Below is columnist Dustin Guastella’s piece from our forthcoming (and final) print issue, “Trains,” which will be released this spring. You can also catch Dino discussing manufacturing, jobs, and populism on the most recent episode of ’s excellent podcast Doomscroll.

Subscribe now

Men today are earning less, learning less, and increasingly dropping out of the job market altogether. And to add insult to injury, this crisis has become cheap and reliable culture war fodder.

Among conservatives the obvious culprit for the backslide is feminism. The right-wing writer Helen Andrews recently claimed that women ruined the workplace by ushering in distinctly feminine ways of handling conflict, ultimately driving men down and out. On social media, “manosphere” influencers like Rollo Tomassi and Andrew Tate expound on the ways that working women have emasculated men and robbed them of their roles as providers. And still other conservatives have seized on DEI initiatives as a source of male disadvantage, prompting Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to announce that it would shift its focus to investigating cases of discrimination against white men. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, liberal feminists blame “toxic masculinity” for men’s failing fortunes in life, love, and work. “It’s people who want to keep men trapped in the 1950s, adhering to rigid gender stereotypes that make them fundamentally unhappy,” argues a Guardian columnist.

Regardless of their political bent, these theories of the roots of the “male malaise” share two essential ingredients. First, they are largely limited to men in professional fields. For instance, while aggressive diversity initiatives are a common feature of the white-collar workplace, they are not nearly as prevalent on the blue-collar jobsite. Second, they all primarily turn on cultural lines. That is, they assume that cultural values and social attitudes are the main drivers of the troubles men are having.

But the problem facing men today is much larger than the cultural maladies identified by the literati, left and right. In part, the problem is the literati. Or at least an economy that privileges them.

The truth is that not all men are falling behind. In our K-shaped economy, highly-credentialed men are still doing exceptionally well. College-educated workers, male or female, not only wildly out-earn those without a degree, but also see this wage premium double over their lifetimes, rising much faster than lifetime wage growth for routine and manual workers. Relatedly, the labor force participation rate for prime-aged men without any college education is nearly 30 points lower than it was in the 1980s. The vast majority of victims of the male malaise, then, are those on the low end of the totem pole. And we don’t need any theory that correlates female diligence with male idleness to explain this. Nor should we look for blame among the myriad other cultural culprits. Rather, the straightforward cause of so much male joblessness and hopelessness is the disappearance of muscle-power jobs.

Work Without Muscle

In 1987, in what was probably his last public address, Bayard Rustin warned of the coming collapse of the blue-collar labor market. He noted that past waves of immigrants had arrived in the United States with “nothing to work with except sheer muscle power” and had managed to achieve economic security precisely because there was an abundance of manual work to be had. Yet, he continued, as the result of ongoing technological shifts in production and distribution, American workers might never again “use muscle power as an upward mobility.” Those who had nothing but brawn to sell, and, in particular, black workers—who were disproportionately employed in said jobs—would be left behind.

This, of course, had nothing to do with some shift in attitudes or cultural values: “Ship owners did not get in a corner and say we hate blacks and therefore we’re going to create a technological proposition which will wipe blacks off the waterfront,” Rustin pointed out. “They simply said technologically it’s cheaper and better to ship goods in containers. And at that point blacks are off the waterfront, with nowhere to go because they were there with their muscle power.” Left unsaid was that almost all of those workers were also men.

Sure enough, since Rustin’s prediction, blue-collar work has steadily vanished. This disappearing act has been driven largely by the collapse of manufacturing, which made up nearly a third of all employment in the late 1970s, but today makes up less than one tenth of all employment. Other blue-collar sectors have shrunk as well: Jobs in rail have imploded from around a half-million employees in the 1980s to just 150,000 people today, even despite yearly increases in tonnage. Jobs in logging, mining, oil and gas extraction have contracted with absolute decreases in the tens of thousands year-over-year since the 1980s (save for the brief fracking boomlet of the mid-2000s). Jobs in construction don’t follow the same secular decline, but suffered a catastrophic collapse after the 2008 housing crisis and took more than a decade to rebound to their pre-crisis levels. (Today, thanks to President Trump’s policies, construction work is again contracting, while wages and standards deteriorate.) Warehousing and transportation remains one of the last great strongholds of manual labor jobs, but thanks to recent breakthroughs in robotics and automation, the giant new plants that dot the outer rings of cities are hiring only a fraction of the workforce that warehouses half their size once did.

None of this was an accident. Policymakers have, for the last forty odd years, declined to combat this precipitous fall and instead encouraged the growth of the “knowledge economy.” Larry Summers, one of President Clinton’s chief economic advisors, summed up the strategy as one that encouraged more people to go to college, got the government out of the way of private investment, and increased the “openness” of global markets through huge free trade agreements. Admiring his work, he bragged: “NAFTA didn’t cost the United States a penny.” Except, of course, what it costs in terms of jobs and lost wages.

The transition to an “eds, meds, and beds” economy has been advantageous for the college-educated, but it’s been disastrous for those without college degrees, and in particular for men. Consider, real wage earnings for college-educated men have grown around 20 percent since the 1980s. For college-educated women over 35 percent. Non-college educated women, meanwhile, have posted anemic wage growth: around 1 percent over the same period. But non-college educated men? They’ve seen their earning power crumble, their wages having decreased by 10 to 15 percent. Here is the real cause of so much male malaise. As millions of men were left stranded in low-wage service jobs, in dead-end former industrial towns, journalist Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men (2012) had noted that younger men especially were becoming “unmoored, and closer than at any other time in history to being obsolete.”

Unfortunately, few on the Left heeded Rustin’s warnings in the 70s and 80s, and today progressives remain remarkably complacent about the consequences of the New Economy. Too many look at the contemporary economic trajectory as natural and, therefore, unchangeable—and at a time when our rapidly decaying infrastructure and the industrial demands of a massive energy transition are crying out for muscle power. They insist that economic development requires going through historical stages whereby workers shift first from agricultural work, then upward into industrial work, and finally upward again into services. Any negative effects of these transitions are simply the price to pay for progress.

But why isn’t it seen as a problem—an emergency really—that good-paying muscle-power jobs are fewer than in the past? Isn’t there anything we can do to ensure that those who have nothing but sweat to sell can get a decent price?

When questions like these are raised, some progressives transform, as if by magic, into the stodgiest conservatives. Utopians who have imaginations wild enough to dream about a world without police, prisons, gender, and borders will insist that it’s impossible to bring a single factory back, or build a new bridge, and that the working class (working-class men, especially) should simply seek work elsewhere. University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant, for instance, penned a New York Times op-ed complaining of the utter futility of trying to reshore industrial jobs, even as he conceded that the disappearance of these jobs had “left behind populations that were poorer, sicker and older.”

To rephrase Federic Jameson’s infamous quote, for some socialists, it seems easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the building of a new auto plant.

Read more

Damage, while fairly new to Substack, has been around in one form or another for nearly a decade. The magazine began in 2018 as a modest attempt by a group of friends to understand the psychic damages wrought by capitalism and since has grown into a regular publication with enough subscribers to keep the lights on and enough detractors to keep things interesting.

We’ve published hundreds of articles to date. This year we’re increasing our output to release at least one article weekly, plus rolling out new regular columns from longtime contributors and . Amber will be writing “Cold Cuts,” a column on films and film criticism of the not-terribly-distant past, while Dino will be writing “We Live in a Society,” a column on class politics and social decay at the end of the neoliberal order.

In honor of this next phase, here’s a collection of some of our greatest hits from the past. If you like what you read, the best way to help keep all of this going is to become a paid subscriber, which gets you access to the full archive and all new paid articles. We receive no outside funding and our editorial group works on a volunteer basis, so a monthly or annual subscription also helps us pay writers, make books, and publish more articles. We’re incredibly grateful for your support.

Subscribe now

Neoliberalism and Its Discontents

Trad Mad by Amber A’Lee Frost

Beyond the grifts and lifestyle porn, there is an objective truth to tradwifery, perverted through the algorithm though it may be: most women want meaningful work, family, and a home.

Build Stuff and Make Things by Dustin Guastella

To fix what deindustrialization broke, manufacturing still matters—don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The Crisis of Coercion by Anton Jäger

The crises of the twenty-first century demand conscious public control. But this power is conspicuously absent, on both right and left.

The Internet Is Made of Demons by Sam Kriss

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is not what you think it is.

Mirroring and Pseudo-Empathy by Catherine Liu

AI chatbots create the fantasy of the always available, understanding Other. Such pseudotherapy inhibits subjective growth and promotes regressive, infantile ways of relating to others.

The Utility of Utilities by Matt Huber and Fred Stafford

Climate activists are no fans of electric utilities. But the market-based alternatives that they often prefer—for rolling out renewable technologies faster than utilities—will not deliver infrastructural change at the scale we need.

Odd Man Out by Benjamin Y. Fong

The Odd Fellows were once the largest fraternal organization in the United States. Much like other such associations, their decline has been rapid and devastating, but remarkably, some still bear great faith in the future of Odd Fellowship.

In Pursuit of the Family by Dustin Guastella

Some of our biggest social crises could be solved by a major investment in one of the smallest social institutions.

What was Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization?

An interview with sociologist and historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull about the history and legacy of psychiatric deinstitutionalization.

Breaking News by Daniel Boguslaw

It’s no secret that journalism is in tatters. In this situation, journalists have a responsibility to ignore the trappings of partisan praise and attack the powers that be.

Size Queen Nation by Christie Offenbacher and Benjamin Fife

The industry for bigger, harder dicks is booming. But what are those pills, pumps, and implants really meant to address?

Subscribe now

Pathologies of the Progressive PMC

Anti-Social Socialism Club by Dustin Guastella

What happens to a Left that dislikes society?

Toward a Socialist Minimalism by Benjamin Y. Fong

It’s possible simply to have no definite opinion about many issues that our media outlets tell us are very pressing. In fact, this might be a principled position to hold.

For a Joyous Juneteenth by Amber A’Lee Frost

The ruling class loves Juneteenth. Or rather, they love something called “Juneteenth” that bears zero resemblance to Juneteenth.

Between Moral and Political Suicide by Dustin Guastella

Immigration is the toughest issue for the Left to solve. And the future depends on it.

The Regression in Psychoanalysis’s “Social Turn” by Ricky Levitt and Christie Offenbacher

The turn from clinical to social issues has led psychoanalysts no closer to solving social problems and further from working through the primary problems of the field itself.

The Left Should Leave Daycare Advocacy to the Libs by C. Kaye Rawlings

The insistence on “affordable daycare” as a viable solution to the problem of childcare reveals a consistent devaluation of gendered labor. It might also negatively impact children themselves.

Who Invited Robert? by Taylor Hines

Robert’s Rules of Order were designed to make large organizations of members with disparate interests and customs functional. No surprise that they have been rejected by many left groups since the 1960s.

Professional Populists in the Culture Wars by Catherine Liu

The cultural studies revolution rejected universalism and embraced popular culture. This has been a disaster for the humanities and social sciences, but enormously successful in obfuscating growing social inequality and inflating the importance of culture.

The Trouble with “Defund” by Dustin Guastella

There is nothing progressive about austerity.

Patrolling Class Theory by Matt Huber

A new crop of academic critics treat working-class differentiation as a theoretical conclusion rather than as a point of departure. This is a profoundly cynical position that obscures the true sources of defeat: working-class atomization and resignation.

The PMC Gets Organized by Dominic King

“Minority unions” could be a fruitful path forward at a nadir of labor’s power, but their lack of focus on traditional workplace demands speaks to a worrying professional-managerial class orientation within these pressure groups.

Everything All of the Time by Aurora Borealis

The Left is committed to fighting for everything to the extent that it is in denial of the fact that it is currently in a position to win nothing.

The Core Priority is Working-Class Power by Anselm McGovern

Fantasies of the “green imagination” are unnecessary, disorienting, and unappealing.

Subscribe now

Arts and Culture

A Great Satan in This Grave by Sam Kriss

Why is Saudi Arabia, possibly the worst and most repressive country in the world, also the only place still keeping the modernist ethos alive?

From Blue Jeans to Blue Banisters by Benjamin Y. Fong

In adulthood, the enjoyment of universality can go beyond a fleeting feeling to a true intimation of eternity, and thus it can only be perceived from the outside as a wild contravention of reality.

Are You My Customer? by Catherine Liu

Service industry hero tales like The Menu, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Bear are not crafted for the people whose work they romanticize, but for their bosses, managers and customers. What message are these stories meant to deliver?

Abolish Tinder by Matte Silver

We don’t need socialized dating apps. We need to eliminate the social conditions that make them useful.

In Praise of the Berenstains by Benjamin Y. Fong

By the standards of most children’s books today, the Berenstains’ series is an absolutely audacious project.

Damage’s Top Ten Movie Moms by the Editors

We love our moms, and we love our movies. It’s Damage’s top ten movie moms. (Plus one because Almodóvar loves his moms, and plus another because RIP Shelley Duvall.)

Subscribe now

When a comedian like Tim Dillon claims “There’s an ancient Sumerian god that Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are communicating with, and they’re going to give birth to an AI demon,” I tend to believe him because the claim is a self-conscious exaggeration, and like any good exaggeration, it indirectly harbors an uncomfortable truth. But more often in AI discourse, the exaggeration is presented directly as the truth, and this is justified by the supposed qualitative social break that AI technology represents.

Take ’s recent piece “An Existential Threat to Organized Labor’s Ability to Help People” (hint: it’s AI!). Here’s the key takeaway:

The progress of the AI industry is in effect shrinking the sphere of economic life in which unions might even hope to be able to help humans. At some point that sphere will become too small to matter to most humans.

Nolan is understandably concerned that those in his own profession—writing—may eventually find themselves replaced by the very AI models that their work helped train. But he also adds:

This is not just about writers. Not even close. It is about architects and lawyers and scientists and teachers and a whole host of other fields that are facing the same dynamic. The basic threat of white collar job automation by AI has been understood for a long time. But I do not think that organized labor itself—all of the labor unions in America today, the ones still able to exercise power on their own little industrial islands—has really begun to reckon with what we are up against.

So what, then, is the solution to this impending obsolescence of labor unions? “I don’t have the answer here,” Nolan admits. “But we had better get our fucking thinking caps on, fast.”

Indeed! But while racing down to my local haberdashery, I did take note of the fact that while Nolan is not simply talking about writers, he is almost exclusively focused on white-collar work. The professions he mentions—writers, architects, scientists, teachers, lawyers, designers, PhDs—all roughly participate in the “knowledge” economy, and while he does add the perfunctory “and a whole host of other fields that are facing the same dynamic,” it’s difficult to know what’s being included beyond this specific set of occupations. But what precisely is included in the AI apocalypse grab bag is actually quite important: if we just go by the professions he lists, his claim that AI is “shrinking the sphere of economic life in which unions might even hope to be able to help humans” to a point where it’s “too small to matter to most humans” implies that white-collar workers represent the vast majority of organizable workers, and that in making them obsolete, AI is also making unions as such obsolete. The Teamsters and the building trades might have something to say about this!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2025 “Professional and related occupations”, which include most of the jobs mentioned by Nolan, accounted for 25.7% of total wage and salary earners in the United States. Let’s imagine a 30% reduction in the number of these jobs in the next decade due to AI, a figure that’s in the range of what many different business analysts are predicting. If that 30% reduction were to take place today, holding constant the 14.7% unionization rate in that occupational category, there would be 1.65 million less union members, bringing union density from 10% to 8.9%.

That is undeniably bad. But the question is if it constitutes an event horizon for organized labor, and the answer is clearly no.

Read more

Bayard Rustin, lead organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Executive Director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, delivered the following speech at Clark College in January 1971. It didn’t make the cut for our new volume, Rustin’s Challenge, but it’s a great speech regardless. For more of Rustin’s writings and insights, pick up a copy of Rustin’s Challenge today.

The college educated are an elite amongst black people, and as an elite they must bear certain responsibilities that go along with their privileges. There is a tendency to want to escape these responsibilities, to retreat into various forms of alienation, and it is this tendency to withdraw from responsibility that we must oppose with the same firmness and idealism with which we have fought for racial justice.

The dominant philosophical notion amongst the elite today is what I call a new tribalism. This consists in turning in on yourself in an alienated form rather than trying to solve an objective problem. A problem which is “out there.” This tendency is world-wide. Thus, the French Canadians don’t want to be a part of Canada. They want to do their French thing, which is of course an impossibility. The Walloons in Belgium do not want to be a part of Belgium. They want to get over in a corner and do their thing. It was most interesting when I was last there. They’re talking about “Walloon food,” just as some of us talk about “soul food.” The Luos in Kenya don’t want to be a part of Kenya. They want to do their Luo thing. The Eritreans who joined into Ethiopia after the war don’t want to be a part of Ethiopia. Anybody who wants to discuss black unity had better face the fact that there are sixteen African countries in which there is nothing but division, fighting going on. And the one between the Eritreans and the Ethiopians is one such conflict.

In other words, the feeling that “I want out” is part of a world-wide trend. Now this trend always proceeds from the same psychological syndrome. It proceeds from the syndrome of hope followed by disappointment followed by turning away from the reality into one’s own bosom.

Alienation and withdrawal always proceed from hope, though this may seem surprising. No desire for social change is possible except where there is hope. But the fruit of hope unfulfilled is disappointment and internalization. Now that is why you have to be responsible, because it is the educated amongst blacks who have hope. There is very little hope in the slums. They cannot have hope because there is no way for them to leave.

But hope can also give rise to revolutionary feelings. Show me a black man who is in despair, who spends all his time talking about the blue-eyed white devil, and I will show you a man who will make absolutely no contribution, because he is in despair and change springs from hope.

Purchase Rustin's Challenge

Now I would like to show you how this works from our own black history. Hope, despair, internalization, black nationalism, and further despair. In World War I, there were 300,000 black American soldiers in France. “After the war is over,” they thought, “we’re going to come back home and we’ll have freedom.” Great hope! But what happened after the war was that they came back to find that they were being driven off the farms in the South. They were terrorized by the Palmer raids and lynched by mobs, and of course there was unemployment. So their hope turned to despair. And because of their despair, they turned their minds from reality. Thus, in the 1920s you got most black people thinking it was revolutionary to follow Marcus Garvey, who had no program whatsoever.

Marcus Garvey’s movement was essentially a movement for the economic uplift of relatively well-off West Indians. It provided absolutely nothing for the average black man. Yet many followed because they had lost hope in everything else.

You have the same thing happening today. When Dr. King spoke in Washington in 1963, everybody had great hope that the problems would soon be solved. And in fact, we got the ‘64 bill and the ‘65 bill. But what happened? Following Dr. King’s speech, unemployment amongst black people continued; the school system was worse than ever before; medical care got more expensive than ever for the great masses of blacks. So there was despair. And it is in this context of hope followed by despair, that you get a series of leaders who are essentially non-leaders. They shout slogans and before you know it they disappear, because the conditions today produce internalization. Despair leads to irresponsible leadership.

And so every year, with the help of the white press, you will get a new leader. This year it will be Stokley Carmichael, who has absolutely no program. Next year it will be Rap Brown, who has no program. The year after that Robert Williams will be flying back from China to start the revolution, but it will not come. The next year it will be Huey Newton, who comes out of jail to start the revolution which will never come. We will have one non-leader after another because they speak to the deep alienation and despair of the people.

Then you get the internalization on the part of many people like ourselves. Instead of seeing that the problem is economic, social and political, we turn in on ourselves out of despair. Instead of seeing that the problem is adequate medical care, we substitute how long we grow our hair, which will solve absolutely no problem whatever. Or we substitute talking about “soul food.” I was up at Yale University where the woman who teaches the soul course spent two hours teaching the youngsters there the proper way in which to cook pigs’ feet. If one thinks it is important whether we call ourselves black, Negro or an Afro-American, we are only ignoring history.

The founder of the first black newspaper in this country spent the whole first page of that newspaper describing why one should call oneself a “colored” American. Fifty years later, W.E.B. DuBois wrote a letter to a young girl who asked him what she should call herself. And he said, “Obviously, the logical thing is to say, Negro.” Malcolm X spent half of his adult political life telling people that they should call themselves Afro-Americans or black men. And that debate is not new. It goes on because black people have their backs against the wall economically. And it will disappear. (For example, the Garvey movement was destroyed not because Garvey stole money. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Who cares? What destroyed it was that the CIO was formed and the trade union movement began to take black people into it by the millions. The minute black people had faith again in America and were no longer alienated, they forgot Garvey.)

Now this is important, because if we’re going to understand this syndrome we must understand what is false and what is not false. I maintain that the so-called alienation of black and white is unreal. Alienation of male and female is a false statement of the proposition. Alienation between young and old is a false statement of the proposition. For example, I maintain that there are greater differences between people under 30, than there are between people over 30 and people under 30. Illustration: George Wallace received his greatest support from people under 30. He got the lowest vote from those between 50 and 60….

The basic alienation in all societies is between poor people and affluent people. That’s where the problem is, and where it will always be. And it won’t be easy to solve. I’m sometimes astounded at how absolutely unmindful so-called radical black people are. Anytime the man comes to you with any proposition, you should never swallow it right off; you know, like decentralization of schools. When did the man ever come to me and offer me power? He wants to give me control over my ghetto. Watch him, he’s up to something.

Or when he comes to you, talking about black capitalism. Now my friends, if white capitalists, manipulating billions of dollars, permit white poverty to exist in Appalachia, how is this half dozen Negroes you got in Atlanta with their little banks and insurance companies, going to end black poverty in the United States? It’s impossible. When Mr. Brimmer tells them that these banks are charitable institutions which will have little or no effect upon the ghetto, they jump on him as if he’s said something naughty, when he’s merely told the truth.

To solve the problem of poverty requires not some small program or even a spiritual revolution, but a profound social revolution. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean because people can get all hung up on spiritual foolishness. Not that I don’t want spirit in it, but take Thomas Jefferson for an example. He wakes up one night and decides slavery is wrong. So he feels guilty. He writes a note saying on his death his slaves shall be free. Now he’s so relieved, he’s no longer the evil man that he once was.

The fact of the matter is, Thomas Jefferson did us a profound disservice, and found himself a cop-out. What he should have done was to have seen that the solution to social evils cannot be found in the soul, but in the Congress of the United States. He should have gone into the House of Representatives and into the Senate and started getting a bill passed to do away with slavery itself. That’s what he should have done, but he didn’t.

Now what is alienation? It is the feeling that my mind and my hands are cut off from the production of goods and services or from any meaningful social function. Here again, if you really want to find out where the real alienation is in America, it’s among the wealthy middle class. They are the ones who say America stinks; that you can’t bring progress into the United States; that everything is wrong; that we’re leaning toward fascism—that old foolishness. That’s what they say. And so they give money to radical blacks to carry on their revolution for them by proxy. Of course, blacks are not going to do that. Not because they are unmindful or ungrateful, but because it cannot be done that way and they know it.

We have to understand three basic dynamisms: (1) black rage; (2) white fear; and (3) affluent guilt.

Now I don’t have to talk about black rage, you know about that. What you do not know about is white fear. Whites are going to be fearful in this society, and the talk about racism is not going to have a single thing to do with it.

White fear means whites are fearful of black people, but not in the terms of the Kerner Commission report. When the man writes up a report and says he’s a racist, be careful. Don’t do what he wants you to do, which is to get the biggest kick on earth out of the fact that the government reports said all whites are racists. So what? The question is what you do about it. If you’re not going to send them all to a psychiatrist, why make a psychological analysis of it? If, however, the man had said the problem is jobs, free medical care, full employment, free education, it would be different. But he didn’t say those things, which are precisely the problem, because he’d have to pay something for solving it. As long as he calls himself a racist, he can divert our attention from any solution to the problem.

I’ll bet you there is not a class on this campus that hasn’t discussed racism. Our fixation on racism, as important as the problem is, has obscured the effects of the technological revolution upon blacks. This is never discussed. It has obscured the tax policy of the United States, which is brutalizing blacks. This is also not discussed because we get such a kick out of calling people racists. It obscures the effect of the policy of the government in regard to land costs. It obscures what is happening to blacks being driven off farms because you can’t say they’re being driven off farms today merely because of racism. More basic factors are at work. Therefore, our fixation on racism harms us because it obscures many of the major problems we face.

At root the problem is not really racial. If I took every black in Chicago, in Detroit, in Philadelphia, in Washington and in Atlanta between the ages of 18 and 25 and turned them white tomorrow, they still will not get jobs. The problem is that Mr. Nixon has decided that unemployment is the answer to inflation. So he has created unemployment. And this produces racial division because whites are fearful that we will get their homes, and we are enraged because we do not have homes. What I am suggesting here is that alienation and divisiveness will not be overcome because we like one another. True reconciliation proceeds from effective economic and social programs.

Let me give you another illustration from American history. The Abolitionists had a spiritual mission cut off from any economic and social program. They said, “We are against slavery. We want the slaves freed.” They helped in this, but when the slaves were freed and said, “We want 40 acres and a mule,” the Abolitionists had gone home. The Abolitionists never created any social and economic program to back up real freedom for black people. What I am saying again here is that we may be able to get out of the problems we are in if we avoid certain traps.

If we are to have true reconciliation in America, if we are to overcome our alienation from one another, it will require a total commitment to solving the underlying problems of the society. This will not be done with words alone. It will not be done with escapist ideologies and token programs. It will be done with political commitment to building a majority movement for change, and with social commitment to using newly gained political power for the cause of social justice.

Subscribe now

Bayard Rustin was lead organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Executive Director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

The following is adapted from opening remarks delivered at the launch for our first book, Rustin’s Challenge, in Philly on February 26, 2026. You can order Rustin’s Challenge here.

It’s easy to flatten Bayard Rustin into a kind of stock character: the 1960s activist, the outsider, the agitator, the dreamy idealist. This is wrong.

Rustin was hard-nosed and iron-willed. He was suspicious of the young New Left—and they were suspicious of him. He didn’t like sentimental liberalism. He didn’t like fads. He was, throughout his life, obsessively concerned with one problem: the problem of social class, or the problem of who gets what, and who does what, in a rich, industrial society.

Even his commitment to civil rights (for which he was immortalized most recently in a 2023 Netflix movie produced by the Obamas) wasn’t an end in itself, but rather, was a means to building what he really wanted: a movement for economic equality and social solidarity.

So one answer to the question “Why Rustin?” is simply that it’s important to set the record straight, to rescue the Rustin that we know from his writings and speeches from the risk of caricature. In an age where a person’s legacy is easily reduced to a twenty second TikTok (“Bayard Rustin: the Gay, Black Civil Rights Icon You’ve Never Heard Of!”), we want to offer people something more to chew on, some of Rustin’s actual ideas, which not only remain relevant today, but also run against the contemporary progressive orthodoxy around questions of race, identity, and political strategy.

Subscribe now

That brings us to the second part of the question: Why now?

Coming of age in the 1930s Rustin’s political sensibilities were shaped by the organizations and philosophy of what we now call the Old Left. That Left was characterized by a singular focus on the plight of the working masses, the failures of the economic system, and the determination to forge a new social compact. He swam among the reformers and radicals of the 1940s and the civil rights change-makers of the 1950s. He was, therefore, exceptionally well-positioned to see both the virtues of the New Deal, which he fought to advance, and the emerging vices of the New Left.

The new progressives of the ‘60s, he observed, were increasingly quick to “substitute self-expression for politics.” They embraced personal autonomy as the highest good and endorsed a permanent revolution in cultural norms. They were obsessed with the psychological problems of racism and sexism but less excited by questions of how an economy should be run, the way a national budget should be organized, what to do about jobs, and who would pay for which programs and why. We still live in the long shadow of that Left; the shadow of 1968. And this shadow is now so long it’s sometimes hard to see the edges of it, or the light beyond it.

Today progressives still focus the lion’s share of their energy on cultural priorities, demands for tolerance, and radical-sounding slogans—to defund this or abolish that—which have no hope of attracting the kind of durable majorities needed to achieve reform.

Rustin witnessed the emergence of these progressive pathologies firsthand. Just as one can identify the exact moment when a bell is struck but can never quite pinpoint when the ringing stops, the counterproductive tendencies that would shape the Left for the next several decades were perfectly clear to him then. They were new and sharp, representing a break from what had come before. And, he feared, this approach to politics was a step backward that would only contribute to the slowing, or even reversal, of American political progress.

His diagnoses were prescient. In the 1970s, Rustin castigated comfortable professional-class liberals who, armed with a sense of moral superiority, attacked working-class whites as “privileged.” He predicted the rise of the urban riots that bubbled up across the United States in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, noting that those at the bottom of society were trapped in a “cycle of frustration.” He feared that demands to overturn everything, injunctions to violence, and slogans meant to scandalize, no matter how emotionally appealing, would succeed in changing nothing. Today—when protests bloom overnight on social media, demand the world, then recede just as quickly as they materialized—his criticisms are just as apt.

Or consider Rustin’s charge that liberals’ fixation on race and racism would lead them down blind alleys. “I’ll bet you there is not a class on this campus that hasn’t discussed racism,” he said in a 1971 speech at Clark College. Yet, as he pointed out, such widespread attention to racism had failed to dent inequality, and worse, it had served to obscure more basic economic problems. “If I took every black in Chicago, in Detroit, in Philadelphia, in Washington and in Atlanta between the ages of 18 and 25 and turned them white tomorrow, they still will not get jobs,” he growled. “We get such a kick out of calling people racists,” Rustin argued, that “Stokely [Carmichael] can come back to the United States and receive $2,500 a lecture for telling white people how they stink.”

Here, not much has changed except the lecture fees: today Robin Di Angelo charges $30,000 to tell white people how they stink.

But Rustin’s criticisms are only half of his genius, and they are only potent because they were complemented by clear-eyed political solutions. While Rustin relentlessly assailed what would become the defining political style of the Left, he also offered a robust political program intended to address the economic fact that has come to define our age: that the American economy was making an entire class of workers functionally redundant.

By the 1970s, Rustin had warned that advances in technology and automation, combined with the growing frenzy for free trade, would lead to mass unemployment and general wage stagnation. No amount of retraining or skill-upgrading could keep pace with the rapid changes in robotics and computerization—or the lure of cheap wages abroad. He feared the growth of a permanent underclass of workers who would never again make a decent living on their ability to sell their muscle power alone.

Since then, of course, we’ve swapped some seven million factory jobs for some seven hundred billionaires. And now, with the rise of AI, the threat of wage stagnation and widespread redundancies has returned; this time for college-educated workers. Rustin was right: no amount of skill upgrading could outrun the machines. The most straightforward solution, therefore, was massive investment in the kind of public works programs that had revitalized the American workforce a generation prior:

In World War Il, we did not ask whether people were too black, or too old, or too young, or too stupid to work. We simply said to them this is a hammer, this is a tool, this is a drill. We built factories and sent these people into the factories. We paid them extraordinarily good wages and in two months they created the miracle of making planes that flew. We can find a peacetime method for doing this—public works for schools, hospitals, psychiatric clinics, new modes of transportation, of cleaning the air, of cleaning the rivers. All of these improvements would benefit not only the poor but also the affluent.

That’s a stirring vision and today it’s even more desperately needed. As we stare down yawning inequality, a jobs crisis, and a crumbling built environment, it should be apparent that we need big new investments fast. Further, it’s obvious that the private sector has no interest in sinking billions of dollars into ensuring that working people have a decent wage, cheap electricity, tidy schools with well-paid teachers, safe neighborhoods with helpful police, and charming parks with public pools. In fact, Silicon Valley and Wall Street are far more interested in dumping billions into the very technologies that will throw countless families into chaos as they intend to slash their costs through wage depression and rolling bouts of layoffs. It’s high time we meet the challenge Rustin put to his contemporaries and reclaim his vision for the future.

Purchase Rustin's Challenge

Dustin Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and a Board Member of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Rustin’s Challenge is officially out! Below is Benjamin Y. Fong’s introduction to the volume. You can order a copy today, or you can pick one up in person at our release events in Philly at 6pm on February 26th, and in NYC at 7pm on March 26th (at Verso, 207 E 32nd St, NY, NY 10016 - second floor). More events in the works.

Subscribe now

The Left today is, amongst other things, a problem.

To paraphrase volume contributor Adolph Reed, Jr., it might be best to think of the contemporary “Left” as a collection of subcultural formations interloping where the Left has traditionally been. From online obsessions and organizational horizontalism to rigid identitarianism and maximalist politics, many of the tendencies of this unwieldy amalgam are anti-majoritarian. Every once in a while, whether by the force of a particular politician’s charisma or the strategic-mindedness of a subset of the Left, those tendencies can be constrained enough for the Left to have some electoral or organizational success. But the inadequacies and pathologies of the self-styled “radicals” of our day inevitably reassert themselves in destructive ways, and it’s worth being honest with ourselves at those moments that we’re dealing with signal, not noise.

The Right, unsurprisingly, has made great hay of the Left’s inadequacies. It’s convinced a great number of Americans that “the Left” stands for nothing more than that small but influential wing of the Democratic Party with odd, alienating cultural positions.

It may be too late to save the label from usages that corrupt it, but for our purposes, we will use “the Left” to identify that political tradition devoted to economic equality, political democracy, working class empowerment, and collective flourishing. It is in the name of that tradition and its pursuit of freedom and equality that we criticize the contemporary Left; that we wish to displace the collection of self-defeating tendencies comprising the “Left” with true organizations of democratic socialism. Without an honest reckoning with these tendencies and their deleterious consequences, the Right will be the only beneficiary of left stupidity, on which it feeds parasitically while offering no genuine solutions to our social crises.

There is no more important thinker in this task than Bayard Rustin. Rustin is best known as an itinerant civil rights leader, close advisor of Martin Luther King, Jr., and lead organizer of the iconic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Rustin was also gay and a devoted pacifist—identities that kept him a marginal political figure, even while all close to him believed him to be a brilliant strategist and top-rate organizer. This is the Rustin that most people know, and the Rustin that was portrayed in the recent Netflix biopic, Rustin. In this version of his life, most everything important that he contributed happened before or on that momentous day of August 28, 1963.

This collection concerns a different Rustin: the post-1963 Rustin who encouraged civil rights and progressive activists to turn “from protest to politics,” and in so doing became a contentious, even reviled, figure on the Left. We concede that Rustin was a bit too hopeful about the political opening that the Lyndon Johnson administration provided, and that he was led by that hopefulness to tolerate a military Keynesianism that he surely would have criticized as a young man. But these mis-steps alone do not explain the intensity of the reaction against Rustin on the Left. To this day it is not uncommon to hear all manner of unfair accusations lodged against him, all to the effect that we can safely see the post-1963 Rustin as tragically compromised.

This move has the benefit of conveniently dismissing one of the most trenchant critics of a regressing liberal establishment and the New Left, both of whom he lambasted in the mid- and late-60s for turning their backs on the social and economic program needed to fulfill the promise of the Civil Rights movement and neglecting a political-economic analysis of the momentous tectonic shifts that were displacing workers. Indeed, we believe that the rejection of the post-1963 Rustin from the Left is less about Rustin himself and more about wanting to ignore the volley of critiques that we try to represent in this volume.

In “The Myth of the Racist Voter,” Rustin chides liberals for blaming the results of the 1972 presidential election on the “backwardness” of voters as a way of covering up their own failures. And in “Liberals and Workers,” he laments the new liberal tendency to devalue workers’ economic position, leading to identifications and problems that we today associate with identity politics. Rustin’s critique of new liberal tendencies in the late 1960s proved to be quite prescient. In a speech to the City Club of Cleveland from 1987, by which time the liberal bad habits Rustin identified in the later 1960s had settled into common sense, Rustin declared that there was only one way off the increasingly absurd road of “special privilege” that liberals had committed themselves to, and that was to re-embrace the politics of universalism. From what we’ve been able to gather, this speech, included in this volume, was Rustin’s last.

But Rustin only ever felt indirect sway over liberals, who he thought hesitant allies at best. His real object of concern from the mid-1960s on was the development of a misguided radicalism. In “Socialism or Moralism,” he laments the rapid emergence of an “obsessive moralism” on the Left, which “substitutes slogans for analysis.” In “The Kids, the Hardhats, and the Democratic Party,” he condemns the “kids” of the New Left for goading reaction on the Right and fracturing the liberal coalition. And in “The Alienated,” he attempts to make sense of where these self-defeating tendencies come from, specifically among the “alienated” youth. While Rustin disagreed fundamentally with the orientation and tactics of the new social movements, he understood where their particular form of “frustration politics” came from, and feared the consequences of not addressing the source of this frustration.

We face a situation in which, if there is not justice, and very soon, there are elements in our minorities who having rejected real progress, and acting on the basis of emotion, may well tear this society apart. As they say, if they cannot share equally in the American house, then they will burn it down.

Committed fully to the idea of a coalition between the key civil rights organizations and organized labor, and vocally opposed to the new “radical” tendencies emergent in the ‘60s, Rustin was unafraid of taking what we might consider today to be heterodox positions. They only appear “heterodox,” however, because the very alienation he warned of has become hegemonic on the Left. In “Growth, Jobs, and Racial Progress,” he criticizes the new tendency amongst environmentalists of his day to be anti-economic growth, a tendency that has only become more pronounced today on the climate Left. And in “Let’s Talk Sense About Crime,” he similarly goes after the idea that law enforcement as such is “anti-black” and urges the Left to take seriously the issue of crime that plagues poor and working-class communities.

For today’s Left, these two articles are a direct challenge to what has settled into common sense, though there are promising signs that some of the kneejerk attitudes on these topics are softening. Rustin also weighed in on many less contentious though still actively debated topics on the Left: in “Annual Guaranteed Income,” he offers what is still a helpful framing for proposals for what we call “universal basic income.” In “Imports Against Black Workers,” he rejects the notion that the erection of trade barriers is an inherently protectionist endeavor, correctly predicting the devastation to working-class communities that globalization would bring. And in “The Role of the Artist in the Freedom Struggle,” he steps back from politics to outline what he believes the task of the black artist is: “to reveal to all the human core of the human experience as seen through the black experience.”

It’s easy to look back at the Johnson administration, with the benefit of hindsight, and see little possibility for the revitalization of the New Deal coalition. But it’s important to remember just what a moment of political sea change the mid-1960s was. With the exit of the Dixiecrats, the Democratic Party was in the midst of a profound transformation wherein its base did substantively shift. That Rustin saw an opening for the civil rights and organized labor coalition to take a driving seat within the party was not that fanciful, yet it was treated that way by a curious number of people on the Left then and still on the Left today. It’s worth asking why that was and is. His critics on the Left are fine pillorying Rustin for his comments on anti-war protest tactics. But where are the similar condemnations of the New Left for sitting out the fight for the Freedom Budget for All Americans, arguably the last off-ramp from an imminent neoliberalism?

The Freedom Budget will receive later mention in these pages, but briefly, it outlined a federal budget to eliminate poverty in the United States within a ten-year period, with concrete proposals for improvements in jobs programs, housing, healthcare, and education. It was essentially a beefed up Bernie Sanders platform proposed through the A. Philip Randolph Institute and largely written by Rustin, and among the New Left it was ignored or hated. This should strike us, as it did Rustin, as worthy of investigation.

Why did the Left turn its back on a transformative economic and social program in favor of maximalist sloganeering and alienating tactics? Why did it begin to adopt a range of ideologically blinkered positions contrary in spirit to both the civil rights and labor movements? As anyone on the Left today knows, these are not simply historical questions. We continue to live in the wake of mid- to late-60s developments, even as majoritarian and universalist politics came roaring back to public consciousness with the Bernie Sanders campaigns.

A true Left for the twenty-first century will overcome the self-imposed limitations of the last fifty years and reground itself again in working-class organization and aspiration. This requires sound strategy and patient organizing work, but also a good hard look in the mirror. Even half a century on, it’s difficult not to catch a clear reflection of ourselves in Rustin’s writing. One can only hope that in another half-century, for leftists two generations from now, his critiques have lost their relevance.

Purchase a copy of Rustin's Challenge

Benjamin Y. Fong keeps a Substack on labor & logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.

Wealth taxes are on the table. The California proposal for a one-time 5% tax on the net wealth of billionaires is roiling the Democratic Party. This proposition would raise about $100 billion to re-fund the Medi-Cal system after the dramatic federal cuts to the program with the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Governor Gavin Newsom is against it, and he may be tanking his 2028 ambitions if he continues to oppose it.

Democrats are well positioned to win the next two national elections if they stay focused on affordability and come up with viable ways to dramatically increase standards of living. But given how tarnished their brand and the depth of public distrust, they cannot succeed unless they develop a campaign around a believable plan for transformational change. To do that, they need to run against a rigged tax system.

Subscribe now

The main argument for a wealth tax, as opposed to income or other taxes, is pragmatic: it is the only source of the kind of revenue the federal government is going to need if it is going to make a substantial difference in improving the lives of most Americans. Personal income and corporate profits combined amount to a bit more than $30 trillion a year. The total net wealth of all Americans is more than six times larger at $200 trillion. The government taxes the two little bitty piles—first as income, then as sales taxes, often as property taxes and fees, and more recently, as tariffs. The big pile is the least taxed. What sense does that make?

The top 1% in the United States all by itself has double the wealth of all income in a given year—about $60 trillion now. If we taxed only the wealth of the top 1% at the 2% rate now proposed in France, it could produce about $1.2 trillion a year in the US. Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute recently did a very sophisticated study of various ways to tax the rich. He came up with a total of $1 trillion in additional revenue in 2026 if nine reforms were enacted. The wealth tax he used produced a little more than half of that.

Some of the various Democratic proposals to alleviate the affordability crisis wouldn’t cost much (labor law reform, living wage legislation, breaking up monopolies) but others would cost a lot (subsidized child care, Medicare for All, a substantial housing initiative). You might get enough to make a decent start with Bivens’ other eight reforms, but some of them require an accounting degree to understand—e.g., “international tax reforms” and the “closure of the gap in NIIT and SECA tax bases.” Others, like restoring the corporate tax rate to 35% and establishing a 10% tax surcharge on incomes over $1 million, are easier to understand and would produce substantial revenue—$354 billion combined, according to Bivens’s estimate. But that’s just enough to cover comprehensive child care subsidies as proposed in the Build Back Better plan of the Biden administration, and nothing else.

Without a wealth tax of some sort, the Democrats will end up making promises to do things they can’t pay for. What is needed is a simple, believable way to fund a large and potentially transformative wish list: namely, a readily understandable, thoroughly defensible wealth tax.

At this moment in history, any wealth tax proposal is bound to be immediately popular, but I have a few pieces of advice when it comes to framing. First, don’t make it about simple “inequality,” which is an abstraction and which even a vigorous wealth tax won’t reduce much at this point. Make it about what the wealth tax will make possible; how it will restore value to the contributions to our society made by caregivers, electricians, teachers, janitors, factory workers, etc. With a wealth tax, a greatly enhanced social wage (not simply a “safety net”) can be provided for almost everybody.

Second, don’t make it about hating rich people because they’re rich, and emphasize that the kind of wealth taxes being proposed will leave the very wealthy still very wealthy—and in fact, continuing to get wealthier. Hateful rhetoric turns off most people and will likely cause the wealthy to fight harder against any wealth tax. It’s also wise to point out some of the mind-boggling calculations involved: for instance, that a 2% wealth tax might cost the wealthiest less than paying income taxes on the passive income they receive from their wealth.

Indeed, there are a lot of political-economic educational opportunities here. For instance, the portion of wealth owned by the top 1% in 1990 was under 23% and is now almost 32%. If wealth were shared as it was 35 years ago, $14 trillion would be available to distribute among the rest of us.

One primary cause of the redistribution of wealth to the top is the loss of productivity sharing since 1980. For at least three decades before 1980, real wages rose at the same rate as productivity growth. If productivity had been shared since 1980, the median wage for all workers today would be in the neighborhood of $100,000 instead of the $66,000 a year it is now.

Another primary cause is the steady stream of tax cuts from Reagan to Trump that primarily benefit the rich. In 1980 the top marginal tax rate on personal income was 70%; now it is 37%. The top corporate tax rate was nearly 50% in 1980, but now only 21%. The wealthiest 1% of Americans have twice the money in wealth as all income earners combined. Income, property, and sales are all taxed, and affect everybody. Wealth is not. Again, how is that fair?

Anger at the extreme level of inequality and the way it is being used to impoverish the rest of us is justified and even necessary, and a skilled politician should be able to mobilize it. But that anger will simply be psychological massaging in governing if Democrats can’t pay for a dramatic expansion in the social wage that can make a decent life affordable for everybody. There are several 10-point programs being offered to Dems (e.g., see here and here), and all of them include enhanced social-wage proposals that can unify the party. Some of the programs also have some sort of tax-the-rich plan, but only as a tag-along “pay for.”

Putting a wealth tax at the top and center would be highly popular, especially when used to provide a variety of programs to reduce costs and raise wages, social and market wages. It could also put the Democratic donor class on the defensive in a primary where active Democrats are likely to support such a program. And in a general election, the Republicans have nothing that could compete with it.

Trump’s horrible first year of crony capitalism has opened the door to a renewal of social democracy. Hopefully, Democrats will not be afraid to run through it.

Subscribe now

Jack Metzgar is a retired adult and labor educator from Roosevelt University in Chicago. A founder and past president of the Working-Class Studies Association, he also was a founder of the Midwest Center for Labor Research and editor of Labor Research Review. He is the author of Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered and, more recently, Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society.

John Ganz, a left-wing analyst and author of the popular newsletter Unpopular Front, recently chided the economic historian Adam Tooze for not yelling “Fascism!” enough. Ganz was “dismayed” at Tooze’s “haughty dismissal of the fascism thesis as beneath serious consideration.”

Here is Ganz:

Tooze, unlike the unlettered epigones of his position, admits the possible “usefulness” of the [fascism] analogy. I will go one further: it’s actually predictive. Fascism doubters said Jan 6 was unlikely, then said it was unimportant, then said this regime was weak and would not press its most authoritarian designs, and could not imagine something like Minnesota. But for all its supposed fatuousness and self-dramatization, the holders of the fascism thesis have not been surprised by any of this: this is, more or less, what they expected.

The problem with Ganz’s basic orientation here, no doubt shared by many left-liberals, is threefold.

Subscribe now

First, there are all kinds of violent norm-smashing, democracy-disregarding regimes that aren’t fascist. And while these are less glamorous compared to fascism (because those analogies don’t cast liberals as heroic Resistance fighters against the Great Evil), they often bear a closer resemblance. For instance, American politics in the first Gilded Age was full of violent demagogues who used the state to further their personal political ends, who punished dissenters, killed protesters, and stirred up hate. America can be a very violent place. For a long time our political life was quite violent too—though, political violence here was, like everything else, more chaotic. It took several murderous confrontations with striking workers for Congress to finally pass a law in 1893 that prohibited the federal government from hiring private mercenaries to shoot and kill them. All of this was bad, but none of it reached the fever pitch (in murderous quantity or ideological quality) that characterizes fascism.

Second, as Tooze asks, “Why can’t we have new bad things?” Why is it so difficult for progressives to consider that we might be in a genuinely new moment? When Bertolt Brecht or Leon Trotsky wrote about fascism, their whole point was that this was a new phenomenon that had to be understood in new terms. They didn’t insist that Fascism was Bismarckianism or Neo-Napoleonism. Yet, today, we try to shoehorn everything that has happened into a mirror of something that has happened before. It’s a kind of inverse-Whiggishness, where we assume that we are bound to repeat the exact same nightmare. Until when, exactly? Are communist tanks meant to liberate us? And who will play the role of the United States?

Historical analogies can be helpful, of course. We’re pretty sure, for example, that the rise of nationalist populism all over the globe is in response to declining economic prospects of working people. We take this pretty straightforwardly from the experience of Europe in the interwar period. That’s helpful. But beyond this the fascism analogy serves more to obscure a political solution than illuminate one.

And that brings us to the third, and most important problem: yelling “fascism” doesn’t help us. Ganz insists that his “fascism thesis” ought to live or die by its predictive capacity—he and his followers are never surprised (and therefore, always smug) because their theory tells them that tomorrow will be worse. Good for them, but it doesn’t mean anything. Because the problem is not whether their thesis is predictive but whether the analogy helps us find a meaningful response to the political advance of the Right. In other words, the problem is primarily political.

At the tail end of her 2024 campaign, Kamala Harris gravely warned that a second Trump term “would be worse. There would be no one to stop his worst instincts. No guard rails.” She was right, and famously, that message failed. Harris lost the election. This not in spite of her prescient warnings, but, at least in part, because of them.

As the Center for Working Class Politics found, her “democratic threat” message was resoundingly unpopular. Especially with working-class voters. That’s no doubt because the #Resistance philosophy behind it dripped with condescension. It reminded everyone that liberals think Trump voters are a bunch of irredeemable fascists.

Ganz might argue that Harris’s failure was in pushing her democracy-mongering without an attendant economic agenda. In this way he could try to rescue the utility of his thesis. This won’t do. The social challenge is much more basic: if you think the person you are trying to win over is an Untouchable, they will smell your hatred from a mile away. Even if you insist that you just want to give them healthcare.

“Fascism” has become a thought-terminating concept for liberals. It’s the ultimate evil, and there is nothing that cannot be justified in the name of stopping it. As Tom Holland has compellingly argued, the specter of fascism now occupies the same role in our political psyche that transcendent Evil once did for more Christian societies. But if the fascists have replaced Satan in contemporary demonology, what does that make Trump voters? Here is our big problem. The key to defeating the Right is to persuade working people who currently disagree with the Left that we have good ways to fix their problems. We won’t do that if we fall back into the trap of insisting that they’re all “deplorables.” They’re not.

Liberals already suffer from a crippling inability to see Trump voters as fellow citizens and to appeal to them on the basis of shared interests. The “fascism thesis” only gives them license to embrace their fear and loathing when what we need is the exact opposite. If we want to defeat Trump, and the odious political forces he represents, we need to be able to think new thoughts, to confront new bad things, and develop new ways to persuade and organize a majority.

Subscribe now

Dustin Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and a Board Member of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die (2012) is a memorable pop album for any number of reasons, but lyrically, it is most fundamentally marked by the ease with which the universal penetrates the particular. It’s not just that she’s lusting after a hunk in a white t-shirt and blue jeans. It’s that her love for him extends to the end of time. It’s not just that she’s dating a loser who plays video games. It’s that everything she does, she does for him. Heaven, jarringly, is delimited by his stunted desires.

There’s plenty of music about temporal attraction, on the one hand, and about eternal love, on the other, but rarely are the two so seamlessly wedded. This quality explains the spiritual youthfulness of the album. In youth, every moment is potentially a window onto the transcendent. Lust flips into love, distraction into meaning, in a kind of category confusion that eventually becomes quite annoying the older you get. The dead weight of accumulated experience must eventually mute this tendency, and if it doesn’t, people become worried about you.

Still, it’s all too easy to simply be deadened as such once the bloom of youth fades. The particular becomes merely the particular; it’s just sex, not love—of course you know better now. This is the essential tragedy of adulthood, and why it’s so easy to either nostalgically look back on one’s youth or else attempt to prolong it well past the point of appropriateness. There’s no recapturing youth… but that’s not to say the universal is lost to time.

Subscribe now

My first kid was born in 2011, and it’s around that time that I dropped out of keeping up with culture. It’s not that I dropped out of culture altogether; it’s more that I became hopelessly untimely, shrugging ignorantly through heated debates of films that had just been released and then randomly bringing them up in conversation years later when I finally saw them, inevitably to a bored audience. This was something I was a bit embarrassed about at first, but which I eventually came to peace with, and even an appreciation for.

At the beginning of 2025, I would not have been able to identify a single Lana Del Rey song, let alone Lana Del Rey the person. In the spring I picked up the Chemtrails Over the Country Club CD at the library (along with Neil Young’s confusing collaboration with Jack White, A Letter Home), just because it was there and I recognized her name. This turned out to be one of those gifts that only the culturally hapless enjoy.

Had I discovered Lana Del Rey when everyone else did, around the release of Born to Die, I think I would remember her now as a pop star with a few pretty good songs. I most certainly would have lost interest with the performative edginess of Ultraviolence (2014) and the banal moodiness of Honeymoon (2015), and that would have been that. But instead I got to hear her at what I later discovered was a key inflection point in her career; a paradigm shift, even.

While there is certainly continuity between Norman Fucking Rockwell (2019), the album that preceded Chemtrails (2021), and Chemtrails itself—“How to Disappear” on the former album sounds almost exactly like a lead-in to “Wild at Heart” on the latter—NFR is pretty clearly an ending. It’s a later pop star’s album—more mature, in one sense, than Born to Die, but still clinging to coy petulance. “Your little Venice bitch,” a repeating self-description on NFR, has all the edgy blitheness that one associates with the early Lana Del Rey, and one only has to imagine the putrid LA guy who would identify as possessing said bitch to grasp the self-description’s essentially vapid quality.

Simone de Beauvoir once faulted women artists for giving in to the temptation of mediocrity: “She lacks the generous-mindedness to forget herself, and this deprives her of the possibility of going beyond herself.” One key way in which this manifests today is in claims to be “insane,” “crazy,” or a “mess” but in practice to be quite staid and boring. It’s a near impossible leap to stop saying you’re crazy and to go forth to manifest craziness, and most never get there. Instead, as with all unearned transcendence in youth, the tendency is simply to settle eventually into the conformity that was there all along.

From the opening track of Chemtrails, “White Dress,” it’s clear that no crowd-pleasing covers of Sublime will be forthcoming. “White Dress” is sung in a hissy falsetto that more or less precludes radio play. Breathiness was a side benefit of Del Rey’s vocals in the early part of her career; from Chemtrails on, it’s a feature, the air escaping her mouth becoming its own instrument.

Del Rey, of course, has a remarkable voice, with an unusual range and clarity, but from the beginning of Chemtrails, she recognizes that this voice, in large part responsible for her popularity, must be stretched and strained, to the point of simply being weird, if she is to communicate rather than just sing. This is the song, and in turn the album, that separates the early Lana Del Rey from the later one. The early Del Rey is breathlessly seeking out new thrills to keep herself turned on, in the parting words of NFR; the later Del Rey wants you to feel every exhalation. We are now in time, and marked by it, in a way that no young person truly is.

Chemtrails’s main attraction, “Let Me Love You Like a Woman,” lacks the cool airs of previous Del Rey hits. And indeed, the universality that so effortlessly emerged from her previous songs is now in question, precarious. Infinity is still there, but only as an idea; it might not make it to the next town.

The late psychoanalytic philosopher Jonathan Lear argued that mourning and melancholia are not just two differential diagnoses, as Freud would have it, but existential categories. Either we mourn, or we are melancholic. Melancholia has an essentially timeless quality. “Men are always this way” or “It’s never going to be any different with us” or “I’m always going to mess it up.” It’s a structure of the world that lends meaning, but in a self-limiting way. The possibility that this might be the moment when always or never fail is foreclosed. Mourning, by contrast, is a recognition of loss. The thing, person, or quality that was there for you, such a natural part of your way of inhabiting the world, is no longer there.

Although we don’t typically think about it this way, youth is something that must eventually be mourned. Indeed, the deadened quality of adulthood that I mentioned earlier could be thought of as a kind of melancholia, a refusal to mourn the youth that we all must eventually pass out of. And the key question in mourning youth is to preserve universality without the manic confusion—to love, as one example, well past the point when love springs forth effortlessly from concrete encounters. This is also to love within, not in spite of, the complexity that adulthood demands.

On the title track of Blue Banisters (2021), Del Rey recalls meeting a man who promised, amongst other things, to help her paint the banisters in her house blue. It’s unclear where this idea comes from, but her charmed reaction suggests it’s his.

Said he’d come back every May
Just to help me if I’d paint
My banisters blue
Blue banisters, ooh

While it’s possible that she was with this man long enough for him to follow up on his promise, it seems more likely from the description that follows that the banisters were never actually painted his proposed color. The love that she nostalgically reflects back upon was “heat lightning,” a shining moment in her life that seemed as bright as it was fleeting. And now, in the present, her friends are over painting her banisters green and gray, which seems to inaugurate this remembrance of what color they could have been. “Blue Banisters” is thus a song about banisters that, in all likelihood, never were, are not, and will never be blue.

This could be an example of someone in mid-life wistfully reflecting on lost love, and there’s certainly some of that. But it’s more essentially a song of mourning rather than melancholia, and on account of one crucial detail: the banisters in question are not banisters that once could have been blue, were actually some other color, and are now being painted green and gray. Despite not being banisters that were, are, or will be painted blue, they are, truly and essentially, blue banisters.

The universality of youth is an easy one, and it’s evident to all; the universality of adulthood must be insisted upon, and likely very few people know it’s there. For that reason, as exciting as youth can be, its meaningfulness is only surface-deep. It goes as easily as it comes. In adulthood, by contrast, provided that we’re not clinging melancholically to youthful exuberance, it lasts. It goes beyond a feeling to a true intimation of infinity, but for that reason it can only be perceived from the outside as a wild contravention of reality.

That is, for instance, what a good marriage consists of: a psychosis shared by two people. From the outside, it’s just two, codependent, decaying bodies, but on the inside, every special moment has congealed to form an eternity to which no one else has access. Of course the banisters are not blue anymore, if they ever were, but you don’t understand: they are blue banisters.

Something similar could also be said of true political commitment: given the terrifying degradation of American society, to insist upon a better world in the womb of the present one strikes most people as insane. But dialectical possibility requires an insistence upon something that is not, which you don’t really remember ever having lived, and which you can only barely make out the future contours of. Of course the banisters are not blue, but you don’t understand: they are blue banisters.

The philosopher Alain Badiou once made a similar point about the connection of love and politics, and he framed it as an extension of mathematical set theory, a move for which he was ridiculed by philosophers and mathematicians alike. In form, it was an argument that love and politics are not the only fora within which universality can be pursued in adulthood.

Blue Banisters is, for the moment, far and away Lana Del Rey’s best album, and it’s relatedly also the most sonically distinct. You get full exhalations in your ear on “Wildflower Wildfire.” You get an unexpected, raw amp simulator cry at the end of “Living Legend.” The insanity that was only stated on previous albums is now instantiated, and there are no misguided attempts to make it pop-worthy.

You also get some recontextualization of previous claims. She already told us she has “guns in the summertime” on the absurd “Florida Kilos” from Ultraviolence. There it’s part and parcel of an empty cool. On Blue Banisters, she’s again got guns in the summertime, but now it’s unclear why, and she’s strangely apologetic for that fact:

I got guns in the summertime and horses too
Guns in the summertime and horses too
I never meant to be bad or unwell
I was just living on the edge
Right between heaven and hell
And I’m tired of it

But most importantly you get a sublimation of that manic flight into eternity that is characteristic of her early albums into a concrete and fragile universality, one that is uniquely enjoyed by adults provided they can adequately mourn their youth. This transformation is far from complete, of course: no one ever really leaves their youth. But for Del Rey, it feels definitive.

On the opening track of Did you know that there’s a tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (2023), the implicit claim of “Blue Banisters” is made explicit: my love for you extends to eternity not because of adolescent confusion but because I will take my share of you with me no matter what happens; because you are not just you, and I am not just me, and what we’ve created together extends beyond both of us. What matters in human life participates in this concrete universality, and it’s an artistic accomplishment of some note to have delimited the path to it in one’s body of work.

Benjamin Y. Fong keeps a Substack on labor & logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.

Subscribe now

In his 1980 Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to “Holocaust,” Moishe Postone challenged the Left to think more clearly about the place of anti-Semitism in the mass psychology of Nazism. Postone saw his project as a political one: in his assessment, the Left of the late seventies and early eighties was failing to come to terms with the centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazi project of an anti-capitalism of the Right. The Left, he cautioned, ought not think it has “the monopoly on anti-capitalism or, conversely, that all forms of anti-capitalism are, at least potentially, progressive.” In order to ground the left project in a commitment to dialectical materialism, Postone set out to show how anti-Semitism was at the heart of Nazi anti-capitalism.

In Postone’s reading of the Nazi imaginary, the Jew represented a concretization of the abstract elements of capitalism. Jews, with their supposed conspiratorial capacities to pull the strings of communists and economic liberals alike, were understood as personifications of the intangible, international domination of capital, and thus as the principal opposition to German autarky. Ridding the world of Jews was, for the Nazis, the heart of an anti-capitalist project that would open the door to ethnic German domination and expansion. Capitalism, in the Nazi reading, would be overcome by German autarky by advancing capitalism’s concrete elements (e.g., the ethnically German workers and the industrial products of the nation’s labor) while simultaneously ridding the world of the personifications of capitalism’s mode of abstracting labor into profit—world Jewry. For the Nazi, the Jew became a fetish, in the Marxist sense of the term—a concrete representation of the abstract elements of the contradictions in capitalism. The fantasied solution to suffering under capitalism was to eliminate that fetish.

Postone’s intent here was to warn the Left a) to look more closely at the great historical horror of the Holocaust and to understand anti-Semitism as the uncompromising motivation behind the Nazi project, and b) to maintain focus on the need for truly dialectical understandings of capitalism as opposed to a “foreshortened anti-capitalism that seeks to immediately negate the abstract and glorify the concrete.” This habit of mind that privileges the concrete over the abstract, Postone believed, represented a dangerous trend in left politics but also in other areas of thought as well, including in psychological theories that might begin to privilege emotions (the concrete manifestations of mental life) over thought (an abstract feature of mental life).

Postone’s invitation to look more closely at Nazism was an important one, and his ideas about the place of the Jew in the psychic lives of the Nazi masses is compellingly argued. However, he seems to have followed his own cautionary advice only too well. While his depictions of the place of anti-Semetism within the Nazi worldview feels accurate, a number of things that Postone holds to be “concrete” truths about the Holocaust have been recently shown by historian Adam Tooze to reflect a kind of impressionistic and associational thinking that misreads important aspects of the Holocaust as an abstracted industrial process.

Subscribe now

Tooze argues in his recent essay, “What fires burned at Auschwitz? On the place of the Holocaust in uneven and combined development,” that Postone and many of his contemporaries on the Left misrepresent the Holocaust as the pinnacle of technological advancement geared towards mass killing. The Holocaust was paired by left thinkers at the end of the twentieth century with Hiroshima as representing the absolute horror that can happen when technological innovation and resources are geared towards killing. Postone claimed that Auschwitz, as a synecdoche for the Holocaust as a whole, was a “factory to destroy value, that is for the destruction of the personification of the abstract,” and that—according to these writers—the centrality of anti-Semitism to Nazi ideology could only be understood in light of the fact that “in the last years of the war when the German Armies were being rolled over by the Red Army, a significant proportion of vehicles was used to transport Jews to the gas chambers rather than for logistical support.” The insanity of the Nazi project, according to this line of thought, could only be understood under the assumption that the elimination of the Jews trumped all other concerns—even to the point of self-destruction on the part of the Third Reich.

Tooze points out two major problems with this understanding of the Holocaust, the first being how few resources the Holocaust actually required in the context of the fully mobilized German war economy. The second is that it tends to put the Holocaust outside of the politico-economic logic of Nazism, risking a historical imagination that draws a caricature of Nazis as simply blindly hating and stupid, with too much access to advanced technology.

The central conflict here is not over Holocaust revisionism or denial. Tooze and Postone both agree about the scale of killing in the Holocaust and the centrality of anti-Semitic thought to Nazi ideology. But in Tooze’s critique, Postone and others simply looked at the surface of things: six million Jews murdered, the use of trains, the presence of incinerators, the timetables and punchcards used to track the numbers to be transported, enslaved, and killed. They held these signifiers next to one another to find a certain kind of poetic meaning without delving into the concrete details of the objects themselves. Timetables and trains are modern, the burning of industrial waste is a factory process, Auschwitz has train tracks and factory-like smokestacks, etc. Postone and his contemporaries then placed these objects next to one another and read them as evidence that the Holocaust was carried out via the technologically-advanced industrial project of the Third Reich.

Tooze, as a historian focused on political economy, takes a deeper dive into what the timetables and camp inventories actually say and comes up with a very different story. The Holocaust was, in the context of the activation of the German war economy, carried out with comparatively few resources, taking little from the rest of the war effort, and representing very little investment in new modes of killing, outside of the use of new chemical agents. The crematoria were technologically not very advanced for their time. The number of train cars needed for the effort of murdering 3 million people in the camps came to less than one-tenth of one percent of the number of train cars needed to move troops and supplies to the front. The three million Jews killed outside of the camps were mostly killed by hand, with guns—a far cry from the hyper-efficient death machine that Postone and others portray.

The failure of Postone and others to look at the actual numbers, to dig into the nitty gritty of the war economy and the Holocaust’s place in it, creates an image of a Holocaust that wasn’t—a high tech horror where technology and modernization are the principal features of the dehumanization of the victims. This obscures the Holocaust that was—a brutal, messy, mostly technologically crude operation made feasible by the immense scale of the German war economy; a project that also served important economic functions within the larger Nazi projects of Lebensraum and mass genocide. Contrary to the caricature of the Nazi motivated by a purely “stupid” anti-Semitism, Tooze shows in his book, The Wages of Destruction, how the infrastructure created in carrying out the murder of Eastern Europe’s Jews was, however crude, intended to be expanded as part of a project of colonial expansion into Poland and Eastern Europe. The plan to populate eastern Europe with a new German peasantry was, in the minds of top Nazi Leadership, the route to securing the German food supply. By the Nazi’s own accounting, this would have involved the deaths through starvation, displacement, and slave labor of an additional forty million Polish and Slavic people.

How did Postone, who saw himself as encouraging the Left to look unflinchingly at actually existing Nazism, get lured into a way of looking at the Holocaust’s surface phenomena that ended up obscuring a more accurate political understanding of Nazism and its projects? Following Tooze, we could say that Postone’s approach represents a fashion for looking at Nazism as if it were a combination of brutality and advanced machinery—an essentially pre-political understanding of the Nazi project. This reading ends up inadvertently buoying the post-war self-presentation of Nazi leaders like Armament Minister Albert Speer, who presented himself as a brilliant technician, not particularly focused on the nonsensical ideological parts of the Nazi project, who was just very good at getting an advanced war machine to run as efficiently as possible. Such an understanding enables the Nazi leaders to present themselves as capable and intelligent, yet “play dumb” where political and ideological motivations are concerned. This, Tooze shows, conceals the fact that Speer and other sophisticated architects and engineers of the war and genocide were constantly finding ways in which plans for the war, genocide, fulfillment of labor demands, and mass starvation schemes could support one another.

One psychological dynamic that may have contributed to this image of the “pre-political Nazi” is the need within the mind for one’s adversary to be stupid. Postone and other left intellectuals of the late-twentieth century were likely as vulnerable as we are today to wanting their political enemies to also be their intellectual inferiors. The quickest route to this self-conciliatory conclusion in the case of the Nazis is to say that anti-Semitism makes no sense. But it is not enough to say that an idea doesn’t make sense simply due to its lack of explanatory power, its moral repugnance, or its reliance on scape-goating. For something to be really stupid, it also can’t make any economic sense; in fact, following it must be the road to economic ruin.

There was thus a psychological seduction to the belief that anti-Semitism and pursuit of the Holocaust harmed the Nazi War effort, as opposed to a recognition that it was carried out at a marginal cost within the context of the war and served economic and political functions within the war effort itself. One’s enemy is much more terrifying if they can consciously and on the cheap use a genocide of six million Jews to lay the groundwork for a genocide of an additional forty million people.

There may be another psychological factor at play here as well, though. Often, when people seek psychological treatment because of harm done to them as a child by another, there is a moment when there is a disturbing realization: that while the harm the patient suffered was deeply wounding, the actions taken actually received very little of their persecutor’s resources. When the thought occurs that someone or something else got most of their persecutor’s actual time and energy, a person is able to move from an anxiously persecuted sense of themselves in the world to contending with a somewhat sadder reality that while they were indeed harmed, it didn’t take much from the other to harm them. When an injury has been materially central to one’s identity formation, it can be hard to let go of the wish for it to have been centrally important to the material well-being or the material downfall of the injurer.

When identity is the reason for a form of oppression, a narcissistic injury is formed that can make any of us vulnerable to reading our oppression as central, even structural, to our enemies’ social organization. The fantasy develops that by engaging in our oppression, our society either dooms itself, or perpetuates itself. Sometimes, however, oppression does not determine the functioning of an economy, but is something like a pilot project carried out with what is scrappy and underdeveloped in an economy characterized by “uneven and combined development.”

Benjamin Fife is a psychologist working and teaching in California. He writes about psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, politics, and history.

Subscribe now

On February 11, 1937—44 days after their occupations of the Fisher Body No. 1 and No. 2 plants began in Flint, Michigan—General Motors workers won a landmark agreement. The one-page document included commitments to union recognition and collective bargaining over wages, seniority, work-life balance, and other working conditions, and a prohibition on discrimination or retaliation against union members. In a supplementary letter sent to Michigan Governor Murphy, GM also agreed, for a six-month period, not to support or bargain with company unions, or any organization of GM workers other than the United Auto Workers.

Before the sit-downs, there were many reasons to believe conditions were not ripe for a breakthrough against the world’s most powerful corporation. In June 1935, only 4,481 GM workers—less than 3% of GM’s hourly workforce—were dues-paying UAW members. In Flint, only 757 out of over 40,000 workers were members, and many GM workers regarded this small minority as “paid agents of General Motors and would have nothing to do with them.”

General Motors routinely flouted the law to undermine union drives—illegally firing and blacklisting union activists, employing spies to surveil union activity, and calling in police to bust up union meetings and strikes. The Congressional La Follette Committee exposed that GM spent millions on its vast anti-union espionage network and was the largest industrial client of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Flint was a paradigmatic company town: city ordinances forbade the distribution of union leaflets and the use of sound equipment for union demonstrations.

When UAW Vice President Wyndham Mortimer first canvassed the clapboard shacks of Flint workers’ neighborhoods in 1936, he lamented that “a cloud of fear hung over the city, and it was next to impossible to find anyone who would even discuss the question of unionism.” As UAW Communications Coordinator Henry Kraus put it, “Suspicion—the result of years of stoolpigeon activity—had reached the stage of a mania among Flint workers. The usual remark was that you couldn’t trust your best friend; you couldn’t even trust your own brother.”

The sit-down strikers nevertheless succeeded spectacularly. By the middle of October 1937, just eight months after the sit-down settlement, 400,000 workers across multiple companies had joined the UAW-CIO. By 1938, US union membership more than doubled to 24%. When GM workers held union representation elections in 1940, a majority of workers in 48 GM plants across the country voted to join UAW. By then, workers across the American economy—in transportation, meatpacking, electrical equipment, and steel—had joined together into new, mass-membership industrial unions.

What enabled a relatively small group of workers to engage in such dramatic action, and more importantly, what made them correct to assume that they had a majority of coworkers on their side? What made Flint workers believe that a successful sit-down was possible—especially when there was real potential for supervisors, police, and anti-union workers to violently suppress their occupation? As the UAW celebrates its ninetieth anniversary this year amidst an all-out assault by the billionaire class, returning to these questions of organization is more important than ever for charting labor’s future.

Subscribe now

Class Confidence

One of the most common answers to these questions is simple: Flint workers—and workers in the 1930s more generally—were highly class conscious. But what is meant by “class consciousness”?

In The Making of the English Working Class, historian E.P. Thompson defines class consciousness as “the consciousness of an identity of interests as between all these diverse groups of working people and as against the interests of other classes.” Similarly, sociologist Erik Olin Wright defines class consciousness as “the understanding by people within a class of their class interests.” While understanding one’s class interests and their relationship to capital is certainly important for collective action, these definitions underspecify the psychological link between understanding and action. After all, most workers today understand that wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a billionaire class and that unions are the most effective way to fight back—but too many remain hesitant to act on these beliefs by forming a union in their workplace.

Others define class consciousness teleologically, reading it backwards from militant collective action. As labor sociologist Rick Fantasia notes, “the extraordinary degree of working-class solidarity expressed in the labor wars of the 1930s has served as a virtual ideal-typical model of class consciousness….” According to these accounts, you know class consciousness when you see it. But narratives of a spontaneous explosion of worker self-activity mystify the origins of class consciousness and collective action.

As any union leader or organizer knows, in addition to class consciousness, workers also need confidence. In order to take the necessary risks to prevail in fierce new organizing and contract fights, workers must not only know their interests but believe they can win them—and constantly exude this confidence in interactions with coworkers. This confidence must also be grounded in reality: in the experience of and lessons from past struggles, in the righteousness of the current fight, and in a strong structure of workplace leaders. Reflecting on the sit-down success, Wyndham Mortimer put it succinctly: “We had confidence and a spirit of sacrifice that eventually enabled us to accomplish what many had thought was impossible.”

Class confidence was an essential psychological precondition of the sit-downs, converting understanding of class interests into militant collective action. Many accounts of class consciousness certainly include some element of what I’m calling class confidence. But by pulling out and specifying this concept, we can better understand the mechanisms that lead from understanding to action and back again.

So how did class confidence come about in the case of the Flint sit-downs? Certainly one factor was the prior accumulation of victories—especially at smaller employers—which gave workers in isolated communities a sense of collective momentum. But previous eras had seen individual victories fail to inspire worker action at scale. What was key in Flint in the winter of 1936-37 to translating this momentum in the broader manufacturing industry into aggressive class confidence in workers’ immediate workplace was something else: a structure of trusted workplace leaders strong enough that dramatic disruption could be met with solidarity rather than fear and repression.

Momentum Toward Flint

In May 1936, French workers began what many claim were the first mass sit-down strikes in modern history. By June, one-fourth of all French workers were on strike, and nearly three-fourths of strikes were sit-downs. At a meeting with French automakers in September 1936, where they warned him about the French wave spreading across the Atlantic, General Motors Executive Vice President William Knudsen dismissed the threat: “No, that could not happen in the United States…. The American people would not stand for them.” Just weeks later, the sit-downs arrived in the US auto industry, starting at smaller suppliers in the early fall before reaching General Motors in November. Workers sat-in at parts maker Bendix in South Bend, Midland Steel and Kelsey-Hayes Wheel in Detroit, and finally, at General Motors plants in Atlanta, Kansas City, and Cleveland.

Each of these victories contributed to a sense of momentum and inevitability. They revived a belief in collective action after years of defeat—most notably Fisher Body No. 1’s previous failed strikes in 1930 and 1934, during which AFL leaders bungled negotiations with the company and GM fired and blacklisted many left-wing union leaders. They also gave practical advice to would-be sit-downers. According to La Follette Committee Investigator Charlie Kramer, Flint worker-activists, especially those with ties to the CPUSA, had developed “a whole organizational plan as to what you do inside the plant and what you do outside the plant. This was an organizational plan which had been derived from the Polish experience, the French experience, and the Akron experience, and Midland Steel.”

Roosevelt’s election to a second term supercharged this growing wave. In the 1936 presidential elections, CIO leader John L. Lewis declared that electing pro-labor federal and state officials was essential for organizing the mass-production industries. Lewis had good reason for this belief: anti-labor politicians and judges had allied with corporate interests to undermine Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda and stifle unionization efforts under the National Recovery Act. Lewis and other CIO leaders created Labor’s Non-Partisan League, committing greater union resources and boots on the ground to electing Roosevelt than in any previous election. When Roosevelt won decisively, “union sentiment flamed up throughout the whole plant like a fire before a wind,” according to one account. A UAW leaflet following the election declared, “You voted New Deal at the polls, and defeated the Auto Barons—now get a New Deal in the shop.”

Equally important was the election of Michigan Governor Frank Murphy, one of many New Deal governors who took office in 1937. Previous governors had used state police to break up strikes. Murphy pledged to support workers’ right to organize. So important was Murphy to the union’s strike strategy that UAW leaders had originally planned for the Flint sit-down to start in January 1937, after Murphy assumed office. Toward the end of the strike, Murphy delayed deploying state authorities to enforce an injunction, giving union leaders critical space to reach an agreement with GM.

Structure of Leaders as Engine of Confidence

Too many accounts of the 1930s upsurge begin and end with momentum and ripe political conditions, leading to a false sense of inevitability. What’s left unexplained is how precisely the sit-down momentum took hold in Flint. This remarkable upsurge of militancy could have ended, as it did at many previous moments in labor history, in heartbreak, with the sit-downs isolated and defeated, never arriving in Flint. Most GM factories were not directly involved in the sit-downs, so clearly factors beyond momentum were involved in making the Flint sit-downs successful.

Here I will show how a carefully built structure of workplace leaders fostered collective experiences that gave workers the confidence to sit down or leave their stations and support the strike from the outside. This structure was also crucial for the seizure of Plant 4 and other moments that brought the strike to ultimate victory, but the focus of this analysis will be on what enabled the Flint sit-downs to happen successfully in the first place.

In June 1936, Wyndham Mortimer arrived in Flint to help prepare for a decisive confrontation with General Motors. A long-time auto worker who rose to prominence after leading an organizing drive at the White Motor Company, Mortimer understood that winning union recognition at GM required organizing “on a national scale for a national strike to win a national agreement.” Flint, a crucial node in GM’s supply chain, was essential to this objective.

Mortimer built on previous years of organizing by the Socialist Party’s League for Industrial Democracy (LID) and other left-wing groups, working with a small core of seasoned shop-floor leaders to rebuild a network of workplace leaders in Flint. He bought a copy of the Flint directory to look up the addresses of five thousand workers who had formerly been part of Flint’s defunct AFL auto unions, and sent those workers a series of letters. Each letter, according to Mortimer, “dealt with a specific issue” and “hammered home the fact that the answer to the problem was the union.” Here’s one letter that took the issue of fear head-on:

It is fear of losing the job that keeps you from signing an application for membership in the union. I do not blame anyone for protecting his job…. But the hard cold fact is that you will lose that job sooner or later. If you do not lose it as a result of joining the union, you will lose it because a new machine will replace you… or because gray hairs appear around your brow…. You will lose the job for any number of reasons beyond your control, because the job does not belong to you. It belongs to General Motors, and your chances of keeping that job will be infinitely better when you join with your fellows in a union, and fight for job security….

Any worker who responded positively to these letters was asked to organize a house meeting with trusted co-workers, outside the view of GM management and their spies, to discuss unionization. Attendees were asked to organize other house meetings and invite more coworkers. Many attendees had been active in previous failed strikes and were persuaded through this process that the UAW’s industrial approach marked a break from the AFL’s timid, craft union approach. Mortimer called this systematic approach to recruiting leaders, “breaking the hard ground” and “leavening the dough.”

Over time, workers built a fairly representative structure of pro-union leaders across most areas in the plant. Here’s how Bud Simons describes the process and the result of their efforts:

Yeah, most of ‘em [Fisher Body No. 1 workers] were scared. So we had… volunteer organizers that we’d set up. And I’d take them over into the [union] hall and Mort [Mortimer] would sign his name on their organizing card, see. Volunteer organizers… Well, then they knew someone, had a brother or somebody in the tool shop or the press room or any place else and they’d get a hold of him, see. And Mort, he’d come out about once a week. And here’s all the guys that are volunteer organizers. Well, they brought their friends and got them signed as volunteer organizers. We had the goddamn place full of them. Hell, we must have had two hundred and fifty volunteer organizers in there (emphasis added).

These volunteer organizers informed their coworkers about successful strikes at other plants, answered workers’ questions about unionization, built unity, countered anti-union intimidation and misinformation, and recruited more organizers.

Months later, Bob Travis replaced Mortimer as the International Union’s primary organizer in Flint but continued the organizing program Mortimer set in motion. In Travis’s words, “I always indicated that someday maybe it would be necessary for us to have a strike. But we wanted to make sure that when we did that, we would be able to protect our strike and win the strike.” Travis reiterated to worker leaders the importance of enlarging their leadership structure “so as to get representation on it from all departments.”

Intermediate victories accelerated leadership recruitment across departments. One of the most important of these occurred in November when “body-in-white” department workers at Fisher Body No. 1 held a mini sit-down over the firing of workers protesting speed-ups—the auto industry’s most deeply and widely felt issue—on their line. Within hours, the fired workers were back at work. Strike Committee Chair Bud Simons summarized the lesson from the victory: “Fellows, you’ve seen what you can get by sticking together. All I want you to do is remember that.” In the following weeks, “organization shot out from body-in-white into [the] paint, trim, assembly, and press-and-metal [departments].”

To be sure, Flint’s workplace leadership structure still had major gaps that could have ultimately imperiled the strike. GM employed 47,000 workers across more than 10 factories in Flint. The company’s massive Buick, AC Spark Plug, and Chevrolet plants had limited pro-union leadership coverage. When the strike began suddenly on December 30th, these gaps enabled the company to stoke an anti-union backlash when the sit-downs idled or slowed production at Flint’s non-struck plants. GM channeled anti-union discontent into a front group called the “Flint Alliance for the Security of Our Jobs, Our Homes, and Our Community.” This organization engaged in vigilante violence against pro-union workers and demanded Governor Murphy enforce an injunction to eject the sit-downers.

The late labor organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey popularized a “structure-based organizing” approach that Flint in many ways exemplifies. But contrary to a central tenet of McAlevey’s approach, Flint Fisher Body workers did not engage in a rigorous, majority-participation structure test before sitting down. There were several reasons for this, including concerns that exposing pro-union workers before the sit-down would result in mass firings and blacklisting and concerns that their factories would prematurely shut down if they delayed a sit-down, due to parts shortages stemming from other sit-downs.

This didn’t mean Flint unionists expected “momentum” from broader industry victories to spontaneously spur masses to action. They knew that without workplace leaders across every department instilling confidence and maintaining unity, the company could easily divide, intimidate, and confuse their coworkers into inaction. That’s why they focused on building a dense, representative leadership structure, while recognizing their limited ability to preemptively “test” this structure in confrontational action. But through leader-driven, confidence-building activities—house meetings, delegations to supervisors over workplace issues, and mass meetings in the lead-up to December 30th—they generated enough solidarity to achieve majority support at the decisive moment, even while only a minority of workers sat down. As Victor Reuther put it, “the company’s return-to-work movement was not able to persuade the majority outside the plant to act against the minority inside.”

I would argue that this approach is key to building class confidence: not necessarily a “verifiable” majority or supermajority in preparation for collective action, but a determined, representative minority that has both a majoritarian focus and enough of an understanding of and an embeddedness within their workplaces to make mass collective action happen. In many ways, the current regime of labor law has veiled this key dynamic that was at the heart of the biggest labor upsurge in American history. As that regime crumbles under Republican aggression and Democratic fecklessness, it’s an opportune time to revisit the basics of building class confidence.

Rebuilding Class Confidence Today

Just as in the early 30s, today a high degree of public support for unions exists alongside a historically low unionization rate and extreme concentrations of wealth and political power. To break out of this interregnum, we must train our focus on tactics and strategies that rebuild class confidence. What can we learn from the sit-downs about how to do this?

A key lesson I’ve tried to draw out here concerns the twin dangers today of overly rigid structure testing and minority vanguardism. If Flint sit-downers had insisted on completing a majority structure test before their strike, they likely would have missed their moment. This lesson contravenes more rigid applications of structure-based organizing, according to which no leadership structure can be considered ready for militant majority action unless it has proven its capacity to engage a majority in lower-stakes action. The opposite is also true: unions have lost elections and strikes by falsely concluding that a majority of workers signing cards or a petition necessarily means you have a strong, confident network of pro-union workers who can lead their coworkers through the boss campaign to victory.

William Z. Foster summarizes the other danger of minority vanguardism in Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry, cautioning that organizing campaigns must “prevent the movement from being wrecked by company-inspired local strikes and other disruptive tendencies. The necessary discipline cannot be attained by issuing drastic orders, but must be based upon wide education work among the rank and file and the development of confidence among them.” Flint organizers certainly agreed with these ideas and sought to avoid premature strikes called by a righteous but isolated few. Still, the lack of organization in Flint’s larger factories nearly proved fatal to the sit-down wave.

How to navigate between these twin dangers? In order to organize today’s massive, high-turnover workplaces—auto factories, logistics hubs, and more—it’s necessary to recruit and train a broad, representative layer of pro-union workers across work areas, departments, and shifts who are willing to help organize their coworkers. Not everyone in this layer will be so-called “organic leaders” in the strict sense of the term—their degree of influence will vary. But without this broad layer taking various actions to build their coworkers’ confidence, the most influential workers will likely sit out the fight. The sit-down experience shows the virtue of recruiting any and all trusted, pro-union workers who are willing to do at least some amount of organizing, tracking the growth of this structure over time, and drawing on it to mobilize workers to mass meetings and other collective experiences that further build class confidence.

The sit-downs are also evidence that big wins tend to happen in the right political conditions and with existing organizing momentum. Today, we must look for opportunities to win elections, strikes, and first contracts at smaller, less-resourced employers to help set off industry-based momentum. But for this momentum to breach a Tesla or an Amazon, we must do the spadework of recruiting and training leaders, across every area and shift, at the largest, most strategically important worksites. Only then will workers have the confidence to believe in Eugene Debs’ famous declaration that the labor movement’s triumph “is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.”

Garrett Shishido Strain is a union organizer based in Richmond, California.

Subscribe now

We are currently facing a loss of faith across the political spectrum in the ability of government to do anything effective. This has long been dogma on the Right, perhaps most famously embodied in Ronald Reagan’s mantra: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” This dogma manifested, for example, as Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which promised to modernize the federal government by importing wiz-kid technocrats wielding AI, like a young programmer known by the online moniker “Big Balls.” DOGE simply became a conservative wrecking ball for a new generation, decimating government in DC and nationwide.

But a similar paralysis has overcome the Left through its decades-long fight against corporate and government exploitation. Two recent books, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman, have addressed this deadlock in public policy and are trying to restore confidence in government’s administrative capacity and bureaucratic efficiency. These qualities don’t attract a mass constituency and win elections on their own, but their absence hampers the ability for government to engage in bold efforts that do.

In that sense, bureaucratic efficiency isn’t quite a political concern itself. You don’t need a political affiliation or ideology to be a bureaucrat. In fact, it’s generally regarded as good if you don’t have either. But if your work becomes political, and simultaneously your efficiency is subject to doubt, then basic government is suspect and day-to-day administration becomes problematic, in which case you can forget about being trusted to undertake a large project that will require large amounts of money and exert sweeping powers.

Read more

Fifty years ago autism was estimated to affect around 1 in 10,000 people. Today, among eight-year-olds in California, 1 in 22 are diagnosed as having the condition. Rates of diagnosis for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have similarly shown marked recent increases. In the UK, adults seeking an ADHD diagnosis increased around 400 percent from 2020 to 2023.

Alongside the steep increase in rates of diagnosis of many long-established conditions such as autism and ADHD, recent decades have also seen new diagnoses proliferate. The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952, listed 106 diagnoses across 132 pages. The latest update, published in 2013, instead contains nearly 300 diagnoses over 947 pages. For the American Psychiatric Association, the second half of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first clearly required more categories to classify the damage.

What explains this simultaneous increase in diagnosis and diagnoses? Susan O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis suggests that there are three possible explanations:

1) We have become better at detecting illness and/or reducing its stigma, such that we are moving closer to an accurate reporting of an underlying rate that may not have changed;
2) We are getting sicker, or have removed enough of the things that used to make us sick such that the ones that are left will be more widespread across the population; or
3) We are coming to understand more of our lives and our struggles in terms of illness.

While the truth likely includes elements of all three, particularly when generalizing across a wide range of mental and physical ailments, it is the third explanation that attracts our attention. This is because, unlike the perhaps more widely-discussed second explanation, it offers the tantalizing prospect that a change in understanding (“we are not as sick as we think”) could lead to an actual, perhaps instantaneous improvement in mental health (“I used to have a mental illness, but I realized it was just capitalism”).

It is certainly the case that our understandings of “illness” and “health” are both socially constructed. As Joseph Dumit argues in Drugs for Life, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s and becoming dominant by the 1990s, the very notion of “illness” became more innate and immutable: instead of seeing health issues as discrete challenges to be solved, we increasingly came to see ourselves as inherently ill, with health never fully achieved, yet always actively pursued. That is, as notions of health moved steadily towards a state of mythic optimality, the threshold for pathological illness became progressively lower.

It’s tempting to blame the medical and mental health professions on the one hand and Big Pharma on the other for this slide towards a situation where we are more likely to understand ourselves in ways that need their interventions. But it is clear that a great many patients are not passively submitting to treatment from doctors; rather, they are actively demanding it. Patients (now called clients) are much more likely to come to treatment already convinced of their inherent (and often immutable) illness, insistent on their therapists’ agreement. Therapists are thereby positioned not as the dominant power or authority, but instead as a secondary factor in the drive towards diagnosis. Therapists’ job in this frame is to affirm patients’ subjective experience: authority is ultimately located in individuals’ experience within the therapeutic paradigm, not therapeutic professionals, in a strange amalgam of the subjective and putatively scientific.

Perhaps, then, pressure towards increasing diagnosis paradoxically stems not from an excess of medicalized authority—the “technological sanitationist despotism” that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben saw in the management of Covid—but a lack of it, a breakdown of authority. It seems plausible that the negotiated and accelerated process of psychological diagnosis is symptomatic of a broader problem with the very notion of authority, already in an advanced state and much discussed. Devolution and devaluation of various forms of external authority heighten emphasis on subjective experience and identity—including mental health diagnoses. In this reading, greater understanding of distress in personal, psychological terms is a response to diminished understanding of distress in sociopolitical terms.

Subscribe now

Importantly, any account of medical authority that does not link back to wider questions of political authority risks missing the context most important to understanding how diagnosis and our fundamental idea of mental health might be changing. After all, both mental health and politics are social processes based on making and coming to understand what subjects are. In its most directly political sense, authority is a material relation between national populations and their states, which has been weakened by the hollowing out of the representative mechanisms (centrally, political parties) that once secured that relation. For Antonio Gramsci, a crisis of authority emerges when a crisis of representation precipitates the detachment of the masses from the ideologies that have traditionally structured and secured mass consent. In his view, this crisis of authority results in a direct and visible crisis of ruling-class hegemony.

Today we are in a situation of a crisis of authority without an alternative to a crumbling hegemony. This hegemony is brittle, appearing robust not because of its internal coherence or deep reach into the hearts and minds of the populace but because of the absence of an alternative political vision to a discredited and visibly collapsing liberalism. Consequently, today it is the dynamics of decay rather than renewal that characterize our politics. It is not surprising that subjects turn away from this situation towards their inner damage, looking for answers in an increasingly therapeutic mode of self-understanding and action. Diagnosis provides an explanation for suffering; it makes meaning of the very real subjective damage individuals experience. Social decay can be internalized through the prism of psychopathology because a zombified liberalism is unable to explain its own exhaustion. More widely, we lack the political resources to grasp decay: ideologies that were once live options no longer command mass support, and so it is hardly surprising that as life is increasingly understood as a private affair, we internalize the dialectic of decay to an ever greater extent.

Paradigms over Practitioners

The breakdown of traditional institutions and the attendant breakdown in the subjective experience of authority has been much discussed, perhaps most famously and trenchantly by Christopher Lasch. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Lasch explains that healthy individuals develop in the tension between their own particularity and the collective society of which they are a part. Individuals need a robust authority to internalize, rebel against, and so on, to progress from the narcissistic world of childhood to the adult world of collectivity and responsibility. Moral thinking and behavior (the superego in psychoanalytic terms) in childhood involves a relationship between the child’s instinctual needs and desires and the social repression thereof. At first, morality is fairly harsh and rigid, counterpoised by the primary narcissism (feelings of essential goodness, specialness, importance) that buoys the young child against overwhelming vulnerability. In the context of rational, compassionate, legitimate authority, ethical thinking and conduct develops into an adult superego that is firm but flexible, rooted in a non-compulsive or fear-based internalization of social mores. Absent adequate authority, however, pathological superego formations develop.

Lasch, writing in the aftermath of the sixties, and the widespread parental and cultural permissiveness generated then, theorized that the ostensible removal of external prohibitions against instinctual urges and the devolution of social institutions and their perceived authority, led to a perpetuation of infantile morality—at once readily absolving of blame and guilt, and moralizing and punitive. Without firm adult authority to develop in dialogue with, the ego or self remains weak and narcissistic, driven in its moral thinking by early childhood repression of libidinal drives. Lasch was preoccupied with the question of what it means for the subject when these structures of authority fundamentally change. Although traditional sources of authority still held some sway, they were already starting to be partially replaced by the authority vested in science and expertise, and in various forms of self-help, including psychotherapy, which contained an important injunction: to be yourself, to follow your bliss, compounding the narcissistic tendencies of arrested development.

Today, by contrast, the authority vested in science has significantly eroded, proving insufficient even within educated liberal spheres, and roundly rejected elsewhere. Therapeutic authority in the person of the therapist has also weakened, as expertise of all forms is under broad attack, dissolved into something that is accessible not through therapeutic skill or training but by each of us in our own lived experience of psychological damage. Just as students, not teachers, are now seen as the authorities on education, so too are patients seen as the ultimate authority on their own mental health. Thus the therapeutic paradigm still wields considerable power, but mental health practitioners less so. If in Lasch’s era the injunction to achieve personal happiness came with some sort of guidance from authority outside themselves, individuals today are thrown back on themselves as the source of their own authority in a more radical way. Amidst broad mistrust and even anger towards social institutions of all kinds, the self is the only place left to turn. Individuals today thus feel acutely responsible for their own happiness (or unhappiness); they have no authority to develop through, to rebel against, or blame.

Diagnosing the Failed Self

Myriad forces have contributed to the all-pervasive “therapy culture” we find ourselves in today. In addition to the historical ascendance of cultural narcissism and self-help described by Lasch, emphasis on mental health dovetails with the neoliberal narrative of unlimited potential personal gain through adequate effort. It is a form of the valorization of individual control and responsibility that runs deep in the American psyche, and carries strategic advantages. Pledges to take charge of one’s mental health, take responsibility for oneself, to “do the work,” and so on, are often rewarded. Even for the working class, fluency in mental health speak is pragmatic. Moreover, the near impossibility of traditional material gains (a college degree, a home) for broad swaths of the population turns young people inwards as an alternative source of meaning and accomplishment.

As Jennifer Silva details in Coming Up Short, growing up today in America is to be confronted with an elaborate system of risk that working-class young people manage by increasingly resorting to therapeutic language and self-conceptions. This pivot to mental health and self-development can indeed bring both relief and fulfilment. However, being fully responsible for your own happiness, with no one to turn to besides yourself, is a highly pressurized and ultimately impossible position. If the self is seen as the final source of happiness and success, then the self is also the greatest obstacle. Managing one’s mood becomes a personal and often an economic imperative. Mental illness or medicalization actually softens this position. Medical diagnosis responds to a pervasive absence of legitimate authority with an assumption of personal responsibility at precisely the same time that it responds to the colossal socioeconomic damage wrought by pervasive abdication of legitimate authority with an insistence on personal weakness. In a world where “making it” in traditional material terms is far too difficult for far too many people, without anyone external to blame, the self becomes the source of failure, paradoxically both blamed and absolved of blame through the language of illness.

Ultimately, any focus on self-development without the material conditions for its realization will produce self-lacerating subjects ready to demand diagnostic relief from the reality of “coming up short.” Accordingly, the explanation of—and only possible solution to—our age of diagnosis is not to be found in the individual. The suffering that contemporary subjects experience is very real, but explained through the language of psychopathology because the external authority needed to constructively externalize it is absent. It is a serious pre-political challenge to any sort of emancipatory politics if we increasingly find subjects who are ill and self-pathologizing, buttressed by a culture insistent that people pull themselves by their own bootstraps. To a Left still marked by a deep streak of sixty-eighter scepticism of authority, defending the notion of authority might seem like a conservative, even reactionary position. But recognition of the need for authority in a society that cannot create anything authoritative is instead a step towards a mature acceptance of both our limits and our agency. The task of any political project that wants to arrest the implosion of our current political system—let alone replace it with something more human—is to constitute a collective authority that allows people to develop their agency while coming to an awareness of their limitations.

George Hoare is a writer and co-host of Bungacast living in London. His most recent book is An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci: His Life, Thought and Legacy (with Nathan Sperber).

Amber Trotter is a clinical psychologist in San Francisco.

Subscribe now

A few months back we announced the forthcoming publication of Rustin’s Challenge, a new collection of writing from civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin with commentaries from contemporary thinkers on the Left. This is the first book put out by Damage magazine. We’re happy to announce that we’re in the proofs stage and are shooting for an official release date in January or February of 2026.

Pre-Order Rustin’s Challenge Here!

We could still really use those pre-orders to get a sense of what size print run we should pursue, so please spread the word widely! In the meantime, here’s the Table of Contents for the book:

In gratitude,

Damage editors

Before I moved to Melbourne, I had heard of safe injection sites, places where addicts can consume drugs without worrying about unsanitary needles or calls to the police. While I knew safe injection sites might mitigate some of the terrible harms of addiction, I was unprepared for what I encountered. Workers at North Richmond Community Health, a few blocks from where I lived, ask visitors to state their drug of choice, then provide clean needles and lead them to a private room to inject, sometimes even helping them find veins. Dazed people stumble out. They roam the streets, safe from overdosing, as they try to steer clear of schoolchildren who are sometimes nearby. It’s only a momentary release. Soon enough, they spend what little money they have on the next hit and repeat the cycle. Many Melbournians, like those from other big cities facing high rates of overdose, think there’s not much else that can be done. Addicts have chosen this life, and it is much better to offer them safe conditions to inject than to let them die in the streets.

There’s a part of the Left that strongly agrees with this judgment and goes further: worrying about people’s personal choices amounts to getting mixed up in a moral debate, and, as leftists, we should focus on politics. In this view, politics is about figuring out what’s the best way of arranging our collective, public lives so that we can all discover and pursue the moral values that make us who we truly are. Since politics concerns the aspects of our lives that affect the lives of others, it is the realm of contestation and disagreement. It is for this reason that we argue against our neighbor if she opposes a wealth tax or advises bosses on how to best union bust. Morality, on the other hand, is understood to be a different matter altogether. We have no business criticizing our neighbor’s Catholicism or trying to get her not to live a life of drug addiction. Discussing morality is at best a fun intellectual exercise, and irrelevant for those of us that want to change the world.

But something has gone awfully wrong with a Left that remains neutral on issues such as whether one should be addicted to drugs. Leftists often fail to realize that their politics depend on their views about morality, and by failing to recognize this truth, they have implicitly adopted a moral picture that is both incoherent and incompatible with leftist ideals.

Subscribe now

“Private” Morality

The moral picture at issue here is something like the following: morality pertains to our private lives, not our public, political lives. We should figure out for ourselves, by a process of self-discovery, which values suit us from a sea of different alternatives. These values will guide us, tell us which lifestyles we should adopt, or how we should raise our children. They act as a north star that helps us figure out our life paths. Others don’t have a right to tell me which life path is good for me.

In the case of addiction, some will argue that no one should be forced to turn to substance abuse as a salve for the hardships of poverty, and furthermore, we shouldn’t stigmatize or punish those who do suffer from addiction. That is undoubtedly correct. But some on the putative “Left” go further and claim that we also have no right to demand, for instance, that someone not use heroin if they freely choose to do so. In other words, we are not entitled to tell them they have the wrong priorities, or have chosen the wrong life path. Such a life might indeed not be one we would choose for ourselves, but our fellow citizens should be free to make that determination for themselves. We can only take issue with others’ actions when they impact our public lives—that is, we can only dictate how fellow citizens should live when it comes to “political” questions, not moral ones. I can no more tell them whether they should take drugs than I can tell them whether they should listen to music.

This conception of morality, according to which our moral values belong to a deeply personal, even sacred, sphere, coexists uncomfortably with another. If a family member were using drugs in a self-destructive manner, it’s easy to imagine judging their life choices—that is, judging what he ought to do, or how he ought to live his life. The same thing is often the case with friends or co-workers.

So there are aspects of people’s private lives that we can and often do judge; we don’t just reserve such acts of judgement only for overtly political cases. Perhaps it would be good to rein in our judgments in some cases, but human beings are inherently social animals who need to live in community. We cannot live in community without caring for each other, and wanting those around us to live good lives—good public and private lives. This means exercising judgement about the private lives and personal choices of others: values and actions related to people’s so-called private life can be better or worse, good or bad, just as those in people’s public lives. To exercise such judgments doesn’t entail condemnation. Rather, it means that we judge their choices, as in the case of addicts, as harmful to not just to the community but also to themselves, and we believe there is a better path for them to take.

While we appraise people’s life decisions all the time, such appraisals are usually hidden behind the language of privacy. Suppose you believe that abortion is a deeply personal choice. That means that you believe that neither the government nor any private citizen can stop you from getting an abortion or force you to get one. When someone opposes your right to an abortion, they therefore seem deranged or oppressive; they want to invade your private life. But to believe that neither the government nor any private citizen gets a say about whether you have a right to an abortion is just another way of saying you believe that abortion should be allowed. And this is a moral judgment about the private lives of others, about what they can or cannot do, the values they can or cannot have. You believe, in other words, that there is nothing morally wrong with getting an abortion. The person who opposes your right to an abortion is, typically, neither deranged nor evil; they just disagree with you about what should be allowed, what is right and wrong.

Against Consumer Morality

To see something as a personal choice is to see it as something one is allowed to do. That means that we do judge the personal choices and values of others all the time. And we judge what others and the state can or cannot do on the basis of how we judge personal choices and values. Our political positions are therefore never neutral with respect to our moral positions. Morality always involves a judgment about which choices and values are correct or incorrect, and politics concerns the best arrangement for us to act according to those moral judgements.

That we are making political judgments on the basis of moral judgments raises a vexing question: what is the correct account of morality? Those who want to leave morality out of politics often implicitly embrace individualistic morality. According to this view, there is a wide array of permissible values and life paths, including those that embrace the habits of addiction, dishonesty, or laziness. What matters is not the values themselves, but rather that you are the author of your own life, and that you chose those values for yourself. “You” are understood to be a collection of wants and desires, along with properties like gender and race. You are therefore a unique subject, and the values you choose are the right ones if they speak to you and reflect your authentic self. In individualistic morality, what makes a value or life path right or wrong is that you choose it, without coercion, as an authentic expression of your true self.

One of the difficulties of this view is that being authentic requires that you strip away everything you have inherited from others in the process of unveiling your “true self.” What remains is what Michael Sandel calls an unencumbered self, shorn of communal or class identity. There’s little reason to think such a self has anything left with which to make self-discovery or a basis on which to pick some values to live by instead of others. And to the person who faces a life crisis, and does not know what values define her, or which values to choose, individualistic morality has no guidance to offer except to tell her to look further into herself.

The idea of individualistic morality emerged with the rise of capitalism, and now reflects the notion of people as individual consumers. There is no external standard of right and wrong for a consumer; instead, her decisions should be solely dictated by her desires and preferences. However, most people believe there are indeed external standards for what counts as a good life, as Alasdair MacIntyre and many other philosophers have argued. This might be why individualistic morality has a strong class component: it is mostly the middle class and elites who cherish being their unique selves. Their range of freedom as consumers makes it appear as if they are truly autonomous.

But people who lived in pre-capitalist societies, and even many working-class people today, are not autonomous in most aspects of their lives. As a result, their approach to moral thinking does not rely on individualistic morality. Take, for example, the Crow people described by Jonathan Lear in Radical Hope. For them, what mattered was not that they be authentic but rather that they be experts in something valuable for their community, like being a proficient warrior or hunter. Consider also Jean-Claude Michéa’s or Joan C. Williams’s arguments that commitment matters much more for working people than self-expression.

Individualistic morality’s appeal to authenticity forces us to disavow much more than the most obviously objectionable values. It allows for people to be extremely self-interested, and so the best it can say about free riders, for instance, is that we should design incentives to curb people’s selfishness. Contrast this with the empirical data, presented by Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons and further analyzed by Mark Hoipkemier, that, in practice, the best antidote for free riding is for people to be trained to think of a communal we instead of an I. For those who think this way, free riding is not even a conceptual possibility. But individualistic morality forbids us from trying to persuade others to adopt a communal ethos, or structure society in a way that leads to such an ethos, because it only lets us affect each other’s private lives in the most extreme scenarios.

Individualistic morality ought to be anathema to the Left. The working class has time and again organized through shared values as an “us,” whether that be a union, a neighborhood, or a class. It is what’s implied in Bernie Sanders’s slogan Not me, us.

At best, individualistic morality will grant us only temporary permission to promote a communal ethos and collective struggle, so that we can then return, after liberation, to the very individualism that is alien to most people. For this political program to be feasible, advocates of individualistic morality must think, against the evidence, that everyone wants such a morality or, in a more materialist vein, that individualistic morality will emerge when, through redistribution, everyone has enough resources to order their lives as they see fit. But there’s no reason to expect that material abundance will automatically produce individualistic morality.

Goodness Over Authenticity

Yet this is precisely what we have been doing. Consider a mother who wants her sister’s children to be raised religious, even though her sister is not. Many on the left would see this as an imposition. We typically don’t realize that part of what is moving her is a desire to see children be raised to be good human beings, who help each other out and stand up to injustice. That desire, even if not articulated in these terms, is often connected to an instinctive recognition of the goods of thinking in terms of a communal we, not of an I. Instead, many would tell her that how to raise your children is a deeply personal choice, letting the ideal of authenticity speak through us. Meanwhile, the Right uncritically agrees with her desire to see children raised religious and uses her support to fuel policies that may undermine other values she endorses, such as honesty and commitment.

What we should instead be doing with our religious mother is affirming the idea that children ought to be raised to be good. We should agree with her that part of what it is to love and care for those around us is to want them to flourish and live good lives. And we should go further, for example, by saying that the best way of forming such citizens is by investing in public schools and offering state-funded job programs. We should convince her that we share the ideal of a world in which lying and free riding are morally objectionable. Many on the Left, however, would stop well short of affirming the idea that children should be raised with the virtue of honesty due to their commitment to individualistic morality, which says that it is not up to society (or the state) to tell people how to raise their children.

For all these conceptual and practical reasons, we must reject individualistic morality and the idea that moral values ought ultimately to be left to individual choice. That means the Left must dirty its hands by offering an alternative moral picture. This is necessary not just so that we arrive at the correct political positions, but also so that we build a political program that is relatable to those with the instincts to correctly reject capitalism’s ideal of authenticity.

Thankfully, the Left has no need to reinvent the wheel. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre offers a compelling starting point for rejecting the infinite permissibility of values:

[There is] a set of goods whose contribution to a good life, whatever one’s culture or social order, it would be difficult to deny. They are at least eightfold, beginning with good health and a standard of living—food, clothing, shelter—that frees one from destitution. Add to these good family relationships, sufficient education to make good use of opportunities to develop one’s powers, work that is productive and rewarding, and good friends. Add further time beyond one’s work for activities good in themselves, athletic, aesthetic, intellectual, and the ability of a rational agent to order one’s life and to identify and learn from one’s mistakes.

Some might worry that such a political vision stifles originality and opens the door to the kind of state coercion witnessed in totalitarian regimes. This should worry anyone who pursues an alternative moral picture, for individualistic morality is appealing precisely because it tries to avoid uniformity and undue coercion. That said, whether these challenges can be met should be a matter of collective debate. Consider, in the meantime, that the goods outlined above allow for much diversity. There are many kinds of artistic and athletic activity and many forms of work. There are, in other words, many forms a good life can take. But that does not mean that a life becomes good only because the person chose it for themselves.

Whatever the precise nature of a different, socialist morality, we must, for the sake of our politics, adopt an alternative to individualistic morality. Ignoring moral debates has led us, instead, to implicitly endorse an account that privileges being authentic over being good. The Left must do better, or risk drifting further into irrelevance.

Subscribe now

Ana María Cisneros is a PhD student in Philosophy and a former socialist organizer.

For many years there was a refrain that the Left had become a bunch of postmodern relativists and skeptics. Naturally conservatives worried the loudest about how the bogeymen of regular Marxism had been nefariously replaced by the pronounless bogeypeople of postmodern neo-Marxism. But liberals and even a fair share of leftists lamented the slide into what David Harvey called “militant particularism” and identity politics over universalism and rationalism. Plenty agree with Terry Eagleton in The Illusions of Postmodernism that the leftist shift from not reading Lukács and Sartre to not reading Derrida and Spivak was a disaster.

But since the advent of the first Trump administration, it’s been hard to shake the feeling that the conservatives themselves are the new postmodernists. From Trumpists like Rudy Giuliani declaring that “truth isn’t truth” to Jordan Peterson regularly veering perilously close to “it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” to Curtis Yarvin calling for everyone to get “Tolkienpilled,” the Right is increasingly shaped by the parameters of postmodern culture.

Subscribe now

The Postmodern Condition

Critics of postmodernism have understood postmodernism and postmodernity in several overlapping ways. For them, it usually refers to a series of philosophers and schools of thought, many of which were offensively French. On this reading, postmodern thinkers are keen to deconstruct ancient bedrocks of Western civilization such as truth, justice, Reason magazine and Steven Pinker. An elite phenomenon embracing relativistic identity politics, postmodern philosophy is anxiously presented by critics as permeating the broader culture and distorting it for the worst.

There is a vulgar idealism inherent to these sorts of right-wing critiques, which appeal to intellectuals in no small part because they inflate the significance of their cultural contributions. One of the recurring features of right-wing rhetoric is to veer from locating the sources of social anger in the structures leftists systematically critique to locating social anger in the fact that leftists are systematically critiquing. The idea is that if it weren’t for all these pesky postmodern neo-Marxists endlessly trashing sources of authority, everything would be fine, and everyone would know their place. In more panicked iterations, the excesses of Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler are nothing less than an existential threat to Western civilization. There is a self-flattering quality to this critique, elevating the importance of those who polemicize against postmodern theory and its influence. The critics of such pernicious nonsense become nothing less than the guardians of truth, reason, and A=A. Metaphysics as chewing gum, as Horkheimer once put it.

Another, richer understanding of postmodernity has been developed by Marxist cultural theory, including the works of David Harvey, Perry Anderson, and, above all, Fredric Jameson. On this reading, postmodern theory is demoted to secondary importance, regarded less as driving than reflecting a broader cultural skepticism and nihilism.

In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson defines postmodernity as a cultural logic which permeates many spheres: fine art, architecture, theory and philosophy, and, above all, entertainment. While Jameson is sympathetic to the classic view of postmodernism defined by a declining faith in grand or meta-narratives, his own take is that it is better described by a sense that history is foreclosed. Foundational questions about what social form we are going to adopt have been settled in favor of capitalism, leading to a general sense of malaise. Mark Fisher, drawing on Jameson, described this general lack of agency over the society we wish to create as “capitalist realism.” Novel identities and politics can no longer develop. People nostalgically mine the past for a sense of significance.

Jameson draws heavily on the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, whose classic book Late Capitalism provides a political-economic analysis to ground his account of the emergence of postmodernism as a cultural logic. Mandel famously argued against the center-left view that the welfare state constituted the democratic constraining of unadulterated capitalism. For him, it was rather the fusion of capitalism and the state which enabled capitalism to operate as an ever more encompassing totality. Jameson expands Mandel’s picture to describe how the cultural sphere, which before the twentieth century still retained a kind of artisanal and snobbish independence from capitalism, was increasingly incorporated into the late capitalist totality. Aesthetics and intellectual work, previously the purview of well-heeled, snobbish aristocrats and bourgeois social climbers, is increasingly commodified and replicated on a mass scale.

This means art, culture, and theory increasingly lose any independent capacity to challenge the status quo. At best, postmodern politics can borrow a sense of significance only through nostalgic symbology or pastiche, assembling and reassembling the various resonant symbols and identities of the museum-like past to scrupulously avoid the impossibility of creating the new. In postmodernity there can be no art that offers a challenge beyond the most superficial efforts to shock and ironize the sacred, since the effect is to suggest nothing can change.

The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism

Jameson’s analysis can help us understand why postmodern conservatism emerged and quickly gained such enormous appeal in the twenty-first century. Archaeologies of the Future has a melancholy quality. Jameson notes how even in speculative fiction, it is very rare to find anyone who thinks that we are going to improve upon capitalism—even where, like Philip K. Dick, they acknowledge its nihilism. Today tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk muse openly about transhuman futures, the colonization of new worlds, and the formation of AI superintelligences. All this is easier for them to imagine than a world where oligarchs aren’t at the summit. Somehow eternal life for the rich may be possible, but free buses or public grocery stores are fantastically utopian.

In these conditions of capitalist realism, debates about economic questions and redistribution inevitably become sidelined to contests around identity and values. This is compounded by neoliberal capitalism’s dissolution of traditional “sources of the self,” as political theorist Charles Taylor put it in his book of the same title. Marx and Engels predicted that “all that was solid would melt into air” as the most revolutionary mode of production in history expanded its power of creative destruction across the globe and all spheres of life. The postmodern condition is consequently one where the intensity of debates about identity is proportional to the feeling that the sources of our self are slipping away.

It shouldn’t surprise us that reactionaries have been the main beneficiaries of these intense feelings. As Terry Eagleton noted in The Illusions of Postmodernism, conservative philosophers from Burke through Gadamer have been very comfortable with the idea that politics should focus on respect for traditional identities and forms of knowledge while denying the “rationalist” impulse to exercise freedom and intelligence to remake the world for the better. Moreover the emphasis on the historical contingency of knowledge and rejection of universalism and rationalism characteristic of the postmodern epoch gels well with the instincts of many reactionaries. Joseph de Maistre famously insisted that rationalistic philosophy was a destructive force for corroding the dogmas and traditional authorities into which one was born, and rejected the very idea one could talk about human beings in general rather than Frenchmen, Englishmen, etc.

Under the conditions of postmodernity, these conservative instincts can mutate into a distinctly postmodern conservatism. Lacking traditional sources of selfhood grounded in longstanding material and historical practices, postmodern conservatives turn to hypercurrent media technologies to reify a distinctly pastiche-like sense of identity as a locus of meaning. They draw selectively from the cultural signifiers of the past: whether Catholic nationalism, Reaganite cosplaying, the abiding nostalgia for the good ol’ days of independence and empire, and so on. These reified identities are fragile because they are so often a transparent construction, owing little to the material realities and practices postmodern conservatives experience.

Postmodern conservatives are paradoxical in both normalizing and naturalizing the traditional identities they construct while simultaneously agonizing about corrosive cultural forces and actors that endlessly threaten them. Rather than pin the blame on capitalism, the blame for the disintegration of the self is projected onto the unworthy and dangerous alongside their elite liberal and progressive allies. Migrants, radical professors, critical theorists, gay activists, and Ibram X. Kendi must all be opposed and eliminated to create a safe cultural space for postmodern conservatives and those they consider worthy.

This fixation on identity aligns with the strategic forms of epistemic skepticism postmodern conservatives adopt. They are adept at expressing incredulity towards meta-narratives and appeals to rationalistic authorities, but this doesn’t make the majority of them comprehensive relativists and nihilists. Instead, like figures on the Right going back to Edmund Burke, they appeal to skepticism towards reason precisely to enable unskeptical deference to authoritative figures and traditions that align with their identity and value system. This is facilitated by the postmodern collapse of faith in rationalistic authorities and argumentative reason. What replaces it is a kind of Schmittian decisionism based on friend and enemy identities, with one’s ideology as protected from needing to make an account of itself.

This is all aided by an increasingly comprehensive right-wing media sphere, which insulates postmodern conservatives from alternative perspectives and reinforces preferred narratives. More importantly, as Baudrillard would note, the hyperreality of postmodern media has proven an extraordinarily fruitful arena for adept right-wing influencers. With digital media increasingly disconnected from representing the material world, the appeals to affect, agonism, and undialectical bifurcation into “good and evil” which the Right have always been deft at manipulating have been able to flourish.

Some of the major influencers and figureheads in the postmodern media-sphere are cognizant of this opening for the pitch. Many are unapologetic about prioritizing framing and feeling over deference to the truth. The late Charlie Kirk embodied this form of post-modern conservatism in his book Right Wing Revolutionaries:

Americans are phenomenal salesmen, and we love a good sales pitch. Sometimes, we love the pitch more than the product. Only about one in seven Americans has Geico car insurance, but most of us can remember half a dozen Geico ads…. Americans are, in short, the most successful people in the world at marketing and advertising. In other words, Americans are experts at a type of friendly-looking deception because the heart of advertising is framing. In advertising, framing is about shaping a person’s perception of their own needs. “You have a problem, and this product will fix it.” “You should associate this drink with having a fun time.”…. You can guess where I’m going with this. The political battle in America isn’t just a battle over policy. It’s an advertising battle. And that means it’s a battle between two sides over whose framing is better.

On Kirk’s telling, even “friendly deception” was permissible if one is engaging in political framing, which ultimately is just marketing and advertising writ large. Kirk urged conservatives to “police your own thinking” to prevent even imagining the world the way progressives might suggest. While conservatives might “not be fully certain what is right in a given context, we can definitely be certain the left is wrong.” Kirk concluded by suggesting conservatives chase a “Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader attitude toward every issue possible.”

Conservative influencer Chris Rufo echoes this point in more posh language. In an interview, Rufo declared that the “man who can discover, shape and distribute information has an enormous amount of power. The currency in our postmodern knowledge regime is language, fact, image and emotion. Learning how to wield these is the whole game.”

Postmodernism has often been accused of generalizing a kind of radical skepticism. If so, it is an emphatically un-Socratic skepticism, one which weaponizes uncertainty to banish critical thinking in the name of affirming one’s preferred dogmas. This quality is on full display in Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution, where Rufo manages to reject a huge array of left-wing thinkers without ever feeling compelled to argue against their claims. The goal of discourse is no longer to question one’s priors, but to affirm the opinions one already feels to be true. By chasing affirmation rather than critical reflection, the postmodern conservative entrenches a culture of performative banality whose sole goal is to relieve ordinary people the burden of thinking for themselves through the industrial production of thought-terminating clichés.

The Future Remains Cancelled

Without a doubt, much of what has been written here could be applied to the political Left as well. The fixation on identity, the nostalgic reverence for militant communist movements past, and the intense agonism which relishes manufactured conflict are all very much present. But the Left is fundamentally committed to equality, which has an inherently universalistic dimension to it. Indeed, one of the reasons the Left was so successful in the heyday of rationalist optimism was precisely the conviction that reason could be applied to successfully build a better world for all. This conviction can be found in everyone from liberal socialists like J.S Mill to Friedrich Engels’s insistence that in the future communist society, divisive politics will be replaced by the rational administration of things for the common good.

In a postmodern era, this aspirational rational universalism has been a very hard sell. By contrast, the fundamental cynicism of postmodernity has proven fertile manure for postmodern conservatism to flourish, appealing to deep instincts of superiority that license putting one’s self and the “America” you identify with first. After all, if a world where the free development of each and all will always be a pipedream, you might as well indulge in mankind’s oldest quest: searching for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

In Rufo at al’s ethno-chauvinism and nationalism, we find the culmination of Jameson’s anxieties about how capitalism has completely colonized the cultural sphere and neutered even the prospect of critical thinking about transformative alternatives. The truth or falsity of political identities and positions as a measure of any accurate reflection of reality was irrelevant; they’re only to be appealed to as empty affirmations. We stand for TRUTHBOMBS! and Western Civilization^TM. What really matters is the battle over “framing” and “marketing” through which one defines who people are and what they should believe in. To succeed one must consciously banish complicating facts and alternative ways of thinking about things, strategically applying skepticism to all rival viewpoints while uncritically and dogmatically propagating one’s own with protective love. The postmodern sophist looks warily at everyone else’s convictions while sentimentally tending their own. It is an insular and radically deflating way to perceive the world which demands, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, big feelings for very small ideas.

Unfortunately this radical smallness and vulgarity has not neutralized the appeal of postmodern conservatism. Indeed it has facilitated it. In a postmodern condition, where there is no alternative to capitalism, millions have turned to memed nostalgia as a source of agonistic meaning. It provides a sense of identity and sometimes even the simulacrum of youthful, anti-system populism, even where the actual goal of postmodern politicians like Trump is to cut funding for the poor and middle classes to redistribute hundreds of billions to his fellow sclerotic oligarchs. Until the Left is able to offer a genuinely realistic alternative vision that catches hold and directs the imagination towards something better, the socialist future will remain indefinitely cancelled.

Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College and the author of The Rise of Post-modern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism amongst other books.

Subscribe to Damage

A common defense of Kamala Harris’s doomed 2024 campaign goes something like this: It’s not fair that she was written off as the queen of progressives when she ran her campaign as a Clinton-era moderate. “If what you want is a centrist campaign that’s quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed, and she just lost,” deadpanned comedian John Oliver in his election postmortem on Last Week Tonight.

But Harris’s campaign was not run in a vacuum. The media declared 2024 the Vibes Election, a referendum on the ambient feelings of the zeitgeist rather than substantive policy. The Dems and their surrogates believed this would favor Kamala due to Brat Summer and the manufactured narrative of “joy” surrounding her campaign. But it turns out, those vibes were vaguely woke. Harris kept repeating the line that she was “unburdened by what has been,” but the emptiness of her campaign left voters to fill the void with everything they remembered—and resented. Thus, no matter how carefully Harris moderated her message in her months-long sprint to the White House, the California senator couldn’t outrun the meme version of herself: a cackling liberal scold fluent in DEI jargon, and the personification of every HR Zoom training you’ve ever pretended to pay attention to.

Subscribe now

Arguably, woke officially died with the Harris campaign, but even today, a large portion of the American electorate still believes Democrats at large want to defund the police, let children switch their genders at recess, and force them to disavow their white privilege. A recent poll from Unite the Country—a Democratic super PAC that exists to make Democrats look good—somehow managed to make them look even worse. Democrats are now seen as “out of touch,” “woke,” and “weak,” and their approval ratings have dipped below 35% among white men, Latino men, and working-class voters. For congressional Democrats, the numbers are even more abysmal: Less than one in five Democrats approve of the job their party is doing in Congress, according to a July Quinnipiac poll.

In reality, most elected officials—especially those somewhere other than Portland or Park Slope—aren’t cultural radicals, don’t speak woke, and often try to avoid these issues altogether, especially in the last year. But the party is yoked to a moral project it doesn’t entirely control, and worse, hasn’t figured out how to disown without provoking a civil war in its own ranks.

Take it from longtime Democratic Party ghoul James Carville, who said what “killed” the Democrats in November was a “sense of dishonor” among the electorate—funny considering he was once Bill Clinton’s right-hand man. But still, he’s on to something. The woke era, said Carville, stuck in people’s minds beyond its expiration date. “We got beyond it,” he said. “But the image stuck in people’s minds that the Democrats wanted to defund the police, wanted to empty prisons.”

Subscribe now

The Influence of the Shadow Party

It’s the political story of the 2010s: While Trump single-handedly wrestled the Republicans into becoming the Party of MAGA, the language, instincts, and sensibilities of progressive elites gradually infiltrated the Democrats’ brand, culminating in a soft consensus. By the end of the first Trump term, national Democrats sounded like 27-year-old Brooklynites, liberal arts humanities faculty, or public relations at the ACLU.

Conservatives would have you believe that the shift was part of some authoritarian takeover, but it’s actually proof that the Democratic Party is incredibly weak, less guided by coalitions of real people and more like a brand managed by a loose marketing team and backed by syndicates of donors. Various structural reforms have dismantled the connective tissue between parties and their constituents. In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for unlimited, undisclosed “dark money.” The Democrats initially condemned dark money groups, but by 2024 they became the party of it. State and local party machines, once closely tied to communities and neighborhoods, were eclipsed by donor networks and activist groups.

Since Democrats don’t actually want to govern, they became haunted by the spectre of the “Shadow Party.” That’s the term that John Judis and Ruy Teixeira coined in their book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, to describe what’s become, over the last several decades, the Democrats’ financial and philosophical base: Hollywood, Silicon Valley (though it was split in 2024), higher education, corporate media, and professional progressives. The latter work in activist non-profits, legal funds, foundations, PACs, and special interests—what I’d deem “Big Woke.” (In centrist Democrat circles, they’re being whispered about as The Groups like they’re talking about the mafia.)

These groups are disproportionately part of the liberal professional-managerial class, one that is richer, better educated, and way more online than the rest of the population, and cloistered in coastal metropolises. As Bill Bishop explained nearly 20 years ago in The Big Sort, Americans in the twenty-first century began concentrating themselves by lifestyle and worldview. For liberals, both physical and online clustering created an ultra-liberal laptop-toting monoculture in cities like New York City and Washington, D.C., where seemingly everyone has a graduate degree, listens to podcasts, and has worked for someone who used the term “Latinx” unironically until 2024. They “subsist within their own closed universes of discourse,” Judis and Teixeira wrote, with each “using the extremes of the other to deflect criticism of their own radicalism.” Their politics are less rooted in material struggle and more in cultural values, ideology, or vocabulary. They’re the type who care deeply about student loan forgiveness for PhDs but shrug when you bring up childcare subsidies for the working class.

Big Woke’s power is soft, but there’s a revolving door between them and the Democratic Party. Staffers bounce between activist NGOs, think tanks, communications firms, and Democratic campaigns—often swapping Slack channels but maintaining the same worldview. One month, they’re crafting messaging at a social justice nonprofit; the next, they’re running digital ads for a Senate race. Neera Tanden might as well be their patron saint. As the longtime head of the Center for American Progress (CAP), she ran the flagship think tank of the Democratic establishment. It’s the kind of group that loves identity but balks at organized leftism, publishing pieces on Disabled LGBTQI+ people while simultaneously trying to fire the unionized employees of CAP’s once-affiliated website, ThinkProgress, and replace them with scabs. Tanden herself floated between worlds with ease: advising Hillary Clinton, working in the Obama administration, then landing in the Biden White House after a failed nomination for a cabinet position. The Shadow Party systematically cast a long shadow that Democrats, all the way up to President Biden himself, had trouble casting off. Remember when Biden was once asked off the cuff how many genders there were, and he said, “At least three?”

Subscribe now

The End of Big Woke?

The Democrats could do much more to combat this, but when no one knows what they truly stand for other than anti-Trumpness (what does defending democracy actually entail?), the default view is wokeness. It’s an environment that makes it hard for more idiosyncratic Democrats at the local, state, and even congressional levels to break through. A progressive NGO says “birthing people,” and a House Democrat from Ohio gets asked to defend it. An HBO series recasts a historical drama with modern racial and gender politics, and swing voters in Pennsylvania assume it’s all part of the progressive master plan.

Some rural or exurban Democrats have broken through—but it hasn’t been easy. Take Dan Osborn, the pipefitter-turned-Senate-candidate in Nebraska. Osborn, a former union leader, avoided the culture war altogether and almost pulled off a win against a Republican incumbent in a state where Democrats are usually as welcome as tofu at a football tailgate. He may fare better in a just-launched second Senate campaign against billionaire Cubs owner Pete Ricketts. Then there’s Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, who won in rural Washington by sounding more like a PTA mom than a podcast host. She didn’t campaign on dismantling systemic “isms” but spoke about fixing cars, owning a small business, and maybe not going bankrupt from a medical bill.

These are signs that the tides may finally be turning, and the Democrats may be able to move beyond ultra-liberalism. The professional-managerial class appears to be a somewhat endangered species thanks to the surge of AI and tightening capital, which has led to a mass exodus of white-collar workers through layoffs. Meanwhile, universities are being punished by the Trump administration, media outlets are hemorrhaging cash and audiences, the arts are begging for relevance, Hollywood is dying, and Silicon Valley pivoted to the right.

Big Woke may finally be asleep.

Subscribe now

Ryan Zickgraf is a contributing writer at UnHerd and is a regular contributor to Jacobin Magazine and Compact. He writes from Harrisburg, PA.

Review: Malcolm Harris, What’s Left: Three Paths Through Planetary Crisis (Little, Brown and Company, 2025)

It’s somewhat ironic that when the socialist Left was most powerful, everyone was at each other’s throats. As Lars Lih recounts, Lenin’s strategic gauntlet, What is to be Done, came out of a context in which he was at constant polemical war with another social democratic tendency represented by the journal Rabocheye Delo (“The Workers’ Cause”). When the Social Democratic Party of Germany was amassing a huge, popular base among the working class, there was open warfare on strategy between the likes of Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxembourg, among many others. And, even after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Lenin did not refrain from attacks on certain factions like his 1920 polemic, “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder.”

In many ways, these Marxists were continuing a tradition started by the founder, who with Engels declared, “Our task is that of ruthless criticism, and much more against ostensible friends than against open enemies; and in maintaining this our position we gladly forego cheap democratic popularity.” Marx was also known for his withering attacks on the likes of other socialist anarchists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. In 1860, during perhaps the most productive era of his life, Marx took a year off to refute the attacks of one Karl Vogt, confessing that “clever men… [would be] completely unable to grasp how I could squander my time on refuting such infantile nonsense.”

This is all to say that the early years of the socialist Left were defined by open and hostile debate—particularly on questions of strategy—rooted in the conviction that some viewpoints were right and others hopelessly wrong. History and class struggle were the proving grounds of such ideological battles.

But as working-class power was crushed by neoliberalism beginning in the 1970s, there has been a shift on the Left. Instead of “ruthless criticism” and inter-factional debate, a new common sense has emerged that, actually, the Left is on the whole good and noble, and that the only real problem is that it’s too scattered and fragmented. In the 1960s, in contrast to the “old” social movements centered on labor and working-class politics, “new” social movements rose to confront a multiplicity of social ills, from war and imperialism to racism, sexism, and environmental degradation. Each of these contained a virtuous cause, but by themselves, they were too weak to attack something as large as capitalism itself. The solution was to build a coalitional politics—often called a “movement of movements”—that could combine to build sufficient strength to address the root causes of each movement’s pet problem.

Perhaps the apogee of this form of left politics was the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, including a smorgasbord of unions, environmentalists, feminists, farmer organizations, and more—leaving many commentators to wonder what unified their disparate causes. The attempt to fold all of them together into something called an “anti-globalization movement” did not seem to help matters, particularly among those still committed to a socialist internationalism.

The last great iteration of this trend was Occupy Wall Street, where each and every anti-establishment ideological camp was welcome: from anarchists to hard money Ron Paulites. In stark contrast to the party-based and organizationally grounded debates of the Second International, Occupy was famously defined by a vague commitment to “consensus” formation, which ultimately led to Jo Freeman’s “Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Consensus, of course, tended to reward the most radical-sounding posturing in the square.

One of the radicals who made his name in the Occupy movement is Malcolm Harris, whose new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through Planetary Crisis, is a product of this ecumenical, hyperradical, but deeply weak and marginal Left of the last half-century. The book is a spin on the aforementioned coalitional politics, wherein the base conviction is that the Left is good, and that it would win if only it could get together. Instead of a “movement of movements,” Harris calls for a “strategy of strategies,” with a focus on three: what he calls marketcraft, public power, and communism (more on these below).

While Harris evinces some open-mindedness and flexibility in his coverage of his three chosen strategies, the book overall is evidence of the stubborn narrowness of current left discourse, as described in these pages as a “self-defeating ideological extremism, which paradoxically suit[s] the professional ‘radicals’ in the media, the academy, the arts, and the activist NGOs.” The book’s title is instructive in that, apart from the clear double meaning, the lack of question mark (what’s left?) demonstrates that the task of the modern leftist is not to debate and question what is left, but to dictate and curate the “range of opinions” that are allowed in its shrinking milieus. In contrast to the old Left characterized by organizational strength and polemical debate, in the Left today ideas are “put forth and debated not as commitments in a platform but as fodder for internet debate,” making it appear “both unserious and irresponsible.”

While this book was clearly written as an attempt to build some form of “Left Unity” in the waning days of the Biden Administration, its appearance in the second Trump term only further shows that if this Left isn’t more open to self-reflection and internal self-criticism, the new Right is very happy to remake the world in the wake of neoliberalism’s ashes (and our collective weakness).

Subscribe now

Which Way for the Left?

To his credit, Harris diagnoses the “planetary crisis” reasonably well. He begins with an anecdote from a financial analyst for Shell, who had the gall to confidently say “we don’t plan to lose money” in the face of a crisis caused by their primary product, oil. The example allows Harris to explain the particular psychosis of a capitalist class that is hell-bent on profiting off sunk assets, even if it means disastrous warming for the planet. He calls this sociopathic force “Value” with a capital V. When Value shapes the global “social metabolism” (a bit of jargon he takes from Marx by way of the Hungarian Marxist István Mészáros), our planetary fate appears sealed for collective destruction. So, the overarching question of the book is: what force on the Left could stop the power of Value?

What follows is a nice three-part structure in which Harris lays out the three left strategies to tackle the planetary crisis. Oddly, he claims himself an impartial and objective presenter of these strategies, writing, “My goal with this book is not to convince readers that one is better than the others or that they should convert. I am admittedly a partisan of one strategy, but if I did my job well, it won’t be too obvious which one.” Well, for this reader, it is painfully obvious which one he favors (folks, it’s communism). But in the interest of objectivity, each strategy’s chapter contains two parts—the first makes the case for the strategy, and the second lays out its problems and challenges.

The first strategy is what he calls “marketcraft” (he takes the term from Steven Vogel, but just after What’s Left came out, a new manifesto for the approach was published by Chris Hughes). For Harris, this is the approach of “the liberal establishment” that claims we can come together as a “rule-making polity that allows markets to function in the collective interest and produce a universal rise in the tide of human well-being.” In short, this is the strategy of “Bidenomics”—the idea that through smart industrial policy design (tax credits with rules meant to promote just outcomes like prevailing wages or investment in “disadvantaged communities”), the state can marshal the private sector to invest in the right “green” technologies. Cleverly, Harris makes fun of this strategy by comparing it to what Barbara and Karen Fields call “racecraft,”, where race becomes constructed as a force so powerful that it obtains almost supernatural causal powers over society. In much the same way, this strategy tends to treat markets as a quasi-mystical force beyond our social control.

Bidenomics never dictated investment or consumer decisions but only hoped its nudges would be enough for markets to deliver. The problems for the marketcraft strategy, according to Harris, include its often nationalist approach to what are global problems (using tariffs to promote domestic “green” industry) and a focus on what he calls the “goddamn cars”—the promotion of electric vehicles as a particularly materially-intensive answer to maintain America’s spatially extensive form of decentralized suburban development. So much for strategy #1.

The second strategy is somewhat confusingly called “public power.” To be sure, Harris does discuss the public ownership of electricity systems as a model for this strategy. He is particularly enamored with the potential for entities like the Tennessee Valley Authority to develop pumped storage hydro facilities (as an aside, Harris needlessly denigrates actually-existing public power by claiming TVA “went corporate” in the 1980s). But, as the chapter unfolds, it is clear that Harris means public power in the broader sense of public control over the economy at large. He discusses the importance of planning and “instead of production for production’s sake, production for our use.” He also suggests that this strategy entails the “dispossession of capitalists” or, as Marx would say, the expropriation of the expropriators. Clearly, the agent of public power is the working class. As Harris puts it, “organized labor is both the subject and object of the public-power strategy. The working class builds public power, and public power builds the working-class.”

At this point in the book, I wondered: isn’t this the fight for socialism—and particularly a Marxist vision of socialism in which the proletariat seizes the means of production from capital and subjects production to democratic planning? If so, then, what in the hell is communism?

Communism of a New Type

Harris begins his discussion of the third strategy, communism, by acknowledging that it is “weighed down by a lot of history,” but curiously he says almost nothing about the actually-existing political movement “communism” under which one-third of humanity lived for a good chunk of the twentieth century. Indeed, the real communist movement only comes up when Harris gets to the “drawbacks” section—namely, that communists routinely get murdered by capitalist states with support from US imperialist forces.

Harris’s communism is altogether different from that of the USSR or China. He defines it as “a strategy in which the planet’s exploited people abolish the capital system of Value and impose a new world social-metabolism based on the interconnected free association and well-being of all—and not just humans.” The key word in this definition, and to the modern Left, is abolition. Only a few pages later, Harris equates communism with the abolition of the family. Later in the chapter, he cites favorably what he calls “movement luminary Mariame Kaba” for her op-ed in the New York Times, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” Most of what falls under the umbrella of contemporary abolitionism is included, and that of course includes the abolition of capitalism. In fact, when Harris covers the drawbacks to the “public power” strategy rooted in the organized working class, he disparages unions for spending too much time “building power to bargain within capitalism [rather] than on building the power to abolish capitalism.”

After abolition, what do communists, according to Harris, imagine in its place? In contrast to the rapid industrialization plans of previous communists, he proposes, “[c]ommunists want to restore people’s ability to reproduce themselves via direct metabolic connection with their particular environment, the land.” To his credit, Harris does warn of the dangers of localism and affirms the movement must be rooted at the level of the species, claiming the “best thing about the long twentieth century” was the “emergence of a true world society.” He also is at pains to insist his version of communism is not a nostalgic call for a return to the past, but rather to use the “past as a foundation as people make a new world.”

Nevertheless, this is very different from a Marxist communism, which is an unabashedly progressive vision of the future premised on the forced separation of the mass of producers from a “direct metabolic connection” with the land (this is what “proletarianization” is all about). Marx insisted that such a small-scale community-level form of production would be replaced by a socialized form of production able to provision humanity as a whole. That would necessarily entail that most humans rely on food, energy, and other materials not produced from “their particular environment” and rather rely upon hyper-efficient, large-scale industrial production necessary to provide free time for all. Unlike capitalism, where such necessities are provisioned via anarchic markets, Marx’s vision of socialized production meant a planetary-scale form of democratic planning for the entire species.

Like many among the professional-class Left (who don’t tend to do much manual labor, let alone back-breaking farm work), Harris’s vision of communism includes a positive appraisal of “agroecology,” a “low tech” sustainable mode of farming. Quite apart from its ecological benefits—which can be debated—advocates, including Harris, almost never bring up that it is more labor-intensive (among other concerns) and will entail millions more laborers being pulled into agricultural work. While advocates tend to spin this as a good thing (rural jobs!), the strategic question remains: how will you recruit these millions into a political program that Leigh Phillips jokingly refers to as “drudgery for all”?

Rather than the proletariat, the agent of Harris’s communism is much more indigenous and peasant communities. Drawing from the work of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, he speaks of the “Indigenization of Marxism.” Harris borders on an essentialist politics that assumes indigenous “communities” are (a) monolithic groups and (b) inherently noble, ecological, and kind toward the earth (practicing what Harris calls “earthcare”). This kind of romantic obsession with indigenous peoples is rife in the radical professional-class ideology Harris swims in. In my milieu, the University, jobs and academic programs in “indigenous studies” have exploded in recent years.

While I would certainly not deny we can learn valuable ecological lessons from some specific indigenous practices of ecological stewardship, the political strategic question at the core of the book is left hanging: what is the political advantage in a strategy that centers groups which—in Harris’s admission—comprise 5-10 percent of the global population? How does this version of communism appeal to the roughly three quarters of humanity that are not still attached to land-based livelihoods, or, in Harris’s wistful terms, “the most oppressed, least alienated people in the capitalist world” (and by “alienated” he mostly means alienated from the land).

Harris’s communism is not only a professional-class exoticization of land-based peoples, but also celebrates people closer to his own milieu: namely, anarchists. Harris’s preferred vanguard is “small groups of radicals”: squatters who occupy abandoned hotels and housing, tree sitters who try to “Stop Cop City” outside Atlanta, activists who engage in property destruction, and the select Black Lives Matter activists who razed the Minneapolis police station. In his view, being a communist means engaging in direct action (and generally fucking shit up), though the historic role of Leninist party organization guiding action is notably absent. Harris concedes that many urban land occupations “haven’t been nearly as successful as their rural inspirations,” but temporarily relaxing the book’s focus on strategy, he says, “that hasn’t stopped communists from trying.”

The coalitional result of this strategy appears to be a decidedly minoritarian politics rooted in an alliance between urban anarchists and indigenous and peasant communities. What’s “left” is basically most of humanity, and, indeed, the traditional agent of communism, the working class.

The book ends with Harris’s main concrete policy proposal (which echoes what others have called “disaster communism”): community disaster councils where local communities do mutual aid, food and medical provision in the wake of increasing climate disaster. One might wonder if this is a convenient substitute for the abandonment of the state as the more traditional democratic structure to provide aid when society breaks down (just this summer, FEMA, apparently, simply did not answer calls from flood victims on the Guadalupe River in Texas). Low-resourced and uneven community-based “mutual aid” is, you could say, “what’s left” after decades of right-wing austerity and attacks on the public sector.

What’s the Opposite of Mass Politics?

On the surface, What’s Left is an ecumenical “big tent” strategy for the Left to regain power, but underneath this veneer are loads of ideas that ordinary people would likely find bizarre, if not repulsive. Harris promotes a proposal to turn a golf course into a “public sex forest” that its advocates claim would solve an urgent social problem: “thousands of perverts have no good place to fuck.” He champions a rural Senegalese community concerned about their dependence upon commodified bouillon cubes who made a local alternative “sum pak” made from locust beans, shrimp and, for a time, sand (the organization funding such initiatives is a Western NGO drawing significant funding from the Canadian Government). He implies at one point that he supported the “fully successful assassination of [former Prime Minister] Shinzo Abe” in Japan in 2022. I could go on. The point is that, in promoting such wild ideas, Harris seems disinterested in what it would take to build an actual left mass politics that appeals to those not already inside the left tent.

This allergy to mass politics is, as usual, rooted in a disdain for ordinary working-class Americans. Indeed, it is these workers who, according to Harris, are the primary obstacle to the “public power” strategy. The problem with them is they just want too much. On one page he speculates about the potentially problematic desires of what he later calls “coddled Americans”: “Maybe they do not like taking the bus and prefer driving their cars…. They can’t help but appreciate the low prices Americans pay for food, courtesy of an unequal global division of labor and extractive farming techniques.”

According to Harris and many on the Western Left today, Global North workers’ standard of living comes directly at the expense of poor workers abroad. Harris bluntly explains, “…if workers in the core act like they have something to protect in the current system, it’s probably because they do.” The image of privileged workers protecting their global position seems out of step with daily headlines of skyrocketing wealth flowing to the top and a cost-of-living crisis and economic insecurity for the majority of Americans. Rather than pitting workers against each other, it makes more sense to see all workers as losing a “global class war” with capital.

Unionized workers in particular, says Harris, might be too eager for their own exploitation. The problem is what he calls, following the late academic Joshua Clover, “the affirmation trap.” As Clover explains, this deadlock occurs when “labor is locked into a position of affirming its own exploitation under the guise of survival.” Fossil fuel workers who want to keep their jobs, unions that prioritize good contracts with capitalist employers, and workers who might rely on car transport are all positioned as the main barriers to public power. But, in the context of capitalist austerity, with the evisceration of the social safety net, it’s not like there are a lot of good options for workers who lose their livelihood. It was union leaders like Tony Mazzocchi who argued that only the labor movement has the strength to put into place actual protections for workers who bear the brunt of environmental progress (what became known as a “just transition”).

Any socialist labor organizer will tell you that union leadership and bureaucracy can indeed be a barrier to the kind of class struggle unionism we need to revive. But Harris’s problem with labor is different in that he impugns them for not adopting what is often the insane agenda of today’s environmentalists, including adopting labor-intensive agroecology, intermittent electricity grids fully powered by solar and wind, and locally-made bouillon cubes. Harris, for example, endorses communist Jasper Bernes’s vision of revolution that entails “a rapid decrease in energy use for those in the industrialized Global North, no more cement, very little steel, almost no air travel…” No cement? At all? Forget public power or communism: who precisely is going to get on board for any project where this is the aim? As I’ve argued here before, it is the actual workers in the building trades that often have more realistic and practical ideas about decarbonization than the radicals on the Left.

It is also telling what Harris considers not debatable. Early in the book he claims he will not even consider what he calls “naive techno-optimism” in addressing a planetary crisis very much caused by the social relationship between society and technology. Consequently, Harris has very little to say about how a socialist Left should approach key questions of technological innovation. Near the end, he tries to lay out the “points of coherence” that everyone in his broad left tent should accept, and starts with “the police are the enemies of the people.” While this might gain you traction in ACAB Twitter, this is certainly not the basis for a big tent. It is not coincidental that Zohran Mamdani disavowed his previous claims to “defund the police” on his path to victory in the mayoral election in America’s largest city.

In sum, Harris’s book is the outcome of a long process in which the Left has celebrated its varied forms of “resistance,” but had no clear path to power. For all the polemical debate, the socialists of earlier days at least agreed that power came from working-class organization and politics. By the 1970s, that conviction was abandoned by the Left just at the moment capital got better organized to crush the labor and workers movement. Since then, the Left keeps hoping that its scattered parts can somehow unite to once again build a powerful Left. But the conviction underlying this is that the Left’s scattered parts are inherently good in themselves.

What’s missing is any confrontation with the fact that the Left’s marginality might be of its own making, in that it consistently adopts positions at odds with the popular masses. The Left does not merely need to combine its disparate strategies, or unite its various movements; it requires a wholesale strategic reevaluation.

Matt Huber is a professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University. He is the author of Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet.

Subscribe now

In the fourth season of the popular TV show Couples Therapy, celebrity therapist Orna Guralnik explains her theory of mind over inspiring orchestral music set to B-roll footage of New York City and images of trains tunneling through mountainsides. She narrates:

A traditional psychoanalyst would say, “If you go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into the unconscious, you’ll find the drives—sexual drives, aggressive drives, competitive drives, death drive… that’s the bedrock of the psyche. People like myself think that if you go really, really deep, if you dive into the unconscious, I think you’ll find the collective.

The music intensifies. Images of people from different ethnic groups appear, presumably engaged in culturally significant activities. Finally we see archival footage of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and the 1963 March on Washington, followed by a Black Lives Matter protest. Guralnik continues, “Being part of a group and part of a collective is deeply embedded in us.”

The idea that people are products of their social environment, that they desire and in fact need to be in association with one another, is not original. Freud himself famously authored several significant works on the subject, and the field’s history is rich with further elaborations in this vein. Nevertheless, according to many contemporary theorists and practitioners, psychoanalysis has a problem here. The traditional one-on-one clinical encounter in which the depths of the unconscious are probed, casting light on forbidden sexual and aggressive wishes and the defenses that prevent them from reaching consciousness, has come up woefully short in recent years by ignoring the critical role that social forces play in individuals’ lives. Worse yet, psychoanalysts have actively catered their efforts towards a particular population, disproportionately white and affluent, while claiming the mantle of universalism.

Subscribe now

A new crop of psychoanalysts have arrived on the scene to address this deficiency. Their mandate is twofold: on the one hand, they propose a theoretical revision to correct the supposed lack of attention psychoanalysis has historically shown towards considering social facts, and to define the specific mechanisms by which the social is embedded in the psyche. On the other, they propose a number of technical interventions to address the social context in the clinical setting, both for the sake of those currently practicing and in treatment, and as part of an effort to broaden the appeal of psychoanalysis beyond its typical supply of wealthy, white practitioners and patients.

Journalist Maggie Doherty covers some of these developments in a recent piece in Harper’s Magazine by sharing her experience at the annual conference of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) in Washington, D.C., where organizers staged a particularly clear challenge to traditional institutional psychoanalysis’s avoidance of social questions. After decades of lamentation about the diminishing popularity of psychoanalysis, a solution finally seems to have emerged: modernization is being undertaken by a growing and increasingly vocal contingent within psychoanalysis, in a movement Doherty calls the field’s “social turn.”

Alongside the necessity of bringing social considerations into the analysis of patients and into the institutes, proponents of the social turn also believe that just as psychoanalysis needs politics, so too does politics need psychoanalysis. That is, the revitalization of psychoanalysis (of the political kind they are vying for) is a necessary and powerful tool for impacting social reality as a whole, beyond the therapeutic encounter. Doherty captures this sentiment in the words of Beverly Stout, who claims that “with new social and historical approaches towards addressing racism, psychoanalysts ‘could really change the world.’”

How can such an ambitious plan of action for psychoanalysis both within the field and in society at large be realized? The work of Dr. Dorothy Holmes is a good example of what the social turners have in mind. Along with several other eminent psychoanalysts, Holmes spearheaded a large-scale inquiry into the impact of systemic racism in American psychoanalysis.

The Holmes Commission report, released on Juneteenth 2023 and coming in at over 400 pages, was first conceived in the summer of 2020, as record numbers of people hit the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd. The Commission’s findings were based on more than 2,000 survey respondents, including faculty, staff, administrators, and current and prospective candidates at various training institutes. The results were damning across the board. It found that institutes were systematically unprepared to deal with racism and that “racial enactments”—the unconscious ways in which biases and stereotypes are expressed in interpersonal and group settings—were ubiquitous, concluding that action was needed at all levels. These actions amounted to a top-down prioritization of race among all trainees and teachers, including a DEI initiative, the development and support of effective leadership, the establishment of reading and discussion groups, modification of the curriculum, and regular engagement with racial equity experts.

Many of these efforts are now under way. Institutes have set up Holmes Commission reading groups and designed new classes highlighting various articles, films and podcast appearances from the Commission’s organizers, as well as from members of the Black Psychoanalysts Speak (BPS) group. They have created race-based scholarships and established “racial affinity” discussion groups for BIPOC, AAPI, LGBTQIA+ and “white-identified” students. The frequency with which psychoanalytic institutions send out missives about their DEI initiatives, the tenacity with which every conference embraces social themes, and the overwhelming tenor of these transmissions seems to convey the pivotal message: We are social now.

The work of Donald Moss, another key figure named by Doherty, offers some perspective on how one version of the social turn can be extended into the clinic. Moss achieved perhaps the first and only instance of a psychoanalytic presentation going “viral” with his “On Having Whiteness” paper and event. In the event description, Moss compares whiteness to a “parasitic-like condition” which “renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse.” Whiteness is Moss’s name for whatever characteristic an individual initially attaches to in order to map their world and to designate for themselves a place of superiority within it, a position from which to act out a hatred and aggressivity that is both primary and fundamental. The goal of treatment is to eventually inhabit a psychical world less dominated by that mapping, so that the person can be more flexible and less prone to hateful reactivity. The analyst moves the patient toward this goal implicitly, all while recognizing that, as a primary attribute, whiteness will never be fully rooted out—the work of “trying to achieve the requisite nimbleness with Whiteness” is ongoing and unending.

In truth, Moss’s clinical ambitions and claims do not stray so far from classical analytic theory: he is simply adding “Whiteness” to any number of metaphors for primary aggression. But in this provocative choice and his inflammatory tone, Moss makes it clear he is bending the rules of traditional analytic writing. Why? Because he really does feel that the message is urgent, that the time to mobilize against racism is now, and that the place (why not?) is institutional psychoanalysis. We arrive then at a strange meeting place between urgency and pessimism. Racism is, on the one hand, both an inevitable and indissoluble feature of psychic life, and, on the other, the most pressing issue psychoanalysts face institutionally and clinically.

This particular brand of politics, which essentializes social problems while demanding deep and urgent changes, will be familiar to anyone who has participated in the public culture of the professional classes in recent years. In Damage, it has been analyzed from a number of angles, one of which is the politics of “everything all at once,” which ravenously sets its sights on more and more lofty goals at exactly the rate that its power to actually achieve them diminishes. Another name for it is “hyperpolitics,” which Anton Jäger defines as “a form of politicization without clear political consequences.” Amidst the mania of failing to mourn the historic defeat of the working class and the devastating state of the Left’s marginality, impotence, and disorganization, the feeling follows that there is no time to be strategic, to take stock of what influence we do have and where. We must be doing politics in every place and always: at work, in culture, in our institutions, in interpersonal relationships, and yes, even in the therapeutic encounter.

Subscribe now

Why Psychoanalysts Generally Have Bad Politics

There are several explanations for why psychoanalysts have absorbed this particular brand of politics. The first is their class location and the interests that follow from it. Psychoanalysts are college-educated professionals who, despite good intentions and genuine humanitarian commitments, contribute to and act as drivers of an elite cultural discourse that obscures the political-economic origins of social problems and separates them from the majority of people. At the same time, the class is not a monolith, and certain segments of it also find this discourse alienating. By and large, psychoanalysts belong to a subset of professionals that Alex Hochuli has termed MANGOs, or college-educated professionals in the media, the academy, the arts, and the activist NGOs.

As Dustin Guastella has recently elaborated, MANGOs are credentialed members of society raised in the values of their social class. Though highly influential, they are also an island unto themselves. MANGOs are shielded from market competition through powerful patronage networks and exempted from any form of democratic contestation. NGOs, for example, are not subject to the same democratic mandate as traditional dues-paying membership organizations. This state of affairs allows MANGOs to put forward maximalist positions, often heavily shaped by the internet, without fear of reprisal or failure. They end up favoring a politics that is both too broad (everything is political) and too narrow (prioritizing marginal over universal demands). Like their MANGO peers, psychoanalysts are free to expound upon the virtues of diversity, marginality, and fluidity, and in so doing to secure valuable social capital.

The second explanation is more particular to the field itself: The leaders of the burgeoning social turn derive their sense of urgency from the belief that, because they possess specialized professional knowledge of the psychological mechanisms at work in various social pathologies, they are both uniquely qualified and morally obligated to address them. Psychological training equips analysts with powerful conceptual tools within the clinical context. It can be tempting to want to apply those same tools outside of the particular context in which they are useful, and even to so extend their reach that they displace sociological or political-economic analyses. But this extension of psychological explanations lends itself to an overvaluation of credentialized, technical expertise—analysts’ own.

That psychoanalysts tend to psychologize the political problems facing society should surprise no one. It is a predictable response coming from a group of professionals whose moral identity and commitments—not to mention career prospects—are in many ways tied to getting this wrong. Psychologizing social problems provides analysts a sense of agency in a situation in which they are powerless but morally compelled. Still, no amount of psychological analysis can be expected to address the causes of social problems that lie far upstream of the symptoms that analysts encounter. On the other hand, these efforts can and do negatively impact clinical practice and institutional pedagogy.

Flattening the Singularity of Dale

Guralnik sits with her peer advisory group discussing the case of a young black couple, India and Dale. Dale, we are told, has an aversion to anger because he grew up with a strict pastor grandfather. It is getting in their way as a couple. Guralnik asks the group how she might “find a language” to expand the conversation with them. A voice from off-screen interjects, “Can I ask a question? Has your whiteness been named?” Guralnik asks in what way. The voice continues, “Have they ever challenged you about it?” Guralnik smiles and says no. Her questioner, Dr. Kali Cyrus, nods her head knowingly and asserts, “I want them to.” She suggests that Guralnik inquire deeper about their “difference.” The group agrees that Dale is trying to silence India because of his internalized racism, and they believe that it would be helpful if the two of them could describe it. Guralnik asks Cyrus, “But how do you get there?” and Cyrus responds, “You can even be like, ‘I know I’m a white therapist, but could you help me understand what this feels like from your perspective?’” This is precisely what Guralnik does in the very next scene with India and Dale.

Doherty cites a sobering statistic in her Harper’s piece: while 10,000 Americans are in psychoanalysis today for ailments like depression and anxiety, 40 million are treating those same symptoms through psychiatric medication. In light of these numbers, the righteous overtones and exhortations of urgency coming from the politico-psychoanalytic vanguard cover over certain realities of the field—namely its abject marginality. Moral high roads and lines drawn in the sand have led to a scene in which analysts are competing amongst themselves over who can most capably wield a set of far-flung categories, mostly imported from academia, and integrate them into psychoanalytic thought. The nature of these categories and the context in which they have been introduced has at once rigidified the field’s thinking and sent analysts scattering to cover their moral and political tracks. The result is that analysts are no closer to the aim of expanding the field’s reach to more marginalized communities, while being further than ever from working through the primary problems of the field itself, i.e., those posed from within their consulting rooms.

An important difference between psychoanalysis and all other therapeutic modalities and treatment options is its insistence that the analyst does not possess the answers. It is a field founded on evenly suspended attention, whose method proceeds through adherence to discourse as it unfolds, without any prior end in mind. Its method is discovery by surprise, allowing for fragments to emerge that are as bizarre, oblique, and particular as the patient is singular. It is an open-ended inquiry so as to catch the unconscious off guard.

Conversely, a paved path provides coordinates for the unconscious, tools with which to avoid confrontation with the deepest sources of conflict and bypass forbidden desires. The contemporary fixation on fitting patient experience into a grid of political categories and concerns provides plenty of such equipment. Analysts’ desire, on an individual or an institutional level, to “bring race into the room,” for example, short-circuits the strategy of open-ended inquiry by creating expectations for what should or shouldn’t happen in a treatment. Rather than tackling the task of navigating and working through unconscious avoidance, such a predetermined set of expectations for what will need to come out in the course of an analysis risks aiding it. In Dale’s case, even if we accept that it might be good for him to “challenge Guralnik’s whiteness,” prefiguring that outcome deprives him of the opportunity to arrive there freely and organically through a confrontation with his own conflicts and desires. Instead Dale is guided, very possibly as he has been throughout much of his life, towards an end that others desire for him.

As Doherty’s numbers suggest, the clinical issues facing the field today are formidable. Addiction, rises in teen and adolescent suicidality, the increasing prevalence of socially isolating diagnoses such as autism, BPD, and psychosis, serious lags in children’s (especially boys’) educational achievement, mental health, and transitions to adulthood make for a daunting and complex clinical picture. Many, if not all, of these issues are exacerbated by near constant interaction with newer and more absorbing forms of technology. If a sense of urgency for members of the psychoanalytic field is to be derived from anywhere, it is here: that all of these problems are currently being addressed primarily through band-aid solutions that further estrange people from their experience rather than deepening and enriching their relation to it.

With all the ruckus about diversifying the field and extending the reach of psychoanalysis, some rather straightforward approaches seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle. For a field historically distinguished as an elite concierge service accessible only to the very rich, one would think that finding ways to make it financially affordable without compromising the basic dignity of the psychoanalytic process would be an obvious priority. This could start with a vision of state-funding for public clinics, or a plan to secure roles for analysts in the most heavily trafficked and emotionally acute sites of social life: in schools, hospitals, and social service agencies. It might involve recruiting analysts who are good at institutional organization, handling logistics, lobbying legislators, even working creatively around evidence-based treatment standards and Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement requirements. Ultimately a real “social turn” for psychoanalysis would look relatively pedestrian compared to the grandiose ambitions of Doherty’s lot, but it could play a substantial part in meeting real needs of contemporary malaise.

Psychoanalysis can aim higher than moulding its theory to fit with ever shifting elite demands, and also lower than healing all of society through its clinical practices and institutional missions. Ultimately, the psychoanalysis that will be most useful for a wider public is one that embraces some basic limitations: clinically, institutionally, and in its role in society. While psychoanalysis can and often does promote greater capacity for civic engagement, it is meaningful, important, and good enough as a practice which works through debilitating suffering and promotes facility with alienating symptoms. What the field needs today is not condemnation and critique so much as some modest confidence in and clarity about the unique value of psychoanalytic interventions, and coherence around what makes even the most archaic psychoanalytic theory still profound and transformative today.

Ricky Levitt is a psychoanalytic candidate in NYC.

Christie Offenbacher works as a psychoanalyst in private practice and at a public clinic in NYC, and teaches at the School of Visual Arts.

Subscribe now

At the end of Milan’s M1 metro line you’ll find Sesto San Giovanni, a sizable blue-collar city. It was once called “Italy’s Stalingrad,” not only for its Brutalist concrete block apartment buildings and hulking steelworks, but also because Sesto San Giovanni was consistently one of the most left-wing towns in Italy. Older residents are still proud of the role the city played in the Resistance. From 1922 until liberation in 1945, Sesto’s denizens organized strikes, barricades, and protests against the Fascist government. Many workers gave their lives for the cause. For these actions the city was later awarded a gold medal for military valor by the Italian Republic. After the war, for decades, this working-class town consistently voted for the powerful Italian Communist Party and its successors, while Milan, its much richer big city neighbor, typically voted for the Right.

That’s all over. In 2017 Sesto elected a right-wing mayor for the first time in 71 years. And in 2022, Sesto voted for Giorgia Meloni’s right-populist alliance by double-digit margins. Over the same period, Milan, rich as ever, has drifted to the left.

Immigration was the issue at the heart of these elections.

Progressives have lamented the fall of Italy’s Stalingrad, blaming their electoral losses on skillful scapegoating by Meloni and the even harder-right Lega Party. And it’s true that the Right has stirred up anxieties and ratcheted up the emotional pitch of the debate, talking about immigrants as if they were all criminals or worse, an invading army. But the Left would be wrong to assume that immigration skepticism is akin to an infectious hate-virus spread by the Right or the product of “misinformation.” Voters didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that immigration was a big problem—big enough that they would give up generations of political loyalty—simply because right-wing demagogues said so.

In Italy, immigration has increased dramatically year-over-year since 2000. And Sesto has seen a significantly larger increase than the country at large. At the same time, the country’s economy remains stagnant, and salaries are now slightly below what they were in 1990. The region’s major industries—once a font of stable, decent, working-class jobs—have closed up. None of the four major metalworks still operate today. As they shuttered, so did the social and cultural organizations of the working class. Workers of the mid-century enjoyed a decent wage and a thick associational life, both made possible by the labor movement. Today’s workers have neither. The children of Sesto’s former factory workers now look for jobs in less stable, lower-wage services, or else they move abroad. In this context, left-wing appeals to openness and multiculturalism rang hollow while the Right’s promise to restrict immigration and restore social and economic security found wide support.

While there are certain peculiarities that make Sesto a particularly dramatic case—few cities are home to both a Karl Marx library and a Gramsci Avenue—in many ways it’s like any other rust belt town in any rich country anywhere in the world. The Left has lost working-class towns like this all over the globe. And in many cases, they’ve lost them because they’ve lost the debate on immigration.

In fact, over the last three decades, immigration has emerged as the signature issue that has allowed right-populist parties to pull blue-collar voters away from the Left. That’s because mass immigration is the most visible social byproduct of globalization. The challenges associated with it represent all that is dysfunctional in the contemporary political and social order: economic scarcity, social anomie, uprootedness, and cultural alienation. Without a compelling answer to these challenges, the Left will continue to flounder.

Subscribe now

How the Left Lost on Immigration

Among the well-educated there is a notion that support for immigration restriction is an outgrowth of ugly, racist, or bigoted views. It can be that, sure. But even then, ugly and racist views don’t rise to the level of social or political signifcance—on a global scale no less—unless there is something driving them. What is the motive? Scarcity, for one. The very nature of immigration calls attention to economic scarcity in a way that few other social phenomena do. After all, the reason people travel tens of thousands of miles to find good work is because there is none at home. And the reason native workers resist their coming is because there are fewer and fewer good jobs to go around.

As a recent paper from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank demonstrates, the surge of mass immigration to the United States from 2021 to 2024 “helped cool” a supposedly “overheated” labor market. Translation: immigration suppressed wages. Further, this “cooling” was felt most acutely by those already living hard-scrabble lives—manual workers without university education. As the authors report, workers in construction and manufacturing—that is, those workers progressives most desperately need to win—“saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth.” To make matters worse, this happened just as inflation exploded and prices soared.

But it’s not only that native-born workers in rich countries are forced into wage competition with foreign-born workers. It’s that for the last 30 years or so, these workers have been losing the same wage competition to foreign workers abroad. Factories drained out of places like the American Midwest, the English Midlands and Italian towns like Sesto because labor was cheaper elsewhere. Now the plants are gone, and whoever is left in these former industrial hubs is thrown into an intensified wage competition with over-exploited immigrants for the few decent jobs that remain. It’s an employer’s dream.

Economists never tire of pointing out the macroeconomic upsides to having a large, docile pool of cheap migrant labor—think of all the new restaurants, affordable services, and low grocery prices. No doubt, the free trade in goods and labor has juiced economic growth. But it’s not as if one click upwards in GDP translates to a wage hike for the average laborer. Most of the gains from this growth have accrued at the top. What’s more, free-trade-fueled growth has come at significant social costs that are rarely mentioned—probably because they aren’t felt by economists. Instead, it’s working-class communities that bear the burden. Not only are the border towns that house and manage the integration of recent arrivals—from Southern Italy to Southwest Texas—overwhelmingly working-class, but they are often small towns where the social character, municipal services, and general way of life are easily overwhelmed by a surge of immigration. Add to the mix that many of the new arrivals are single young men struggling to find steady, dignified work, isolated in their host nation, and, as a result, suffering from acute anomie. Though perhaps through little fault of their own, they aren’t exactly the easiest new neighbors.

While it’s true that steady and orderly immigration doesn’t increase crime rates, there is evidence that large surges in immigration are followed by spikes in crime and social disorder. Yet concerns about order and safety are routinely dismissed by liberals and progressives rather than addressed as genuine challenges. Ironically, many who favor liberal asylum and immigration laws appeal to a spirit of solidarity, arguing that asylum seekers are victims of crime, violence, and low wages in their home countries. And they are; their conditions rightly outrage our sense of justice. At the same time, complaints of crime, violence and low-wages from native-born workers are not received with the same sense of moral outrage. Instead, they are combed over with powerful statistical tools designed to prove that such anxieties are little more than a mask for hate. Can’t it be that the victims of hyper-globalization are both the immigrants and the native-born?

Today, progressives are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the question of immigration because it was mainstream center-left parties in the core economies, like the United States, UK, and Northern Europe, that helped develop the broad tenets of globalism that now face backlash at the polls. In these countries, the center-Left designed, promoted, and defended the free-trade treaties, the complimentary migration policies, and the promise of a globalized economy while justifying such policies with shallow appeals to multiculturalism and tolerance. As a result, to many workers, the Left are the globalists responsible for this mess.

As the center-left embraced globalism, they also traded their blue-collar social bases for the Brahmin voters who dominate these parties today. The class composition of the current parties of the Left has blinded them to the nature of the problem and the ways in which slogans of global openness are received by blue-collar workers. By virtue of their white-collar work life, most progressives are not adversely affected by immigration—in fact, in many ways, thanks to cheaper services and more diverse consumer choices, they actually benefit. As a result, they have internalized the notion that globalized labor markets benefit all. They are perennially shocked to find that the masses reject that claim.

A Left that cannot mount a serious critique of what historian Perry Anderson has called “factor mobility”—the fluid exchange of people and money that keeps global capitalism limping along—will continue to fail. To put it more plainly, those who discuss immigration as a matter of tolerance, pluralism, and global openness while neglecting to mention the social, cultural, and economic challenges—in a time of extreme inequality and stagnant growth rates—are advocating political suicide. They are rolling out the red carpet for the Right.

Subscribe now

The recent elections in Portugal prove the point. In the lead-up to the May 2025 snap election, open-borders leftists insisted that Portuguese progressives need not change tact on immigration. They could win big by promising better public services and more social insurance programs, while leaving the border issue to the Right. But as journalist Juan David Rojas noted, this was a doomed strategy. Portugal is a small, and relatively poor, country on the periphery of Europe. From 2020 to 2024 the foreign-born population there more than doubled. By the time of the election, 70 percent of Portuguese voters said they favored less immigration. Predictably, the Left got walloped.

The center-right Democratic Action won the day. But a hard-right populist party stole the headlines. As recently as 2019, the right-wing party Chega (translation, “enough”) polled at a measly 1%. They now control the same share of the vote as the center-left Socialists (22.8%). According to the New York Times they “made inroads in regions that were historically strongholds of the left.” The voteshare of far-left Bloco, meanwhile, was cut in half—to 2%. “It’s not the Left anymore” that represents the working class, said Professor Antonio Costa Pinto, a left-wing political scientist. “Chega is the protagonist of the anti-establishment feelings.”

Counterexamples: Denmark and Mexico

So what, then, is the path forward for the Left? As Anderson has noted, while Right and Left can both rail against the elites, oligarchs, and negative social effects of neoliberal capitalism, only the Right can effectively rail against immigration “with still greater vehemence, xenophobia towards immigrants operating as its trump card.” But there, Anderson writes, “populisms of the left cannot follow without moral suicide.” He’s correct. ICE, at the direction of President Trump and the hard-right architects of the administration’s mass deportation policy, has spent the past year tearing apart peaceful, hard-working families and flinging neighborhoods into terror. Endorsing that program would indeed be moral suicide, and with few political benefits, as most workers disagree with the viciousness of Trump’s deportation machine.

The barbarism of the Right’s immigration program only underscores the urgency for the Left to find a solution to the immigration question that is economically sound, morally defensible, and, crucially, provides a viable way back to power. In recent years, a handful of left-wing parties across the globe have managed to articulate a straightforward progressive opposition to mass migration that has proven capable of outflanking right-wing populists. In Mexico, the left-populist MORENA initially adopted the standard liberal-humanitarian line on immigration but soon cooperated with Trump’s Migrant Protections Protocols and implemented stronger protections on both the Northern US and Southern Guatemalan borders. Importantly, MORENA has framed the mass migration issue in starkly left-wing terms, both as a fight against American corporations with globalist ambitions and as a fight for human dignity and workers’ right to stay at home. This formula went well beyond anything the Right was offering.

While mass immigration may benefit rich receiver-nations (or rather, may benefit the ruling classes of rich receiver nations), mass emigration is often a disaster for poorer supplier-nations. “Brain-drain,” lost productivity, and shrinking tax revenue are persistent and bedeviling problems for any developing nation that suffers from excessive outmigration, as are the social hardships of broken families and depopulated small towns. Any way you slice it, the economic case for liberalized borders rests on a kind of rich country chauvinism wherein the role of all poor nations is to provide the rich ones with an endless supply of cheap labor and consumer goods. The whole world’s people, poor as most of them are, are expected to take it as their duty and destiny to contribute to the GDP of the United States and Europe. In Mexico, AMLO and his successor Claudia Sheinbaum pitched their populism in these terms. Their criticism of immigration was understood not as cruelty or hostility toward newcomers but as a defense of a beleaguered nation. Combined with the party’s successful new social and economic reforms, this full-throated populism has attracted and retained a working-class base. In Mexico “populism” is a creature exclusively of the Left. And today MORENA might be the only left-wing party in the world to actually grow its share of working-class voters in recent elections.

Similarly, though under very different conditions, the Social Democrats of Denmark under prime minister Mette Frederiksen called for reductions in immigration long before the Right had a chance to capitalize on the issue. Like MORENA, they have avoided hysterical, inflammatory, or xenophobic rhetoric and instead framed the issue as one of workers’ rights and against “social dumping.” Frederiksen’s populism combines a criticism of globalism with a traditional social democratic egalitarianism: “An American capital fund buying our homes. A bonus of several hundred million kroners to a CEO. Does greed know of no boundaries?” Though, unlike many of her contemporaries on the Left, she sees democratic control of the border as a pillar of progressive principle.

As a result, her party—unlike virtually all other left-leaning parties in Europe—has maintained their long-standing base of workers and stanched a right-wing populist wave. In fact, while far-right parties have been surging on the rest of the continent, in Denmark’s most recent elections, the nationalist Danish People’s Party was barely able to hold onto a single seat. Moreover, the Danish Social Democrats’ continued electoral success has translated to policy victories, expanding benefits and deepening the social state—which, in turn, has strengthened their political position.

Populists of the Left in Denmark and Mexico explicitly tied globalization and mass migration to the “Washington Consensus” and the interests of multinationals and high-finance. That is, they pitched migration restrictions against the capitalist plot to rob their nations of wealth, sovereignty, power, social protections, trust, and high-skill workers. They connected the ills of globalized finance with the travails of globalized labor, rightly noting that to address either we must address both. As they won back the working class, parties like MORENA and the Danish Social Democrats became more, not less, migration skeptical. At the same time, they have not embraced the cruelty or thoughtless xenophobia of parties of the Right. “Our government wishes to help people who are fleeing war and violence,” argued Frederiksen in a recent speech, “Help in the regions of origin. This is where we can help the most.”

The success of both MORENA and that of the Danish Social Democrats offers a lesson: there is no reason to embrace the hateful rhetoric of the Right, but there is good reason to demand democratic control over the labor market.

Sovereignty, Democracy, and Internationalism

Still, in a last-ditch attempt to avoid taking political responsibility, some will argue that we can simply organize our way out of this conundrum. If foreign-born workers all join a union, they might say, then immigrant labor would cease to act as a wage-depressing reserve. By organizing, they will have succeeded in democratically regulating the labor market at the firm level. Plus, in the process of organizing, many native-born workers will come to see immigrant workers as equals in the fight against their employer. No doubt, this is an elegant and attractive solution. The problem is that it is almost impossible to do at scale.

In their classic study, Racial Competition and Class Solidarity, sociologists Terry Boswell, Cliff Brown, John Brueggemann, and T. Ralph Peters Jr. found two major factors that explained the failure of cross-race organizing on the shopfloor. The first was obvious: overtly racist paternalism on the part of employers. In such cases solidarity was smothered. But the second factor was merely the presence of recent immigrants. They concluded that, in the cases they studied, as “employers attempted to replace dominant labor with cheaper minority labor, racial competition resulted in renewed racial antagonism and segregation of the labor market by unions.” A constant stream of new entrants into the labor market, it seems, makes workplace organizing much, much harder. Under such conditions, racial balkanization and competition typically prevails. And with the labor movement in the sorry state that it’s in, where we can’t even organize enough native-born workers to halt our decline (let alone grow), how should we expect the unions to organize the millions of undocumented workers needed to reverse the effects of wage suppression, while also changing the hearts and minds of millions more? The “organize everyone” argument serves more as psychological comfort to people on the Left than it does to provide a compelling solution.

To find a real solution we must begin by understanding that a critique of global migration need not be synonymous with anti-immigrant scapegoating. To be sure, in the US, the working class has not actually embraced the reactionary caricature that some liberals imagine. As the Center for Working-Class Politics has shown, even as a majority of working-class voters support tighter restrictions on migration and greater investments in border security, they also favor a pathway to citizenship and are broadly opposed to deportations of peaceful, lawful residents without due process. That’s hardly a program of xenophobia. Instead, it seems a straightforward attempt to wrest some control back from the wild consequences of unfettered globalization. As a Trump-voting asphalt worker recently told me, it’s not the immigrants he has a problem with, it’s a system that encourages a “permanent under-class of workers.”

There’s our political opening. Taking advantage of it requires breaking with the way the contemporary Left has dealt with the migration question. It’s not that the open-borders Left is too utopian, or too idealistic—quite the opposite. They are too committed to the status quo. Until now, fluid borders and global movement have been seen as synonymous with the old socialist ideal of internationalism. But nothing could be further from the truth. Internationalism supposes that nation-states could, and should, democratically cooperate to pursue shared interests or mitigate mutual conflicts. Internationalism depends on democracy and sovereignty. Yet on the question of migration—in both rich, labor-importing countries and poor, labor-exporting countries—democracy and sovereignty are nowhere to be found. The decision to become a hyper-mobile world wasn’t much of a decision at all. The imperatives of the market, and the interest of financial elites at home and abroad, demanded that labor become more liquid on a global scale. Voters were only consulted after the fact. In such a situation democratic internationalism has given way to globalist, technocratic governance. And in whose interest? Sovereignty has been ceded to the demands of the market, the demands of capital.

Mistaking globalism for internationalism and prizing autonomy (the freedom of movement) over sovereignty (the capacity for self-rule), we’ve rendered questions about immigration in moralistic, rather than democratic, terms. The fluidity of labor and capital are naturalized, while their effects on social cohesion and solidarity are made invisible. This position, if it can even be considered political, only risks further empowering the Right. Worse, it is socially and morally indefensible in the long term. If we wish to have a stable and solidaristic social world, we cannot endorse ceaseless, constant churn. And if we wish to have a democratic society we cannot have a global market in labor, any more than we can have a global market in finance.

To put it simply, if we want to win back working-class voters, we should take seriously what they are voting for. They are demanding democratic control over the labor market and a restoration of social order. They are demanding a reduction of the all-consuming market’s scale from the global to the national level. To pursue those aims is not a cynical election maneuver. Nor does it run against our moral duty. Instead, it is in line with our broader goals of restoring the power of ordinary citizens over their nation-states, of strengthening the position of labor at home and abroad, and of reasserting the promise of internationalism over the failure of globalism. There lies the path between moral and political suicide.

Dustin Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and a Board Member of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Subscribe to Damage