologically harmful for the life of people and plants,” and that in a few years use of the more powerful and numerous weapons under development would “create on the whole globe conditions impossible for life.”

Despite the scientists’ efforts to convey the destructiveness of thermonuclear explosions, many continued to work on the weapons, believing that the threat of nuclear devastation would serve as a deterrent to war. As Richard Garwin, a central figure in the US hydrogen bomb program, once put it, “one of the key and general tools for preserving a society is to threaten unacceptable damage to the forces or even to the survival of another society.”¹³ Holloway cites the more familiar and elegant formulation of Bernard Brodie from The Absolute Weapon, published in 1946: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.”

One could imagine that averting war should be the responsibility not only of the military establishment but, let’s say, of diplomats and political leaders, who might, for example, try to avoid crises that could escalate into war. The Cold War was rife with crises, and US and Soviet leaders saw nuclear weapons not only as tools to deter the other side from behavior they feared but also to compel it to behave in ways they desired (thus the neologism “compellence” to accompany deterrence). Thomas Schelling, Brodie’s colleague at the RAND Corporation, the think tank established by the US Air Force, developed some of the key ideas associated with nuclear coercion, including the “threats that leave something to chance,” and he offered guidance for how leaders should deploy those threats to achieve geopolitical advantage.

Holloway contrasts Schelling’s views with those of John Foster Dulles, US secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dulles coined another neologism, “brinkmanship,” to describe the coercive diplomacy he pursued against the USSR and China during the 1950s. But Schelling used the term differently, according to Holloway.

The brink, in his view, is not “the sharp edge of a cliff where one can stand firmly, look down, and decide whether or not to plunge.” The brink is a curved slope that one can stand on, but with some chance of slipping. “Brinkmanship involves getting onto the slope where one may fall in spite of his own best efforts to save himself, dragging his adversary with him. Brinkmanship is thus the deliberate creation of a recognizable risk of war, a risk that one does not completely control.” This is more nuanced than Dulles’s definition, which implies that the brink has a sharp edge. It is also different in an important respect: for Dulles the “necessary art” was “the ability to get to the verge without getting into war.” 

A substantial portion of Holloway’s book details crises that many previous scholars have studied as involving implicit or direct threats of the use of nuclear weapons: Berlin (1948); Taiwan (1954–55); Suez (1956); Hungary and Poland (1956); Taiwan again (1958); Berlin again (1958–63); Cuba (1962); a Sino-Soviet border conflict that coincided with Richard Nixon’s attempt to embody his “madman theory” of using a nuclear alert to convince the USSR and North Vietnam to agree to a peace settlement on US terms (1969); the India-Pakistan war over East Pakistan–Bangladesh (1971); and the Yom Kippur War (1973). 

Whereas other scholars have claimed that nuclear deterrence or brinkmanship succeeded or failed in one or another of these crises, Holloway is able to determine better than his predecessors the validity of such claims. How? Mainly through his access to the archival materials documenting the decisions — often from Soviet archives but sometimes through triangulating, for example, Soviet reports of Chinese decision-making combined with US intelligence analyses and memoir accounts.

In these crises nuclear threats were used in ways that did not conform to a simple model of deterrence in which State A plans to attack, State B threatens to retaliate, and State A desists. There were implicit threats and explicit threats, and bluffs; there were clear threats and ambiguous ones; there was deterrence and self-deterrence; there were threats the adversary welcomed for domestic reasons; there were nuclear threats against non-nuclear states as well as against nuclear states; there were crises in which one side made nuclear deterrent threats, and crises in which both did. Nuclear threats were various rather than uniform. 

Often Holloway does not find that nuclear weapons provided much leverage in these crises. For example: “Dulles’s 1956 claim that nuclear deterrence ‘stopped the Chinese in Formosa’ was overstated for, notwithstanding the ‘liberate Taiwan’ slogan, Mao did not plan to attack Taiwan in 1954–5.” He does, however, argue that “nuclear weapons could exercise a deterrent effect even when there was no explicit nuclear threat,” because leaders who accepted the common knowledge recognized the danger of escalation. Moreover, contrary to Schelling’s prescriptions, in the first Taiwan Strait crisis, “nobody deliberately created a ‘recognizable risk of war’ that they did not control.” 

Whether there is such a thing as reliable “control” in the nuclear bargaining scenarios Schelling imagined or Dulles enacted has come under question over the years. In a pathbreaking 1987 essay, Carol Cohn examined the effects she experienced as an antinuclear activist and scholar in learning the arcane and often gendered language of “defense intellectuals.” The more expert she became at deploying the jargon, the more distanced she felt from her original motives of fear and anger about the nuclear arms race. She also offered insights on the question of control. “A more subtle, but perhaps more important, element of learning the language,” she explained,

is that, when you speak it, you feel in control. . . . 

 . . .  Much of the reduced anxiety about nuclear war commonly experienced by both new speakers of the language and long-time experts comes from characteristics of the language itself: the distance afforded by its abstraction; the sense of control afforded by mastering it; and the fact that its content and concerns are that of the users rather than the victims of nuclear weapons.¹⁴

Holloway quotes Sakharov, who took part in discussions of Soviet nuclear war planning, to similar effect: “The ‘unthinkable and monstrous’ was transformed into a ‘subject for detailed examination and calculation,’ he wrote. ‘It became a part of daily existence — still imagined but already seen as something possible.’”

Holloway himself resists the tendency to treat nuclear war as normal, even though the book contains many pages of detailed treatment of how the superpowers planned to fight one. Perhaps reflecting on the process of writing his book, he suggests that “planning for thermonuclear war is more disturbing to think about than the development of nuclear weapons, which can be seen as scientific and technical achievements, or even past nuclear crises, since we know how those ended.”

Holloway’s understanding of common knowledge as a source of restraint during those crises relies on leaders to maintain the sort of anxiety that Khrushchev reported he felt when he first learned about the effects of nuclear weapons: “‘I couldn’t sleep for several days,’ he remembered. ‘Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons, and when I realized that I was able to sleep again.’” But it takes a certain kind of magical thinking or religious faith to assume that the weapons wouldn’t be used just because you don’t intend to use them. Meanwhile, as Holloway recounts, Khrushchev brought crises to the brink in the confident expectation that his adversaries shared his knowledge of nuclear war’s horrible consequences and could maintain control over the situation to prevent the worst.

If common knowledge played an important role in keeping nuclear-armed states from hurtling over the brink, as Holloway maintains, luck clearly played one too.¹⁵ The author documents many close calls caused by misunderstandings, principal-agent miscommunications, and pressures of domestic politics, especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet by and large, his story of the development of the nuclear order is a rather optimistic one. “Nuclear weapons have not been used in war since August 1945,” he writes toward the end of the study. “That is the most important thing to say about them.”

Daniel Ellsberg was fond of saying that nuclear weapons have not been used the way a cocked pistol pointed at a forehead is not being used. Holloway implicitly acknowledges the point by paying so much attention to nuclear crises. And he anticipates criticism, writing in his introduction: “If there is a nuclear war in the next ten years, the nuclear history of the Cold War (and the style in which I have written this book) may look like irresponsible folly in the face of the nuclear danger — rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, to repeat the metaphor Jonathan Schell used in his classic book on nuclear war, The Fate of the Earth.” Yet his book ends long before the unraveling of the nuclear order he recounts, with most of the US-Soviet arms control treaties in shambles, wars between nuclear-armed states and suspected nuclear aspirants in the Middle East, and a renewal of interest in nuclear deterrence in Europe and Asia. In his conclusions, Holloway cautions that “it would be a mistake to idealize the nuclear order as it existed during the Cold War,” and perhaps the best that can be said about predictions of proponents of nuclear deterrence — “that there would be peace (in the sense of no war) between the superpowers — has held so far, even if it seems to be Orwell’s ‘peace that is no peace.’” A further consideration, to which other scholars have devoted attention, would be congenial to Orwell: the tension or outright contradiction between democratic governance and the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons as well as the corrosive effects of nuclear secrecy on democratic norms.¹⁶

Holloway’s book is not likely to inspire antinuclear activists the way Schell’s book did. Or to put it another way, its tone differs from what a nuclear abolitionist might adopt. Consider the first paragraph of Ray Acheson’s book on the origins of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (aka the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty), which entered into force in January 2021:

Nuclear weapons have a history and a legacy of anguish, pain, and suffering. From the horror experienced by people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, to the torment of Indigenous populations whose lands and waters nuclear weapons were tested upon in the ensuing decades, to the fear of the entire world held in the grip of possible nuclear annihilation, nuclear weapons have scarred our global community.¹⁷

The events Acheson recounts include the founding of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, inspired by the successful efforts to produce treaties banning land mines and cluster munitions. The fear and anger about the humanitarian consequences of the production, testing, and potential use of nuclear weapons served as further inspiration for the campaign.

Despite its measured tone, Holloway’s book amasses plenty of evidence to show why people were frightened enough of the bomb and angry enough at their leaders to turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest, even if he grants the protests themselves rather less attention. Holloway describes the extraordinary accumulation of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons — a process initiated by the United States, which enjoyed a nuclear monopoly until 1949 and “nuclear superiority” into the 1960s.

In 1952 it had in its stockpile 841 nuclear warheads capable of delivering 50 megatons of TNT equivalent; by 1960 those numbers had grown to 18,638 warheads capable of delivering 20,491 megatons — a staggering increase in destructive power. In 1952 the Soviet Union had 75 warheads and in 1960 an estimated 1,605. The Soviet stockpile was less than 10 percent the size of the US stockpile into the early 1960s.

Holloway also documents the toll that a nuclear war would exact in human death and destruction by citing the relevant US government studies. A 1949 report had concluded that an air offensive against the Soviet Union with fission bombs of the sort dropped on Japan

would result in 2.7 million Soviet deaths. In 1955 the estimate was 60 million deaths in the Soviet Union and its allied countries. Full execution of the first US Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), which was completed in December 1960, was judged likely to result in 285 million prompt deaths in the Soviet Union and China. Six months later, it was judged, that number would reach 325 million, as a result of deaths from initial injuries and radioactive fallout. Another 300 million might die from fallout in Europe and in countries close to the Soviet Union.

He quotes from the memoirs of Daniel Ellsberg about his time as a Pentagon nuclear war planner and his characterization of these numbers: “Roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.” He cites Lynn Eden’s work that reveals how much the government estimates ignored

the fire effects of nuclear explosions — both thermal damage and firestorm phenomena — as well as electromagnetic pulse effects. Since those effects are among the most serious, the planners underestimated to a significant degree the damage and destruction their planned nuclear strikes would inflict on the Soviet Union, thereby driving up their own requirements for bombs.¹⁸

Holloway then returns to his theme of common knowledge:

These figures confirm, in a brutally clear fashion, the judgment that the political leaders of the three nuclear powers had come to in the mid-1950s, that all-out nuclear war was unacceptable. But do they also make a mockery of that judgment? After all, the United States and the Soviet Union continued to accumulate nuclear weapons and gave serious thought to the ways in which those weapons could be used in war.

Not only did the United States and Soviet Union produce nuclear weapons by the tens of thousands, far in excess of what one might consider necessary to deter an attack from the other side; they engaged in reckless behavior during crises, issuing statements that suggested their willingness to escalate conflicts to the point of nuclear catastrophe. This is the potentially deadly part of the “deadly connection” peace activists drew between military intervention and nuclear war.

The United States deployed so-called tactical nuclear weapons to Europe starting in the first half of the 1950s in support of a policy that came to be called “extended nuclear deterrence.” The idea was to create a tripwire that would pose the risk of escalation to all-out nuclear war if the USSR invaded, but also to use the weapons militarily in the event of war. It was necessary to “bring the battle back to the battlefield,” as J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the key promoters of tactical nuclear weapons, put it. In 1955, NATO carried out an exercise called Carte Blanche that entailed simulated use of the weapons. The New York Timesreported at the time that the five-day exercise included 12,347 sorties and dropped 335 simulated atomic bombs.¹⁹ It did not report estimates of 1.7 million Germans killed in the Western and Soviet sectors and 3.5 million wounded, but Der Spiegel, the German weekly magazine, did. “Of the total 335 atomic bombs dropped, 268 fell on German soil,” the article reported, as it described how an actual war would have “reduced the Federal Republic to rubble.”²⁰ US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe numbered 7,300 at their peak. The Soviet Union responded some years later with an arsenal that reached about 10,000.

While Europeans feared that the weapons would be used, Dulles and Eisenhower worried that an emerging taboo might prevent them from ever being deployed. Dulles insisted “that we urgently educate our own and world opinion as to the necessity for the tactical use of atomic weapons,” echoing Oppenheimer’s position. Asked by reporters about Dulles’s assertions that tactical nuclear weapons could be used in a war in the Far East, Eisenhower agreed: “I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” The policy carried over into the next administration, when Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defense, was asked in a September 1961 press conference whether he was suggesting that the United States would “perhaps use nuclear weapons in connection with the Berlin situation.” His response: “Yes, I definitely do. We will use nuclear weapons wherever we feel it necessary to protect our vital interests. Our nuclear stockpile is several times that of the Soviet Union, and we will use either tactical weapons or strategic weapons in whatever quantities, wherever, whenever it’s necessary to protect this nation and its interests.”²¹

Holloway devotes a chapter to the conflict over West Berlin — a western enclave located deep within the territory of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops. Khrushchev threatened to resolve the anomalous situation of a divided Germany and NATO’s refusal to recognize the borders established after the victory over Adolf Hitler by signing a separate peace treaty with the GDR and giving the East Germans full control of access to the city they claimed as their capital. He was under pressure from Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, who faced brain drain in the exodus of his citizens to West Berlin, not yet blocked by the wall that would be built in August 1961. Even then, it was not clear that the wall would exert a stabilizing effect. General Lucius Clay, Kennedy’s representative in Berlin, dispatched ten tanks to the East Berlin border in October to assert the right of a US diplomat to cross over without showing identification, and the Soviet side had matched the deployment. Both Khrushchev and Kennedy were under pressure not to back down. “Ulbricht persisted in trying to persuade Khrushchev to sign the peace treaty,” writes Holloway, and “Clay planned to use tanks with bulldozer mounts to break down parts of the wall.” Kennedy ordered Clay to remove the US tanks, and the Soviet side reciprocated, defusing the crisis. Holloway concludes his chapter on the period of 1958 to 1963 by citing Schelling’s advice that to bolster the credibility of a deterrent threat one might burn the bridges needed to escape. “In the Berlin crisis,” Holloway writes, “neither side burned its bridges. Neither side cut off the possibility of its own retreat. Neither side showed itself oblivious of the risk of nuclear war or unmindful of its possible consequences.”

Other accounts are less sanguine. NATO’s plan for defending West Berlin, originally designated “cosmic top secret” but declassified some years ago, called for “selective” use of nuclear weapons in the event that its armed forces, on the verge of defeat, were unable to break an anticipated blockade by East German and Soviet troops. Nuclear weapons would be used as a political signal of the sort Schelling recommended at the time to Kennedy.²² The problem is that, as Holloway reports in an earlier chapter, Soviet strategy at the time envisaged a massive preemptive nuclear attack on NATO’s nuclear forces just before they were launched. It made no provision for tit-for-tat “communication” of the sort Schelling fantasized.²³

Selective nuclear use was not the only US strategy under consideration. Pentagon official Paul Nitze criticized the proposal for a selective nuclear attack and advocated instead for what was known in the jargon as a disarming first strike. He described how, “at our meeting with the President, I suggested that since demonstrative or tactical use of nuclear weapons would greatly increase the temptation to the Soviets to initiate a strategic strike, it would be best for us, in moving toward the use of nuclear weapons, to consider most seriously the option of an initial strategic strike of our own.”A US first strike, Nitze claimed, “could assure us victory in at least a military sense in a series of nuclear exchanges, while we might well lose if we allowed the Soviets to strike first.” Kennedy declined his advice, which by Nitze’s own account would have produced nine to ten million US casualties in a Soviet retaliation, but ten times that many Soviet ones in a first strike, and therefore a “victory.”²⁴

Khrushchev highlighted the nuclear dimension of the Berlin conflict when, on August 31, 1961, he “announced an end to the nuclear test moratorium that had lasted almost three years. Over the next four months the Soviet Union conducted fifty-nine tests, including, on October 30, the detonation of the most powerful nuclear device ever tested, with a yield of 50 megatons.” Antinuclear activists considered Khrushchev’s decision to break the moratorium a cruel betrayal. Back in the USSR, Andrei Sakharov despaired of the test’s impact on the environment and public health. As he later wrote in his memoirs, “I had come to regard testing in the atmosphere as a crime against humanity, no different than secretly pouring disease-producing microbes into a city’s water supply.”²⁵ Holloway suggests, “perhaps the preoccupation with nuclear weapons was a salutary reminder of the death and destruction that could follow a failure to resolve the Berlin crisis by peaceful means.” Common knowledge of nuclear destruction, in his view, ultimately led to restraint. Holloway quotes Valentin Falin, a Soviet diplomat who was directly involved in the crisis as Soviet and US tanks faced off across Checkpoint Charlie: “Only 200 meters and strong nerves stood between Europe and World War III.” It seems likely that luck also played an outsize role. In future crises, can we assume leaders won’t follow the advice of a Schelling or an Ulbricht or a Clay or a Nitze?

It may seem an unusual criticism for such a long and wide-ranging study — and perhaps more directed at publisher than author — but the book might have been strengthened by extending its coverage chronologically, in both directions. The notion of deterrence, threatening mass murder of civilians to discourage war, was not invented along with nuclear weapons in 1945. Nor were notions of retaliation against civilians for the sins of their leaders. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the culmination of a systematic destruction of Japan’s population centers by incendiary weapons that created firestorms. The “strategic” bombing of Germany and its European allies led to the deaths of some six hundred thousand people; the aerial bombardment of Japan killed around five hundred thousand, including one hundred thousand residents of Tokyo over the course of a single night’s fire-bombing on March 9–10, 1945. It was ordered by General Curtis LeMay, who later became head of the US Strategic Air Command responsible for waging nuclear war.

The mass killing of civilians by aerial bombardment during World War II could not be characterized as deterrence but rather as punishment or revenge against the Germans, Japanese, and Italians for their governments’ aggressive wars. One of the earliest proponents of using the threat of mass civilian casualties as a deterrent predates the war. Italian General Giulio Douhet published his book, Il dominio dell’aria (The Command of the Air), in 1921. He explicitly argued for attacking population centers at the outset of a war. Douhet considered such attacks an efficient way to end wars quickly, or even, as the language of the nuclear age would later put it, to deter them by offering the prospect of vast civilian destruction. In the event of war, he preferred to see civilians die suddenly than to sacrifice the country’s best — young male soldiers, in his view — in years of relentless trench warfare such as characterized the Great War. The preference for saving young male soldiers at the expense of civilians defies our gendered expectations of protecting innocent women and children, but Douhet was not the only one to express it. During World War II, the British pacifist Vera Brittain produced an impressively researched study of the impact of Anglo-American bombing on civilians and cities in Germany. George Orwell, of all people, took her to task for excessive emphasis on such “catchwords” as “killing civilians,” “massacre of women and children,” and “destruction of our cultural heritage.” Why, he asked, “is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage.”²⁶ A fundamental difference between civilians and soldiers is that the latter bear arms and can defend themselves, whereas the former are literally defenseless.

Following the outbreak of World War II, the British had pursued a bombing strategy against Germany and the industrial cities of Genoa, Milan, and Turin in Italy that they called “dehousing.” It deliberately harmed ordinary working-class families while claiming to pursue military objectives (e.g., destroying munitions factories near the workers’ houses). The strategy was championed by Churchill and his science advisers Solly Zuckerman and F. A. Lindemann.²⁷ Dehousing resembles the recommendation that a non-civilian, military target be used for the first atomic bombing of Japan, as Holloway quotes the minutes of the meeting in which it was proposed: “A vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” He dryly adds: “it implied a very narrow definition of ‘civilian,’ if workers’ houses could be described as a non-civilian target.”

Punitive bombing of civilians, a practice that US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had denounced as “inhuman barbarism” when Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy did it, became the regular practice of the Allied war effort. Remarkably, it also played a role in the president’s vision of a postwar security order. Roosevelt’s plan for “four policemen” (the US, UK, USSR, and China) to maintain international security envisioned punishment of aggressors. “Violators first would be quarantined,” he explained to the journalist Arthur Sweetser, “and then, if they persisted in their disruptive activities, bombed at the rate of a city a day until they agreed to behave.”²⁸ Roosevelt’s proposal predated the successful test of an atomic bomb, which occurred after his death. When Churchill learned about the Alamogordo test at the Potsdam conference in July 1945, he waxed enthusiastic about the atomic bomb’s use against his wartime ally and anticipated enemy, the USSR. “We now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians!” as Holloway quotes him. “Now we could say. . . .  if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev, Kharkov, Stalingrad [sic], Sebastopol etc. etc. And now where are the Russians!!!”

The impulse to punish civilians for the transgressions of their leaders, evident in the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II, became a staple of the nuclear era. Holloway quotes McNamara from 1963 on the requirements of “assured destruction” as a deterrent to a Soviet attack: the “ability to destroy, after a well planned and executed Soviet surprise attack on our Strategic Nuclear Forces, the Soviet government and military controls, plus a large percentage of the population and economy (e.g. 30% of their population, 50% of their industrial capacity, and 150 of their cities).” In other words, the United States would destroy 150 Soviet cities and nearly a third of their inhabitants in response to an attack ordered — or perhaps even launched inadvertently — by Soviet leaders or their subordinates. Harming civilians for the misfortune of living under bellicose leaders has continued long past the Cold War, with the 1999 NATO air war against Serbia, Russia’s invasions of Chechnya, Israel’s destruction of Gaza and Lebanon, and Donald Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran. 

When Trump vowed, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” some Republican politicians located their backbones and retorted, “That’s not who we are.” But it is. Even though Holloway recounts in excruciating detail Soviet and US plans for using tens of thousands of nuclear weapons against ostensibly military targets, the power of nuclear deterrence, to the extent it is real, lies in the threat of mass civilian casualties. “If we regard nuclear weapons as deterrents, we plan their use in order not to have to use them. It is a troubling moral problem,” he writes. Others have been more unequivocal in their condemnation of nuclear deterrence. Bernard Lown, the cofounder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, once characterized nuclear retaliation as a “sick Hitlerite policy” and analogized it to the total destruction of the Bohemian village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, and massacre of its inhabitants, ordered by Hitler in June 1942 in reprisal for the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich.²⁹ Lown’s point is that once deterrence fails, nuclear retaliation means wholesale slaughter of civilians as revenge. That is why well-meaning proposals that the nuclear-armed states adopt policies of no first use of nuclear weapons, while potentially stabilizing in the sorts of nuclear crises Holloway recounts, are still morally reprehensible in what retaliatory second use would entail.

One of the reasons threats of mass killing of civilians became an acceptable way to try to deter war is because the states that used that method of warfare during World War II emerged victorious. A lesson that Churchill took from the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, relayed to a close military adviser at the time, was “it shows that if you get into a war, it is supremely important to win it. You and I would be in a pretty pickle if we had lost.”³⁰ Military leaders from LeMay to McNamara reportedly drew similar conclusions. So did Leo Szilard, the physicist who drafted Albert Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt warning about the possibility that Nazi Germany might build an atomic bomb. After it became clear that Germany, now defeated, had not given priority to building such weapons anyhow, the Manhattan Project scientists continued working on the bombs that would destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Szilard wrote a fictionalized account of a future war, won by the USSR, after which the nuclear scientists were put on trial for inventing and supporting the use of weapons of mass destruction.³¹ In fact only one scientist, Joseph Rotblat, had left Los Alamos on grounds of conscience when he learned in late 1944 that there would be no Nazi atomic bomb.

What is perhaps most important to know about the danger and immorality of pursuing nuclear deterrence after World War II is that it was unnecessary. Holloway quotes with apparent approval veteran diplomat and historian George Kennan’s doubt “that the Soviet Union wanted world war at any time since 1945, or that it would have been inclined, for any rational political reason, to inaugurate such a war, even had the atomic bomb never been invented.” Yet Holloway does not pose the question of whether nuclear deterrence was even needed, if the main adversary had no intention to launch a war. What political scientist Robert Jervis wrote a quarter century ago remains true today: “The Soviet archives have yet to reveal any serious plans for unprovoked aggression against Western Europe, not to mention a first strike against the United States.”³² Holloway’s research confirms the point. Although he explains that Soviet leaders assumed a future war would begin with an invasion from the West, he does not discuss the war plans that were declassified as part of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost in the 1980s. They showed that following the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet army planned to undertake a strictly defensive strategy in the event of war in Europe, defending in three bands — 50, 100, and 150 kilometers — from the border of its occupation zone before seeking to recapture territory. Until the plans were revealed, most observers, even if they assumed Soviet status quo intentions, expected that the Soviet Union, if attacked, would seek to avoid another war fought on its territory by immediately going on the offensive.On the contrary, well into the 1950s, as Joseph Stalin began rebuilding the armies of the satellite states under Soviet occupation, their strategies “remained unequivocally defensive.”³³

Meanwhile, in May 1945, Churchill had ordered the British military’s Joint Planning Staff to conduct a study of the feasibility of a surprise attack against Soviet occupation forces in Germany at a time when the USSR was still an ally. Operation Unthinkable concluded that the prospects for success were poor, but in the meantime, as Holloway reports, Soviet intelligence, through its sources in London, briefed Stalin and his foreign minister Viacheslav Molotov on the plan even before its final results were conveyed to Churchill. US war plans during the period of nuclear monopoly envisaged attacking Soviet cities with atomic bombs. One approved in December 1948 envisaged 133 bombs launched against seventy cities.³⁴ Holloway reports on such plans and the threat they were intended to counter, along with a table that shows the United States moving from a position of nuclear monopoly until 1949 to a vast superiority in nuclear weapons by 1961: the US had 170 nuclear weapons in 1949, when the USSR tested its first, and the US arsenal grew to a mind-numbing 22,229, compared to the Soviet side’s 2,471 in 1961, at the height of the Berlin Crisis. Holloway might have devoted more attention to the exaggeration of the Soviet military threat dating from these early years, particularly the war scare of 1947–48 that was intended, as The Wall Street Journal put it, “to prod more Army-Navy money out of Congress” — the origins of the US military-industrial complex.³⁵

Moving beyond the Cold War, one might argue against repeating its mistakes by treating post-Soviet Russia as a serious military threat. Unfortunately, however, today’s situation is different. Neither NATO nor Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a status quo power, and Putin has already unleashed a war against neighboring Ukraine, intended to extinguish it as an independent country. Even if one judges NATO’s eastern expansion as a provocative error, that does not justify Putin’s war, whether or not he feared that Ukraine would one day join the alliance and serve as a launching pad for an invasion. Preventive war is plainly illegal, and in Russia’s case something like committing suicide for fear of death.

Although it is doubtful that Putin would undertake an outright invasion of NATO countries, he has made threatening gestures against Estonia and has specifically named Narva, an outpost on the Russian border closer to Putin’s hometown of St Petersburg than to the capital, Tallinn, as a traditional Russian city. With a population of 88 percent Russians, many without Estonian citizenship, Narva could be vulnerable to infiltration of “little green men” along the model of Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, promotion of a secessionist movement, or capture. Here the nuclear crises of the Cold War that Holloway describes could provide relevant lessons. Narva, like West Berlin, would be difficult or impossible to defend against Russian encroachment, and NATO’s policy of extended nuclear deterrence is effectively the same as back then: “If you try anything, we’ll blow up the world.” Putin would face some risk of provoking a nuclear response in making a move against Narva, but the potential payoff if NATO did not respond would be high — demonstrating the hollowness of the alliance’s commitment to defend indefensible enclaves, like West Berlin during the Cold War. 

Might there also be a similar and dangerous misunderstanding of the conditions under which each side would resort to nuclear use, as in the Berlin crises? According to David Holloway, yes. Analyzing Russia’s nuclear strategy of “escalate to de-escalate” a month after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he warned in an article that, “in a period of high tension, a miscalculation could have catastrophic consequences.”³⁶ Holloway recommended a strong political response to any Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons rather than nuclear retaliation. Other observers have offered less sensible counsel. A recent report of the self-styled European Nuclear Study Group considered alternatives to the United States’ shaky commitment to threaten nuclear holocaust to defend European territory — a prospect even less plausible under Donald Trump than under his predecessors, given the administration’s anti-Europe animus. The report’s main worry was that a European jointly controlled nuclear arsenal might lack the credibility, will, and “political institutions and processes that signal a ‘readiness to push the button’ across the range of plausible scenarios for which deterrence is designed.”³⁷ The authors might profit from studying the Cold War nuclear crises in Holloway’s book and reconsider whether readiness to push the nuclear button is the best path to security.

In July 2017, meeting at United Nations’ headquarters in New York, 122 countries answered that question with a resounding no. They voted in favor of a legally binding treaty to ban nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Ban Treaty came into force in January 2021, after fifty countries ratified it — the story that Acheson tells in Banning the Bomb. Unless the effort continues to stigmatize the possession as well as the use of nuclear weapons, we are unlikely to see a reduction in the danger of nuclear war.

Writing about the minority of countries that still stake their security on nuclear deterrence, Holloway concludes his study with a question:

What does it say about us, about our societies, and about the world we live in, that in the interest of national security, we have felt the need to build immensely destructive weapons, to create missiles to deliver them to targets around the world, to select targets, to train troops to handle the weapons and launch them, and finally to convince our adversaries (and ourselves) that we are prepared to implement strategies that could wreak death and destruction on a massive scale? 

He doesn’t provide an answer but acknowledges that “it is a troubling moral problem.” 

In his final remarks, Holloway returns to Schelling to evaluate his claim, mainly associated with the scholarly work of Nina Tannenwald, that a “nuclear taboo” has prevented the use of nuclear weapons in war since 1945. Holloway seems skeptical, and the history he recounts of hair-raising nuclear crises shows that skepticism is warranted. “A taboo implies that a person who engages in prohibited behavior will be sanctioned by a group, because the behavior is regarded as dangerous for the group,” he writes. But despite the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Nuclear Ban Treaty, there has been no sanctioning of countries that have built tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, trained their troops to use them with detailed military manuals and simulated (and real) nuclear exercises, threatened nuclear and nonnuclear states alike with massive destruction, and despoiled the territories and poisoned the environment of indigenous peoples in Algeria, Kazakhstan, Nevada, and the Pacific islands in the interest of testing their nuclear explosives. To say there is a taboo against nuclear use under these circumstances is akin to saying there is a taboo against cannibalism while preparing recipes, cookbooks, and utensils to cook and serve human flesh.

Forsberg wrote a fascinating doctoral dissertation, published years after her untimely death, that studied the conditions for abolishing what she called socially sanctioned (as in accepted) violence. Drawing on psychology, anthropology, archeology, sociology, and history, she studied the cases of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and slavery, all once accepted, but — through a combination of moral argument and political activism — eventually rendered unthinkable.³⁸Although best known for the Nuclear Freeze campaign, Forsberg considered her life’s work the theorizing and mobilizing of popular action to achieve the abolition of war. She thought war might go the way of those other inhumane practices, if enough effort were put to exposing its evil nature and mobilizing against it. We were lucky to survive the period David Holloway describes in Nuclear Weapons: An International History, but we will need more than luck to eliminate the scourge of nuclear weapons and war.

Discussions of DSA’s strategy are rife with comparisons to other leftist electoral projects. The Socialist Party of Eugene Debs’s era in particular forms a key point of comparison for writers from various political positions.³ Yet what often goes unexamined in these comparisons is the profound institutional transformation of electoral politics that separates the Debsian Socialist Party as well as efforts that predate it, such as the People’s Party (more commonly known as the Populists), from DSA. The introduction of primary elections and the spread of ballot access restrictions have drastically changed the strategic calculus for electoral politics and ensured the abject failure of third-party efforts since their introduction.

It may be objected that discussing these twentieth-century institutional changes is unnecessary, as the adamantine nature of the two-party system in the United States can be explained as a simple consequence of Duverger’s law. Named after the political scientist Maurice Duverger, the rule states that in a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post electoral system, such as exists in the United States, a two-party system will result. This is because the system places third parties in the inevitable role of spoilers, where voting for them only makes more likely the election of one’s least-favored alternative. But Duverger’s law is insufficient to explain two-party dominance in the United States, either historically or comparatively. Historically, third parties, particularly in the late nineteenth century, had considerable success, electing nearly sixty representatives, five senators, and more than a dozen governors. From a comparative perspective, two-party dominance is far more pronounced in the United States than in the United Kingdom, Canada, or India. Something else is at work.⁴

One piece of the puzzle is the introduction of the direct primary in the early twentieth century. Prior to the direct primary, candidate nomination was managed through some combination of party nominating conventions and simple diktat by party leaders. Direct primaries, by contrast, involve holding an election among some class of voters: either voters signed up with the party, which is called a closed primary, or any voter who chooses to vote in the primary, which is called an open primary. These elections are typically administered by the state rather than the party. During the Progressive Era, when politics in most states were dominated by a single party, challengers, who had no hope of ousting incumbents on the opposing party ticket, turned instead to attacking the power of parties themselves. The direct primary, by expropriating parties’ control over their ballot lines, was one of the chief lines of attack.⁵

Primaries drastically change the incentives for those who wish to challenge the policies of a political party. Rather than building an entirely new party apparatus, they make it possible to challenge an incumbent party leadership in a lower-turnout election that requires mobilizing far fewer voters. Once a primary is won, the challenger simply inherits large portions of the existing machinery of the party. In parts of the country that are dominated by one party, winning a primary effectively guarantees victory in the general election. As such, the political entrepreneurs who hope to challenge an incumbent party leadership, and the voters dissatisfied with that leadership, tend to run and vote in primaries rather than building a third party.⁶

The incentive to compete within existing parties is heightened by the legal hurdles to such endeavors that have been thrown up since the early 1900s. Chief among these are ballot access laws, mandating a certain number of signatures be collected by third parties who wish to appear on the ballot. The Democrats and Republicans are often exempted from such requirements, creating one set of laws for the two major parties and another for everyone else. These laws began proliferating as states attempted to repress the Communist Party in the 1930s but have been used frequently since then, as major parties fear third-party competition.⁷

Combined with primaries, ballot access laws further disincentivize challenging parties from without. They create uncertainty about whether it is even possible to appear on the ballot and ensure challengers need to spend their limited resources on gathering signatures and navigating the inevitable legal challenges the two major parties mount regarding the signatures.⁸

Primaries open the door to challenging the party from the inside, and ballot access laws close the door to challenging it from the outside.⁹ Given this combination, it is little surprise that the postwar period has never seen a sustained third-party challenge reach the level of the Debsian Socialist Party, let alone that of the People’s Party. Instead DSA, as the most successful US socialist project of the post–World War II era, has grown primarily by organizing itself as a force within the Democratic Party.

DSA’s origins go back to the 1970s. It was founded out of a fracture in the Socialist Party, which by the 1960s had dwindled to a group with some influence among unions and intellectuals but little mass base. Much of the group recoiled in horror at the development of the New Left, seeing them as spoiled middle-class children embracing Stalinist totalitarianism. In 1972, the group split. The majority embraced hawkish Cold War anti-communism, while a minority led by Michael Harrington, who had achieved fame as a socialist writer and speaker, founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC).¹⁰ Leveraging close ties with some of the more progressive union leaderships, the organization achieved some real success in the late 1970s by cohering a socialist pole within the Democratic Party.¹¹

In the early 1980s, the group merged with the New American Movement, veterans of the New Left who had reached similar political conclusions to DSOC members. This merger created DSA. Though the new group was larger than DSOC, the political environment of the 1980s proved inhospitable to socialist politics, and membership remained largely stagnant over subsequent decades.

The American left experienced some rejuvenation following the turn of the century, and this set the stage for DSA’s rebirth. First, the movement against the Iraq War was a crucial politicizing context for many in the cohort that would emerge as DSA’s new leadership. Second, the financial crisis of 2008 and the glacial recovery that followed gave a new prominence to economic inequality in US politics. Finally, the Occupy Wall Street movement showed that mobilizing large numbers of people around this issue was possible.

Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign transformed this growing radicalization into a force that would reshape both DSA and US politics as a whole. In his first presidential campaign, Sanders won over thirteen million votes in the state primaries, and his steadfast advocacy for democratic socialism throughout the campaign helped to coalesce a new left pole in American politics. The organizational expression of this was the rebirth of DSA.

Organizers in the group were quick to recognize the potential of a Sanders campaign. DSA had supported Sanders earlier, including in his campaign for the Senate in 2006, raising about $60,000 (or 1 percent of his fundraising) for him.¹² Sanders himself declared his interest in running for president in an interview with The Nation at the beginning of March 2014. Within weeks, DSA members were discussing a petition campaign encouraging him to run and laying the basis for DSA’s participation in his campaign.¹³ By the beginning of April, they had launched their petition.¹⁴

Over the course of the campaign, DSA members participated at all levels. Local chapters organized tablings and social events (“Beers for Bernie”), and members played a central role in the Labor for Bernie group that worked to recruit union members to the campaign.¹⁵ Much of this was organized through the group We Need Bernie, which DSA members formed as an independent expenditure group to support Sanders’s run. Even at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2016, where Sanders’s defeat by Hillary Clinton was officially pronounced, DSA members organized a Socialist Caucus at the DNC, bringing the fifty-five DSA members who had been elected delegates together with other Sanders delegates.¹⁶

DSA’s energetic participation in the campaign dovetailed with other dynamics to supercharge the group’s growth. Sanders was emphatic about identifying as a democratic socialist, and DSA had the phrase in its name. It also, unlike most other existing socialist groups, had basically no barrier to entry, requiring no political education to become a member. As a result of all this, by mid-2017, the group’s membership had roughly tripled to twenty-five thousand, turning it from a group consisting largely of retirees to the biggest socialist organization in the United States.¹⁷

When Sanders began gearing up for his 2020 campaign, DSA was well-prepared to support him again. Already in October 2018, the DSA National Political Committee (NPC, the group’s elected leadership body) had convened an exploratory committee to discuss possible orientations toward the 2020 primaries, with an eye to preparing for a Sanders run. This committee proposed a process for endorsing Sanders in which the NPC would run a membership poll immediately after he announced his candidacy, and if the membership voted to endorse, the NPC would then issue an endorsement and begin organizing a campaign.¹⁸ This is precisely what happened in March 2019. Of the 24 percent of members who voted, 76 percent voted to endorse.¹⁹ Two days after Sanders officially announced his campaign, the NPC had endorsed him.²⁰ At this point, DSA’s membership had grown to about fifty thousand members.²¹ As a result of the organization’s growth since 2016, it was able to play a much larger role in the 2020 campaign. In cities where the Sanders campaign did not have a field office, like Chattanooga, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, DSA was effectively the local campaign, organizing canvassing and phone banking.²² Overall, the DSA for Bernie campaign knocked on over half a million doors in the race.²³

Despite all of this, Sanders’s defeat came quickly. After he won the first three primary contests, most of the Democratic candidates dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden, who seemed to be the only one who could plausibly stop Sanders. After running an unimpressive showing in the first three states, Biden won a decisive majority of delegates from the Super Tuesday primaries, and Sanders never recovered.

Despite the gut punch that Sanders’s defeat represented, DSA grew considerably throughout the campaign. By March 2021, it had reached ninety-one thousand members, bringing it close to the Socialist Party’s peak over a century earlier. What historian Matt Karp has called “Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War” transformed DSA from a stagnating group of aging leftists to the primary organization of a new generation of the American left.²⁴ The process was not without growing pains.

DSA was transformed by the Sanders campaigns. As Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht wrote, DSA had become “a different entity than the one that existed two years prior.”²⁵ Previously DSA had been a relatively politically homogeneous group, with broad agreement on the political approach Harrington had articulated in the 1970s and ’80s. By 2017, DSA contained within it nearly every tendency of any significance on the US left, from Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists to anarchists. These tendencies were at first mostly unorganized, but DSA quickly developed a vigorous culture of internal factionalism, carried out largely through different caucuses. The group’s evolution since 2016 is, in part, the evolution of the political debates within it, which have focused on questions ranging from the group’s internal organization to its relationship to elected officials.

Two essays have been touchstones for many of the discussions within DSA and are worth briefly reviewing before getting into the specifics of factional debates. The first is Seth Ackerman’s piece from late 2016 entitled “A Blueprint for a New Party.” Ackerman argues that aspects of American election law, such as those described earlier in this essay, foreclose third-party politics as a route for building an electorally competitive left. Instead leftists need to construct a kind of party within a party: an organization that uses the ballot line of one of the major parties but has its own program, membership, organizational structure, and fundraising apparatus. Though Ackerman himself does not use the phrase, this proposal has come to be commonly referred to as the party surrogate model and has been referenced widely in debates in DSA.²⁶

The other article is Eric Blanc’s “The Ballot and the Break,” from late 2017.²⁷ Blanc’s article is a history of the Minnesota Farmer-
Labor Party (FLP), which was built in the 1920s and became, for a time, a successful state-level labor party, independent of the Republicans and the Democrats. Blanc argues that the FLP was established along the lines that Ackerman suggested: by building up independent organization in Minnesota’s politically dominant Republican Party. But the crucial moment in the process came when FLP supporters left the GOP and established their own party. Blanc calls this strategy the “dirty break,” contrasting it with the demand from many socialist groups for a “clean break” with the Democratic Party. Rather than embark on the mission of forming a third party immediately, Blanc argues, socialists should follow the FLP’s example and use the Democratic ballot line to build up their forces until they are strong enough to launch a credible electoral vehicle of their own.

It would take time for these to become orienting points in the debate. At the first DSA National Convention held after the 2016 Bernie campaign, in August 2017, factionalism in the organization remained muted, and the positions that would divide the organization were just beginning to take shape. In the months leading up to the convention, two main groupings appeared. First, the Momentum slate of NPC candidates argued for unified national priorities, most centrally a campaign for Medicare for All, and for an electoral approach that largely followed the strategy suggested by Ackerman. The group also embraced several proposals that would break with past practices, most notably endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and disaffiliating DSA from the Socialist International.²⁸ A second grouping, calling itself Praxis, also coalesced. Praxis rejected Momentum’s focus on nationwide priorities, preferring to let local chapters set their own courses, and pushed for NGO-style skills trainings as a means to democratize the organization, by which they meant giving members the skills to do their own organizing without relying on official DSA structures.²⁹

The convention delegates ultimately elected six NPC candidates from Momentum, five from Praxis, and five from DSA’s pre-2016 membership. It also voted for endorsing BDS and leaving the Second International. Proposals to commit DSA to a more hostile posture toward the Democratic Party failed but received about 40 percent of the vote, portending the organization’s leftward shift over these questions.³⁰

After the convention, the factional ecosystem grew even more dense. At the convention itself, the Libertarian Socialist Caucus was formed, consolidating an explicitly anarchist current in DSA. A few months later, DSA Refoundation was launched as an explicitly “revolutionary socialist” caucus, which largely consisted of members from various Trotskyist currents. Many supporters of Praxis, meanwhile, reformed as a caucus simply called Build, reflecting a mostly nonideological approach that continued Praxis’s emphasis on decentralization. The Momentum slate launched the Spring Caucus, which soon split over internal disagreements, resulting in the formation of Bread & Roses, which generally continued the commitments that had defined Momentum. Some of these currents, like DSA Refoundation, would dissolve in internal acrimony before the next convention.³¹ More generally, this was a period of real instability in the new organization, with some NPC members resigning and leaving the organization. Despite this, local chapters achieved a great deal in their organizing and successfully laid the foundations for DSA’s intervention in the 2020 Sanders campaign.³²

Yet the success of many DSA chapters reinforced a de facto decentralization that only intensified after the 2017 convention. Though the Momentum slate, which had been the strongest advocate of centralization, won the most seats on the NPC, over the next two years, the NPC was largely consumed with internal crises of various sorts and, as a consequence, failed to provide national political leadership to the organization. Immediately after the 2017 convention, there was a furor when it was revealed that one NPC member, a union organizer and longtime member of DSA, had done work for police unions in the past.³³ The next year, a member of the NPC was accused of sexual misconduct, precipitating an investigation. Beyond these episodic crises, the atmosphere on the NPC was, by all accounts, distrustful and hostile, with little possibility for collaborative leadership.³⁴ In this atmosphere, chapters largely went their own ways, and the organization developed tremendous heterogeneity among chapters in dimensions like ideology, culture, and organization. Some chapters wanted to go all out in organizing for national Medicare for All marches. Others preferred to do free brake light repair events to build a base through mutual aid (the mutuality of these kinds of community service projects was always unclear). A hundred flowers bloomed.

The 2019 convention was polarized along similar lines, with centralization and posture toward the Democratic Party remaining key axes of division. The Build caucus was the successor to the Praxis slate, carrying the banner for decentralization. Bread & Roses was the successor to Momentum, committed to the party surrogate as a vehicle for the dirty break, the rank-and-file strategy in labor, and an appropriate degree of political centralization to achieve both.³⁵ A couple other caucuses had also sprung up in the meantime. The first was the Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC), which prioritized running socialist candidates for office, generally on the Democratic ballot line, and expressed skepticism of the rank-and-file strategy embraced by Bread & Roses. SMC quickly developed a reputation as the right wing of DSA due to its lack of angst over the question of the Democratic ballot line and its willingness to work in coalition with mainstream Democrats to keep Donald Trump and the rest of the GOP out of office.³⁶ The second was the Collective Power Network, a grouping which combined SMC’s position on electoral politics with support for Build’s decentralization agenda and strong opposition to the rank-and-file strategy.³⁷

At the 2019 convention, the forces arguing for centralization and for working within the Democratic Party won out, for the time being. Resolutions to redirect a far greater share of the organization’s funds to local chapters failed. An SMC resolution to continue prioritizing electoral work passed, as did Bread & Roses’ resolution requiring candidates to campaign as open socialists and “use their public profile to popularize a class struggle perspective.” Though a fourteen-question litmus test for candidates failed, a “Bernie or Bust” resolution, forbidding the organization from endorsing any other Democrat should Sanders fail to win the 2020 nomination, did pass and would have consequences the following year.³⁸ In the NPC elections, Bread & Roses elected three candidates, SMC elected four, and Build and some allied caucuses elected five, resulting in a decisive victory for the centralizers.³⁹

While DSA was immensely successful in its support of the Sanders campaign in 2019 and 2020, the twin shocks of Sanders’s loss and the COVID pandemic disrupted much of the group’s work for the following two years. The 2021 convention was held online, and its results largely indicated political continuity for the organization. At the same time, the number of resolutions calling for some variety of break, either clean or dirty, with the Democratic Party, had increased and come from a wider variety of factional positions. Though the convention results favored continuity, they also suggested that the organization’s current path was becoming more controversial.⁴⁰

Even as the national leadership was unable to set a line of march for the organization as a whole, there was significant dynamism in many local chapters. This most often manifested in electoral campaigns, generally the group’s most successful means of reaching large numbers of nonmembers. Between 2016 and 2021, dozens upon dozens of DSA members won office, eclipsing the success DSOC had achieved in the 1970s and establishing the organization as the most successful left electoral project since the Socialist Party.

New York City, long the heartland of American socialism, led the way. The chapter had been one of the first to embrace running candidates for local offices in the Sanders moment. In 2016, they ran Debbie Medina, a housing organizer, for a state senate seat in Brooklyn. Though Medina lost, out of this campaign came the NYC-DSA Electoral Working Group, which would form the nucleus of the chapter’s electoral operations over the coming years.⁴¹ Two years later, the chapter achieved two impressive victories. In 2018, Julia Salazar beat a sixteen-year incumbent (the same senator who had defeated Medina two years earlier) for a seat in the state senate. Even more significantly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives. Her victory attracted significant national press attention, and on the day after she won her primary, over 1,100 people joined DSA, about thirty times the normal daily recruitment.⁴²

Two years later, in 2020, the New York City chapter built further on this success. The Electoral Working Group coordinated a huge effort among volunteers from the chapter, and, together with liberal insurgent groups like the Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party, succeeded in electing two state senators, three state assembly members (including future New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani), and one member of congress, Jamaal Bowman.⁴³ A year later, the chapter ran six candidates for city council and elected two. For a group with fewer than a thousand members in the city just five years earlier, it was a period of stunning victories.

Other chapters also achieved considerable electoral success in this period. The most notable after the New York chapter was Chicago’s, which won the election of six members to city council. Here coalition politics were even more central than in New York. The chapter’s electoral effort was closely coordinated with United Working Families (UWF), which had been founded five years earlier by the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU health care workers. In the 2019 election, all of DSA’s candidates were also endorsed by UWF, which devoted significant resources to the races. Whereas in New York the chapter had to build its campaign largely without union support, as most unions were uninterested in taking a chance on challengers to the Democratic establishment, in Chicago socialist success was built on a partnership with the most powerful unions in the city.⁴⁴

Beyond these major cities, electoral victories were more scattered. In 2018, DSA member Rashida Tlaib won the Democratic primary for the House in Dearborn, Michigan, joining Ocasio-Cortez as the second socialist elected to Congress after the Sanders campaign.⁴⁵ In 2020, St Louis DSA got Cori Bush, a former nurse, elected to Congress. In 2018, the Metro DC chapter helped elect two candidates to the Maryland House of Delegates. In Minneapolis, the Twin Cities chapter elected three city councilors in 2021, amounting to about a quarter of the council.⁴⁶ All told, DSA has helped elect some three hundred candidates to office across the country since 2016.

The period of 2016 to 2021 was unquestionably one of ascent for the organization. In 2021, DSA could claim nearly ninety-five thousand members and had experienced about six consecutive years of growth. Though the organization still functioned as more of a loose collection of local groups rather than anything like a unified nationwide group, this configuration did not prevent it from achieving considerable success. As the group began to confront life after Sanders’s five-year war and the challenges of left politics with a Democrat in the White House, problems that were left unresolved in this initial period of success would soon make themselves felt.

Even as DSA was becoming an undeniable force in US politics, its limitations and weaknesses were also becoming clear. From 2021 onward, factionalism would intensify in the group, leading to damaging internal conflicts. At the same time, the group’s demographic profile remained more or less constant, revealing the limitations of its penetration into major labor unions and the US working class more broadly.

The major factional flash point since 2021 has been on the question of Palestine. DSA’s revival was marked by a break with the organization’s longtime position on this question. In the 1980s and ’90s, DSA was distinguished on the US left by a deeply pro-Israel position. As mentioned above, the 2017 convention effectively repudiated this with its endorsement of the BDS movement. This proved complicated, however, as the ranks of DSA-endorsed elected officials grew. Most notably, Representative Jamaal Bowman, in late 2021, first voted for a bill that provided funding to Israel’s Iron Dome missile interceptor system and then went on a trip to Israel and Palestine sponsored by J Street, a liberal Zionist organization. Both actions were met with swift condemnation from DSA’s national BDS Working Group, which had been established in 2019 to coordinate support for BDS. The working group demanded that the NPC expel Bowman. When the NPC declined to do so, the group and its supporters turned their campaign against the NPC, denouncing it as “racist” and “imperialist.”⁴⁷ When the group refused to adhere to the DSA code of conduct and continued campaigning against the elected leadership, the NPC ultimately voted to de-charter the working group, removing its status as an official DSA body. In the aftermath, some fifty DSA chapters (out of about two hundred) passed resolutions supporting the BDS Working Group.⁴⁸

Out of this episode coalesced the political alignments that have largely defined DSA over the last five years. The primary political divide in DSA ceased to be over the organization’s degree of centralization and instead concerned its relationship to the elected officials it had endorsed. Caucuses like SMC, still the biggest bloc of votes on the NPC at that point, argued for a more collaborative approach, while others foregrounded “accountability” as a key principle for the organization’s interaction with elected officials.⁴⁹

As the borrowing from the pseudotherapeutic lexicon of contemporary liberalism here suggests, the discourse of accountability in DSA often functions as an attempt to wish away some basic problems of the political terrain. The most obvious of these is the fact that elected officials in DSA, by virtue of being elected, need to represent, in some form, the constituencies who elected them. Any attempts to enforce accountability to DSA, carried out through sanctions like censure, the reversal of endorsements, or expulsion, will be of little consequence because, unlike the officials’ constituencies, DSA does not have the ability to remove an official from office. This is the fundamental limitation of accountability as a framework. It is maniacally focused on the kinds of negative sanctions the organization can impose on elected officials, when the limits of these sanctions should be painfully obvious. Alternative ways of exercising organizational influence over officials, such as finding ways for positive-sum outcomes in which both the organization and the official solve problems for each other and are thus invested in each other’s success, go unexamined in the squall for accountability.

The Bowman affair provided a fillip to the currents in the organization most dissatisfied with the group’s direction since 2016. The hegemony of caucuses that wanted, more or less, to generalize the NYC-DSA approach nationally provided a focal point for discontent. The 2023 convention demonstrated the new strength of these countercurrents. The newly formed Red Star caucus, descended from Refoundation, won three seats on the NPC, while the Marxist Unity Group, influenced by the British Marxist Mike Macnair and firmly supportive of the effort to expel Bowman, won two. They were joined by three candidates from Bread & Roses, which had moved from an alliance with SMC toward one with the dissidents. SMC, meanwhile, ran six candidates for the NPC and elected only two. For the first time since 2016, factions of the organization that did not look to the Sanders campaign as the most important model for socialist politics led the organization.⁵⁰

This period coincided with stagnation in DSA’s growth, which in turn fed dissatisfaction with the existing leadership. Membership had peaked in 2021 and by mid-2023 had fallen to about fifty thousand. The Biden presidency proved barren ground for the growth of the Left, with only brief exceptions, such as when the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade.⁵¹

October 7 and its aftermath further inflamed tensions in the organization. The NPC immediately put out a statement condemning all violence against civilians and arguing that Operation al-Aqsa Flood was a response to the Israeli regime of occupation and dispossession. For some older members of DSA, this proved a bridge too far. They condemned the organization for its alleged “indifference to human pain and suffering, and . . .  its failure to demonstrate empathy for the victims of Hamas.” In their telling, DSA had compromised its moral authority and thus its ability to contribute to building democratic socialism.⁵²

Around the same time, some were drawing the same conclusion from the other direction. The Bowman affair and its fallout convinced some that DSA was firmly captured by reformists unwilling to take a principled stand on anything. One observer from this camp declared in late 2023 that “the DSA moment is over.” Centrists watching the drama agreed, crowing that “the war in Gaza is tearing” DSA apart. Obituaries began to be written.⁵³

The doomsayers were proved wrong in 2025. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary proved a massive boon to an organization whose morale was flagging. The recruitment bump the organization experienced in the wake of the victory was even larger than the one in 2018 following Ocasio-Cortez’s unexpected win.⁵⁴ Thanks in part to Mamdani’s victory, DSA reached one hundred thousand members for the first time in early 2026.⁵⁵

Some of the obituary writers had plainly mistaken the optative for the indicative. This was particularly the case for those who interpreted the NPC’s refusal to expel Bowman as the organization’s crossing of a reformist Rubicon. While some tried to argue that DSA’s stagnation around 2022 was due to disgust with the organization’s conduct in this matter, sober examinations of membership trends revealed a rather more banal dynamic. Membership tended to spike in response to external events, like Ocasio-Cortez’s election or the 2020 Bernie campaign, but a large portion of members who joined during such episodes did not renew their memberships the following year, leading to an “exodus” exactly a year later. The membership decline that followed the Bowman affair was a year after DSA’s 100K Drive recruitment campaign in late 2020. Rather than an expression of disgust with reformist betrayal, DSA’s stagnation in the second half of the Biden administration was instead a consequence of the membership surge of late 2020 and early 2021 and an absence of electoral successes, like Ocasio-Cortez’s and Mamdani’s, that provide the organization with its main membership boosts.⁵⁶

Yet if DSA has proven more resilient than many had feared (or hoped) in the dark days of 2024, the limitations that the organization confronts remain formidable. Two in particular stand out: the group’s massive variation in political culture across chapters and its isolation from the working class.

The decentralization that developed organically in the wake of DSA’s revitalization has never abated. As one critic of the national leadership observed during the Bowman affair, “National leaders oversee the work of our hundreds of chapters less than a semi-separate ‘National chapter,’ which contains national campaigns. . . .  Though the DSA constitution states that the National Political Committee is the ‘highest decision-making body of the organization between meetings of the Convention,’ in practice this rarely filters its way down to local chapters.”⁵⁷ The fights over national leadership in the organization may be intense, but the group’s political structure has barely changed since the less electorally focused caucuses won a majority on the NPC in 2023. Individual chapters vary wildly in their organization and conduct, with some chapters holding “Maoism 101” discussions led by video game streamers, while others organize the canvassing of tens of thousands of voters to send members to Congress.⁵⁸ Chapters in more conservative areas, in particular, appear more likely to devolve into subcultural study groups. In these places, successful electoral campaigns are considerably more difficult. This has two effects. First, it deprives the chapters of the kind of victories that are DSA’s primary vehicle for recruiting members. Second, as these chapters tend to engage in less electoral work, they face less pressure to adjust their culture in ways that allow them to effectively engage people outside of activist subcultures. Both of these factors reinforce subcultural dynamics.

Because of this variance in political culture, some DSA chapters are engines for socialists to break out of their marginality in American political life, while others actively reinforce that marginality. Moreover, the marginality embraced by some sections of the organization actively hinders those sections seeking to break out from it. Many currents in the organization embrace the most self-indulgent forms of expressive politics, like rhetorical maximalism that has zero connection to any actual political goals.⁵⁹ This kind of maximalism is all too easily deployed as a cudgel against the more politically adroit sections of the organization by conservative media. If DSA is to be more than an idiosyncrasy of urban Democratic politics in the United States, this political culture must be overcome. But given how strongly self-reinforcing it is, the prospects for doing so without the national structure imposing a common political culture are slim. As yet, there is unfortunately little indication this will happen. The devotees of rhetorical maximalism and political minimalism retain a majority of the NPC seats.

There is also a possibility that a healthier political culture can be built via a more decentralized route. An example of how this can occur comes from the Green Party. In the 1980s, the Green movement in the United States was captured by a leadership that was ideologically opposed to participating in elections. However, state-level organizations embraced electoral campaigns and were able to essentially take over the national organization by the late 1990s. A similar path could be envisioned for DSA. But any hopes in this direction must be tempered by the fact that much of the dysfunction in the organization is locally based and self-reproducing.⁶⁰

The second limitation the group must confront is its continued isolation from large sectors of the working class. In 2021, the organization conducted a membership survey including some information on members’ occupations and a few other demographic characteristics. The results were largely unsurprising. About 80 percent of members age twenty-five or older have a college degree, and most live in cities. In terms of occupational composition, a few categories are overrepresented, most notably teachers and academics, who make up about 10 percent of DSA’s membership, compared with about 3 percent of the workforce as a whole. Others are underrepresented, most glaringly retail, food service, and other service sector industries, which represent about 20 percent of total employment but only 6 percent of DSA members. Blue-collar workers are even less represented in DSA, making up nearly one-third of total employment but only about 4 percent of members. DSA members are concentrated in the salariat, with relatively little penetration down into the layers that make up the bulk of the US working class.⁶¹

The picture is similar on the subject of unions. Overall, about 20 percent of DSA members who are currently working are members of unions. While this is about twice the rate of unionization in the labor force as a whole, it is less impressive in light of the union density of previous organizations of the US left. In 1938, for example, the leadership of the Communist Party complained that only about 27,000 out of 75,000 party members were in unions.⁶²

Despite the relatively low union density of the group, however, it has made some significant interventions in labor. Most notably, the Emergency Worker Organizing Committee (EWOC), which was launched with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America in 2020 to support workers interested in unionizing, has played a role in hundreds of unionization drives over the last six years. Dozens of DSA members hold union leadership positions, and the group has built relationships with important union leaders such as Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants and Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers.

But again, compared to organizations like the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, this is a skimpy record. The Socialist candidate challenging Samuel Gompers for president of the American Federation of Labor in 1912 received a third of the vote.⁶³ In the late 1930s, about 40 percent of the unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations were led by Communists or close allies of the party.⁶⁴

DSA’s relative isolation from much of the working class limits the organization in two ways. First, it contributes to the reproduction of subcultural activist organizational norms. With such a heavy concentration of college-educated members, it is inevitable that the organization will reproduce some of the pathologies of campus politics, from extreme moralism to obsession with different identity groupings. These dynamics perpetuate marginalization and impotence. Even more important, however, DSA’s isolation from large sectors of the working class has meant that, for the most part, the beneficiaries of the policies the organization fights for are not its members. When DSA members are part of successful campaigns to raise the minimum wage, for example, the group’s class composition means that very few of its members directly benefit. Yet this point should not be overstated. Where DSA has been most successful, like in New York, the group has won reforms like tenant protections, whose benefits extend through all layers of the working class. But it remains the case that, unlike the Socialist Party of a century ago or its fellows in the Second International, DSA chapter meetings by and large are not debating issues of immediate consequence to the organization’s members.⁶⁵

This last point dovetails with a final one. DSA has had more success with electoral politics than any other socialist group in the United States in the last hundred years. At the same time, however, it has struggled to find its footing outside the electoral arena.

To be sure, DSA’s focus on electoral politics has paid rich dividends. At the most basic level, any serious attempt to win an electoral campaign necessitates large-scale engagement with sections of the population that are not part of the activist subculture. To win their votes, organizers need to show they can prioritize the concerns of these voters, which will often require discarding ways of talking about some issues or abandoning some positions altogether. Electoral work, in other words, serves to discipline organizations, forcing them to abandon at least the most obviously self-marginalizing aspects of their political culture. This has undoubtedly had a salutary effect on DSA in those chapters that have done large-scale, sustained electoral work. To the extent that the organization has broken out of left subcultures since the 1980s, its commitment to electoral organizing has been responsible.

Yet at the same time, DSA has basically failed to establish a real presence outside this realm. This is in sharp contrast with other organizations of the modern American left. The Socialist Workers Party of the 1960s and ’70s, for example, while never reaching even three thousand members, played a crucial role in organizing the movement against the Vietnam War.⁶⁶ The Communist Party famously played a leading role in the struggle against racism in the 1930s and ’40s.⁶⁷ The International Socialists, a group whose membership probably never reached five hundred, played a crucial role in establishing Labor Notes and Teamsters for a Democratic Union.⁶⁸ DSA, despite being significantly larger than these groups, has established no such footprint in the labor movement or various social movements. While these groups shaped US politics well out of proportion to their actual numbers through their work in various movements, DSA has not been able to leverage its much larger membership in a similar way.

But the consequences of this go beyond DSA leaving money on the table, so to speak. They also affect the group’s politics and potential. First, they influence the trade-offs DSA confronts as a socialist electoral project. Socialists have long recognized that the class structure of capitalism itself is not sufficient to guarantee that workers will identify their shared class interests and unify politically. Their propensity to do so depends on the strategies adopted by other political actors, like parties and unions, that are dedicated to this project.⁶⁹ If these actors succeed, there will be a high degree of class consciousness among workers, and electoral and industrial initiatives will have much stronger chances of success. If they fail, workers will instead embrace political identities organized around race or nation, or simply political quietude.

As political scientist Adam Przeworski has argued, political parties in particular face a trade-off here. No socialist party has ever won an election with the votes of workers alone; they have always depended on winning some layers of the middle class as well. To win these votes, parties must de-emphasize their class appeal and instead build a nonclass mass appeal to win voters outside the working class. But doing so has a cost. As parties de-emphasize their class appeal, they disorganize their key voting base by ceasing to organize them on a class basis.⁷⁰

Yet Przeworski argues there is a way out of this dilemma, as parties are not the only organizations that organize workers as a class. Unions can also perform this function. Where unions are strong and centralized, he argues, the trade-off that socialist parties face between being mass parties and being class parties is not so harsh. Parties can afford to dilute their class appeal without risking their foundations in the class consciousness of workers because that class consciousness is sustained through other institutions. In this situation, seeking the vote of sectors of the middle class does not necessarily mean losing votes among workers.⁷¹

For DSA, this trade-off has the potential to be more severe than it was for the European socialist parties. First, DSA is already based primarily on a relatively thin stratum of the working class, consisting primarily of college-educated workers. While this stratum, partially in response to its increasing proletarianization, has trended left over the last decade, there are signs of limits to this radicalization.⁷² Most notably, there has been limited enthusiasm for the broad-based taxation necessary to build the comprehensive welfare state it seeks.⁷³ DSA will simply not be able to sustain its agenda without more working-class votes. Second, the fact that DSA’s strategy is to run on another party’s ballot line does have real costs in terms of its ability to build class consciousness. The party’s elected officials may proclaim their socialism loudly and proudly, but to many voters they will simply be Democrats, because that is the ballot line on which they run. Critics of the party surrogate strategy have a point when they argue that it inhibits cohering a generalized socialist political identity among the electorate.⁷⁴

Finally, of course, there is the abysmal union density in the United States. When Przeworski and his coauthor John Sprague wrote about the ability of strong unions to soften the trade-off between creating a mass party and retaining a class base, they were comparing Swedish unionization with French unionization in the 1960s and ’70s. The distance between those two cases is almost negligible in comparison to the United States of the 2020s. Today the majority of the US working class has no experience whatsoever with unions, and the existing unions are far more oriented toward sectional interests than class-wide solidarity.⁷⁵

As such, DSA’s ability to become a force not merely in electoral politics but in the union movement as well is of particular urgency. Without a massively revived labor movement, DSA will face particularly unpleasant versions of the trade-offs that have confronted all mass socialist parties over the last century and a half. Of course, it is too much to expect DSA to single-handedly revive the American union movement. To appreciate the scale of the task, consider that even today there are over one hundred union members in the United States for each member of DSA. Yet it is inarguable that previous socialist groups had a bigger impact on the labor movement with a far smaller membership. Though initiatives connected to DSA like EWOC and the Rank-and-File Project have done excellent work, the organization’s ability to grow and sustain itself will be dependent on doing much more in the labor movement.

The second drawback of the organization’s overriding focus on the electoral sphere is the familiar Marxist case that the state in capitalist society is structurally biased against socialist policies.⁷⁶ Because of this, even if a pro-socialist government can get elected, it will, sooner or later, be compelled to abandon its commitments in the face of resistance from capitalists. To be sure, this critique has often been leveled with a glibness that belies the considerable power socialist parties amassed at different points in the last century, as well as the complications that bedevil some of the canonical cases of the dynamic it describes.⁷⁷ But even with appropriate reservations, the argument retains considerable force. Though it is often framed as a warning about how periods of socialist governance end, this argument is just as useful for understanding how they begin. In the United States, for example, the period of reform at the height of the New Deal came about because the capitalist class, under pressure from an insurgent working class, split into a section that preferred compromise with workers and another that opposed it. With capital thus split, workers were able to win significant reforms.⁷⁸ The broader lesson here is dispiritingly familiar in studies of subaltern insurgency: when elites remain unified, the triumph of subaltern groups is unlikely. In an advanced capitalist democracy like the United States, industrial disruption by workers remains the most plausible way of generating these kinds of divisions.

Though DSA’s ambitions for transforming American society run through electing more socialists to government, the success of this endeavor will depend at least in part on US workers’ ability to mobilize. In the abstract, almost all members of DSA would affirm a version of this thesis. But it remains true that DSA has found little success in the second half of this formula, even as its success in the first has been extraordinary.

Richard Nixon, in the final address to his staff before resigning the presidency, observed that “only if you’ve been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.” It is an apt, if unlikely, epigraph for the story of DSA. The organization has traversed the full distance between the valley and the mountain in a single decade. In 2014, it was a moribund remnant of a bygone left, a few thousand aging members presiding over the embers of Michael Harrington’s project. By 2026, it was the largest socialist organization in the United States since the days of Eugene Debs, its members seated in Congress and statehouses across the country, with one of them governing the nation’s largest city. Few could have predicted this ascent, and it would be churlish not to recognize it for the genuine achievement it is.

Yet the peaks and valleys with which this essay began should counsel against any easy confidence about what comes next. The history of the US left is a history of organizations that reached comparable heights or higher, only to collapse within a decade or two. What distinguishes DSA from its predecessors is instructive. On the one hand, DSA has been spared the two forces that destroyed so many earlier left organizations. It has not faced serious state repression on the scale that broke the Communist Party, and its decision to work within the Democratic Party has insulated it from the strategic cul-de-sac of third-party politics that doomed most of the postwar left. The institutional story of DSA is, in this sense, one of adaptation. DSA has discovered a way to build a durable socialist presence within the peculiar constraints of the US electoral system. On the other hand, the very adaptation that has allowed DSA to survive has also limited what it can become. Running on the ballot line of another party, drawing its membership overwhelmingly from a thin stratum of the educated salariat, and struggling to establish itself in the labor movement and other areas of struggle outside the electoral arena, DSA remains, despite its size, a shallow-rooted organization.

The limitations surveyed in this essay — the wild heterogeneity of its chapters, its distance from the bulk of the working class, and its difficulty acting outside the electoral sphere — are not the sort of problems that resolve themselves with time or growth. If anything, DSA’s structure tends to reproduce them. Its decentralization allows self-marginalizing chapters to persist and even flourish alongside its most effective ones; its class composition draws it back toward the pathologies of campus and activist subcultures; and its electoral successes, precisely because they are so much easier to achieve than durable institutional presence in unions or social movements, continually tempt the organization to define itself by them alone. None of this is destiny. The comparison with the Greens suggests that a decentralized organization can, over time, be reshaped from below by its more serious tendencies, and the comparison with earlier socialist organizations suggests just how much a determined minority can accomplish in the labor movement with even modest numbers. But these outcomes will not arrive on their own. They will have to be fought for, against the grain of the organization’s own proclivities.

Whether DSA can win those fights is, at present, an open question, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What can be said is that the organization has already outlasted its own obituaries more than once, and that its survival through the barren years of the Biden administration and the bitter conflicts over Palestine testifies to a resilience its critics have repeatedly underestimated.

Four major assumptions frame my discussion.

First, I assume a just socialist society will realize the value of political equality. Minimally, this includes the rights necessary for people to participate as equals in representative political institutions, such as equal rights to freedom of speech and assembly as well as to vote and to run for public office. Plausibly, it would include mechanisms to ensure the “fair value” of these equal political rights, by, for instance, prohibiting economic inequalities from translating into unequal influence on the political process.⁴ Following Erik Olin Wright, we could say that such a society would give all people “broadly equal access to the necessary means to participate meaningfully in decisions about things that affect their lives.”⁵

Second, I assume a just socialist society will involve some form of worker or collective ownership of society’s productive assets. There are many different ideas for what collectivization or socialization of ownership might mean: a system of worker cooperatives, state ownership of productive enterprise, social wealth funds, John Roemer’s “coupon socialism,” or some combination of the above. We can remain agnostic about which form of collective or worker ownership is to be preferred.⁶

Third, I assume a just socialist society will realize an egalitarian conception of distributive justice, however that is defined.⁷ I follow Wright again here in interpreting distributive justice as requiring that everyone has “broadly equal access to the material and social means necessary to live a flourishing life.”⁸ Most of my arguments should be acceptable to those who subscribe to other understandings of egalitarianism, however.

Still, it will be useful to clarify what “broadly equal access” does and doesn’t entail. It does not mean absolute equality of real incomes or other goods. What is necessary is that everyone be entitled to some sort of social minimum. Insofar as there are inequalities above that threshold, people should have genuinely equal opportunity for acquiring a greater share of unequally distributed goods: a person’s prospects should not depend on accidents of birth, natural endowments, or class origins.⁹

Fourth, I am limiting this discussion to the context of sufficiently developed countries — i.e., a hypothetical socialist version of an OECD country like the United States. For reasons given in section II, poor economies raise distinct issues that would need to be addressed by a different moral framework.

I argue for two key moral principles that should guide a socialist response to the problem of allocating and mobilizing labor. The first is that, in a sufficiently just society, all those who are able to work have a duty to do so, grounded in the value of fairness as reciprocity. The second is that all workers have a right to freedom of choice of occupation.

With these principles of productive justice on the table, I now turn to evaluating some prominent models of how socialist societies should address the problems of labor allocation and mobilization.

The failure of the utopian views discussed above might lead us to resort to the coercive power of the state. If there is work to be done, and if a sense of duty and other internal motivations are insufficient to make sure people do this work, then perhaps people must be legally forced to do it. 

First, we might endorse forcing people to work in general, without forcing them to take any particular job. This approach is embodied by the parasite laws that existed in the Soviet Union and other state socialist countries. Second, the advocate of coercive labor policies might endorse forcing people to work particular jobs. Unlike the parasite laws, these policies were not widely adopted by the Soviet Union or other command economies, even at the peak of Stalinist central planning. As Bhaskar Sunkara, Mike Beggs, and Ben Burgis describe them, the state socialist economies had a “quasi–labor market” in which “most people  . . . were not told by the state where they had to work,” and central planners relied on wage differentials to attract workers to the jobs where they were most needed.⁵⁴

No prominent contemporary proposals for socialism endorse state coercion as a general method for getting people to work. And no such proposal envisions coercing people to work particular jobs as a large-scale solution to the labor question, something that not even the socialist command economies attempted. I will therefore set those ideas aside. Contemporary philosophers such as Lucas Stanczyk and Jan Kandiyali have, however, endorsed forcing people into certain jobs for limited purposes. I now turn to evaluating their arguments. 

The models surveyed in section III all fail to offer a realistic mechanism for enforcing the duty to work — whether by dismissing the duty entirely, by relying too heavily on nonmaterial motives, or by using inadequate material incentives that track the wrong metric. Coercive requirements have a limited role to play, as I argued in section IV.

Where does that leave us? My contention is that the labor market is the central institution through which a socialist society should solve the problem of getting needed work done. Socialists often defend the use of markets, including labor markets, on grounds of efficiency. I argue that labor markets are also uniquely suited to solving the labor question consistently with the principles of productive justice. Labor markets realistically enforce compliance with the duty to work, without unduly constraining occupational choice. In other words, they are not subject to the problems of either feasibility or justice that afflict other approaches we have considered.

There is a temptation, when we look at the postwar social democratic golden age, to treat it as a different sort of recipe. Sweden cooked this; Australia did a variant of it; the Danes and the Austrians put their twist on it — strong unions, full employment, rising wages, welfare states. We often look at that world that’s still within living memory and naturally say, “That worked; let’s just get the chefs back in the kitchen.” This idea has real power. The memory of postwar arrangements, the nostalgia for aspects of the stability and dignity they afforded people, and the idea that the greed of bosses and the corruption of politicians are the reason why we “can’t have nice things” today, as the saying goes, has benefited our generation of the Left significantly.

But for the cadre of our new left, it’s worth thinking about the particular set of conditions in the 1950s and ’60s that produced postwar social democracy. There was high economic growth and rapid productivity gains alongside it. There were strong, dense labor unions fighting for higher wages at the point of production and delivering votes for labor parties. There were relatively closed national economies and limited capital mobility. Industrial employment was expanding, which meant the working class was being concentrated in large workplaces where it was easy to organize, rather than finding themselves scattered. And there was a favorable demographic structure: lots of working-age people and relatively few retirees, so the emerging welfare state was cheaper to fund.

Those conditions papered over the central contradiction of social democracy. They allowed a movement that generally never challenged who owned the means of production to nonetheless radically transform the lives of working people and the trajectory of entire societies. A worker in 1945 and that same worker’s child in 1975 lived almost in different worlds, and social democracy could take much of the credit for that. For a while, the contradiction — that you’ve empowered workers politically and on the shop floor while leaving the power to direct investment and generate wealth in private hands — didn’t overwhelm the system. There was enough for higher wages, enough for profits, and enough for the welfare state on top.

And then the conditions changed dramatically. In advanced capitalist economies today, production is organized in globalized networks that are harder for national governments to control. Financial capital is extraordinarily powerful and mobile, and it disciplines any government that frightens it, as it disciplined François Mitterrand’s France in 1983, and as the bond markets remind every finance minister to this day. Not to mention, there are enormous technology sectors that will continue to rapidly change economies in ways that are hard to anticipate. Beyond that, populations are aging, so the dependency ratio that made the welfare state cheaper has inverted. Productivity growth has slowed, especially in Europe, which makes capital less willing to accept corporatist compromises. Relatedly, union density has collapsed across almost the entire advanced capitalist world. And in a more globalized world, states compete with one another even more to attract investment, bidding down their own taxes and labor standards in the process.

A government that walks into office today with a traditional social democratic program faces constraints that were much looser in the postwar period. I’m convinced that a 1970 playbook can still be used to win elections in 2026, but I’m equally convinced that it’s doomed to fail as a governing program. However, it’s not just that the constraints are tighter. It’s that social democracy has lost its social base. The dense industrial working class that was the body of those parties has been thinned in its numbers and has become more ideologically scattered. In this environment, which is only partially of their own creation, social democrats have had to expand their appeal to a less coherent class basis.

Through these adaptations, in most parties of the world, social democratic parties are still viable as broad progressive electoral coalitions. But these coalitions are likely more apt to limit their program to ex post redistribution through taxes and transfers than to the thing that made postwar social democracy revolutionary in its effects in places like Sweden: the harnessing of investment and the predistributional shaping of the economy. The economic crises of the 1970s played a larger role in reshaping social democracy into a pale imitation of itself than the obvious lack of moral fiber of some social democratic leaders. It became clear that the old model could not continue, and it had to be changed.

To the right of social democracy, you saw a more headlong embrace of the new environment. Think of Tony Blair’s New Labour, which accepted the Thatcherite settlement on labor markets and financial deregulation and embraced the rhetoric of flexible markets and “welfare to work.” At the same time, it married these policies to the defense of existing welfare state institutions like the British National Health Service and targeted redistribution to help those in the most extreme distress, like in Blair’s push against child poverty.

The Prices and Incomes Accord struck in Australia between the Hawke–Keating government and the union movement in the 1980s and early ’90s was among the most ambitious attempts to manage the crisis through a centralized bargain. Workers agreed to restrain their wage demands; in return, they were promised a “social wage” as compensation. Australians might have gotten more consolations than some of their peers elsewhere, but they still experienced the same dose of financialization and deregulation of the Australian economy and developments that made capital more mobile and labor weaker.²

Compare these responses from the right and center of social democracy with the road not taken. In 1970s Sweden, faced with declining investment and growing economic crisis, the LO trade union federation proposed to take a slice of profits each year and gradually transfer ownership of large firms to worker-controlled funds — a real bridge from social democracy toward socialism, paid for by wage restraint that workers were already practicing in Sweden’s system of centralized wage bargaining.³ It targeted both an economic crisis and the broader contradiction of social democracy by addressing the question of ownership of the means of production directly. But ultimately the proposal was gutted, not only because of strategic missteps and the opposition of capital but also because of the opposition of the Swedish Social Democratic Party leadership itself. It had not built the mass support needed for socialization of production, and — even if it had wanted to, which it did not — it couldn’t mobilize anyone but the most class-conscious workers for the transformation of property relations. A party that had been built to manage capitalism in the interests of workers could not manage a transition to socialism.

Today social democrats, rather than debating greater social ownership, are struggling in a new social and economic environment to maintain even the existing compromises they made with capital. So that’s the bind. The Left is still able to summon electoral victories through social democratic rhetoric, but the social depth of our winning coalitions is far thinner, and the scope for governance within capitalism is even more narrow than before. Simply willing ourselves back to 1970 is not a viable strategy.

Some of you might reply, “This isn’t my problem. I never was and never will be a social democrat.” But the decline of reformist socialism has been a catastrophe for revolutionary socialism as well. For most of the twentieth century, revolutionaries regarded the reformist leaders — the union bureaucrats, the parliamentary socialists, the precinct captains — as obstacles to a more radical politics: people who would lead the workers up to the edge of a decisive moment of truth with capitalist power and then flinch or sell out. And there was truth in that, of course.

However, look at the universe that those reformist parties and unions helped create. They politicized workers — they took people from a myriad of different backgrounds and gave them an identity as subjective members of a class based on their objective position in the economy. They built and maintained the institutions in which that identity lived: the unions, the cooperatives, the workers’ societies, the labor press, and trades halls. They trained organizers and taught people how to run meetings, how to take a collection, how to hold a picket, and how to deliver an oration. And they did this on a mass scale, touching the lives of millions.

The revolutionary left emerged from the same soil of the workers’ movement as the reformist left, but even after splits rendered it a minority, it still benefited from the mass class politics the reformists often led. A communist party could go out and recruit the most militant, most class-conscious workers precisely because there were millions of organized workers to recruit from. Though these parties aimed for more than this, they were, at the very least, skimming the most advanced layer off the top of a movement that mass reformist politics was largely responsible for maintaining.

Capitalism itself produced the worker as an objective category, as a condition of exploitation that we aim to abolish. But the worker as a political subject was built deliberately, through institutions — and as we know all too well in our bleak times, mass class politics is no guaranteed feature of politics under capitalism.⁴ When union membership collapsed, when the labor parties drifted and weakened, when the working-class associations long captured by reformists closed their doors, workers did not become more revolutionary. Deprived of the institutions that had made them a class, they instead became more politically disengaged, more individualized, and sometimes more nationalist or xenophobic, or at least more deeply cynical about politics of any kind.

The “school of socialism” — the idea, which even sharp critics of reformism like Rosa Luxemburg held, that the daily struggle over wages and hours and conditions educates the working class, develops its capacities, and teaches it its own power — now seems closed.⁵ If collective action is too difficult or dangerous or doesn’t seem viable to people, then the appeals of the revolutionary left have even less daily resonance. And we know that most workers experience only work and individual cost-of-living struggles, not coordinated struggles over wages and housing and shop-floor democracy. I dwell on this because it has a strategic implication: there is no shortcut around the patient rebuilding of mass working-class organization and identity. The revolutionary who is trying to create a radical breakthrough from today’s low level of politicization and the nostalgic social democrat who wants to fire up their 1970 Ford Falcon right away will both find themselves in want of a class agent and an organizing climate that will only exist if we build it.

The third road is not a zombie social democracy, and it is not a pure opposition. It is a democratic socialism whose purpose is not to stably administer capitalism in workers’ interest — because we’ve seen that the conditions for stable administration have largely evaporated — but to push along the axes of democratization and socialization. It must use every position it wins, every reform it passes, and every institution it builds to expand the democratic capacities of working people and the sphere of social ownership. And it must do this through mass parties that thousands of ordinary people can actually join and shape, that are nonetheless programmatically committed to socialism as an openly articulated destination and as a daily practice.

The openness and the programmatic commitment to socialism have to go hand in hand. A party that is open but has no destination becomes a progressive catchall organization that drifts wherever the electoral winds blow. A party that has a destination but is closed — with excessively tight membership standards — will find it harder to both build and eventually merge with a wider workers’ movement. We need both: a broad, welcoming mass party with a clear socialist horizon as well as a socialist transition plan written into its program and in its public declarations. This isn’t a novel proposition, but it is different from the left-populist approach that is still dominant on the global left. Whether we build new socialist parties or transform existing parties into mass socialist parties depends on the country in which we’re organizing. But it does little good to uncritically build catchall parties that are just committed to a purer form of social democracy.

Our socialist parties must win reforms that materially improve people’s lives, because if we can’t do that, it’s safe to say no one will trust in our ability to accomplish anything else. But we should prioritize reforms partly by a second criterion: Do they expand the democratic capacities of working people, and do they connect to the more radical socialist transformations we hope to see in the future? We must pursue reforms that strengthen (and democratize) unions and construct cooperatives and democratic public institutions to rebuild the working-class infrastructure we’ve lost over the last few decades. We should steadily increase the sphere of social ownership and worker control. And we must deliberately create constituencies with a material interest in pushing further.

Welfare-state capitalism can’t be our final destination, but at every turn and at every level of governance, socialists will be confronted by a contradiction that we must figure out how to overcome: our reliance on the accumulation of private capitalists to fund the state and provide productive employment for workers. We might even hit the brakes ourselves. Nothing could be less desirable as a program than a socialism that goes too far for capitalism but not far enough for socialism.

The broad strategy of what an older tradition called “non-reformist reforms” — reforms measured not only by the good they do today but by whether they shift the balance of power and open the door to tomorrow — still seems like our best path out of this bind. But such a strategy only makes sense if we foreground our ultimate destination of socialism.⁶ Today there is almost no growing left party — from Die Linke to La France Insoumise — that systematically articulates socialism as a theory and practice. When confronted by the structural dilemma of social democracy in our age, there is no reason to believe that these parties, much less the Greens here in Australia or in Britain, will pursue a program much different than those of today’s center-left parties.

It’s worth acknowledging that, in practice, non-reformist reforms have themselves often been used as rhetorical cover for a comfortable gradualism that we should reject on a few different grounds. Even if there is a social democratic road toward a postcapitalist socialism — even if the relatively patient sequence I’ve just described is the right one — we cannot get around the question of rupture. Somewhere in that sequence, there has to be a definitive break with capitalist property relations, a point at which ownership of the decisive productive wealth of society passes out of private hands. You cannot reach the abolition of class by an infinite series of small adjustments that tilt the playing field against capital. At some point, there needs to be a big change that requires popular support and extraparliamentary mobilization, at considerable risk to the stability of a democratic socialist government.

This is where an older argument on the socialist left merits revisiting. Writing against the Eurocommunists of the 1970s, Ernest Mandel pressed the gradualist road on a dilemma it could never resolve. Either the measures a left government enacts leave the economy’s commanding heights in private hands — in which case they do not amount to a transition to socialism at all — or they begin to socialize investment and expropriate capital in earnest, in which case they provoke precisely the concentrated resistance that the gradual road was meant to spare us. There is no third route of infinitely patient encroachment that capital obligingly declines to contest. The confrontation is not an option we can engineer out of the transition; it is a structural feature of expropriating a class that will not consent to its own supersession.⁷

The old image, which we can find in texts from the left wing of social democracy and the Gramscian traditions of left Eurocommunism, is of the workers’ movement slowly surrounding the fortress of capital. You dig your trenches, you build your moats and your siege engines, you encircle the citadel with counterinstitutions, and one day the war of position is won, and the fortress falls.⁸ The problem is that the fortress will not be sitting still. Capital is not a castle; it is a dynamic foe. While we are patiently digging our trenches, it is restructuring production, moving offshore, automating our most militant trade union sectors, capturing our institutions, splitting our coalition, and changing the ground we’re standing on. The longer the transition to socialism is drawn out, the stronger the capitalist counteroffensive will be, and the more exhausted the workers’ movement will grow. And in the context of exhaustion and the need to institutionalize victories, the more the pressures of bureaucratization set in.

I want to speak briefly on bureaucratization, because I think it’s easy in certain traditions to treat it as simply a moral failing, a story of good radicals who went soft and bad leaders who sold out. But more often than not, the process comes out of something necessary: the need to consolidate a victory, to make a gain permanent, to institutionalize the lessons of a struggle so they don’t have to be relearned by the next generation. We can’t keep our militants permanently mobilized at peak levels. The problem is that the very apparatus built to defend yesterday’s victory develops an interest in not risking that win on tomorrow’s uncertain victories. A party machine that makes a gain may well ossify around it, just like a radical union leadership that delivers a great contract will likely moderate in the process of administering it.

Surveying the very social democracy that had formed him, Robert Michels called this tendency the iron law of oligarchy: the claim that every large organization, however democratic its professed aims, throws up a leadership that prioritizes the consolidation of its own position over those it leads.⁹ We need not accept Michels’s fatalism — he drew reactionary conclusions from it late in life — to take the observation seriously. Bureaucratization isn’t a corruption that comes from outside a healthy movement. It’s a process generated by the movement’s own victories and the institutions we build to make those victories last. And that’s why we can’t just indulge in moralizing hand-wringing about it; we have to think about checking it by design.

The measures Marx drew from the Paris Commune — officials democratically elected and subject to recall, paid no more than the workers they represent, and with no permanent caste of administrators raised above the people — were a practical program for keeping an apparatus subordinate to its base. Their modern equivalents might be as simple as the rotation of positions and term limits, the deliberate training of successive layers of organizers so that no one is irreplaceable, transparency about money and decisions, the right of the rank and file to recall their representatives, and a low ceiling on the material privileges of office. The most important check, of course, is a movement from below that a party can neither control nor dispense with.

This means, broadly, that we need two things in productive tension. We need a free, extraparliamentary class movement: tenant organizations, workplace committees, struggles against oppression, and other institutions of a politicized working class. And we need a democratic socialist party that genuinely aims to govern, on the basis of a clear socialist program and an explicit program of transition. If all that sounds fanciful, it’s because we are very far away from socialism. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. The distance between where we stand and the society I’m describing is enormous and not just one or two good election cycles away.

But even while being aware of our present weakness and our relative lack of rootedness in the class itself, we have no honest choice but to keep rupture in view. If what we want is merely a somewhat more humane capitalism, then we can lower our sights and join the center left and hopefully find ways to keep the far right at bay. But if we actually believe, in our bones, not just in a kinder society but in a society that rids itself of exploitation and oppression, then a humanized capitalism cannot be the destination. And if we can’t shake that belief in socialism, we have to refuse both the dead end of nostalgic social democracy and the dead end of sectarian politics and try to construct a mass socialist politics of governance, transition, and rupture.

This brings me to my last and most important point, because everything I’ve just said about strategy assumes something we are no longer entitled to assume: that the people we’re trying to win over to our program will actually believe that socialism could work. The lesson the twentieth century taught many people — not through capitalist propaganda alone but also through real historical experience — is that all the disparate varieties of socialism failed in one way or another.

Social democracy ground to a halt. It came up against the contradiction we discussed earlier: the standoff between an empowered labor movement and a capitalist class that still controlled investment. And when growth slowed, social democrats felt they had no choice but to beat a retreat. Centrally planned state socialism, for its part, collapsed far more dramatically. And it didn’t collapse only because of political repression or the arms race or Western subversion; it collapsed because, on its own terms, it could not deliver the goods. Any radical democratic socialist party that is serious has to reckon with these failures, and not just at the political level but at the economic one as well.

The administrative planning of state socialism failed for two key reasons. The first was calculation. Gosplan, the Soviet planning agency, was responsible for coordinating an economy that included almost 50,000 factories, 26,000 construction enterprises, 47,000 farming units, 260,000 service establishments, and more than one million retail shops — producing some twelve million distinct products, each of which required the right inputs from the right suppliers at the right locations on the right timelines, with supply chains stretching across eleven time zones. These, in total, meant tens of billions of variables, rising into the trillions when you extend the planning horizon across time.¹⁰

The information needed to fully plan a complex economy does not exist in a form that any central authority can gather, no matter what kind of computing power is behind it. As a result, though the Soviet system was billed as one boasting rational, scientific mastery over the economy, it was in fact a system caught in a perpetual struggle to keep up with it. Plans were built on incomplete information, revised through bureaucratic bargaining, and patched together by countless informal exchanges — favors, barter, and workarounds that operated alongside the official system. These arrangements helped keep the economy running, but they did not solve the underlying problem: planners still lacked the information needed to coordinate production efficiently across the whole system. The result was recurring shortages, surpluses of unwanted goods, and a host of inefficiencies throughout the economy.

The second core problem revolved around incentives. Every manager knew next year’s target depended on this year’s reported output, so they lowballed their capacity, hoarded labor and materials, and lied. Weak firms were never allowed to fail — the soft budget constraint, as the Hungarian economist János Kornai named it — because failure meant unemployment and broken supply chains, so inefficiency was never punished and never weeded out. The result was a tremendous waste of human labor and resources and a shortage economy that did not meet social needs.¹¹

And we’ve already discussed the impasse of social democracy, one that the Polish socialist Michał Kalecki saw coming in the 1940s. He pointed out that genuine, sustained full employment is politically unstable under capitalism — not economically impossible but politically unstable — because when workers no longer fear unemployment, the discipline of the labor market evaporates. The balance of power on the shop floor tips toward workers, profits get squeezed, and the capitalist class, which still controls investment, eventually responds to restore discipline and find a route toward renewed profitability. This is more or less the story of the 1970s and, combined with the rational interests of workers in preserving their employment and thus the profitability of the capitalist firms where they work, the social democratic impasse in a nutshell. You can’t reform your way around it while leaving investment in private hands.¹²

Simply put, if you’re a socialist, there is no going back to either model. The dream of running a whole modern economy by administrative planning cannot and should not be revived. And the dream of transforming capitalism while leaving its owners in command of investment will run into Kalecki’s wall every time (or likely run aground even before that). Now, if there are problems with the two models of socialism that emerged out of the workers’ movement of the nineteenth century and out of the common wellspring of the parties of the Second International, then we need to start discussing what an alternative would look like.

There’s no fixed single model of a feasible socialism, but its necessary elements should be clear. A twenty-first-century socialism has to do two things at once that sound contradictory. It has to abolish market dependence — the condition where your very survival hinges on succeeding in the market — while preserving markets as a tool for coordinating a complex economy. We need some markets, but we don’t need any capitalists. And we want to harness those markets without being mastered by them.¹³ In practice, that means decommodifying the basic infrastructure of a human life — things like health, education, transportation, energy, housing, and telecommunications. These should not be rationed by price but should be provided as a matter of need, because organizing them through profit-seeking firms is both less just and, often, less efficient.

After that, in the broader economy of ordinary goods and services, markets can be great tools for socialism, with prices carrying information about what’s scarce and what’s wanted. But the firms in that economy are controlled by the people who work in them, not by outside shareholders or private capitalists. Governance attaches to participation, not to a financial stake, and membership in a firm becomes akin to membership in a political community, with a voice and a vote, which can’t be bought and sold. The posttax surplus those labor-managed firms generate is controlled by the people who produce it, but investment is not left to individual firms and instead is socialized. This is done through a system of public banks accountable to a democratic state that holds society’s productive wealth in common and lends it out productively.

If you had a system with worker ownership and not just worker control, you would have to deal with, among other problems, distortions arising from workers seeking out capital-intensive sectors with the highest dividends to work. The job market would be a different sort of lottery. In this version of socialism, though, firms are still given extensive autonomy within regulated markets. And inefficient firms are allowed to fail by being outcompeted by their peers as a key feature of the system, because meeting people’s needs with goods and services effectively is a good thing, and at a more philosophical level, wasting human labor power through inefficiency is something egalitarians should refuse to tolerate.

To further help keep a socialist system both highly productive and egalitarian, we could use wage benchmarks — minimum rates, differentiated by occupation — that establish a floor reflecting collective priorities about dignity and skill and contribution, rather than letting local bargaining power set the price of a human hour. This obviously has some echoes in the old system of centralized wage fixing and in the operative effects of centralized wage bargaining in Sweden at the height of social democracy. Wage minimums create stability for workers, since they’re not entirely dependent on dividends from their firm’s profits, and they also serve to push firms onto a “high road” of development. A group of worker-managers who want to get ahead can’t do it by pushing themselves below the benchmark to gain market share, so they instead have to innovate, retrain, reorganize, and find areas to invest in. The economy is steered toward rewarding technological advances and new production techniques rather than just sweating out cheap labor.

Of course, the point of all that productivity is not productivity for its own sake. The point of a dynamic socialist economy is to convert that economy into shorter hours, longer lives, and more time outside production. In other words, it would remove exploitation and domination from our economic activity and then use that economic activity to produce more freedom for people to decide how to spend the one life that they have.

The workers who marched in Melbourne in 1856 were not asking for a marginally better deal. When they demanded the eight-hour day, they were asserting that a worker is not merely an instrument of production but a full human being entitled to all that life has to offer. That demand is the whole of socialism in miniature. It is the demand that people be the authors of their lives rather than the tools of someone else’s accumulation.

We are very far from socialism. But what we cannot do and at the same time survive as a socialist movement worth its name is lower our horizon to adapt to our present weakness.

This incorporation of apparently hostile forces into the extreme centrist blob is well represented by the recent histories of Italy and Spain. These countries have two politically opposed governments that each reject the form of the extreme center, promise change without challenging the EU and euro framework, and confirm their effective subordination to supranational, treaty-based norms that dictate national governments’ policy. Not by chance, they are also the two countries that most benefited from the EU’s postpandemic funding. Recent elections in both states confirmed a repolarization between left and right on strong identitarian grounds and the reduction of the space for generically “neither left nor right” populists. 

This was itself key to Meloni’s success in the 2022 Italian election, which made her Fratelli d’Italia party the dominant force in the broad-right coalition. Ahead of the vote, she promised to represent a “monogamous” part of the Right that would never form governments with the Left, as the rival right-wing parties (the late Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the Lega) had done under the previous cross-party government headed by ex–European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi. Yet here is the paradox, key to understanding the recomposition of the elite with new faces and the broader cross-European integration of the far right into an extreme-
center framework. If Meloni boasted that she led the only opposition party during the Draghi era and thus stood for democracy against technocracy, since her election in 2022, her government has hardly differed from that of Draghi — an extreme-center icon if ever there was one — in either economic or foreign policy. That is not to deny all change: Meloni has helped push the EU toward a hardening of its collective migration controls and an externalizing of border policing to non-EU states. Yet beyond the equality wins (first female prime minister, first former neofascist to head the antifascist republic), Meloni’s record is thin. 

In Spain, Partido Socialista (PSOE) leader Pedro Sánchez has headed coalitions with more left-wing forces since 2020, opposed to a similarly united conservative and far-right camp. His government has sharply increased the minimum wage, implemented gas price caps, rolled back conservative labor reforms, and extended rights to gig economy workers. This is important, but it’s not exactly era-defining change. For his supposedly more radical partners, Yolanda Díaz’s Sumar, this “first left-wing coalition government since the Spanish Civil War” offered an opportunity to deliver real changes from above and thus show the power of having such a party in the institutions. This was, in a sense, a technocratic vision; even apparently promising ideas like promoting more worker cooperatives were more the stuff of brainstorming in think tanks than a real movement in Spanish society. Sumar’s presence may have stiffened Sánchez’s resolve, but it could hardly be said that it has used its institutional leverage to rebuild working-class organization. Moreover, the weakening of the government’s margins for maneuver since the 2023 election has badly undermined its left flank, which has suffered most of the poll setbacks resulting from this inertia. Having only a precarious majority in Congress (and reliant on fiscal-hawk Catalan nationalists), the coalition has been unable to deliver further economic reforms or even pass a proper budget. In 2026, it did introduce an amnesty for half a million migrants in Spain — but it also made a deal with Mauritania to detain asylum seekers in the northwest African country, copying the model of externalization now widespread around the EU. Intensely despised by Spain’s right-wing media and judiciary, Sánchez has focused on beefing up his international standing as a “progressive” ally of left-wing governments in Latin America and as a critic of Israel and US foreign policy.

In both leaders’ public messaging, there remains at least some trace of complaint about the European norm. Sánchez, never a Euroskeptic, was an outlier when he rejected the call for European NATO members to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP. This most left-wing of contemporary European governments nonetheless oversaw the bulk of a doubling of Spain’s defense budget.⁶ While during the post-COVID period the EU relaxed limits on member states’ borrowing, the tightening of these rules since 2024 has again brought into view their strongly political and disciplinary function. Propaganda by Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party today praises her for reducing the budget deficit below the EU Stability and Growth Pact’s 3 percent maximum,⁷ since this strips Europe of a tool it might otherwise use to discipline a government it does not see as friendly, in the manner of Emmanuel Macron’s extreme-center coalition in France. In its electoral campaign material, Fratelli d’Italia promises that denying Europe this opportunity to blackmail Meloni leaves her more room for “social policy” (though the most notable such policy move thus far was to slash unemployment benefits). Much as Wojciech Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law in Poland claimed to defend his country from feared Soviet invasion, a nationalist leader’s conformism to the dogmas enforced by opaque EU institutions like the European Semester process may now be recast as a defense of potentially threatened national autonomy. 

France’s presidential election next year offers another case of the convergence of the far right with extreme-center assumptions. It is more than possible, even likely, that the successor to the ultimate extreme-center president, Macron, will be the Rassemblement National candidate. Will this be, as the party used to claim, a victory for sovereigntists over globalists, the people against elites? Far from it. While balking at the by now embarrassing impression of subordination to Donald Trump, this party’s economic agenda promises only a redivision of France’s shrinking social state by imposing “national preference” in jobs and services and helping more children to attend private school. Party president Jordan Bardella today courts business chiefs, including some more radically libertarian ones,⁸ and promises “order in the state’s accounts and in the country’s streets.”⁹ The party’s more discriminatory plans may well bring it into conflict with existing EU rules; indeed, the party would surely hope for such a scenario to restore its radical luster. Yet even historic champions of the extreme center today report that this party is, after all, aligned with their dogmas. Hence the Economist correctly analyzes that a far-right government would never leave the EU or euro or reverse Macron’s reforms but rather would tear up overweening regulations on business. This is even labeled “the most promising populist project.”¹⁰

These examples do not tell us that the EU’s direction is unchanging but rather that it incorporates apparently sharp electoral shifts into extreme-center norms. While the bloc’s party-political balance has continued to move to the right since the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this has not so much ousted the former extreme center as widened its ranks to include new, more conservative representatives. This surely has also enabled a shift in the EU’s central economic agenda and the ideological banner under which collective borrowing is possible. The same period has seen the waning of the politics of “green reindustrialization” — upheld by von der Leyen upon her appointment in 2019 as the means of reviving the European economy — in favor of a focus on rearmament, as per the ReArm Europe project presented by von der Leyen herself in 2025. Talk of resisting shocks, boosting resilience, and even Europe’s ability to defend itself in times of war is all the rage for everyone from social democrats to the far right. As I shall now explain, however, even if it appears as a relatively cohesive agenda, this change of priorities marks an effective weakening of the EU’s strategic direction and of its claim to represent a distinct pole in global politics.

Liberal EU federalists often snatch at electoral developments, such as Viktor Orbán’s recent defeat in Hungary, as proof that the populist wave must pass soon enough and allow the EU to return to its supposed normal path of liberal progress. Such ideas were widely voiced after Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 and Olaf Scholz’s election in Germany in 2021, though these leaderships each proved rather limited barriers to “populism.”¹¹ Still, the notion that the EU is a liberal project — because of its cross-border legal framework, because of the neoliberal economic policy assumptions embedded in its constitution, because it seeks to institutionalize multilateral approaches to global problems — should not be mistaken for the assumption that it is bound to be led by forces that present themselves as ideologically centrist or as liberals. The question is whether the general decline of these forces and the sustained rise of those to the right of Christian Democracy, including in the EU institutions themselves, will break its liberal architecture. The answer to this question is not only about specific electoral events — will Rassemblement National or the Alternative für Deutschland ever reach or at least share in government power? — but the way that EU institutions incorporate the demands voiced by such parties into norms also taken for granted by more apparently liberal parties. The EU today seems far less likely to crack apart than to continue developing in the direction of a “Fortress Europe” whose model of security for citizens is based on militarization and harsher border controls. 

A familiar brand of left-wing optimism imagines periods when the contradictions latent in the capitalist system build up, followed by sudden explosions of revolt. British YouTube personality and former MP George Galloway remarks somewhere that “there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”¹² Even such an account can recognize the need to prepare and organize rather than merely wait for the future day of revolutionary breakthrough. Yet a frank assessment of the past decade complicates the idea of alternating moments of normality and of disarray. As various social theorists have noted, the sense of permanent acceleration is today a protracted experience, and one embedded in the postmodern psyche itself. Remarking four decades ago upon this sense of “time-space compression,” Marxist geographer David Harvey spoke of different coping strategies, from a nihilism that prepares the way for new “charismatic politics” to a narrowing of the field of political and intellectual intervention as such.¹³ Online culture has added a few more layers of self-referentiality to this picture. The memes made a decade ago about a dismal era of electoral events after the votes for Brexit and Trump are reproduced nearly identically in 2026. The claims that things can’t keep getting worse today come with a knowing extra dose of irony.

If such memes give vent to an apparently superficial “vibe” of disillusionment, they also reflect a deeper shift in institutional rhetoric. In 2026, the extreme center can hardly promise a path back to sunlit uplands in the way it could even in the moment of the financial crisis, still at the tail of “end of history” enthusiasms. During the sovereign debt crisis, unpopular and socially harmful austerity measures imposed by the EU and at the national level were widely presented as a painful moment that would clean up public spending and help secure the confidence (among investors, or even from other taxpayers) needed to underpin future borrowing. Even if such moves faced much criticism — because of their direct social impact and because of the sense that they were not necessary or even effective — this was the logical extension of the extreme-center parties’ hegemonic project. This ordoliberal design for curbing welfare spending and privatizing services was meant to lay the bases of future job growth. Centrists thus derided the “populists” shouting from the sidelines, who, they said, defended irresponsible spending while mainstream parties made the tough but necessary choices to secure the economic future. This promise of a return to supposedly normal growth and progress has by now largely receded, though, in favor of a greater political focus on security, protection, and simply keeping established systems functioning.¹⁴ This is also paradoxical. Today, as almost all leading European political personnel speak of a looming era of global conflict, they are largely bereft of projects that could make the EU more resilient in the face of mounting shocks. 

This is not simply because the extreme center has continued to stick by the same austerian formulas that it used to respond to the sovereign debt crisis in the early 2010s. It’s important to realize that it didn’t. We can see this even where, for instance, in France, an extreme-center government, or what has been called the “bourgeois bloc,” remained in command throughout the last decade.¹⁵ While predictions of a postpandemic revival of Keynesianism are sometimes overblown, there was surely a shift in gears. The EU’s loosened application of its own debt and deficit-spending rules during the first months of COVID-19 was combined with an investment plan, NextGenerationEU, where for the first time the bloc used large-scale collective borrowing in the name of crisis resolution. The funds raised (initially slated at €750 billion) were to be directed in at least 37 percent toward the green transition and 20 percent toward digitization. All this was shot through with classic extreme-center ideas, hardwired into the EU’s foundational treaties — notably in that member states, acting under EU supervision, directed public borrowing toward underpinning private business. These measures were certainly incentivizing and steering capital, but they still left social and green objectives subordinate to the higher interest of creating favorable conditions for profitability. This approach encompassed the mainstream political space, especially in the main beneficiary countries in southern and eastern Europe. Both Spain’s broad-left government and Meloni’s hard-right coalition in Italy could build lasting support on the resulting investment.

The postpandemic spending broke earlier taboos on collective borrowing. This was also a shift away from the early 2010s period where governments in wealthier, more northern countries — egged on by angry right-wing populists and much of the business press — had often loudly proclaimed their refusal to pay for the supposed laziness and free-spending habits of their incorrigible southern counterparts. In the countries that most benefited from postpandemic funding, and especially in Italy, right-wing parties that had once railed against the EU instead pivoted toward casting themselves as the most competent in distributing European funds, perhaps also helping out their own base. Still, there were many contradictions, across national contexts and in terms of who was benefiting. The European Green Deal agenda, by which the EU promised to become climate neutral by 2050, was supposed to be the largest single focus of collective European investment. Yet the primacy on catering to existing EU business lobbies, and especially to German auto manufacturers, put severe limits on what could possibly be achieved in reshaping the European economy. 

Take electric vehicles (EVs), for example: a commodity whose production is highly ecologically damaging but an important plank of both European designs for the green transition and serial German governments’ promises to mitigate long-term job losses at auto firms like Volkswagen and Audi. Right-wing leaders like current chancellor Merz have pushed for a longer delay before these companies have to stop making new internal combustion engine vehicles (the deadline is set for 2035). This pressure has already secured some opt-outs at the EU level, with the overall aim of emissions reduction increasingly hollowed out by the removal of targeted policies. But even insofar as European car manufacturers are actually shifting toward EV production, the weakness of EU industrial policy and relatively poor productivity leave the sector squeezed between far stronger American and Chinese competitors.

The German car industry also matters because of the commonsense notion that transitioning to military production will prove easier than green reindustrialization. This is not simply an ideological operation but responds to a fundamental weakness of the Green Deal as currently constituted: the fact that a real ecological transition can hardly assume a one-for-one replacement of employment opportunities in existing businesses. Even left-wing ecological writers have criticized the idea that green jobs plans — for instance, installing solar panels — are going to create mass-scale, long-term industrial employment.¹⁶ We may likewise worry that Renault’s conversion of an auto plant toward manufacturing drones for Ukraine, or Volkswagen’s reported decision to start producing for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, will only provide a long-term stimulus to job numbers in the worst-case scenario (i.e., that the produced weapons continue to be used). In taking this line, a leader like Merz, formerly a hard-line conservative but now head of a grand coalition uniting Christian and Social Democrats, seeks to respond to pressure from the pro-fossil-fuel far right represented by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). This also means gutting the Green Deal commitments earlier voted through by the current ruling parties. This project has not yet been killed off, though in 2025 the center-right and further-right parties in the EU parliament joined to pass a so-called omnibus bill that exempts smaller and medium businesses from emissions reporting requirements and kicks more immediate transition targets into the long grass. Here again, the extreme center is not so much replaced by the far-right insurgency as incorporating some of its objections, thus producing a hobbled and ultimately inoperable version of the derided Green Deal. 

This vote to weaken Green Deal proposals was widely heralded as a sign of a rightward shift in EU Parliament coalition-making, now that the votes of the European People’s Party (EPP), the main conservative alliance) and the various harder-right factions are close to a majority of seats. EPP leaders who formerly spoke of cordons sanitaires now redirect them against the Left, taking support for remilitarization, or even just for Israel, as the condition of political respectability. The risk of grand coalitions being replaced with a right-wing majority has produced many “the center cannot hold” narratives¹⁷ and raised questions about the formation of more formal Italian-style right-wing coalitions at the EU level, or at least in many other member states. Such an arrangement already governs Finland and Sweden and is likewise advocated by supporters of a union des droites in France; there Bardella has forged an alliance with the right wing of Gaullism and no longer calls his party “neither left nor right.” The likely imminent arrival of the first AfD-led state governments in Germany also poses the possibility that the Christian Democratic firewall against open collaboration with this party will soon be a thing of the past: ahead of the 2025 federal elections, they had already voted jointly on a resolution on immigration, though the AfD has maintained a strong oppositional posture against Merz’s government. 

Upon the night of his election win in February 2025, Merz spoke of greater independence for Europe, to be realized through increased defense commitments. This is a claim made by almost all political sides, at least in Western Europe; Ronald Reagan–admiring Poles are less keen to admit the loss of the US military commitment. European NATO members (with the partial exception of Spain, but with the agreement of sometime-dissident leaderships like in Hungary and Slovakia) have over the last year committed to a military spending target of 5 percent of GDP. Creative accounting is surely at play here: EU authorities let Poland cover spending on army bases under postpandemic “green” funds, while Italy’s ruling coalition wants a long-planned bridge to Sicily to finally be realized in the name of military resilience. In Germany, however, this turn required an important departure from a previous extreme-center shibboleth, as the Bundestag lifted the debt brake constitutional limit on spending for this sole purpose. The Social Democrats and Merz’s party supported the amendment; the AfD voted no, warning against a military buildup in opposition to Russia; the Greens and even part of Die Linke backed the government. The grand coalition for rearmament stretches far indeed: even the AfD supports German remilitarization as a jobs plan, so long as it is unbound from support for Ukraine and not tied to the creation of an EU army. 

Broadly, there is some possibility that this agenda will make Europe more self-reliant in terms of defense. This has surely not shown itself over the genocide in Gaza or conflicts like Iran and Venezuela, nor in the panic over Greenland, where EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas has almost exclusively spoken as a representative of Ukrainian defense. She, like national leaders Merz, Macron, and Meloni, seems willing to accept all manner of Trumpian humiliations in exchange for continued support for Kyiv, or at least for the president’s agreement not to make a deal with Russia at Ukraine’s expense. Europe continues to buy American weapons to be delivered to Ukraine, and even the current rapid expansion of EU defense spending fits into this logic: such a relatively large military power as Poland, already closest to the 5 percent target, has as its main military suppliers the United States and, almost as important, South Korea.¹⁸ Some EU initiatives aim to break this kind of dependence, so that at least under future administrations the bloc will be less beholden to the whims of the US president. While talk of “slamming the door”¹⁹ on the United States as a supplier is overwrought, the announcement of an €800 billion EU fund for military production, and such moves as the creation of a €500 million Rheinmetall plant near Brasov, Romania (a city formerly named after Joseph Stalin), point to a bid for greater autonomy. 

Talk of this spirit of independence is today all the rage, from New Statesman columnists hyping up a new “British Gaullism”²⁰ to French far-right leader Bardella’s call to break with “vassalage” to the United States.²¹ This is surely paradoxical, because while classic extreme-center leaders always posed as anti-populists damning Trumpian policies, their agenda of boosting defense spending is yet to mark any notable rejection of his personal authority to dictate international affairs. Although some remaining “sovereigntist” forces may leap on declarations such as Meloni’s comment that the US-Israeli war on Iran is “outside the scope of international law” — vaguely asserting that the attack is either condemned by or merely irrelevant to such judgment — the EU carries minimal weight in pushing for peaceful solutions to either of the current mounting conflicts. The move toward a more independent posture, by increasing the physical infrastructure of defense (mainly through the expanded production of tanks and recruitment of young people as soldiers), takes place entirely under the umbrella of assumed US leadership. As Almut Rochowanski has written, it seems that the EU suffers more from the decline of US primacy than Washington itself does, because of the threat to Europe’s role as a free rider on the global hegemon.²² European resilience is hardly to be found, and directly because of the turn to military spending. It has, I have said, served as an ideological banner for the expansion of the extreme center to include further-right forces and to cater to the demands of traditional fossil-fuel industries while also overshadowing and directly undermining the green transition. Yet when we discuss Europeans’ security today, this climate question is vital — not just because climate wars spur waves of refugees or because militaries are themselves mass emissions producers but because Europe’s energy needs are both increasingly dependent on the United States and vulnerable to its imperial policy. Having cut itself off from Russian gas and turned to alternative sources, notably in Algeria, the EU leadership also committed to massively ramping up liquefied natural gas purchases from the United States. Rather than follow through on its promise to be the world champion of the green transition, the EU leadership first designed a long-term plan to reduce emissions, then gutted this agenda when faced with the reaction to surging energy prices during the Ukraine war. Far-right parties managed to hobble the Green Deal without being able to replace it with some viable alternative for Europe’s energy needs.

What do the effects look like today? Where China has built up its own energy resilience with a view to such potential crises,²³ Europe has fallen far short of this. While its leaders are careful to flatter Trump and seek to build up their own armed forces, this will not save Europeans from the effects of his policies. Instead, the shutting of the Strait of Hormuz in March almost immediately pitched the continent into a raft of warnings about shortages, highlighting its crippling dependence on importing fossil fuels. At the time of writing, the continued crisis was not just pushing up prices but limiting the fuel supply, forcing the EU to lean even further into dependency on the United States, despite not approving of the war itself. Even short of a further expansion of the war — a US-Israeli assault over which most EU leaders have kept a guarded silence, or else weakly gestured toward discontent — this latest crisis promises fresh difficulties for incumbents, given the fundamental effect that it could have on ordinary citizens’ fuel needs. If extreme-center policies are well-known to be pro-business, their short-termism and looting of the public realm for the sake of profitability has left the EU deeply ill-prepared for this latest disaster. 

Learning from China is apparently not much on the minds of European leaders: they look not to the scale of its ambition but rather to the grubby underside of its labor market. Merz returned from a recent trip to China touting its long working hours as the reason for its success, reheating the classic crisis-era argument about lazy European workers who expect too much.²⁴ It was a typical encapsulation of the short-termism of the EU’s political leadership: calls for one more push, rather than planning the kind of investment — in rail, in road, in diversified energy sources, in fiber optics — that might make workers’ work more productive. This is, quite literally, the race to the bottom: telling Europeans that since they are falling behind in a supposed competition with China, they have to speed things up and lower their expectations. It’s the same as Europe’s argument about immigration, on a different scale — since the Fordist labor compact has declined and new jobs can only be low-paid, low-skilled, and precarious, the only conflict left is to divide the shrinking opportunities between the children of “nationals” and new arrivals on the market with lower expectations. 

Even with Frexits and Italexits no longer on the agenda, boasts about the revitalization of the European project — and the by now exhausting claims about the EU finally achieving “strategic autonomy” — sound foolish. The possibility of seeing Meloni meet Bardella as fellow leaders of EU governments will perhaps not be much of an occasion for centrist pride. More fundamentally, though, Europe is not a garden in serene isolation from the jungle of the outside world but part of a much bigger garden across which the stench of war is already blowing.²⁵ Faced with the climate crisis, the EU leadership could have built the very energy resilience it is now so sorely lacking. It made great plans to boost its number of tanks but neglected its own promises to build the energy infrastructure on which all our lives depend. With the war spiraling in the Middle East, even European consumers happy to ignore the lives of Lebanese and Iranian people will increasingly realize how much this affects their existence too. The political avenues this takes remain uncertain. Yet most troubling is the depoliticization of key economic questions that will shape the EU’s response to this latest crisis.

Writing in 2015, Ali reckoned that extreme-center hegemony was weaker than it seemed. Populations were no longer wedded to the old parties and, he hopefully averred, resented the hollowing out of democratic choice. Yet the more notable shift over the last decade has been a falling off of public debate about the EU and its treaties. These questions have become absent from view and thus naturalized as the inevitable underpinning of debates on welfare or military spending. Even supposedly radical far-right forces may well adapt themselves to this, perhaps offloading cutbacks onto minorities while protecting “national” workers’ conditions. From the European left’s standpoint, however, the challenge is more fundamental. Amid rising military spending and pressures on the cost of living, supposedly radical-left parties seem increasingly reduced to a rearguard action to defend already underresourced welfare systems, within EU rules set by neoliberals. They do not mobilize working-class voters for political change so much as they warn them against the dangers of the far right. In this shrunken ambition lies the extreme center’s main triumph. Centrist candidates may not be winning many elections today. But if any threat to EU business as usual is neutralized and rendered harmless, the extreme center can still claim a victory.

We have witnessed in recent years a renewed interest in social democracy. Its appeal is quite understandable.¹ Today this idea is mainly associated with the welfare states that emerged in the postwar era, their memory standing in sharp contrast with neoliberalism and its dire social and political consequences. For many scholars, the state of political instability in modern democracies is a consequence of the downfall of the mid-twentieth-century social democratic consensus. 

The predominant understanding of this term, however, is heavily informed by a liberal appropriation of the history and meaning of social democracy. In praise of the most recent Labour cabinet formed in the United Kingdom, Daron Acemoğlu claimed that social democrats “first moved away from hard left ideas and rhetoric. Then, once in power, they delivered on the concrete improvements they had promised.” This strategy, the author added, led to a “democracy functioning properly and delivering in terms of economic growth, stability, public services, and low levels of inequality and corruption” — a formula that “has worked well for workers’ parties and social democrats elsewhere.”² Behind his assertion that “the social-democratic compact now needs to be refashioned for the twenty-first century” is an account in which any relevant differences between social democracy and liberal progressivism are erased.³ The embrace of liberal principles is viewed as an inevitable consequence of the decision to engage in institutional politics that led, furthermore, to an era of democratic stability. 

The distinct feature of this view is the underlying idea that social democracy and the liberal capitalist order are complementary, both theoretically and historically. In the words of a distinguished scholar on the subject, Sheri Berman, in the social democratic order “the market system was tempered and limited by political power, and the state was explicitly committed to protecting society from the market’s worst consequences.” “Social democracy,” Berman argues, “is a variant of socialism distinguished by a conviction that democracy makes it both possible and desirable to take advantage of capitalism’s upsides while addressing its downsides by regulating markets and implementing social policies that insulate citizens from those markets’ most destabilizing and destructive consequences.”⁴ According to this interpretation, social democracy does not aim to supplant capitalism but to constrain and regulate it. It would help people to “adjust to capitalism, rather than engaging in a hopeless and ultimately counterproductive effort to hold it back.”⁵

Although Berman emphasizes that social democratic ideology differs from liberal progressivism, her vision of social democracy incorporates many traces of liberal political thought, hence distorting its historical meaning. Most notably, she sees early twentieth-century social democratic thought as a revisionist strain that understood socialism not as an ideology contesting capitalism but as one promoting social amelioration while embracing a market economy, albeit regulated. The defining feature of social democracy is thus not a radical break with the social order but only an impetus to put a check on its most pernicious consequences with the main purpose of safeguarding liberalism and its institutions. 

According to this argument, social democratic politics did not contest the pillars of democratic capitalism but rather contributed to consolidating and stabilizing them. It allowed for capitalism and democracy to be made “sustainable and compatible,” or to “reconcile capitalism with democracy and social stability.”⁶ In other words, social democratic parties went from being disruptive to being agents in creating stable capitalist democracies. Following this conception, the postwar era and its alleged stability were the main expressions of social democratic politics. The “social democratic compromise,” she argues, “undergirded the West’s greatest period of success.”⁷ The relationship between democracy and capitalism inaugurated by social democratic reformism was “an integral part of the reason why Europe was able — for the first time in its history — to combine economic growth, well-functioning democracy, and social stability.”⁸

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of just how hegemonic this interpretation has become is the fact that many on the Left today consider following the path of representative democracy as equivalent to capitulation, as if one necessarily entailed the other. The account according to which social democracy represents a full acquiescence to the principles of liberal democracy and the market, however, is a gross simplification of the much more layered experience of social democratic parties and governments throughout the twentieth century. As is often the case with historical and political concepts, the polysemantic nature of social democracy lends the term to many uses depending on the values and purposes of whoever wields it.⁹ In the present case, beneath the veil of a nostalgia in which social democracy is equated with an idyllic era of harmony between capitalism and democracy, there is a much more contradictory and, for that matter, fruitful relation between socialist working-class parties and the institutions of liberal democracy.

A critique of the liberal interpretation of social democracy and the thesis that moderation led to institutional integration and democratic stability is the order of the day for those concerned with the current possibilities of democratic socialist politics. Here an examination of the period before social democracy’s mid-twentieth-century postwar compromises is particularly useful, allowing for a better understanding of the dilemmas and challenges that followed from the socialist decision to participate in democratic institutions.

According to the prevalent account of social democracy, the decision of socialist parties at the turn of the twentieth century to 
participate in elections and follow parliamentary politics led 
to their moderation, and this is understood as their acquiescence to the principles of the market and liberalism. 

Far from being an idiosyncratic opinion, this narrative is part of a lineage of political studies on social democracy that developed in the postwar era, becoming predominant in the scholarly field and in broader educated circles. Social democracy, writes the historian Tony Judt,

was the outcome of an insight vouchsafed to a generation of European socialists early in the twentieth century: that radical social revolution in the heartlands of modern Europe — as prophesied and planned by the socialist visionaries of the nineteenth century — lay in the past, not the future. . . . Genuine improvements in the condition of all classes could be obtained in incremental and peace-
ful ways.¹⁰

This understanding, however, has not always been dominant. The political mobilization of the working class and its integration through the mass party were considered key determinants behind the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, and consequently they also became an issue in the endeavor to create a postwar order founded on liberal democratic stability. 

Sigmund Neumann refers to working-class parties as “parties of social integration,” calling attention to their disruptive potential, since they replaced institutions of the status quo as the vehicles for the political integration of marginalized classes.¹¹ By performing a broad role in the lives of their members, from ideological formation to social assistance, from the cradle to the grave, these parties created a legitimacy of their own that extended far beyond the electoral cycle and could potentially challenge the state itself. For Gregory Luebbert, integrating the working classes into political life was the major challenge of the interwar period, leading to the formation of new types of regimes whose legitimacy was based on mass mobilization. In his words, “The years that followed [World War I] were characterized by a search for political-economic formulas that would  . . .  dissipate, accommodate, or crush the claims of organized workers. It was from those searches that liberal democracy, social democracy, and fascism emerged.”¹²

Already considered one of the main reasons behind the instability of the preceding decades, the political integration of the working classes became a key issue in the postwar years. This materialized especially in the relation between working-class parties and representative institutions, becoming the object of a range of studies within the scope of modernization theories. The contributions to this field and its later formalization within modern political science were decisive in shaping our contemporary understanding of social democracy. 

One of the most influential of such authors was the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, for whom the democratic integration of socialist parties was a decisive step in consolidating liberal democracy. For him, the political representation of the working classes by socialist parties represented a “democratic translation of the class struggle.”¹³ The social tensions that accompanied the rise of such parties could be mitigated in the political realm by “constant adjustments made by the main actors in the democratic game — the parties and their leaders — to the requirement that the system be kept in balance.”¹⁴ This gradual process of working-class parties’ integration would be crucial to the stability of liberal democracies from then on.

The idea of the “democratic game” refers to the theory upheld by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, dominant in modern political science, in which democracy is understood as merely a procedure for elite selection based on electoral competition. The formalization of this theory was accomplished mainly by Anthony Downs, whose model of electoral competition hinges on parties’ gravitation toward the median voter.¹⁵ An important premise here is a conception of the state as a neutral electoral institution. Thus, the only relevant force of moderation is democratic competition itself, which reliably produces a convergence around moderate programs as parties contest an electoral majority. Both the stability and legitimacy of the state derive from this system of equilibrium.

Applied to social democracy, this theory holds that the disruptiveness associated with the rise of working-class parties was mitigated by their entrance into electoral competition. The question of democratic stability, then, ceases to be a problem of working-class representation deepening political conflicts. Rather, it becomes one of institutional development, in which the main issue is the broad acceptance of the rules of the game. This mechanism ensured the integration of socialist parties and their full acceptance within the established order. Hence, the idea of moderation as a necessary step in the integration of working-class parties became a cornerstone of postwar liberal thought and, consequently, of the common understanding of social democracy today.

The liberal appropriation of social democracy, therefore, is based on two premises: first, that the workers were fully integrated into the institutions of liberal democracy, and second, that this integration led to an overall consolidation of democratic institutions, by the logic of political convergence. Following the same reasoning, the integration of social democratic parties would constitute the best strategy to guarantee liberal democratic stability and, in the end, the best defense of the status quo against challenges stemming from the working classes. This conceptual framework informs a historical narrative that presumes a smooth transition from early social democracy to the mid-twentieth-century social democratic moment and finally to social democracy as the “third way” at the end of the century. 

The evolution of social democratic parties is thus conceived as a process of institutional political development. Having been fully integrated, social democratic parties would not seek social reform anymore, as their role would, in theory, be limited to the representation of preferences in the electoral game. “That these policy shifts were necessary is indicated by changes in patterns of political support, to which all social democratic parties have had to react,” argues sociologist Anthony Giddens, the most important ideologue of this late social democracy. “The class relations that used to underlie voting and political affiliation have shifted dramatically, owing to the steep decline in the blue-collar working class.”¹⁶

Political scientist Adam Przeworski, both alone and in collaboration with John Sprague, contributed an important critical approach to the idea of social democratic integration. According to them, the moderation and entrance of socialist parties in liberal democratic institutions was conditioned by a strategic dilemma that followed the nonfulfillment of the Marxist expectation that the growth of the working class would lead to the formation of a social and electoral majority. Because of the relative stagnation in their numbers after a period of intense growth, socialist parties were forced to choose: either remain faithful to the revolutionary ideology and remain a minority in parliament, or build electoral coalitions and thereby dilute their ideological aims. “When socialists seek to be effective in electoral competition,” write Przeworski and Sprague, “they erode exactly that ideology which is the source of their strength among workers.”¹⁷

The parliamentary road, hence, did not necessarily result from previous moderation. But after the decision to follow it had been taken, the argument goes, it did limit the range of options available, creating the necessary context for the socialist party’s posterior transformation from a revolutionary class party to a reformist people’s party, a Volkspartei. It is important to note that, according to this logic, the trend toward moderation was a necessary consequence of a particular set of institutional constraints. “The combination of a class structure in which workers are a minority with political institutions that call for a popular mandate imposes a particular logic on the choices available to socialist parties at any moment of history.”¹⁸

Despite the critical appreciation of integrative theories, there is, in the work of Przeworski, what seems an inescapable force guiding social democrats toward both elections and the market economy. The logic of democratic politics would not offer opportunities for social reform but would instead corroborate market principles in limiting the political possibilities of transformation. Subjected to the logics of capitalism and Schumpeterian competition, social democracy finds itself imprisoned between the predefined preferences of the electorate and market constraints. 

Although this approach is more critical of the liberal perspective on social democracy, it has its own shortcomings. Instead of convergence and integration, moderation represents a rather fatalist political perspective, in which there is no possible outcome other than the domestication of socialist working-class parties and their acquiescence to the status quo. Once the decision to participate in elections is taken, the result is predictable, if not inevitable: moderation leads to domestication, and so social reform is not achieved. As Przeworski himself states, “Social democrats will not lead European societies into socialism.”¹⁹ In this light, the late-century “resignation” of social democratic politics and its reformist impulse seems almost unavoidable.²⁰

Most critical works today are still situated within this very same understanding of social democracy, accepting acquiescence as a given. The insistence on this appropriation reveals just how imprisoned the political debate is, even within the Left. Looking at the early experience of social democracy, it is clear that the political integration of workers was not easily achieved and never fully accepted. In fact, as working-class parties hardly fought their way into representative institutions, what followed was growing disruptiveness. The social democratic path toward parliamentary politics, therefore, cannot be fully apprehended by the ideas of integration and domestication. Alternatively, I propose that it created a situation of what the sociologist Norbert Elias called “unstable equilibrium,” referring to the difficult relation between the “established” and “outsiders” in which the very existence of the latter poses an unmistakable threat to a given social order.²¹

Early social democrats encountered sometimes insurmountable obstacles and fierce social and political opposition in their rise to power. Contrary to fatalist assumptions, however, the resulting scenario of instability led to a varied array of outcomes, which ranged at different moments from institutional crisis and breakdown to the promotion of broad social reform. Over the next two sections, I discuss how this played out in the case of the most important social democratic party in the early twentieth century, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), or the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

The term “social democracy” was created during the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly in reference to countries where the socialist struggle went hand in hand with the democratization of political institutions. This was especially the case across Central and Northern Europe, where the institutions of the reactionary regimes stood firm against the innovations of the century of revolutions. In 1889, the Socialist International admitted parliamentary politics as a legitimate path of political struggle and ratified the democratization of representative government as a crucial step in the fight for socialism.²²

The German Social Democrats constituted the leading party of the Second International and were by far the largest socialist one at the turn of the century. Its trajectory is representative of the increasing importance that parliamentary struggle was gaining in the socialist movement. The SPD, in its modern mass party form, resulted from the fusion of two independent organizations in 1875 at the Congress of Gotha. A little over three years afterward, most of its activities were made illegal by the Bismarckian anti-socialist laws. Created during the rule of Kaiser Wilhelm I, it thrived against the deliberate will and vigilance of the state.²³

Parliamentary representation was basically the only activity of the party that remained legal and provided a channel for social democratic growth during this period. As soon as these laws expired in 1890, the party organized a congress at Erfurt, which took place in 1891 and laid the basis for its political stance in the decades to come. Following the guidelines that had already been established at the founding of the Second International, the Erfurt Program admitted and reinforced the importance of engaging in electoral competition and parliamentary politics as a path to socialism, and it defined universal suffrage and secret voting as its two key political goals. 

In the program, there was no apparent contradiction between parliamentary politics and the horizon of political revolution.²⁴ The authors Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky are often understood to have held diverging and even antithetic views within the party. While Bernstein is usually remembered as the theoretical founder of modern social democracy, with his thesis of an “evolutionary socialism,” Kautsky is associated with the predominance of orthodox Marxism within the SPD.²⁵ Nonetheless, Kautsky was as much an enthusiast of social democratic parliamentary politics as Bernstein. This path had already been admitted by Friedrich Engels himself in his final years, as he famously argued in his introduction to The Civil War in France in 1891. By then, the SPD’s period of electoral growth was already well underway under the leadership of August Bebel. This was not controversial; rather, electoral participation was supported by a strong majority, including Kautsky himself. His endorsement of the Erfurt Program, therefore, was not circumstantial but part of the party’s long-standing commitment to democratic politics. 

In his comment on the Erfurt Program, published in 1892, Kautsky argues that “whenever the proletariat engages in parliamentary activity as a self-conscious class, parliamentarism begins to change its character. It ceases to be a mere tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie. . . .  It is the most powerful lever that can be utilized to raise the proletariat out of its economic, social and moral degradation.” Furthermore, he continues that 

the proletariat has, therefore, no reason to distrust parliamentary action; on the other hand, it has every reason to exert all its energy to increase the power of parliaments in their relation to other departments of government and to swell to the utmost its own parliamentary representation. Besides freedom of the press and the right to organize, the universal ballot is to be regarded as one of the conditions prerequisite to a sound development of the proletariat.²⁶

Thus, the distinguishing feature of Bernstein’s argument is not the embrace of parliamentary politics. It is rather his idea that this democratic path allowed for a peaceful and, in his words, evolutionary transition to socialism. His argument was based on a critique of the Marxist assessment about the fate of capitalism. By the time he was elaborating his work, in the late nineteenth century, he already perceived that capitalist economies were showing signs of more complex arrangements than previously assumed in Marxist thought. Instead of the predicted growth of the proletariat and consequent deepening of class conflict, he observed the proliferation of more sophisticated forms of property, the emergence of a new middle class, and the increase of working-class income. “If society were constituted or had developed in the manner the socialist theory has hitherto assumed,” argued Bernstein, “then certainly the economic collapse would be only a question of a short span of time.”²⁷

These developments would have not only compromised the theory of catastrophic collapse and the inevitability of social revolution but also mitigated the contradictions between the interests of the proletariat and the propertied classes. Socialism should then be based in the democratic and peaceful reform of capitalism, and hence it would be evolutionary: “In all advanced countries we see the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie yielding step by step to democratic organisations.”²⁸ To interpret this argument as an acquiescence to capitalism, however, is a mistake. Bernstein remained a socialist and, as such, fundamentally anti-capitalist. The issue for him was not whether socialism was desirable but how to achieve it in the absence of a revolution. “Unable to believe in finalities at all, I cannot believe in a final aim of socialism. But I strongly believe in the socialist movement, in the march forward of the working classes, who step by step must work out their emancipation.” The path to socialism would, then, be intertwined with the construction of what he called a “real democracy.”²⁹

The discussion between revolution and reform was less a matter of willingness to enter parliamentary politics than a reflection of the ambiguities and challenges of a socialist working-class party engaging in representative institutions. The reconciliation between these two approaches — Kautsky’s and Bernstein’s, the revolutionary and the evolutionary — was much easier when the SPD held a steadfast and uncompromising opposition to the imperial regime. From the moment it took more decisive steps toward institutional protagonism on the eve of World War I, it became considerably more difficult for the party leadership to hold party lines and avoid defections, not only because of the controversial decision to vote for war credits in 1914 but also, and perhaps most notably, during the years of democratic government since 1919. Contrary to the liberal understanding, the theory of peaceful reform was put to the test as much as the revolutionary theory during this period. 

The difficulties of evolutionary socialism are better apprehended when bearing in mind that the meaning of democratization at the turn of the century was quite different from the Schumpeterian use of the term. As Bernard Manin argues in his important study on the matter, representative institutions were aristocratic in birth and conception, and so they remained during the rise of the social democrats.³⁰ More than the contrast between parliamentary and absolutist government, democracy had to do with the opening of political institutions to the participation of the lower classes. That the viability of increasing the political participation of the lower classes was more feasible within a parliamentary government than in an imperial one did not entail that parliamentarism was synonymous with democracy. Democratization took on a primarily sociological meaning and referred to the entrance of the masses into the political arena. This was arguably the most important political novelty at the turn of the century and led to a deep crisis of traditional forms of political authority and legitimacy. In the words of Luebbert, “no stable interwar regime could ever be formed if it lacked mass support.”³¹

Especially during its constitutive years, social democracy was a phenomenon of mass politics closely tied to the creation of the mass party form, which became one of its most enduring political achievements and a remarkable tool for mobilization and participation of the working classes. This development transformed the nature of representative government in a decisive way, leading to the creation of what Bernard Manin named “party democracy” in place of “parliamentary government.” “Socialist or social democratic parties,” he writes, “are generally considered the archetype of the mass-based party that has become a linchpin of representative democracy since the late nineteenth century.”³² The rise of the social democrats represented much more than the entrance of a new competitor into the game. It gave birth to a different form of politics based on the mass mobilization of workers. It is no surprise that this brought considerable tensions into the political order in general, and to representative institutions in particular. Contrary to Bernstein’s idea of an evolutionary transition to socialism or a “real democracy,” the democratization of the state, with its social and economic implications, could still feature revolutionary turbulence.

The degree of subversion in social democratic politics in settings of economic inequality and social hierarchy is frequently underappreciated. The threat posed by the rise of socialist and working-class parties to leading roles was deeply felt at the heart of the establishment, even when accompanied by moderate programs of reform and a conciliatory tone. Wherever they emerged, traditional elites faced an unprecedented challenge to maintain their political dominion. In her study about the changes in electoral institutions in the late nineteenth century, Amel Ahmed argues that traditional elites were not against the expansion of suffrage per se but mainly concerned with the resulting uncertainty. Socialist parties “were a powerful political force that posed an existential threat to the institutions of capitalism and liberal democracy.”³³ The conservative answer to this meant predominantly “to limit its influence by either channeling [participation] through established parties or minimizing the representation of independent workers’ parties.”³⁴

Contrary to the liberal interpretation on this subject, the institutional politics of social democratic parties caused political instability, not democratic stability. In the case of the German Social Democrats in the early twentieth century, moderation did not comprise an acquiescence to the status quo, even as they were steadfastly moving away from the goal of social revolution. Although Bernstein’s idea of evolutionary socialism did focus on social reforms managed through parliamentary institutions, thus differing from Kautsky’s attempt to reconcile parliamentary politics and social revolution, it still pointed toward a radicalization of democracy as a path to overcoming capitalism. As such, it was equally disruptive to the status quo and was so perceived by established elites. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, the SPD was the largest working-class party in the world and the model of the new mass party form. Under its leadership, the socialist movement took decisive steps to increase parliamentary representation and social mobilization. In a demonstration of strength, the party grew incessantly against the will of the state from the end of the nineteenth century to the eve of the war. The largest and most influential social democratic mass party was pit against one of the most powerful monarchies and unyielding conservative elites in Europe. This laid bare the challenges and conflicts of a socialist path to democratic rule.³⁵

Between 1914 and 1918, the Social Democrats went from holding a rigid oppositionist stance to leading a new and democratic constitution as the German Empire crumbled. The German Revolution of 1918 birthed a democratic republic under the leadership and in the image of the Social Democrats that stood as an alternative to the expanding influence of the Bolsheviks to their left. The Weimar Republic was the first major social democratic experience of government, with the SPD both responsible for its creation and acting as its guarantor. Given the outcome of the Weimar Republic, however, it is remembered mostly as a tragedy.³⁶ In modern appropriations, attuned to the liberal perspective, the outcome has frequently been understood as a deviant case that strayed from the path of democratic development. Of course, this perspective expects a specific institutional path toward democratic stability.

Yet there is much to be learned from early social democracy. While I consider the case of the SPD in the Weimar Republic to be an extreme one, and hence not representative of social democracy’s typical trajectory, it starkly reveals its attributes.³⁷ The case of Weimar shows that the adoption of a reformist program does not necessarily reduce the hostility of upper classes against the party. The disruptiveness of social democrats contributed to both the expansion of social and economic rights with the new constitution and the political crises that led to the demise of the regime in the early 1930s. 

Although by the early twentieth century the SPD had already grown to become the largest party in the Reichstag, the German parliament, it remained thoroughly isolated in the imperial regime in all practical matters. The sociologist Guenther Roth famously called this a “negative integration,” in which an outsider socialist party, despite being allowed to take part in representative institutions, is forbidden through formal and informal rules to effectively govern.³⁸ The relation between party and regime began to change on the eve of World War I. In an era of total war, the government decided it was too risky to have a hostile party at home, especially the largest in Germany, with wide legitimacy and a strong influence over the working class. From this point, Social Democrat leaders sensed an opportunity and began the slow but decisive movement toward governing.

To be sure, the passage from an oppositionist stance to more proactive participation in government was not without grave decisions and internal controversies. Engaging in negotiations with the regime signified a rupture with the directives of the Erfurt Program. Up to that moment, the leader Bebel had managed to maintain party cohesion with a strategy of uncompromising opposition in which parliamentary politics and the revolutionary horizon were made compatible.³⁹ His passing in 1913 led to the formation of a new dominant group within the party around the leadership of Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann that aimed to breach the party’s imposed isolation and was willing to negotiate with the regime. The decision of the SPD to vote in favor of war credits in 1914, sealing the pact with the government, led not only to the end of the Second International for all practical purposes but also to the defection of important figures of the party, including Bernstein himself.⁴⁰

These previous dealings with the faltering regime put the Social Democrats in an ambiguous position when revolution broke out in 1918. While the Social Democratic base and many of its leaders took part in the uprising, the party became the only political institution capable of preventing a total breakdown of whatever remained of the political order. The SPD held on to a strategic position to negotiate the political transition and to lead the country to create a republican government.⁴¹

The mobilization and legitimacy that the SPD had gained over the previous decades made the party both a threat to the upper classes and the only institution capable of managing an organized transition, one that would avoid a Bolshevik takeover or a full breakdown of the social order. At the end of 1918, a parliamentary monarchy and a democratic republic were the only viable possibilities for the future of the German state, and accepting the leadership of Social Democrats was the only way for the conservatives to preserve some of their vital interests. Social Democratic leaders understood this leverage and navigated this uncertain landscape in order to ensure a leading role for their party in the new political regime. Few historical circumstances are as illustrative of the fine line walked by social democracy as the founding of the Weimar Republic.

From the beginning to the very end, the Social Democrats were highly conscious that the republic had been created in their image and that it should be preserved at all costs. The party was dominant in the Constitutional Assembly, having obtained 37.9 percent of the vote and 163 of the 423 chairs. The SPDremained the largest party in parliament until the final days of the republic, only losing its predominance in the elections of 1932. In the Assembly, the coalition in support of the new republic, including the Catholic Zentrum party, obtained over 76 percent of the votes and held 329 seats.⁴² Ebert was elected president and Scheidemann chancellor. The result was the establishment of a constitution that outlined an ample set of social and labor rights, laying the basis for a welfare regime, or Sozialstaat. It is only natural, therefore, that the Social Democrats became the first and foremost defenders and guarantors of the new regime.

Even in these exceptional circumstances, what followed was not the integration of the SPD in the established order but a situation best described as a state of unstable equilibrium. The bridges forged by Ebert and Scheidemann during the revolutionary moment with the German upper classes had been highly circumstantial and did not erase the political tensions arising from a democratic government with socialist contours. The political participation of the working class in the German state was unprecedented. The Stinnes-Legien Agreement, an interclass arrangement based on mutual concessions, allowed for an uneasy coexistence that lasted for some years and for the social provisions of the constitution to affect German labor relations. Nonetheless, the political tension arising from working-class politics remained high and were unresolved during the lifespan of the republic. In this regime, syndicalists and Social Democrats coexisted with a conservative judicial and military apparatus formed in the imperial years that never fully adhered to what most of the propertied classes regarded as a social democratic order.⁴³

Young Social Democratic scholars writing at this time, such as Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, were prolific in theories about class struggle in democratic settings. In a text written in 1928, Kirchheimer asserts, “Today the idea of a state based on the rule of law is situated between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It became the dividing line between two groups in struggle, in which neither feels that it constitutes a definitive law for the distribution of power.”⁴⁴Far from initiating a process of democratic consolidation, social democracy would have led to a “state of equilibrium in the relations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.”⁴⁵ In this scenario, institutional stability would depend on constant political work to reinforce the basic political compromises of the founding years. 

Managing this situation was not easy and became even more challenging when the Weimar coalition saw its electoral support falter, with the country still facing the burdens of war. In the elections of 1920, the Social Democrats saw their electoral share fall to 21.9 percent. From then on, their stance became a defensive one, mainly focused on the survival of the regime against increasing attacks by different right-wing groups, which were feeding off social unrest and were bolstered by political formations that never fully embraced the new constitution.⁴⁶ Between 1920 and 1924 there were two coup attempts, and in 1924 a center-right coalition formed to take over the government, sending the Social Democrats back into the opposition. In 1925, the conservative general Paul von Hindenburg won the presidential elections against the candidate of the Weimar coalition, the centrist Wilhelm Marx. After this, only in 1928 did Social Democrats make it back to government, just in time to face the dire consequences of the economic crash of the following year.

Under these conditions, Social Democratic leaders constantly sought to assemble coalitions in order to uphold the democratic institutions they had worked to build. The alliance and concessions to the Catholic Zentrum party between 1920 and 1925 was one such attempt but not the only one. After the SPD’s return to government in 1928, the fiscal policies adopted by Rudolf Hilferding were austere, justified by the rhetoric of orthodox Marxist ideology but also and perhaps mainly a concession to financial elites.⁴⁷ The one point that the SPD never gave up was its defense of basic social and labor rights, as manifested, for instance, in its efforts for the approval of pension laws in 1923 and unemployment insurance in 1927, and its open refusal to withdraw social rights during the years of economic collapse. In the early 1930s, this commitment undermined the efforts of compromise and coalition building. 

The crisis of 1929 brought this basic political contradiction out into the open. From then on, the political efforts of German conservatism, in the figures of President Hindenburg and his appointed prime ministers Heinrich Brüning and Franz von Papen, became increasingly relentless in its attempts to overthrow the republic, which it identified with the Social Democrats themselves. These figures directed efforts to isolate and marginalize Social Democrats, and soon enough this basic posture led to a more open offensive against the regime and an embrace of Nazism. In this moment of crisis, even the partners of the Weimar coalition undermined Social Democratic leadership. The “last Socialist-led government of [Hermann] Müller,” explains Martin Jay, “fell when the SPD resisted further accommodation and intransigently resisted the reduction of unemployment benefits for workers, thus fracturing [the] coalition.”⁴⁸

The open attempt to expel the SPD from the political scene is compelling evidence that the shift away from a revolutionary goal did not mean the domestication or, for that matter, the integration of the party. In their path to representative institutions, Social Democrats brought opinions and interests into democratic institutions that proved difficult to reconcile with those of the upper classes. While this conflict clearly threatened democratic government throughout the period, the achievements of Social Democrats owed to their abilities and virtues in navigating the situation of uncertainty. 

The tragic end of the Weimar Republic should not be interpreted as the necessary fate of democratic socialist politics. As an extreme case, the main methodological value of analyzing the experience of the SPD is to create alternative lenses to understand social democratic politics and what lessons it still holds.

It is important to note that the abdication of social revolution did not necessarily entail an acquiescence to capitalism or to the principles of a free-market economy. This is true even in the work of Bernstein, considered by many the main intellectual of social democracy in its modern sense. Despite his defense of an evolutionary socialism and the parliamentary road to social reform, Bernstein remained a socialist and argued for a real democracy, which for him implied the full political participation of the working class and its parties as well as the political means to promote social reforms. The disruptiveness of social democratic rule during the Weimar period and the subsequent crises that led to the decay of the regime clearly put evolutionary socialism to the test as much as revolutionary programs had been put to theirs.

The German Social Democrats remained disruptive to the status quo after embracing the parliamentary road and the founding of the republic. It is precisely because of this lingering subversiveness that the idea of integration does not provide an adequate line of interpretation on the history of social democracy. By bringing into representative institutions interests and opinions associated with the mobilization of the working class, social democrats widened the scope of conflict and public debate. In doing so, they tested the very limits to which a capitalist and exclusionary social order was willing to tolerate truly democratic institutions. In this sense, the participation of social democrats in representative institutions radicalized democracy. 

The adoption of this perspective challenges the liberal understanding of social democracy’s role of moderation. Instead of the convergence and limitation of political conflict, social democratic moderation mainly involves the ability to navigate a situation of unstable equilibrium, a circumstance in which institutional stability is constantly put to the test by growing political conflict and different views regarding the very nature of the regime.⁴⁹

Thus, although the commitment of the upper classes to democratic institutions will vary with their perception of the extent to which their vital interests are safeguarded, it is precisely under conditions of uncertainty that they are most likely to accept social reforms. This is what happened at the founding of the Weimar Republic and, arguably, in the postwar compromises. In this sense, the social democratic moment was not the result of institutional development but of hard-fought political struggle.⁵⁰

Finally, the instability associated with any attempt at social democratic reform should not be read through a fatalist lens. Rather, instability lies behind both the risks of institutional breakdown and the possibilities of advancing social reform through democratic means. This is, therefore, a conception of social democracy that reaffirms the indispensable role of political agency. And in doing so, it points to the continuing relevance of the social democratic legacy for the Left today.

Let me start with the achievement.

The history of the modern left is usually told as a history of failure. But, at least when it comes to the taking of power, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The modern socialist movement began, in its recognizable form, in the middle of the nineteenth century  — with small groups of workers and artisans confronting a spectacular and terrifying industrial society. Within seventy years, those small groups had grown into the largest political parties in Europe. Within a hundred years, parties calling themselves socialist or communist governed roughly half the planet.

There was nothing like it in modern history. You have to go back to the early Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries to find a movement that spread so far and so fast  — from a few thousand militants in the 1860s to political power, in some form, across more than half the world’s population by the 1960s.

Hal Draper, an American socialist and a sharp critic of every actually existing version of socialism, observed in 1966 that “for the first time in the history of the world, very likely a majority of its people label themselves ‘socialist’ in one sense or another.”¹ That isn’t a sectarian project. That was, by his estimation, the majority of politically conscious human beings on every continent, identifying with some version of an idea that, sixty years earlier, had been the property of a few pockets of workers or exiled intellectuals.

But before the socialist movement won state power, it won something even more remarkable. It won a culture.

In the coal villages of Wales, miners asked to be buried with their copies of The Communist Manifesto the way an earlier generation had asked to be buried with their Bibles. In working-class homes across Europe, portraits of socialist leaders hung where icons of saints had once been displayed. The feasts of the old religious calendar were folded into a new calendar of strikes and secular martyrs and holidays. Eric Hobsbawm recorded an announcement from the Po Valley in 1891: “The priests have their festivals. . . .  The First of May is the festival of the workers of the entire world.”²

This was not just political organization. This was the building of a counter-civilization inside the shell of the old one. Workers had their own newspapers, their own sports clubs, their own choirs, their own schools, their own funeral societies, their own theories of history, their own heroes, their own holidays. They walked through the same streets as their bosses, but they lived, in some real sense, in a different world  — a world with its own moral horizon and its own picture of what was coming next.

And what was coming next, many believed, was socialism.

Two broad versions of that future eventually took shape. There was socialism within capitalism  — the social democratic project, which sought to humanize the market through the power of collective bargaining and the state. And there was socialism outside capitalism  — the communist project, which sought to abolish the market altogether through state ownership and central planning.

Both of those projects, in their heyday, transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Whatever else you say about Soviet Communism  — and I am from a democratic socialist tradition extremely critical of it  — it took a peasant society and industrialized it in a generation, eliminated illiteracy, defeated Nazi Germany on the battlefield, and offered, for many people in the colonized world, a seemingly working model of how to escape the imperial division of labor. And whatever you say about social democracy, postwar Sweden under Olof Palme was among the most decent societies that has ever existed. It featured full employment, strong unions negotiating on more than equal terms with employers, and a universal welfare state. It meant real dignity for working people on the shop floor and in society as a whole.

Even many critical of both models saw them as at least way stations on a road that millions of people genuinely believed led, eventually, to a society in which the great division of human beings into a class that owns and a class that works would be ended for good.

How did we go from flawed or partial victories to defeat?

The standard story, told by many on the Left, is that socialism was crushed from the outside. By the Cold War. By American imperialism. By the CIA. By Augusto Pinochet’s coup; by Operation Condor; by the dirty wars across the Global South. By the Thatcher–Reagan counterrevolution. By the bond markets disciplining François Mitterrand in the early 1980s. By the long, patient work of capitalist agents through their think tanks, media, and political parties.

Part of that story is, of course, true. The socialist movement was indeed the target of the most sustained, well-funded, and ruthless ideological and military counteroffensive in modern history. We shouldn’t forget that. Nor should we forget just how many martyrs violent anti-communism, from Indonesia to the Southern Cone, left behind.

But if we tell ourselves only that story  — if we say that we were simply beaten by external enemies  — we let ourselves off the hook in a way that makes it impossible to learn from what else happened. And we owe Eric Aarons, and everyone like him who spent a lifetime trying to understand our defeat honestly, more than that.

The truth is that socialism was not only beaten from without. It was also beaten from within  — by its own political crimes and by its own economic failures.

The political crimes of the twentieth-century communist movement are not a slander invented by Cold War propagandists. The gulags were real. The bloody terrors and purges were real. The famines that killed millions in Ukraine and in China were real. The destruction of open expression, of free trade unions, of religious freedom, of civil society  — that was real too. And those crimes were committed not just by authoritarians who pretended to be socialists but by people who believed, sincerely in many cases, that they were building the future Karl Marx dreamed of. We can’t resort to a “No true Scotsman” defense. This was the real  historical experience of socialism for millions.

It was what Leon Trotsky predicted: The substitution of party for class. The substitution of state for party. The substitution of leader for state.³

And the belief that history was so clearly on our side  — the belief that I want to resurrect  — was used to construct a moral universe in which any means used to accelerate history were justified. Individual rights and the rule of law were seen as bourgeois. The conviction was that, having seized the commanding heights of the economy, one could simply command the rest of society into the shape one wanted.

A socialism that does not understand, down to its core, why the decisions that shaped state socialism were wrong  — not just tactically wrong but morally wrong  — is a socialism that will not and should not have a future in the twenty-first century.

But most of the Left agrees on these political questions. Where there is less reckoning is on the economic failures of socialism.

Soviet-style central planning did not collapse only because of political repression, or only because of the arms race, or only because of CIA intrigues. It collapsed because, on its own terms, it could not deliver. By the 1970s and ’80s, the gap between what the system promised and what it produced had become impossible to disguise.

The first reason was calculation. Gosplan, the Soviet planning agency, was responsible for coordinating an economy that included nearly 400 bureaucracies, 43,000 factories, 26,000 construction enterprises, 47,000 farming units, 260,000 service establishments, and more than 1 million retail shops  — producing some 12 million distinct products, each of which required the right inputs from the right suppliers at the right locations on the right timelines, with supply chains stretching across eleven time zones. These in total meant tens of billions of variables, rising into the trillions when you extend the planning horizon across time.

To rationally plan that, you would need to know what every enterprise could produce, what every household would want, and how every input connected to every output. No one could know that. Not the most brilliant economists in the world. Not the most powerful computer that has ever been built or ever will be. The information simply does not exist in a form that any central authority can collect and process. So what you got instead was guesswork  — last year’s numbers plus a little more  — propped up by a sprawling secret economy of barter, hoarding, and back-channel deals that managers ran on the side to keep things moving.

The second and related problem was that of incentives. Every manager understood that next year’s resources depended on this year’s reported numbers. So they lowballed their projected capacity and overstated their actual output. They hoarded labor and materials. They lied. The workers under them figured out very quickly that exceeding a quota just meant a higher quota next quarter. Weak firms were never allowed to fail, because letting them fail meant unemployment and broken supply lines, so inefficiency was never punished. From the Politburo down to the shop floor, the entire hierarchy had an incentive to misrepresent what it was doing.

These were not bugs you could fix with a better algorithm. They were features of the structure of Soviet-style economics itself. And what we, as socialists, have to admit is that there is no version of administrative planning that escapes these problems. The dream of running a complex modern economy purely by planning should not and cannot be revived.

And then there is social democracy, whose failure took a different form. Social democracy didn’t fail because it tried to abolish capitalism. It failed because it tried to tame capitalism without transcending it.

For a generation, its basic formula worked. Social democracy produced strong unions, full employment, a generous welfare state, rising wages, and a growing economy that produced enough surplus to fund all of it.

But there was a contradiction at the heart of the social democratic settlement, and it did not survive the moment growth slowed. Social democracy empowered workers politically while leaving ownership of the means of production in private hands. This produced a permanent standoff between a powerful labor movement and a capitalist class that still controlled investment. As long as the pie was growing, the standoff was tolerable  — there was enough for wages, enough for profits, and enough for the welfare state on top. But the moment the pie stopped growing, in the stagflation of the 1970s, the standoff collapsed.

The Swedish social democrats actually saw this coming. Rudolf Meidner, the great Swedish economist, proposed a plan in 1976 to gradually transfer ownership of large firms to worker-controlled funds, using a portion of profits each year  — a real bridge from social democracy to socialism, funded by the wage restraint that workers had already practiced for decades. It would have solved both Sweden’s economic difficulties and its political impasse.

But it never came into being in a viable form, not just because of opposition from capital but because the leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party itself would not fight for it. They were not willing to mobilize the working class for a transformation of property relations. The plan was watered down, then gutted, then abandoned. And before long, Swedish capital was able to solve the crisis of social democracy in its own way, by pushing along a lengthy campaign of liberalization that has reduced the Swedish welfare state to a shadow of what it was.

We should learn lessons from both failures.

Soviet-style socialism failed because you cannot run a complex modern economy without prices, autonomous firms, and real incentives. Social democracy failed because it tried to leave private ownership of capital intact, and a capitalist class with all the levers of investment in its control will eventually use its power to dismantle whatever constraints have been placed upon it. These two failures were mirror images.

But the lesson of these failures is not that socialism is impossible. The lesson is that socialism has to be rethought in its technical design, without abandoning our goal of a society without exploitation or oppression.

Before I get to what that twenty-first-century socialism might look like, I want to make a practical and not just normative case against moderation. Because the temptation for a defeated Left is to say: “Never mind socialism, let’s just talk about social welfare, or public housing, or higher minimum wages. Those things are winnable. Why burden them with the unpopular word, the discredited dream?”

The first reason is that a Left without a socialist horizon is not even a more effective reformist left. It is a worse reformist left.

Reforms are not abstract policy proposals that float through history on their own merits. Reforms are won by movements. And movements are sustained by stories  — stories about who their constituents are, why they matter, where they are going, and what they are part of. A movement that can only say, “We want a more generous unemployment benefit,” is a movement that will not mobilize the energy it needs to win even that benefit, because the unemployment benefit by itself does not answer the questions that working people actually ask when they consider whether to give up an evening, a Saturday, a career, and sometimes a life for political action.

The bigger questions, I would argue, are actually more mainstream: Who am I in this society? Why are resources distributed the way they are? Where are we going as a society? Is there a future in which our children inherit something better than what we have? Who’s standing in the way of realizing that future?

The great socialist parties of the early twentieth century could answer those questions. They could tell a Welsh miner that he was the inheritor of a tradition that ran from the Levellers through the Chartists through the workers’ internationals, that his union or party card signified membership in a movement of millions of workers around the world, that the strike he was about to join was a small skirmish in a global struggle that would eventually, in his children’s lifetime or his grandchildren’s, mark the final triumph of labor. That story is what made him willing to be locked out, to be beaten, or to lose his job. It was not just the wage increase and material security for his family; it was also the story that gave those sacrifices deep meaning.

When you take the story away, you have starved our movement of one of its greatest sources of power. You have asked people to fight a hundred small fights without ever telling them what the fights are for.

Second, a Left without a socialist destination eventually becomes something other than a Left. It becomes a kind of progressive technocracy: a network of policy professionals, NGO staffers, communications consultants, and electoral operatives who manage the symptoms of a system they have given up trying to change.

A progressivism that has nothing to say about class  — that talks only about identity, or only about poverty, or only about policy  — is no match for a Right that has plenty to say about class, even if everything it says is a lie. The Right will tell working people that their enemies are immigrants, that their enemies are minorities, that their enemies are the cultural elite. A progressivism that refuses to name capitalists and the rich as the enemies leaves working people with nothing to put against that story except the assurance that their feelings will be respected and their ascriptive identities will be honored.

The Left that wins in the twenty-first century will be a Left that can name what is wrong, name who benefits from it, and name what we want to put in its place.

The third reason is that we owe it to the people who came before us. The socialist movement was built by people who had no objective reason to believe they would win. The Welsh miner reading The Communist Manifesto in 1890 had every reason to think his life was going to be short, hard, and forgotten. The Russian textile worker in 1905 had every reason to think the autocracy would last forever. The factory worker in São Paulo, the dockworker in Sydney, the metalworker in Turin in 1920 believed they would win because they had decided, against the evidence, that they were not history’s victims. They were history’s authors. They were the protagonists of a story whose ending had not been written.

That world-historic confidence is what built every institution we have inherited: The eight-hour day. The weekend. The old-age pension. The hospital you were born in. The school you went to. The union that, if you are lucky, still represents you at your job. None of those things fell from the sky. They were ripped out of the hands of people who did not want to give them up, by movements of working people who believed they were doing more than just bargaining for crumbs. They believed the future belonged to them.

And we, who have inherited the dividends of their fight, have allowed ourselves to settle for less. We have shrunk our horizon to fit our present weakness, and then we have wondered why we cannot grow.

This is the main reason why we need to recover the horizon of socialism and the language not of parliamentary gossip and media sound bites but of centuries and continents. This is why, as old-fashioned as it might seem, we need to talk about socialism and the abolition of class society. About the end of the millennia-long division between those who command labor and those who perform it. About a world organized around a radical form of democracy and equality.

Marx famously warned against writing recipes for the cookshops of the future. He was rightly critiquing the utopian socialists of his day. But in our world, our challenge is to prove to people that socialism is not just politically desirable but technically possible.

As a result of not just capitalist propaganda but the real failures of both forms of twentieth-century socialism, a skepticism has grown about socialism’s future. Wouldn’t taking democratic control over a complex economy eventually boomerang into crisis, collapse into inefficiency, or harden into authoritarianism?

To say that socialism is technically possible and we should sketch out blueprints for it doesn’t require pretending that there’s a single settled model of socialism just waiting to be implemented. But it does require confronting a set of unavoidable questions that any credible alternative must answer.

Could a socialist economy use prices, profits, and competition to coordinate complex production without reproducing domination or significant inequality? What incentives encourage efficiency and innovation in an economy of democratically governed firms? How can productivity growth be sustained so that living standards continue to rise, shortages are avoided, and technological change continues without the sort of mass insecurity that workers experience today? And what role must the state play in stabilizing the macro economy, guiding investment, and enforcing democratic priorities without suffocating initiative?

Let me sketch, very briefly, what I think a credible socialism for our century might look like.⁴ A twenty-first-century socialism, as we would describe it, has to do two things at once. It has to abolish market dependence  — the condition in which your survival depends on success in the market  — while preserving markets as one tool among others for coordinating a complex economy.

In practice, this means decommodifying broad areas of life. Health care, education, transportation, energy, housing, and telecommunications are the infrastructure of a modern life. Organizing them through markets, through profit-seeking firms that ration by price rather than need, is a mistake  — not only morally but practically, because the result is a system that is both more unequal and less efficient than public provision would be.

Beyond these domains, as my colleagues and I describe in The Blueprint, lies the broader economy of goods and services, where coordination problems are more varied and markets remain important. In the market sector of an economy composed of democratically governed firms, price signals would still convey information about supply and demand, helping to coordinate production and consumption.

But the surplus generated by economic activity would be controlled by those who produce it. And investment would be allocated through public financial institutions rather than by capitalists. In this way, markets can function as tools of coordination without reproducing the power relations of capitalism.

In this socialist framework, productive enterprises in the commodity-producing sector are controlled by workers rather than by external shareholders or private capitalists. Governance rights attach to participation rather than to a financial stake. Membership in a firm, then, resembles membership in a political community. It confers voice and real democratic control at the point of production, and it imposes obligations, but it can’t be traded like a commodity.

This shift in governance requires a corresponding shift in how investment is organized. Any feasible socialism must avoid soft budget constraints and allow inefficient firms to fail while more productive ones expand. From an egalitarian standpoint, this should be common sense. Why should we waste the most valuable thing in the world  — human labor  — in inefficiency?

But workers in democratic firms should not be expected to supply capital themselves, or to tie their personal savings to the fortune of a single workplace. Leaving investment decisions at the level of individual firms would generate systematic distortions that would destroy a socialist system. Disparities in capital intensity, for example, would encourage workers to cluster in capital-rich sectors, while labor-intensive production and the public sector are left understaffed. Imagine everyone wanting to work on oil rigs, or some other very capital-intensive sector where your dividends would be massive, instead of working at a childcare clinic.

Organizing ownership and investment as a social function rather than a firm-level one is therefore essential. Public banks serve this role by holding productive assets in common, allocating capital on behalf of society as a whole. In this way, firms operate with real autonomy while remaining stewards rather than owners of social wealth. And the state can use a vast array of macroeconomic tools to influence the direction of development.

One additional mechanism that is essential for such an economy to remain both efficient and egalitarian over time is the creation of minimum wages, differentiated by occupation, to shape development itself. Rather than allowing labor markets to sort worker-managers purely through localized bargaining power or sectoral rents, benchmark wages establish a floor that reflects collective priorities about dignity, skill, and social contribution.

Firms and sectors that rely on low pay and labor discipline would be pressured to innovate, reorganize, or contract. Those that raise productivity through new techniques, through additional training, or through technological improvement would be rewarded through increased dividends. In this way, the economy is directed along a high road of development that rewards innovation and investment rather than just sweating out labor.

Of course, in a socialist economy, the goal of increasing productivity isn’t a goal for its own sake. The goal is the expansion of leisure, of security, and, ultimately, of time outside production.

A socialism that merely redistributes income without changing how time is organized would fall short of its promise. But a socialism that combines redistribution with social ownership, democratically guided investment, and wage structures that reward efficiency can translate a dynamic economy into shorter hours, longer lives, and greater freedom over how those lives are lived.

This is a sketch. I am laying out in five minutes what deserves five hours. But the point is that we need to be discussing models of socialism as part of our struggle for both near-term and long-term changes.

Ultimately, our goal as egalitarians must simply be the end of class society  — not a slightly fairer class society, or a class society with better safety nets, but the end of the division of humanity into a class that owns and a class that works. It would be the first society, in most parts of the world, since the Neolithic Revolution that is not organized around that division.

Eric Aarons spent his life advocating for working people and for a better world. He gave that life to the conviction that the society we live in is not the only society we could live in, and that ordinary people, organized, are capable of building something better.

This was a life that was well spent.

We live in an age that has tried very hard to convince us that the lives of people like Eric were wasted. That the organizers, the party members, the union militants, the teachers and shop stewards who gave their decades to the socialist movement were, in the end, deluded. That they bet on the wrong horse. That history has rendered its verdict, and that the verdict was against them.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Eric was not wrong. The Welsh miner buried with his copy of The Communist Manifesto was not wrong. The Russian textile worker, the Italian metalworker, the South African unionist, the Brazilian peasant organizer, the Australian docker, the American socialist who campaigned for Eugene Debs over a hundred years ago, or even the one who knocked doors for Zohran Mamdani last year  — none of them were wrong. They were not naive. They were not history’s fools. They were people who looked at the world they had been given and decided it was not good enough, and they spent their energy trying to build something better.

The fact that they did not finish the job does not mean they were wrong to start it. And the fact that we have inherited their unfinished business does not diminish what they did. It just places an obligation on us to continue their work.

The key aim of The Class Matrix is to make a case for the centrality of class structures and the incentives they generate in both the reproduction and development of the socioeconomic order. The reproduction of capitalism is mostly discussed from the perspective of the individual worker, while its broader development and institutional variation are viewed from a macro perspective through an analysis of representative historical examples. This section will provide a synthetic overview of the key materialist arguments made in relation to these areas.

Unlike the orthodox Marxist thesis that sees class structure as compelling workers toward collective resistance (perhaps best summarized by the grave diggers metaphor in Marx), Chibber argues it is most likely to lead them to seek individualistic ways of dealing with capitalist exploitation. Collective action is therefore read as a deviation from the norm rather than as the standard behavior. This recasting of classical Marxist analysis consequently shows the redundancy of the culturalist dominant ideology model, whereby a lack of collective action by workers is seen as a mark of false consciousness — that is, a “collapse of rationality” causing the workers to be “mistaken in their judgment about their own interests.”² Chibber shows that capitalist relations incentivize individualistic ways of navigating their structures, while collective action is fraught with difficulties and uncertainties. It is thus perfectly rational for workers not to organize against their employers. 

While Chibber’s analysis is based on classical Marxist categories, it acknowledges the paramount importance of job security over wage gains and the employee-employer conflict of interest as well as issues such as the free-rider problem implicit in collective action. He recognizes the role of culture in overcoming workers’ preference for individualistic solutions, even though its power remains constrained by the material organization of collective actions. Ideas and identities are not sufficient, and material incentives such as strike funds are necessary to inform “their judgment of the toll [collective action] will take on them” and “their ability to incur the costs it will entail.” As a consequence, the default attitude of the working class is rather what Chibber calls “resignation” or “passive consent.” Workers see their situation as “regrettable but unavoidable.”³ We might call this the reproduction as dull compulsion argument. It aims to refute the role of culture and ideology in the stability and reproduction of capitalism. 

The book also highlights the constraints of class on nations’ development by discussing macro-level and broad historical trends. Not only do these relations bar any radical socialist project; they also limit the extent to which capitalism might be reformed. This occurs because class sets “actors’ interests with respect to any reforms” and forces “an unequal power relation between the contestants even when they pursue these more limited reforms.”⁴ In other words, despite variations within capitalism, the economic interests and power of the ruling classes pose limits on institutional variation even when the form of capitalism in question deviates from the crudest logics of surplus accumulation and exploitation. Those two variables determine what is screened out in terms of potential reforms as well as the degree of variation within the system. Any shift toward egalitarian principles is then seen as the result of fierce organized struggle against capitalist interests (as they naturally resist such shifts for structural reasons).⁵ We might call this the limit for institutional variation argument. It aims to respond to criticisms of structural class theory that use examples from European social democracies to cast doubt on the predictive and explanatory power of classic Marxist categories and the social antagonisms they portray. 

This paper assumes both arguments are sound. In my view, the reproduction as dull compulsion argument is sufficient to explain the stability of capitalism as well as the behavior of workers within it. The limit for institutional variation argument can indeed explain various forms taken by capitalism, even when it has moved toward social democracy. However, short-term developments and variations beyond economic factors cannot be explained simply by reference to that. The macroanalysis presented fits a broad historic period generalization, but it does not advance a framework for the analysis of how structural and economic factors influence party politics and state policy. This gap exists because the meso level is missing: the link between individual experience, ideological recruitment, and group dynamics. At this level of analysis, it is necessary to provide an account of interest aggregation and acknowledge the key role played by ideology and culture. As we will see in the next section, while Chibber explains the extent to which economic logics constrain the role of culture, he does not provide an account of its workings within the limits he sets. 

Let us now turn to Chibber’s analysis of culture by first looking at his definition of it. He clarifies that he uses the term in a “narrow” sense “to denote ideology, discourse, normative codes, and so on.”⁶ The bulk of his discussion of the notion is in chapter one, where he takes on the so-called cultural turn. He reconstructs the main premises of the culturalist framework as follows:

The argument from meaning: Social structures require the appropriate meaning orientation on the part of social actors.

The argument from contingency: The process of meaning formation is vulnerable to breakdown and hence highly contingent.

His strategy for challenging this perspective is to take on the argument from contingency by showing that “when it comes to capitalist class relations, there is no such contingency.”⁷ The key argument presented here is that the logics of capitalism assert themselves in the form of economic compulsion on both workers and capitalists. This is compared to the case of a parishioner refusing to follow his role. The pressure he faces will be dependent on “agent-imposed sanctions,” presupposing “continuous monitoring” and “willful intervention” by other members of the community.⁸

Chibber then explains two models for understanding the structure-culture relationship. The first one argues that culture is “a causal mechanism that mediatesthe relation between structure and action.” This view implies that the outcome is not guaranteed until we know the “mediating cause’s availability” and that the “nature of the outcome also substantially rests on the properties of the mediating cause.” The case of the parishioner navigating the structure of a church congregation is meant to illustrate this model by highlighting how his actions are contingent on both his understanding of his position and the “external intervention” of other members of the community. The second model sees culture as a “proximate cause” in the sense that “it provides the codes and meanings needed to activate the structures.” However, “the structure itself ensures the appropriate codes will be available” without the need for an external agency.⁹ This second model corresponds to class structures and describes the economic compulsion discussed earlier. 

Culture is arguably discussed at some length again in chapter four. Here the emphasis is less on meaning-making and more on contingent “habits, norms, and expectations” such as “culinary preferences.” Within this context, Chibber argues for the primacy of economic structures over culture while acknowledging the latter’s relevance to the individual’s life. The principle of this relationship is clearly stated when he explains that cultural practices such as 

many aspects of local religion will continue as before; social mores that are not implicated in economic reproduction will remain in place; legal doctrine attending to myriad practices will continue as before, as long as it does not impede economic reproduction.¹⁰

In other words, the logics of capitalism represent a sort of automatic selective mechanism that might include whatever is compatible with it and exclude whatever is not. The incentives and negative sanctions in its structures ensure this through the agency of individuals. 

While both discussions provide a compelling account of how structures constrain the role of culture, there are some unresolved questions pertaining to the active contribution of culture within the socioeconomic order. If we assume that meaning-making often plays a mediating role in structures’ reproduction, what are the consequences for the agents involved and the form taken by the structure? Chibber’s arguments address only how this role makes their reproduction contingent. Similarly, the way in which meaning-making matters in relation to collective and political action is never articulated (although it is arguably latent in his discussion of solidarity).¹¹ Finally, the active role of contingent habits, norms, and expectations in shaping the reproduction of the socioeconomic order is never discussed. The next section will start sketching a theoretical framework that will enable us to answer these questions. 

Note that Chibber does not explain how his discussion of culture in chapter one (as meaning-making) maps onto his later treatment of the concept (as contingent habits and practices). It seems to me that an altered version of his view is necessary to bridge this gap and bring the two treatments of the concept together. The following discussion more or less accepts Chibber’s key claims and distinctions.¹² However, I define culture in a slightly different way for pragmatic reasons, which will hopefully become clear to the reader as the paper progresses. 

In the simplest possible terms, I see structure as the written, obvious, or explicitly stated rules we encounter when navigating the social world. They tend to be “strongly structured by specialised roles” and “marked by significant authority relations between at least some of these roles.”¹³ By contrast, culture is perhaps best summarized as “the way we do things around here.”¹⁴ It might be defined as the unwritten and implicit norms that relate to the here and now of individuals’ pragmatic experience. Both structures and culture usually (except for class structures, which work through dull compulsion, as previously discussed) operate through the action of what Dave Elder-Vass calls norm circles, that is, a group of “people who are committed to endorsing and enforcing a particular norm.”¹⁵

Structures tend toward universality, as the rules relating to specializations or widespread formal practices show some level of similarity across the world today. In line with Chibber, I see the structures of capitalism as the most universal set of rules and positions. On the other hand, culture is a highly contingent matter. This contingency is determined by the informality of the norms, the wideness of the norm circle, and the severity of negative sanctions individuals face if they break the norms. The informality will require a sophisticated capacity for meaning-making to read the room, as they say. Cultural norms are not written anywhere. The wideness (how widespread the norm is) will determine whether the individual will feel compelled to follow the norm or even come across it in the first place. The severity of the negative sanction and desirability of incentives (assuming the agent operates within the norm circle’s width) will inform the agents’ views on whether they should or should not act according to the norm. This approach thus assumes that structures usually have more power over individuals than culture, as the former tend to be more widespread and feature formal incentives, deterrents, positions of authority, and relations of power. Structures also shape the formation of culture, as agents create informal patterns of behavior and norms while operating within the boundaries they set (e.g., workplace culture). Nevertheless, under certain circumstances, informal norms might override structural rules and incentives. 

I believe this framing can help us further explore the role of culture as a mediating mechanism in the reproduction of structures. Let us come back to the church congregation described by Chibber and assume a new priest has been appointed. While there are formal rules he will need to consider, his role as a religious leader within a specific community in a specific place at a specific time will make his understanding of how things are done there essential to fulfilling his (structural) role. It might be that he will have to do away with certain formalities that come with the official job description as they clash with the local culture. Therefore, the priest might be put in the paradoxical position of having to forsake some of his structural duties (e.g., the sermon must begin with X) to fulfill his primary mission (to be a trusted religious leader in the community). In this case, culture effectively has the causal power (through the pressure asserted by norm circles) to alter some aspects of the structure. Things are likely to be different if we consider basic economic structures. Here culture cannot play such a role, because the key incentives of capitalism relate to the individual’s own material subsistence. As such, they are unlikely to be disregarded. Indeed, their logics are likely to trump or even destroy (as Chibber argues) any cultural norm that is at odds with them. Karl Polanyi’s analysis of how market economies erode reciprocal social bonds provides a clear illustration of this point.¹⁶

We might now move from culture to politics as we follow our agents strategically navigating the various norm circles they interact with. In line with our previous discussion, we can say they will meet various formal structures and cultural norms depending on their socioeconomic and geographic position. Key structures, such as capitalist class relations, laws, and particular job descriptions, will be encountered as various and intersecting norm circles. Alongside these structures, they will encounter a great variety of cultural norms, whose effect on their daily lives will depend on the variables discussed earlier. 

How does this relate to class, interest formation, and politics? Let us begin with the broadest assumption regarding workers. They all have a material interest in gaining wages through their labor. This is of paramount importance, since both their primary needs (food, shelter, and security) and secondary needs (e.g., whatever hobby, interest, or passion they might have) rest on doing so. Since money unlocks our access to virtually everything else, it becomes something that is interesting for its own sake. However, as Chibber points out, material interests do not neatly translate into political strategy. Other relations will likely intervene in shaping individual workers’ understanding of their broader political condition and consequent strategic choices. The various cultural norms and associated norm circles will likely influence this. Indeed, our perception of society is often shaped by unwritten norms and ways of behaving we encounter throughout our daily lives. We have a natural tendency toward wanting to fit into whatever set of norms is widest within our sphere of action. Thus, we could argue that any agent will have an interest in fitting into whatever cultural patterns surround them. This is to feel a sense of belonging (or even prestige) and to avoid negative sanctions from surrounding norm circles. While we might think of this in relation to mundane practices, such as how to politely interact with others in a café, the same reasoning is likely to apply in a variety of more politically salient situations. 

We might think of a worker whose life is embedded within the cultural norms of a deeply religious community. He might see his material interest as being tied to said community and its values (so that he will view a closer tie to this community as an opportunity to improve his material conditions) as well as informing his broader political perspective. Surrounding cultural forms might also inform a worker’s views by negatively affecting their life. Think of a worker being surrounded by norm circles whose misogynistic values and discriminatory attitudes impede her career and damage her general well-being. She might view the satisfaction of her material interests through the prism of her gender, and her broader worldview might be informed by feminist politics. Her material interest might be seen as an aspect of her gender identity rather than a consequence of her class position.

Another important variable in shaping an individual’s worldview is what we might call ideological circles, that is, norm circles that are committed to the spreading and sustaining of ideologies (whether consciously or not).¹⁷ Before we explain their role, let us define ideology. What I have in mind is a neutral notion that emphasizes the political nature of a worldview rather than a critical or negative concept highlighting its role in maintaining relations of power. It is epistemological only in the sense that it sees ideology as a form of knowledge focused on a specific object (social phenomena). However, it is not epistemological in the sense of making a claim about a belief being true or false. In this sense, it is more in line with Vladimir Lenin’s or Antonio Gramsci’s¹⁸ conceptions of ideology (both of whom are usually interpreted as having neutral¹⁹ definitions). Ideologies have three aspects: explanatory, normative, and pragmatic or strategic. I categorize them as follows:

Social commentary: any thought or speech that explains and evaluates social phenomena (whether structures, social problems, or events) 

Vision of the future: a vision of a better society, usually entailing a world where the social problems highlighted by the social commentary have disappeared 

Strategy: the way in which problems highlighted by the social commentary will be addressed and the vision of the future brought to reality 

The social commentary is the basis on which the vision of the future and the strategy rest, in the same way that a doctor’s prescription and expectations are both based on her diagnosis. The social commentary explains social phenomena by making causal connections between them and other phenomena, groups, or specific people. This often involves an evaluation of the cause as negative or positive, depending on the desirability of the outcome — so that, for example, whatever social phenomenon is said to cause crime is depicted negatively, and whatever is said to cause community well-being is depicted positively. It is worth emphasizing that ideologies deal with potential (and highly disputed) causal relations between complex phenomena. So while individuals experience these phenomena, they do not experience what causes them. For example, I might experience inflation when I go shopping but not its cause. The object of those ideas is more abstract than what is addressed by Chibber’s discussion of ideology, where he focuses on its role in ensuring the worker submits to the employer’s authority. My notion concerns a broader sociopolitical worldview commonly associated with party politics and policy. 

While the worker must understand the structures he navigates and his immediate interests, his view of society at large will necessarily be shaped by media coverage and its various assumptions about how social phenomena are connected. While the former world is relatively intelligible and learned through practice, the latter is abstract and distant. It is here that our ideological circles matter most, as they connect these worlds (society at large and the media) with our daily life and its contingencies. Individuals’ experience of politics is never a straight-up media-to-consumer matter; it is filtered by the ideological circles they encounter. This is something rarely acknowledged by the critical theory literature, which (rather unrealistically) sees ideological recruiting as mostly a top-down matter. Our discussion of ideological circles is meant to emphasize the horizontal nature of this process.

Indeed, ideological circles are not necessarily political parties, trade unions, or similarly formal organizations. They might be our peers, friends, family members, or the guys at the local boxing club. We join the ideological circle in an informal and unspoken manner (we are not asked to sign a paper, after all). It is precisely this relaxed and unofficial relationship that makes this the most likely point of entry into a particular ideology. We are simply talking politics amid our conversations about the best TV shows. Our peers’ way of explaining an ideology (even if this worldview perfectly matches that of an official political party) will likely appeal to our individuality, to our cultural background, and to the here and now of how we see things around here. We must remember that the individual’s engagement with the ideological circle will be within the context of other cultural norm circles and thus gain a certain pragmatic importance for her interaction with surrounding practices and communities. For example, perhaps I am interested in being part of my town’s punk scene and engaging in its norms and practices. It just so happens that all the punks in my town are anarchists. My interest in anarchism thus begins through an association with my existing musical taste and my wish to join the punk scene. I might even feel that my punk identity and my anarchist worldviews are one and the same, as I do not experience them as separate entities in my daily life. Furthermore, while I might be aware of liberal, communist, or even Nazi punks, to me, the real punks are anarchists because these are the ones I know. Since practical life is the “hook from which the rest dangles, the absolute support,” whatever I encounter represents “the absolutely real world’s nucleus.”²⁰

Another important point in relation to ideological circles concerns their role in barring individuals from accessing other worldviews or ideological circles. This is not necessarily done through explicit censorship (such as by forbidding members of the circle to learn about other ideologies) but through negative characterizations that make any engagement with contradictory worldviews appear pointless. Think of right-wing memes about Marx as an economically illiterate and envious sloth. Why should one waste time reading his fairy tales about communism? The advent of the internet has exacerbated this issue. While in principle it offers unprecedented freedom to find and explore diverse ideas, individuals tend to cluster within echo chambers, often derived from their local and practical life (e.g., one’s friends on social media are often one’s real-life friends and acquaintances). Of course, traditional media was always a bourgeois affair. However, individuals were still likely to come across some variation of views within the mainstream political spectrum, because television and radio tended to expose them to it. Now that the consumption of traditional media is in decline, particularly among young people, individuals tend to only encounter views they are already interested in. Algorithms and social media ensure they don’t get exposed to much else. 

Overall, this section has attempted to provide a sketch of how ideology and political engagement are likely to be colored by our interaction with surrounding cultural norms. This, of course, is not meant to understate the importance of individuals and organizations that produce ideology. Nevertheless, far from treating individuals as “dupes,” I follow Gramsci in seeing them as “philosophers,” as they share “a conception of the world and therefore contribute to sustain it or modify it, that is, to create new conceptions.”²¹ While nonspecialized individuals will tend to borrow their views from those who specialize in the production of ideologies, they will contribute to their development and alteration. Everyone has a slightly different take on and understanding of the very same ideology. Rather than passively absorbing other people’s worldviews, our minds actively build causal frameworks and narratives that link them to other ideas and to our daily lives. Note that this horizontal development of ideologies might then be picked up by the specialized producers, further developed, and then fed back. Thus, while we might think of producers and consumers in purely structural terms, the reality is more complex and entails a mutual conditioning of the two sides. 

There are arguably different ways of doing ideology that depend on the type of producer we have in mind. The reader might have noted that my definition of ideology would include narratives that are produced by various entities at different levels of depth, preciseness, and abstraction (along with their relative “epistemological circles”).²² While I acknowledge this variety, the definition brings them all together to emphasize their interdependence. What determines if something counts as ideology is whether it addresses social phenomena through social commentary, proposing a normative vision and a strategy for achieving said vision. Its truth value, sophistication, and comprehensiveness are not relevant for its categorization as an ideology. Something might count as ideology even if it only provides social commentary. This is because it is dealing with the same field of knowledge as comprehensive ideologies (containing all three elements). Nevertheless, there would be differences in the manner and style of doing ideology depending on the specific specialized apparatus we have in mind. The following is a brief sketch of key considerations for some of the most influential apparatuses. 

We might begin with the most obvious (and perhaps important) producers of ideology: political parties. Since they usually aim to govern and take over state power, their ideologies must be comprehensive and must include a framework that is compatible with the state’s bureaucracy and legal, financial, and administrative tools. Their comprehensiveness not only entails that they must present a worldview that includes social commentary, a vision of the future, and a strategy. They will also need to address the concerns of various groups as they balance their pursuit of financial backers’ interests with their need for people’s votes. We can thus say that political parties often have two ideologies: a stated ideology (to gain the general population’s votes) and an operative ideology (what actually informs policy and strategy). 

The producer-consumer relationship described earlier is central to how political parties operate. What parties express will leave a mark on the beliefs of the electorate, and this in turn will inform the next politician of some of the central beliefs that she ought to keep in her narrative if she is to gain support. At the same time, politicians need to address and integrate various groups’ interests and grievances. In this case, it is the prospective consumer of ideology who sets the content, which is developed by the party. Finally, political parties are key players in articulating what we might call political morality. This notion expresses moral and evaluative judgments concerning the social and political world (which are usually built upon the narratives of social commentaries). It includes judgments on whether certain social structures and arrangements (e.g., taxing the rich) are fair or not and whether a certain state of affairs (e.g., unemployment), although regrettable, must be endured (to reach lower inflation). Different ideologies would have contrasting views on how they morally evaluate social phenomena and events. 

The next apparatus we will look at is academia. Academic production of ideology does not need to be comprehensive. In fact, academics might simply provide a social commentary (which is precisely what I am doing as I write this). Nevertheless, the data and ideas they produce might be employed by political parties or other partisan organizations. Academics might themselves be partisan and belong to specific ideological traditions (like me). What characterizes academic production is the tendency toward abstraction and lawlike generalization. Indeed, we might think of academics as primary producers of political philosophies, that is, abstract theoretical frameworks for sociopolitical analysis (which, again, is what I am doing right now). Just like ideologies, they entail a social commentary, a vision of the future, and a strategy. However, unlike ideologies, they will conceive of the issues discussed in an abstract and general manner (e.g., explaining unemployment in general vs. in the United States in 2026). 

Another important apparatus would be the entertainment industry and the arts. While perhaps not full-fledged producers, entertainers and artists often present ideologically partisan social commentaries through audiovisual content. What they lack in terms of conceptual depth, they gain in terms of vividness and directness. They are exceptionally important in connecting with an otherwise disinterested audience. The entertainment industry is also key in developing political morality, as its depictions of social and political issues can touch the individual’s emotional core like nothing else. It could be argued that the current distrust of political elites and the antiestablishment attitude that is endemic in political discourse today is at least partly the product of years of entertainment depicting established power as something sinister to be challenged by people. 

Our final apparatus is what we might call the news media (whether traditional or not). These outlets tend to be strongly partisan and support the views and policies of various political parties. Their role is to provide daily social commentary on events in a way that fits within the ideology of their political masters. A key aspect of their ideology production concerns the framing of events in structural or individual terms in a way that aligns with their masters’ ideology. If an event (e.g., an immigrant commits a crime) is in line with the generalizations presented by the masters (immigration causes crime), then they will support this reading of the event. In other situations (e.g., a school shooting), they will portray the event as an individual case (a mentally ill boy) that should not be seen as a serious structural issue (endemic gun violence) to be dealt with by policymakers (gun control). Alternatively, they will connect the issue with another social phenomenon that is more in line with their masters’ narratives (e.g., the problem is not guns but divorced parents). 

While it is perfectly rational, as Chibber argues, for the worker to submit to the rules of capital out of necessity, why would a worker support, for example, Donald Trump? One can argue that working-class support for Trump is largely overstated, yet the existence of any support needs to be explained. Of course, I agree with Chibber’s rejection of the notion of false consciousness and the idea that workers are being duped. The problem relates to the previously discussed fact that we do not experience the causal connections made by the social commentary. While workers have a practical and rational grasp of their immediate surroundings and interests, as we have previously discussed, ideology producers will cover the gap between this daily reality and the broader social world. 

The material interests of groups are connected to other social phenomena or entities (which consequentially become interesting) via causal connections through the social commentary. This exploits a simple fact about our psychological makeup. While some things are interesting for their own sake, such as food, one’s enemies, sexual mates, and (as previously argued) monetary gain, “other objects may become interesting derivatively through association with any of these things.”²³ This is most easily understood through a concrete example. Trump might ask steelworkers, “What causes unemployment in your industry?” His answer is China. His social commentary connects a social problem (unemployment in the steel industry) with China’s economic competition. According to our model, he is connecting something that is interesting for its own sake (as all interests depend on the fulfillment of material interests) with something else. Now China becomes interesting to the steelworker, as its competition is what hinders the satisfaction of his material interest. 

At this point, we can finally move to the macro perspective connecting workers’ material interests, ideologies, and state action and show how everything discussed so far affects the overall development of the socioeconomic order. For this purpose, I propose a reimagined version of the base-and-superstructure metaphor. I find this useful, as it stresses the way in which the state rests on, supports, and alters the economy while also teasing how ideology itself has a material core that it translates into the state superstructure. The model I propose is thus meant to illustrate a relationship of mutual dependence and influence between the economy, politics, and the state. By the economic base, I am thinking specifically about the national economy and the material interests of agents that arise due to its specific conditions at a certain time. Of course, the national economy is affected by international trends and events. Nevertheless, the economic fluctuations and their consequences are experienced by agents and groups through the prism of their location within the state. Thus we can begin by saying that the economy depends on the state in two senses: it sets its boundaries and protects its functioning (through law). Of course, the state depends on the economy for its own functioning. It could not exist if it were not for the surplus created through economic activity. These are key aspects of this mutual dependence. We might think of the base-and-superstructure metaphor as a model for the study of a causal chain of events (from the economy to political and ideological struggle to state action) through time. 

Let us pick a hypothetical time to begin the analysis starting from the economic base. We must bear in mind that whatever starting point we pick, this was itself the result of a previous process: “Every precondition of the social production process is at the same time its result, and every one of its results appears simultaneously as its precondition.”²⁴ The relevance of this point will become clearer at the end of our base-and-superstructure cycle. If we look at a national economy, we will see certain general conditions (e.g., rates of employment, inflation, and growth) and more specific conditions that apply to a sector of the economy (e.g., unemployment by industry) or demographics (e.g., unemployment by age). The material interests and grievances of various groups, however we might wish to cluster them, will be shaped by these circumstances. In his discussion of “relations of force,” Gramsci calls this the “primitive economic moment” where “social groups are formed on the basis of the level of development of the material forces of production, and each one of these groups represents a function and a position within production itself.” The next level of the base is the “common trade” moment, where individuals belonging to the same profession organize through trade unions. The third is what Gramsci calls the “corporatist moment,” where groupings might form based on the wageworker-capitalist conflict. While already political, these moments belong to the base, as they are concerned with the satisfaction of material interests. The existence and commonality of both types of organizations is, of course, not a given. 

In the fourth moment, what Gramsci calls “the hegemonic,” 

one becomes conscious of the fact that one’s own “corporate” interests  . . .  go beyond the confines of the economic group — and they can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups. This is the most patently “political” phase  . . .  in which previously germinated ideologies come into contact and confrontation with one another, until only one of them — or, at least, a single combination of them — tends to prevail, to dominate, to spread across the entire field, bringing about, in addition to economic and political unity, intellectual and moral unity.²⁵

This passage describes the movement from the base to the superstructure’s first level: the level of political and ideological conflict. Within this level, material interests of various groups are aggregated within political units whose ideology and political aims go further than the mere satisfaction of said interests. As Gramsci puts it, these political units create “intellectual and moral unity” among various economic and social groups. 

The level of ideological struggle thus concerns various political entities appealing to economic groups’ material interests by making the previously discussed causal connections. They all try to argue that they are the best at explaining the causes of their economic grievances (through the social commentary), providing the most appealing vision of the future and the most pragmatic policies to solve the issue. Now, there are a few things we must point out. While the most powerful producers of ideologies are bourgeois political parties (due to their ownership of the media and their political prestige), grassroots movements and minor parties also engage in this struggle for workers’ attention within civil society.²⁶ The former will always try to address the material interests of the workers (to gain votes) but must, of course, fulfill the interests of capital too. Their ideologies will thus require them to depict bourgeois interests “as the common interest of all the members of society.”²⁷ Furthermore, the various ideological forms produced by our apparatuses are due to heavily influence public opinion, even though their precise weight is hard to measure. From an individual perspective, local practices and small ideological circles will also play their role in the ideological struggle we are here discussing at a macro level, and primarily through organized political units. 

Note that this view is not trying to argue that politics simply boils down to material interests. Of course, there are other moral and political interests that are potentially as important, depending on the circumstances. However, other political interests are always contingent on the specific settings (as our discussion of culture should have shown); the addressing of material interests, on the other hand, is always necessary regardless of the time and place we pick. This is the sense in which the base determines the superstructure under every circumstance. This is clearly illustrated by the fact that today’s most debated noneconomic issues, immigration and combating global warming, are always connected to workers’ material interests by both sides (with the Right claiming that both harm workers’ material conditions, while the Left argues the opposite). 

Now, for the sake of simplicity, we might think of the end point of this cycle: a national election declaring one party and its ideology victorious. The party will now move from a position of leadership to one of domination. It will be able to use the state’s coercive powers to achieve its ends. Its ideology, which until now was something merely stated through words, can be enacted through law²⁸ and policy. This is the final stage of our base-and-superstructure cycle: state action. Here we can see the superstructure reacting on the base by attempting to affect the economy (through law and policy).²⁹ The specific shape of this action depends on the operative ideology held by the party in power and the specific material interests it seeks to address. The end of the cycle is also a precondition for a new one. The circumstances of the base, along with the material interests and grievances of groups, will change as a result of these policies, whether desired or unexpected. 

The purpose of this paper is to articulate an understanding of culture and politics that is in line with Marx’s historical materialism and, more specifically, Chibber’s own elaboration of the theory. I attempted to provide support for the main arguments presented in The Class Matrix by developing aspects that are latent in Chibber’s work but not properly explored. I tried to accomplish this by providing more conceptual precision for notions like culture and ideology, which were treated as synonyms in the book.

My understanding of culture, in terms of informal and unwritten norms enforced by norm circles, tries to convey its contingency and dependence on context. Through this definition, I was able to provide a rough sketch of how workers’ material interests and perspectives are shaped by their immediate surroundings. This includes broad unwritten rules of conduct but also what I call ideological circles. The latter plays a very important role in familiarizing individuals with the ideologies spread by various political groups. 

While I agree with Chibber about resignation being the source of workers’ passive consent for their situation, my concept of ideology helps us understand how workers relate to the broader socioeconomic sphere. My discussion of ideology producers is meant to tease out different ways of elaborating and spreading worldviews that contribute to the political struggle between groups. In line with Chibber, the framework proposed rests on the basic assumption that workers’ material interest is paramount, as it is tied to their well-being and survival. Shifts toward strategy and broader political interests are framed as being connected to said material interests by means of association through ideology. This account thus attempts to explain workers’ recruitment within bourgeois political parties (without resorting to the notion of false consciousness) as well as the process by which they might join revolutionary movements. 

The discussion of material interests, ideology, and state action through the base and superstructure provides the means for a more fine-tuned understanding of the development of the capitalist socioeconomic order through time. Indeed, my view is that ideology is much more important for the development of the socioeconomic order than for its reproduction, as resignation and habit are usually enough for the latter. On the other hand, the development of an ideology that brings agents together is necessary for the alteration of social reality. The movement from class to party politics to state action is thus explained in more detail, while maintaining Chibber’s general emphasis on how class restrains institutional variation. Indeed, it adds another layer to the materialist case by arguing that ideologies within democratic regimes must always address the material interests of both the capitalists and the workers (even though, in the latter’s case, it might simply pretend to). 

I will conclude by translating these theoretical insights into practical considerations. What would be the best strategy to persuade a far-right populist to ditch his worldview and join the socialist cause? It seems clear to me that morally castigating this person would be a nonstarter. Similarly — and this is the tactic often used by well-meaning people — explaining to this person how his ideological figurehead is tricking him and how he is acting against his material interests as a worker is likely to fail. To do so would be to treat him and all his peers who support said figurehead as dupes. Furthermore, our interlocutor has likely consumed plenty of media dismissing any accusations as conspiracies by the figurehead’s political enemies. Alternatively, he might say that politicians’ moral conduct or intentions are irrelevant if they get the job done. While more promising than the moral castigation, this approach is unlikely to be successful. It seems to me that our discussion so far leads to a strategy that leverages the Right’s cynical use of socialist political morality against it. Bernie Sanders touched upon this moral posturing when commenting on Trump’s 2024 victory. He noted that Trump’s political rhetoric entails empathy for workers’ grievances — as he puts it, what “Trump did do is he said, ‘I feel your pain.’”³⁰ It is clear that, in today’s world, the Right cannot ignore workers’ plight in political discourse. Instead, it tries to leverage their pain (along with workers’ antiestablishment sentiment)³¹ for its own gain. I believe that this is the Trojan horse we must use in our recruitment for the socialist cause. If we want to make socialism interesting, we must start by connecting it with something our interlocutor finds interesting. Since that something is the well-being of workers, this should be a relatively straightforward task.

The Kaleckis stayed in Cuba for three months. They lodged at a luxury hotel, and Michał’s Cuban hosts offered him a draft for $2,000 as an honorarium. The high-minded Kalecki refused and would only accept $200, so they ended up short of money for a while.⁴ Adela kept a diary in which she recorded their sightseeing and conversations with Cubans. The diary gives a vivid and, on the whole, sympathetic picture of the island just over a year after the revolution.⁵ Ada notes the number of armed young people in military fatigues on the streets and the men identifiable as revolutionaries by their long hair. Many wealthy and professional people were already departing for Miami. The Kaleckis frequently spoke with people deciding whether to emigrate or throw in their lot with the revolution. Under American influence, many Cubans seemed to associate socialism with dictatorship, the absence of personal property, and even the dissolution of marriage. Ada reassured them that socialist Poland was nothing like this, and she was embarrassed to admit, as a freethinker and a scientist (she was a graduate in biology from the ancient university of Kraków), that the Roman Catholic churches in Poland were full and that religious education had recently been reintroduced into Polish schools.

As tourists, Michał and Ada were charmed by the historic Cuban architecture, in particular the colonial churches and monasteries. In Havana they were struck by the beauty of the Convento de San Francisco, even more so when they discovered among the guides a couple of veterans of the Spanish Civil War. That war had been of considerable political significance for them. They were in London, with Michał attending seminars at the London School of Economics and making his first contacts in John Maynard Keynes’s circle, when General Francisco Franco raised his revolt against the Republican government in Spain in July 1936. The Kaleckis had joined a demonstration to denounce the revolt.

Ada was especially impressed by the legendary Hotel Nacional, where they stayed in Havana. She confided in her diary that it was the most beautiful hotel she and Michał had ever seen. Fidel Castro was wont to drop in on the kitchens of the hotel from time to time. Around midnight, on December 21, when the Kaleckis were already in bed, they received a telephone call in their room. Castro was in the hotel. Michał was evidently exhausted by the frustrations of his work. But Ada quickly dressed and went downstairs. Sure enough, almost hidden by a semicircle of young people, Castro was there, in a military jacket, with his beret pushed back on his head. He was telling the young women to go out and teach women in domestic service how to read and write. The young women themselves were to apply themselves to their studies and become doctors. All this was interrupted by questions from an audience that occasionally broke into songs of patriotism and support for Fidel. Coming from a country to which socialism had been brought in the van of the Russian Red Army, Ada tried to imagine a Polish equivalent of the cheerful, chaotic, and seemingly mystical dedication to the bearded revolutionary. She concluded that he was like the Jewish “tsadyks” that she had heard about, the Hasidic holy men who whipped up their followers into ecstasies of singing and dancing.

Her husband, ever considering matters from the point of view of his work, was less impressed. In his report on his return, Kalecki called the visit “an exceptionally difficult and even unpleasant mission.”⁶ He had meetings with Che Guevara, at the time the president of the central bank. But Guevara had been called away to the un-central-bankerly task of organizing a militia in the state of insecurity that preceded the break in diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States at the beginning of 1961. Boti, the minister of the economy, was in the hospital following a car accident; a number of staff in the planning commission had left for America; and the Mexican economist J. F. Noyola Vázquez, who was supposed to be directing the Department of Long-Term Planning in the commission, was busy with other projects. In a general atmosphere of revolutionary chaos, Kalecki had enormous difficulty getting any data. According to Adam Szeworski, who worked with him in Warsaw, at one point Kalecki was advised that the only people with reliable data were those at the US embassy.⁷

Apart from the absence of good statistics, Kalecki complained that

the staff of the Planning Board is exceptionally weak and inexperienced. . . .  No one made any effort to make it possible for me to complete this task on time. For the entire time it looked as though the drafting of the five-year plan was chiefly in my, and not their, interest. . . .  

 . . .  This cost me so much effort  . . .  that although I finished shortly before Christmas and then went on a week’s tour of country, I still cannot return to normal.⁸

Kalecki’s doubts about the reliability of the plan were reflected in the title of his report: “Hypothetical Outline of the Five-Year Plan 1961–1965 for the Cuban Economy.” “What  . . .  is presented below,” he wrote, “rests on very flimsy foundations in every possible respect.” This was principally because “the statistics of the base period are highly inadequate.”⁹

Kalecki had little time for planning in value terms, which he considered unhelpful in identifying bottlenecks in the economy. The alternative was to use the methodology developed in the Soviet Union and the countries of the Communist bloc  — namely, “material balances” showing the sources and uses of key commodities such as energy, steel, and food. However, in the case of Cuba, 

It is  . . .  impossible to produce material balances for important items without conducting basic enquiries. Such material balances are, however, a prerequisite of economic planning. It is of paramount importance to establish them as soon as possible. Otherwise the plans for the immediate future (for 1961 or 1962) will be devoid of any solid foundations, which may have very unpleasant consequences.¹⁰

The report is therefore less notable for the accuracy of its data or predictions about a country that was entering a serious political crisis than for how Kalecki identified priorities in socialist economic development:

In these circumstances, the purpose of the present enquiry is merely to substantiate the feasibility, under certain conditions, of a high rate of increase in output and consumption, which will lead to the elimination of existing unemployment in the five-year period considered and to indicate the changes in the economic structure involved.¹¹

Full employment, in a country that had suffered from mass unemployment ever since the abolition of slavery in 1886, was to be achieved after five years, by 1965. The employment of women was to increase to secure their economic independence. Agricultural incomes were to rise. As a result, household consumption was to increase by 30 percent. But Kalecki pointed out that this was to be achieved “by abolishing unemployment, which politically is by no means equivalent to a straight increase of real wages by 30%.”¹² Investment could be kept low by repairing and making more efficient use of existing capacity, with significant outlays on housing, schools, and roads.

A particular bottleneck to economic expansion lay in agriculture. Guevara was actively campaigning for land reform in the countryside, including taking over large agricultural estates (latifundios) and converting them into state farms (granjas del pueblo). Kalecki considered that not much could be expected of the estates due to the shortage of technical expertise in their management and among their workers. In any case, their main crop was sugarcane, whose largest market was in the United States. But he also opposed the distribution of land to the local peasants, whom he considered even less capable of producing marketable surpluses. For this reason, Kalecki considered it inappropriate for the Cuban government to attempt rapid industrialization. With low levels of consumption widespread throughout the economy, any substantial increase in employment that was not matched with a supply of food would rapidly result in inflation and falling real wages.

All this was at odds with the view prevailing at the time among development economists, and the enthusiastic radicals from ECLA in particular, that the fastest way to improve living standards was to build factories and infrastructure as fast as possible. This was the strategy behind Soviet industrial policy, where it also had a political rationale in the creation of an industrial working class as a guarantor of socialism. Kalecki had seen the adverse effects of such devotion to industrial construction on workers’ living standards, from the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s to the shortages of consumption goods in the 1950s. He was notoriously allergic to planning the economy in the manner of a military campaign, which he regarded as responsible for the worst excesses of Stalinist industrialization. 

Despite this critical outlook, Kalecki also seems to have been oblivious to the discussion among economists in Cuba and how that discussion was being driven by the nation’s deteriorating international position. Kalecki made no mention of the takeover of US businesses by the revolutionaries and Guevara’s nationalization of American banks operating in Cuba. The suppression of US business was raising tensions across the Straits of Florida. In November 1960, the US government imposed an economic blockade on the island, crippling the economy by separating Cuba from the chief market for its sugar and from its main sources of raw materials as well as manufactured goods. A political emergency engulfed the country as the United States broke off diplomatic relations on January 3, 1961. Coincidentally, this was the day when Kalecki’s plan was due to be discussed by the Cuban Planning Board. As news came through of the arming of the Cuban émigrés in Guatemala and Nicaragua, Guevara left Havana to organize local militias to repulse any attack. It is perhaps difficult to imagine any head of a central bank organizing territorial troops. But then again, Guevara was no ordinary central banker, and the predicted invasion at the Bay of Pigs by the Cuban exiles came on April 17. Kalecki’s plan was not formally discussed.

The political tension intensified economic discussions on the island. Visiting Cuba, the distinguished development economist Dudley Seers, who shared Kalecki’s doubts about the priority accorded to industry, described the activities of the Planning Board and the ministries as “euphoric planning.” At the center of the euphoria was Boti, who declared in August 1961, as food was starting to become scarce, that the economy would soon reach a growth rate of 10 percent. “Cuba in 10 years’ time  . . .  shall achieve the highest level of living in Latin America by an ample margin, a standard of living as high as almost any country in Europe.”¹³ But by March 1962, the revolutionary government had introduced rationing.

Kalecki was unforgiving of the personal slight. He felt that he had not been taken seriously, neither in the provision of the data that he needed to draw up his plan nor in the discussion of the priorities that his plan advanced. His priorities were full employment and the maintenance of real wages. Guevara, he found, was distracted by the political emergency, and the authorities responsible for economic development allowed their excitement at the potential of the revolution to overwhelm a sober assessment of its possibilities. 

Michał and Ada left Havana on January 6, 1961. On his return to Warsaw, Kalecki complained to the Cubans, through the Polish embassy in Havana, about the lack of cooperation he received. Back in the Cuban capital in March, Guevara met with the Polish ambassador in Havana, Bolesław Jeleń, a Communist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, to explain the political and personal circumstances behind the apparent absence of collaboration. Apart from his own military duties, Guevara confirmed that Boti, the secretary of the Planning Board, had been in the hospital and some of the board staff had left Cuba for the United States. Guevara assured the ambassador that he had already carefully studied Kalecki’s plan for the Cuban economy and that it would be discussed by the board. Kalecki’s plan was later considered, but in academic studies rather than for economic planning purposes. Cuba was not to undertake any Soviet-style five-year planning using material balances until the middle of the 1970s.¹⁴

Shortly after his meeting with the Polish ambassador, Guevara resigned from his position as head of the National Bank of Cuba. As a central banker, his lasting legacy was the takeover of US banks and that resignation. 

Kalecki’s plan offered an opportunity to stabilize the revolution. But it was the lowest bid in the auction of promises that economic planning had become. The political standoff with the United States had made that auction more vital and intense. And the politicization of economic planning led directly to the “very unpleasant consequences” that Kalecki had predicted. Land reform in the 1960s did not reduce Cuba’s dependence on sugar exports, and its agriculture could not produce the food required by the population. Together with the neglect of housing and infrastructure investment, the dependence on food imports constrained rising living standards. These problems were only compounded by decades of US blockade. The Cuban Revolution became the exemplar of revolution internationally, and it was to play a critical part in the decolonization of Portugal’s African colonies. But as a showcase of socialist economic development, the revolution failed.

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.