This essay is from our sixth (and final) print issue, “Trains,” which is out now. Order your copy here.

Paranapiacaba is almost permanently shrouded in fog; maybe the Victorian Englishmen who worked in the town would have felt right at home, were it not for the mountains and the dense Atlantic rainforest—denser than the Amazonian—and the humidity, the bugs, and so on. The railway village, built in the 1860s by the São Paulo Railway Co., would thirty years later put up a Big Ben-style clock tower at the station. It’s unclear whether this represented a symbol of modernity or civilization to passers-through back then, but today it looks both tacky and iconic, out of place but evocative.

Paranapiacaba is perched 800 meters up on the scarp of the jungle-covered Serra do Mar mountain range and means “place whence one sees the sea” in Tupi-Gurani. Below it at sea-level is the petrochemical hub Cubatão—in the 1980s one of the world’s most polluted places, generative of health problems so severe babies were birthed still-born. Beyond this erstwhile “Valley of Death,” on an island facing the open ocean, is Santos and its port, today the largest in Latin America but one which barely sneaks into the global top 40 of maritime hubs—a fact indicative of the region’s diminished global economic standing.

Paranapiacaba was built to house workers and engineers on the railway, which was built to transport coffee, whose agriculture was then booming—an economic dynamism based on commodity production and export, the use-values of which would pass through Santos on its way to Europe and North America.

From the Santos lowlands, the tracks scaled the Serra do Mar through a funicular railway and rack and pinion system, and continued onwards, through São Paulo’s eponymous capital (50 km inland) and on to Jundiaí (another 50 km). On its way up, it carried millions of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Japanese immigrants who would work on the coffee plantations and other farms, and eventually in São Paulo’s burgeoning manufacturing industry. Indeed, that train line stopped in Brás, central São Paulo, where a guesthouse functioned as the first place of arrival for migrants: Brazil’s Ellis Island. Like Paranapiacaba, the disused train station and its environs now hosts events and festivals, serving educational and memorialization functions, a part of the industrial-heritage industry.

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Road Over Rail

The birth of Brazilian railways is evocative of the country’s colonial mentality, even decades after independence. As Odilson Nogueira de Matos explained in his noteworthy Café e ferrovias (1973), it was the English who primarily built the railways because “it was madness to suppose that a Brazilian could be the initiator of such an undertaking. There was no capital, no men, nor could there be ideals in a commercial and industrial body whose base of operations was the importation of slaves from the coast of Africa.” It took the 1850 Eusebio de Queiroz law restricting the slave trade to free-up capital to for the first railways to be built, before the British came in with more significant investment and know-how.

Brazil’s first railway was inaugurated in 1854 and from the 1870s the country (or at least the southeastern state of São Paulo) experienced “railway fever,” as the imperial government guaranteed returns of seven to ten percent over declared capital. But rail was not actually a pioneer, as it was almost everywhere else in the world. It did not open new frontiers but rather accompanied those being cleared by coffee. “Built to serve the interests and conveniences of the farmers,” Matos explained, “the São Paulo railway network, in its arboreal aspect, gives us today the impression of a total lack of planning, which explains why, once the economic basis that motivated it was overcome,” the railway decayed. Rail in Brazil was just a means of getting raw materials out of the country. Corridors generally run West to East, draining out to sea. There was no attempt at building an integrated network, only at funnelling wealth out. The agrarian elite responsible for railway fever had no interest in a strong internal market nor in national integration, which resulted, for example, in a range of different track gauges adopted across the country. It was the political fragmentation of the First Republic (1880-1930) manifested in iron.

The contrast with the US is stark. As Noam Maggor has observed, “What set the US apart from other peripheries was the capacity of the state, empowered by a mobilized agrarian population, to politicize economic policymaking and harness capital in favor of broad developmental priorities.” Organized agrarian interests drove regulation that balanced less-profitable local rail against long-distance trains, whereas in Mexico—though this applies, mutatis mutandis, to Brazil—one would see peasants walking alongside rail lines, rather than being carried upon them. This disregard for local service “contributed to a pattern of uneven development, with a few booming import and export hubs surrounded by vast areas of poverty. Comprador elites, embedded in existing extractive sectors and trade relations, helped defeat political efforts to remake these economies along more balanced lines.”

The 1929 economic crash was also coffee’s bust, and in turn that of the railways that conveyed the beans to ports. Getúlio Vargas’ nationalist government, brought to power by the 1930 Revolution that put paid to the oligarchy, reflected its Bonapartist homologues elsewhere (FDR, Mussolini…). But the nationalization of railways here was more of a bailout, a rescue operation to ward against the knock-on effects that abandoned or bankrupt railways would have across the economy.

Already in 1928, Washington Luis, the last president of the Old Republic, had signalled a change in direction: “To govern is to open roads” he declared, inaugurating the Rio-Petropolis highway, symbolizing a new idea of progress. The corporatist Vargas era that followed (1930-45) centralized the management of railways at the same time as laying the groundwork for the pivot to road, made good upon by Juscelino Kubitschek’s modernizing government (1956-61), which promised “fifty years in five.”

Kubitschek enticed General Motors, Ford, and Volkswagen to set up factories in Brazil through policies such as tax exemptions with stringent local component criteria imposed in return. The automotive industry has a more important multiplier effect than rail, and employed skilled labor to a degree that had not existed in Brazil until then. Moreover, road rendered more immediate political benefit than rail: it was quicker and cheaper to build, explains Talita Lessa Melo, a researcher into the past and present of Brazilian railways, and it sold a vision of speed, autonomy, and popular accessibility. Throughout the developmentalist 1930-80 period, the roadway simply offered more possibility than rail. It was a fortuitous confluence between capitalist interests, developmentalist vision, and a sellable idea.

It was then that the country built and inaugurated a new, modernist capital, Brasília, on a plateau nearly 1000 km inland of the old capital, Rio de Janeiro. The country was undergoing industrialization and urbanization at a blistering pace, and the working class’s share of income was rising. “Centuries ago, cities were built where men decided to stop. Today, man decides where he wants to build,” a government brochure declared. Pointedly, the New Yorker’s story on this “fitting symbol of the country’s future” was entitled “Man Decides Where.” But it was the elevated bus station that served as the centerpiece of the new capital’s non-governmental architecture, not a rail terminus.

The military dictatorship that seized power in the 1964 coup and held it until 1985 rode through the 1973 oil crisis, doubling Brazil’s bet on the car, through oil exploration and the massive expansion of the sugarcane ethanol industry in 1975. What investment in rail was left ended up serving as an argument against it: delivery of the giant Ferrovia do Aço (steel railway) was promised in 1000 days, but it was never completed, consolidating the notion that rail was costly and impracticable.

By the time the Brazilian growth machine halted at the start of the 1980s, the network was in terrible shape, and then came neoliberal counter-reforms which dealt their usual coup, especially once the reins of government were handed over to civilians to do the dirty work. Rail was privatized, the network was disaggregated and fragmented, and new concession-holders were divested of any obligation to invest. Cross-subsidization of less profitable lines was ruled out, so rail persisted as a means to transport soy and iron, while the rest of the network decayed even further.

Today, rail is controlled by big agribusiness, mining, and financial interests; it is only built where it is profitable and ownership is hugely concentrated. Rumo Logística owns about half the network (14,000 km); Vale—formerly a state-owned enterprise set up by Vargas, today one of the biggest mining companies in the world—owns another 2,000 km. Many lines have extremely slow operation speeds, made worse by the occupation of lines by poor communities—a favelization that speaks to yawning developmental gaps in the country. Passenger rail is at best 4% of the network—mainly urban commuter trains and a few lingering tourist trains going nowhere important. It is another snapshot of Brazil’s exemplary “premature deindustrialization”—a shift to services at income levels well below those of Britain or the US when they underwent similar processes.

Iron Fetish

From 1900 to 1980, Brazil averaged economic growth of over 5 percent per annum (3 percent on a per-capita basis), accelerating to 7 percent in the 1950-80 period, making it the fastest growing country in the world after Japan. It was an icon of modernization, but anyone predicting then that this “country of the future”—as Stefan Zweig had dubbed it a decade before—was getting there on iron tracks was greatly mistaken.

In many other countries, rail is rightly associated with industrial progress and modernity. But in Brazil’s growth period, roads had already supplanted rail. Rail never led; it merely followed, and then limped along. It was never an agent of national integration, and is barely even a memory anymore.

Still, rail, unlike other industrial structures, sticks around. Brazil has no good reason to be wistful for rail, but while the rest of the brick and iron remnants of manufacturing are gone, rail and railroad structures still stand. According to Eduardo Romero de Oliveira, a professor at UNESP and coordinator of the Memorias Ferroviarias (Railway Memories) project, this makes the railway iconic and idealized, even if it deserves neither.

The more extensive passenger rail of the early twentieth century was a means of conveyance in a still mostly rural Brazil, carrying people from small town to small town. The urban Brazil that emerged from the 1960s on had less need for inter-city passenger rail. Today Brazil is 86% urban, and over half of the population lives in mid-size to large cities.

The city of Rio Claro is exemplary, for Oliveira, of an ambivalent relation to rail. It is a “small” city (population: 200,000) in the agricultural interior of São Paulo state. The old Companhia Paulista trunk line runs through it, now serving freight coming from the agribiz heartland of Goiás. “Modernity” is to be found in that agroindustry—technologically advanced, hugely capital-intensive, Brazil the world’s breadbasket…—but in a way that “does not touch the lives of ordinary people.” Residents complain about the traffic-generating level crossing, but when asked if passenger rail should “return,” they think the idea “great, lovely, cute.”

This is probably inspired by memories of riding a Maria Fumaça—the steam locomotives that long ago earned the nickname “smoking Maria”—at one railway heritage site or another. Or there’s the fact that the first line of the book all Brazilians study in school, Dom Casmurro, by the literary master of the periphery, Machado de Assis, starts off with a reference to an unexpected encounter that happens on a train. Already in 1975, Milton Nascimento, one of Brazil’s most celebrated musicians, released a track called Ponta de areia, in which he laments the abandonment of the Estrada de Ferro Bahia e Minas line which had run from 1882 to 1966. They ordered the railroad to be torn up / The old machinist with his cap / Remembers the cheerful people who would come celebrate it / The steam engine doesn’t sing anymore. If that was nostalgia then, today Brazilians can only be nostalgic for nostalgia—akin to the third stage in Baudrilliard’s terms of distance from the real, where the sign masks the absence of a profound reality.

So when the residents of Rio Claro inveigh against the state’s dereliction of duty for not sustaining railway transport, Oliveira hears something else: words that don’t sound genuine, that are more like a repetition of someone else’s, the thing you’re supposed to say.

The train, for Brazil, is a fairytale: a fetish, not a transit solution; an image of a past modernity, now turned quaint, not a vision for the future.

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Do, Just Do

Business mouthpieces love to go on about the Custo Brasil, the high cost of doing business in Brazil associated with the drag created by labor legislation, trade unions, public bureaucracy, taxation, and so on. These complaints are usually about cutting workers’ entitlements. But they also, rightly, concern underdeveloped infrastructure. If 61% of all cargo is being trucked around a continental-size country by road (75% when you discount iron ore), that would seem to be an easy target for upgrading—through rail. The fact that it isn’t speaks to an economic irrationality from the perspective of capital itself; a failure of the state to act in the interests of capital in general.

Talita Lessa Melo puts this down to the force of “rodoviarismo,” or highwayism, an entrenched commitment to the road and automobile and all that is associated with it. But we should look beyond isms. The reality is that there are a lot of vested interests in road, notably road-builders and bus companies, and truckers and their bosses. The last of these brought the country to a halt in 2018, in the lead-up to Bolsonaro’s election, in a divisive, politically ambivalent nationwide strike over fuel costs. But again, there is a greater rationality here—the efficiency of rail—which should have buy-in from business interests. Those that prevail, though, are those like finance and the extractive industries, interests that are directed outward, not inward to national development.

Some steps are being made at rationalization, such as the Legal Framework for Railways (2021), which facilitates private investment in the construction of railways and in the use of idle stretches of existing lines. 11,000 km of projects have so far been approved. But this is merely accelerating down the same track of facilitating commodity exports—or as one study put it, it is “reinforcing the market power of incumbent operators and failing to significantly promote intramodal competition or cargo diversification.”

Meanwhile, the 400 km span between São Paulo (metro area population: 23 million) and Rio de Janeiro (14 million) remains unconnected by high-speed rail (HSR). The line has been projected since the late 1980s—and talk ramped up in the lead up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics—but without so much as a spade having been buried into the ground. Construction of the latest project, conceded to private company TAV Brasil and aiming for 300 kmh speeds, was due to begin in 2027. It has now been pushed back a year, with the Workers Party government careful to emphasize that this is a purely private project (a global rarity in such ventures), in turn drawing complaints from TAV Brasil about lack of state support.

More significant is the fact that the global winds are changing: state capitalism is the coming order of the day. Megaprojects are back, and with it, rail-building. But evidence of a change in mentality in Brazil is still very sparse. There is the small, if growing, camp of neo-Stalinists eager to “do a China” in just about any area of policy, but they have little institutional representation. And the fact remains that Brazil is the only non-signatory to China’s Belt and Road initiative among large Latin American countries, together with Mexico. The current planning minister’s enthusiasm for a rail link through the Amazon to Peruvian ports is just a means of selling more commodities to China, not some imitation of its deep and wide infrastructural investment. If backward-looking train nostalgia drives no political action, neither does future-oriented rail build-out.

Of course, China’s own massive build-out of rail is not easily replicable elsewhere, and would not even be economically justifiable in China, without the huge amounts of excess capital that the state can mobilize. But once you have it, you have it. And what China has done is undoubtedly astounding, a marvel of capitalist development. It is a vision of modernity—understanding the network as an integration project—that has been adopted both East (China) and West (Europe); it is a yardstick of development, one by which countries such as Britain and even Germany now measure up poorly. France, which kept rail under state ownership and invested in its network, came out the other side of neoliberalism much better off. A similar story could be told about its nuclear power plants. For Tim Abrahams, host of the Superurbanism podcast, historical vulnerability (Alsatian coal might be taken by the Germans!) cultivated a planning culture of not relying on one thing.

This is an important lesson. Brazil needs to upgrade its infrastructure in toto. What, for instance, is the role of electric vehicles (EVs)? As Benjamin Bradlow, a Princeton scholar studying Chinese EVs in Brazil points out, EVs may not represent futurity in a conventional way, as a transport revolution, but rather as a geopolitical one. For instance, Chinese automakers, led by BYD, are investing heavily in Brazil, to the tune of $1 billion to establish manufacturing, including in electric trucks and buses. Brazil, increasingly talked about as an energy superpower, with ninety percent of its matrix from low-carbon sources, stands to do well out of this new disposition. This is especially the case if claims prove true that electrification is the avatar of the new in a way exceeding whatever small developments there may be in means of transportation.

So it is a matter of doing more, not of never building another highway until a high-speed passenger rail network is built. Britain’s vexatious inertia over building HS2 connecting London and Birmingham is a case in point. It may not be “economically justifiable” in the narrow sense, but the act of delivering such a project proves to the state and citizens both that such a thing is possible, and creates a demand for more of it—and more importantly, it builds capacity. There are those, such as Oliveira, who argue that this misses the point: what good is high-speed rail in a country in which a third of the population still lacks basic sanitation? But this would be precisely that “either/or” vision that misses what comprehensive development is, or should be.

Ultimately, development cannot be reduced to a quaint account of steampowered Brits bestowing modernity, nor of electrified Chinese buying up one’s commodities and delivering rail in return. There is no savior from the outside that will simply bypass the impasse of anti-developmental class forces. In turn, what is required is a national story of overcoming that can energize the populace at large—one that is neither the Cubatão horror story of dirty industry, nor the extractive slash-and-burn that has so often characterized Brazilian development, but one that taps into the utopian energy of the 1950s and 60s.

When this happens, the residents of Rio Claro will no longer think of the idea of trains as “great, lovely, cute.” They will think of them as merely one component of a vast transformation that has changed their lives and that has relegated to the properly historical past the half-century of stagnation and its neoliberal fairytales.

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Alex Hochuli is a political analyst and writer in São Paulo, Brazil. He hosts the global politics podcast, Bungacast, and is co-author of The End of the End of History (Zer0, 2021).

This essay is from our sixth (and final) print issue, “Trains,” which is out now. Order your copy here.

The dread is minimal, but it’s there: that the train autists will read this issue and, if not rally the troops to swarm us with angry emails, then stampede r/trains and work each other into a mass frenzy, possibly resulting in strokes, heart attacks, or suicide. Since it is my sincere goal to prevent anyone from harming themselves or others, I will resist the temptation to reflect on my own family’s three generations in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. I won’t get misty-eyed about my mother’s—and later my—childhood cat, Chessie, named for the mother of the two sleeping kittens who joined her as the mascots of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, where some of the men I come from kept America moving, and whose face dons the vintage wool Chesapeake blanket thrown across the chair across from me right now.

And I won’t talk about my generous support for Los Angeles’s own Travel Town, an outdoor railroad museum—with tourable restored antique freight and passenger cars—where I dedicated a donation to my great grandfather—”Beloved husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, and proud union man”—and whose name is now on the “Restoration Partners” plaque in the Travel Town Arcadia Depot. No, I will speak nothing of that, nor any of the other ways that trains love me more than they love you, you hissing little Deviant-Art freaks.

I’m just here to dance.

A People’s Dance

The transition from steam to diesel train engines began in the mid-1920s, and although there is some pedantic quibbling about what constitutes “retirement,” the 2006 issue of Canadian Pacific Steam places the final year of the steam engine locomotive in the US, save for a few passenger trains, around 1960.

So when Little Eva sang “Come on, come on, do the locomotion with me” in 1962, the technology the dance was pantomiming was already anachronistic. You might assume the reference precluded its christening of a young dance. But you’d be wrong.

The arms, parallel and bent at the elbows, forming two right angles against the body, moved in a single dimension, the hands tracing ovals on either side of the torso, extending forward with the beat before taking an arc backward, like the rotation of the eccentric rod and drive and connecting rods that mobilize the wheels of a steam engine train (you know it’s a steam engine that’s being mimicked because the newer diesel trains don’t have eccentric rods). The Locomotion was as simple as that. Or as complex as you wanted it to be.

It’s what I refer to as a “Peoples’ Dance,” which involves four factors:

1. They travel well. Whether they originated in gogo clubs, dance halls, discotheques, or Tin Pan Alley, they made their way to the masses and eventually permeated popular culture. These are moves that move.

2. They’re “appropriate” in mixed company—at least eventually. There was outrage about “The Twist” that is now generally attributed to a combination of racism, a moral panic over “juvenile delinquents,” general prudishness, and—hand to god—public health concerns, with multiple doctors attesting publicly to the ostensible injurious harm potentially incurred by moving one’s hips. But all that burnt off pretty quickly. And while the Twist can be fun and slutty, its foundational micro-gyration is well-accepted as G-rated, unobjectionable to the minister’s wife in a way that twerking never will be.

3. They are done in public (though not exclusively), with more than one person present. If you see someone doing the dance by themselves, you’re looking at either the artist who popularized it, or a mentally ill person. Or you’re a Peeping Tom (shame on you).

4. And the most important one (this is essential): You do not have to be a good dancer to do them. Or even know how to dance. Improvisation and variations may be extremely advanced, but there is always, always an entry-level foundational move or moves that your mom could—and definitely did, at the Jones’s tiki barbecue after a few Mai Tais—perform with some proficiency.

Moving in Place

Around the mid-50s, America was leaving behind swing dance and it’s highly locomotive (yes, it’s an actual adjective) use of the floor, in favor of more planted, space-saving moves like the Mashed Potato, the Pony, the Bird, the Watusi, the Alligator, the Jerk, the Swim, and a whole bunch more, including the nearly forgotten Locomotion. Think about it: you remember the song, but have you ever learned the dance? Did you even know it was a real dance?

As rhythm and blues music mainstreamed, and Rock ‘n’ Roll began to dominate the radio, dance moves from black Americans were “toned down a little bit” for television consumption, along with desexualized adaptations of the 21-and-up urban night club go-go dancers, who generally weren’t actual strippers or topless dancers but were definitely still titillating enough to be scandalous. Go-go girls had to dance on tiny elevated stages for optimum visibility in a meandering barcrowd, a blocking method that also worked well for performers and dancers on TV, an increasingly common appliance in American households. Cameras kept close to the performer, and while faces were good TV, full body shots let you see how they moved. Sometimes they would even do close-ups of feet.

If you had dance halls or school dances, or just a conducive public space, you might learn to dance with your peers. If you didn’t, you could watch Dick Clark every Saturday at 3 and practice at home. In fact, your local TV station might have their own dance show, featuring local amateurs, just like you. And if you got good enough, you might be able to audition yourself, and be on TV, because if that girl from your rival high school over in South Baltimore can do it, why can’t you?

These new dances—or cutesy’d up old ones—were ready-made for teenybopper programming. A new shoe even came on the market, optimized for the moves, if you were willing to be a little scandalous: go-go boots, with their lower, thick, chunky heels, for a little bit of height and bounce, and virtually no tread, eliminating any friction that might anchor your feet and make it harder to slide or rotate your feet in place. Go-go boots weren’t prohibitively expensive, nor were any of the other fairly quotidian ensembles sported by the kids on American Bandstand and The Buddy Deane Show. You didn’t need a special wardrobe, equipment, or lessons.

You could learn to dance in your living room, right in front of a nineteen-inch TV screen, because while the dancers might be moving a lot, they were usually moving in place. Again, essentially, you didn’t have to be a good dancer! An awful dancer could make the Locomotion look good! And a great dancer could make it look transcendent, embellishing their interpretation to the level of fabulous choreography. But you could keep it bare bones, and no one would laugh at you.

And Little Eva was there pumping you up.

“My little baby sister can do it with ease
It’s easier than learning your A-B-C’s”

You got this! I mean the choreography is in the lyrics.

“Jump up, jump back”

You can do that! That’s as minimal foot movement as anyone could possibly ask of you, and we’re gonna’ make it look good, right? Right! Ok, let’s work the room.

“Now that you can do it, let’s make a chain now”

See what that girl in front of you is doing? Just do that. Actually, I think she’s looking at you for tips. You look like such a pro! Ok, now, don’t forget your hands.

“A chug-a chug-a motion like a railroad train now”

If you feel like challenging yourself, and maybe shootin’ yer shot—no pressure!—you can throw this one out to impress that chick in the slutty go-go boots!

“Do it holding hands if you get the notion”

For a moment, everyone, everywhere, could dance. Then we switched trains.

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In 1935, in the lead-up to a general election, Canadian Prime Minister R.B. Bennett called for a “New Deal,” on the US model of the same name. Voters weren’t convinced by Bennett’s last-minute conversion to economic populism, and Bennett was ousted, along with any future for a Canadian New Deal.

This fact has not stopped Canadian political leaders from calling for a Canadian Green New Deal as shorthand for an all-consuming climate policy. There is no greater advocate for a Canadian Green New Deal than Avi Lewis, who now leads the New Democratic Party. Lewis famously collaborated on the short, viral video about AOC and the GND, “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” and has made a CGND one of the key platforms of his campaign for the NDP leadership.

There are aspects of his vision that are well thought out and in many cases, uniquely Canadian. Lewis calls for the expansion of “green” crown corporations to “mass-produce and install electric heat pumps, rooftop and balcony solar and backup batteries; support new neighbourhood energy utilities that provide geothermal heating and cooling; manufacture electric-battery delivery vans and buses, and farm equipment.” Most Canadians interact with crown corporations—what Americans would know as state-owned enterprises—every day when they want to buy beer, take the train, or send a piece of mail. They are explicitly framed in the language of resisting US tariffs and strengthening the Canadian economy.

So why frame this as part of a “Green New Deal”? In the US itself, the GND framing is of questionable use: while voters like the concrete policy proposals often raised in association with it, the idea of a Green New Deal itself has arguably failed as a rhetorical strategy. Few unions actually ended up supporting it, it lacks the class basis of the Rooseveltian New Deal, and right-wing disparaging combined with the general political inexperience of many of its boosters damaged its reputation.

But at least in the US, there is a foundational American nation-shaping event to point to as a reference. In the New Deal, the country itself was remade, both politically and physically. Infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam have left a lasting impression and serve as a physical reminder of the promise of the New Deal in the American psyche. This is the theoretical strength of the Green New Deal in the US. It appeals to what people already know: memories of their grandparents, infrastructure projects they pass on their way to work, and policies that they interact with every day of their lives. Even where the GND is polarizing, it establishes itself within a clear lineage of American history.

The Canadian Left’s obsession with a GND, by contrast, is simply bizarre. There is no foundational event of an original New Deal to draw on, or Depression-era infrastructure to point to; it is a policy based on an imported logic, framing, history, and politics.

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Everyone seems pretty miserable, and journalists, economists, and scholars want to know why. The trouble is they can’t seem to blame the most obvious culprit: the economy.

, the leading liberal chronicler of our emerging “Anti-Social Century,” dismisses an economic explanation for our social malaise: “Americans are rich and getting richer, by most conventional measures.” , a popular conservative demographer, similarly blows off the economic explanations: “young men in 2024 saw their highest inflation-adjusted earnings since the 1970s!! It hasn’t been this good to be a young man in a long time!” Meanwhile, economist put down the axe he is perpetually grinding against President Trump to wonder: “Why are Americans so down on an economy that, while not the greatest, isn’t terrible by the usual measures?” And veteran conservative firebrand sums up the concern troubling commentators on both sides of the aisle: How Can America Be So Miserable When It’s So Rich?

These accounts are part of a broader panglossian genre of writing that has sprouted up like spring weeds. The economic fundamentals are sound, pundits right, left, and center assure us. The bad feelings are all just vibes.

To most people, stories like these read like dispatches from outer space. The truth is that the economy really is broken and really is making us miserable.

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The following is the introduction to our sixth print issue on the theme of “Trains.” The issue will be mailing out very soon. Pre-order your copy here if you haven’t already!

Beyond the physical infrastructure of engines, carriages, and tracks, trains are one of the most famous and inspiring symbols of modernity. The modern age is of the machine, and there are few machines that have such a direct connection to the ideas of time and progress as the train. Trains represent directed movement, speed, and power. In the paintings of Turner and Manet, the steam produced by the trains of the nineteenth century billow out and cloak the train itself, adding even more majesty and mystery to the machine.

For Marxists such as Marshall Berman and David Harvey, modernity is understood as a particular experience of space and time. In Berman’s reading, modern subjects find themselves at home in an ever-changing maelstrom in which “all that is solid melts into air,” while the characteristic modern experience for Harvey is one in which technologies of mass communication and travel compress both time and space. Trains represent the possibility of mass access to the sort of speed that can shrink the nation and the world.

Over and above the moving of goods—initially around the rapidly industrializing north of England—trains have long represented the fast movement of people. Early train passengers felt the exhilaration of this speed while also worrying about asphyxiation due to the compressed air they would be forced to breathe. Medical experts expressed concern that train travel would lead to “cerebral lesions” and other naysayers likened railway travel not to transport but to the delivery of packages. If the motorcar came to stand in for individual freedom and movement around the expressway world, the train was a symbol of collective, industrialized power—a heavier, more brutal way for humans to conquer their geographical surroundings.

Alongside this new aspect of consumer travel experience, trains have long stood as a metaphor for the more abstract ideas of historical movement and progress itself. If for the optimistic liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, progress was a river flowing in one direction, it was also a train running along the tracks of history. Edmund Wilson’s influential 1940 account of revolutionary socialism, To The Finland Station, sets Lenin’s return by train to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station as the culmination of the tradition. Today the square in front of the station still contains a statue of Lenin that avoided being torn down after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding Lenin’s own ambivalence towards statues (“for pigeons to shit on”), it remains a powerful symbol, with Lenin in classic directing pose, making his 1917 speech atop a constructivist armored car. For Wilson, it was Finland Station that symbolized the terminus for revolutionary socialism and the location for the rendezvous with destiny for the Bolsheviks, and by extension the revolutionary hopes of the century.

For Marxists, trains have also been handy historical metaphors because they embody the idea that a locomotive force is needed—and is on hand—to drive history forward along the rails of progress. Marx saw revolutions, and Trotsky wars, as the “locomotives of history.” Ninety years after Marx, Walter Benjamin wrote that revolutions were not the locomotive of world history but rather “an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.” Benjamin had previously written about a railway disaster in Scotland in December 1879 where a train travelling from Edinburgh to Dundee was crossing a bridge over the Tay estuary when it collapsed, leading to the deaths of all 75 passengers and crew. For a Marxist like Benjamin, historical progress and forward motion requires interruption, not acceleration. If humanity allows the train of history to follow the path already laid out by rails, then it will be a disastrous derailing and a crash into the water below. It is much less Marx’s vision than Benjamin’s that seems dominant now, as we look to interrupt the runaway train rather than putting our faith in a locomotive to drive history forward.

Today our experience of trains and time is unlikely to invoke any conceptions of historical time and far more liable to be connected to the anxieties of everyday clock time. The anxiety of missing a train or the reality of unreliable trains being late or cancelled have replaced any thoughts of historical progress when we arrive at a railway station today. E. P. Thompson’s famous 1967 essay on “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” talks about the rise of a new conception of time mirroring industrial production replacing an older one grounded in agricultural labor; today trains, like all standardized and timetabled methods of transport, instead enforce a travel-discipline in the context of a mass-consumer capitalism. As social life continues to accelerate, this anxiety only intensifies.

But as the locomotive of history has accelerated out of control, actual locomotives have fallen into disrepair. In “The Railroading of a Steel Town,” Ryan Zickgraf tells the story of Steelton, PA, and with it the rise and fall of the steel and rail industries in the United States. In “Foaming for Breakdown,” Courtney Rawlings dives into the world of modern train enthusiasts (“foamers”) on Youtube, who promise scenic cross-country views but who deliver documentation of America’s decline—crumbling infrastructure, economic decay, institutional failures. And Aaron Wells tackles the re-nationalization of British railways in “Slumping Toward Nationalization,” an effort bearing none of the political promise of previous waves of nationalization and one forced by operational dysfunction rather than ideological commitment. Together these three articles all speak to the way in which trains have become a symbol of the broken promises of modernity.

Something similar holds for Alex Hochuli’s “Brazil Off the Rails,” but there he notes a general underdevelopment of rail that has Brazilians today in the grip of a curious “nostalgia for nostalgia.” Having never been an agent of national integration as it was elsewhere, rail improvements today can, for Hochuli, only be one component of a broader developmental vision. For many, the one country with such a vision is China, and our interview with Dan Wang on “China’s Rail Revolution” situates China’s high-speed rail build out and pursuit of other “gleaming infrastructure” within the country’s broader political project.

The Chinese example illustrates that massive rail improvements are still not only greatly desired but also of sufficient romance to capture the public imaginary. For many, trains connote a previous industrial era; they make us nostalgic for a form of progress that was and is no longer. But if it is nostalgia, it is one for industrial improvement of the built environment and for technologies that bind together a national community. In this sense, and again with the Chinese experience in mind, what we take to be “nostalgic” is only framed as such within the coordinates of our present decline and decay.

As Dustin Guastella contends in “Men at Work,” the demand for investment in industries that require muscle-power is no nostalgic fantasy but the key to finding a social cure for the present crisis of “male malaise.” In “Everybody’s Doin’ a Brand New Dance Now,” Amber A’Lee Frost similarly champions “People’s Dances” like Little Eva’s “Locomotion,” which have declined with the rise of a competitive and individualistic dance culture that spurns mass participation. And Nate Fisher holds up the train movie as a barometer of health for the film industry as a whole in “Not Another Train Movie,” lamenting the genre’s decline as representing that of Hollywood itself.

One prominent piece of “nostalgia” associated with trains is the intense class conflict that once manifested in the efforts of rail unionists, a history recounted in Paul Prescod’s “Struggle on the Iron Highway.” There are plenty of people, even on the putative “Left,” who think the era of labor upsurges is over. But if we are to make our way out of the present political and social crisis, we once again need a massive labor conflagration in the key industries of the day. There is no way around the central conflict at the heart of capitalist society.

Perhaps then it is best to think of the train as conjuring up a nostalgia for the “future of the past,” a past when the train was the symbol of forward-facing and ever accelerating modernity. In this reading, the train was the image of the future (unlike flying cars) that we actually had; it was designed to supersede itself by becoming ever more high-speed, ever more reliable, and ever more comfortable. Without a great deal of confidence that we can replace our antiquated rolling stock, decaying tracks, or take collective control of the transport infrastructure that ought to connect us, we have still not gotten past the train horizon and the future it used to represent.

A final note: this will be Damage’s last print issue for a while. We are not closing the door on print and will continue to pursue book projects like Rustin’s Challenge (out now, order your copy!). But the print issues will be on hiatus while we build some regularity into our publishing schedule and professionalize our operation a bit. We are tremendously thankful to everyone who’s supported the print operation and to everyone who continues to support the magazine. Print is dead; long live print!

George Hoare is Associate Director of the Palm Springs School for Social Research (psssr.org) and co-host of Bungacast.

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

The common view of Bayard Rustin on the Left is that he was a talented and marginalized organizer in the iconic period of the Civil Rights movement, that he pulled off one of the great American political events in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, and that from the mid-1960s on, he moved to the right, tragically compromised by, amongst other things, his support for Lyndon Johnson’s war effort. The idea that Rustin either supported or did not speak out against the Vietnam War is typically employed to dismiss much of what Rustin wrote and did from the mid-60s. Indeed, I would say that this has been the main impediment to engagement with the volume that Paul Prescod and I recently published with this outfit.

To cut to the chase, this idea—again, the thing that Rustin detractors point to in order to dismiss his post-1963 work and views—is demonstrably false. I am not simply attempting to “complicate” or “unsettle” some pre-existing narrative here; I mean that the notion that Rustin supported the war is a straightforward untruth, spread first by New Leftists but repeated ad nauseam today, deployed to dismiss someone who had more organizing skill and strategic prowess in his little finger than most compile in their entire lifetimes.

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About whether or not Bayard Rustin was too wedded to the political possibilities of the Johnson administration, a debate can be had. About whether or not he supported the war, it cannot. Whenever he was asked about the war, he repeated that “as a pacifist, I consider all wars evil.” In the spring of 1967, when King came out against the war, Rustin urged publicly that the conflict in Vietnam “be brought to a speedy end.”

Perhaps my favorite example of the wild disconnect between the reality of Rustin’s views and their caricature by New Leftists comes from June 1965, the month that Staughton Lynd published a scathing article on Rustin in the peace magazine Liberation, on whose editorial board Rustin sat. Lynd accused Rustin of being both a “labor lieutenant of capitalism” and also of advocating a “coalition with the marines” for his stance that leftists ought to attempt politically to seize the apparatus of the Democratic Party. It was the equivalent of declaring all-out war on Rustin as an enemy of the peace movement and of the Left more generally. As Rustin’s biographer John D’Emilio notes, Lynd’s article “displayed all the characteristics of a slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoners style of leftist debate”, which “anticipated a style of rhetorical excess soon to become commonplace among radicals.”

But what was Rustin doing in the same month of the same year that Lynd was lighting up the pages of Liberation? Here are a few lines from a speech he delivered at an anti-Vietnam War rally at Madison Square Garden in June 1965:

Though Congress refuses to admit it, we are at war. It is a useless, destructive, disgusting war. We must end the war in Viet Nam. It harms people on both sides. It reveals the bankruptcy of America’s foreign policy. The bombings, the torture, the harassment and needless killings are abhorent to me, and to all civilized men. Therefore, I am for supporting any and every proposal that is humane and relevant, that will end the war in Viet Nam.

And after this address, Rustin led the crowd in attendance in a march from MSG to the UN, where he again spoke to denounce US foreign policy.

All of this should raise a pressing question for us. How, despite expressing his opposition to the Vietnam War in both word and deed, did Rustin come to be known as someone who did not speak out against the war, and even someone who supported it?

There are a whole host of particular infractions New Leftists have cited to impugn Rustin’s character, but when it comes to the war, two key concrete particulars stand out. The first is simply that he was critical of new tactics and gestures coming from the anti-war movement. He found the burning of American flags and draft cards, as well as openly hoping for a Viet Cong victory, to be strategically objectionable, and something long-term that would turn the American public away from the peace cause.

Peaceniks of course blamed Rustin’s new ties and commitments for his having abandoned the cause, but as D’Emilio rightly claims, “Neither Rustin’s financial dependence on organized labor nor his desire to work with the Democratic Party can explain his distance from the growing antiwar movement.” Just as he had no time for the “exaggerated masculinity” of Black Power, so too did he reject the dramatic actions of the young college activists who were now the peace movement’s vanguard. As with the Black Power advocates, Rustin believed that “those in the peace movement who reject America with hate, and support conservative putchism and elitism” were in “unconscious coalition with the worst and most reactionary elements in this country.” “As soon as the Vietnam War was over, and with it the threat of conscription,” Rustin predicted, “the students would go quietly back to their studies and from there to their comfortable middle class lives.”

One can disagree with this analysis, of course, but to say that his criticism of new developments in the anti-war movement amounted to support or acceptance of the war is absurd, especially since Rustin was critical of the strategies of the anti-war movement in the name of the peace cause. But that he offered criticism at all is today used to smear him as an imperialist. I don’t think I need to spell out how this “If you’re not in agreement with us, you’re in agreement with them” kneejerk attitude continues to exist on the Left today.

However, the more substantive reason that Rustin is said to have been silent on the war concerns the rollout of the Freedom Budget. The Freedom Budget was a proposal drafted by the A. Philip Randolph Institute in 1966 for the elimination of poverty in the United States, with massive federal investments in jobs programs, healthcare, housing, education, and other sectors. As one might expect, it bore a hefty price tag, and the question of how the government would pay for such an ambitious program during wartime was naturally raised. Rustin’s position was simply that war expenditure was no impediment to carrying out a massive domestic spending program, or, more specifically, that ending the war in Vietnam was not an economic precondition of creating a more egalitarian society at home.

For this, he was excoriated from many angles. Economist Seymour Melman concluded that the Freedom Budget was a “war budget.” Stokely Carmichael agreed: “To ask for part of the Freedom Budget is to ask for the continuance of the war in Vietnam.” SDS’s Michael Kazin said it was “welfarism at home and imperialism abroad.” Rustin had not supported the war, but he might as well have, according to the critics, given his capitulation to the notion that the country could have both guns and butter.

Again, there are legitimate questions here about the relation between domestic and foreign affairs. But Rustin’s economic assertion that the war expenditure did not financially preclude a robust domestic investment program is simply not tantamount to support for the war. Outside of the contentious political mood of the 1960s, I have real difficulty dismissing the essential truth of the assertion, and wonder if anyone today would say, for instance, that we cannot restore Medicaid funding without first ending the war in Iran.

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More importantly, however, Rustin thought that winning people over to a robust social-democratic program was itself a form of anti-war activism, and indeed, the form needed not just for moral condemnation of the war but for weakening its structural causes. There are two key components to this thought: first, Rustin had organized Freedom Budget chapters around the country and imagined them going door-to-door with petitions (something that never materialized in any substantial fashion, due, amongst other things, to the resistance of the New Left). His first strategic question here was: when you are knocking doors with Freedom Budget petitions, and you find someone who supports your aim of good jobs for all, do you first make sure they are against the war before you allow them to sign? If not, then why make ending the war in Vietnam a precondition of supporting the Freedom Budget?

But just as important to this strategy was the second component, which was that winning the public over to a transformative domestic program would undermine the structural drivers of the war in the long-term. To his New Left critics, he thus relentlessly emphasized the economic aspect of the problem of war: what black Americans needed, what the trade unions needed, indeed what the United States as a whole needed, was an economic replacement for the Vietnam war. It was easy to be against the war but much more difficult “to present a meaningful political alternative to expanded and increased defense spending.” To play with William James’s well-known call for a moral equivalent of war, one might say that the Freedom Budget was proposed as the economic equivalent of war: in Rustin’s words, “The most effective method of redirecting our economic energies away from the war in Viet Nam is to mobilize people around the needs of the poor and the priorities of the Freedom Budget.”

To the young “radicals,” Rustin’s message was clear: if you want the end of this war and to weaken the economic drivers that will lead to future wars, the Freedom Budget is the answer. “At some point, the Viet Nam war will be over, and unless the concepts expressed in the Freedom Budget are accepted, then the funds which will become available will be diverted to other objectives—such as sending rockets to Venus—rather than to alleviating the social conditions of the poor,” he warned. Unfortunately those rockets are still flying, and most have not left the atmosphere.

In sum, when critics bring up Rustin’s views on Vietnam, they do so to discredit him and in turn to dismiss the prophetic elements in his speeches and writings as too entangled in moral and political cowardice and confusion to take seriously. But what I think Rustin’s actual perspective on the war demonstrates is less something about Rustin himself than about a New Left eager to uphold its own moral coherence by engaging in character assassination and straightforward slander while simultaneously flouting a broad-based economic program for working-class progress. Which is to say, again, that Rustin’s work reflects back to us the continued degradation of left politics in the US, even in its very dismissal.

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Benjamin Y. Fong is the co-editor of Rustin’s Challenge and keeps a Substack on labor and logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.

Ana Maria Cisneros’s Damage article “The Need for a Socialist Morality” makes a welcome plea for socialists to rid themselves of the incoherent taboo on normative claims about the kinds of personal lives that are desirable. There are, for Cisneros, a pretty clear set of social goods that contribute to human flourishing on this earth, and socialists shouldn’t be shy about affirming them as the moral undergirding of their political vision.

I have no objections to Cisneros’s overall argument, but I do wonder about Cisneros’s assumption about the intuitive appeal of these goods to broad swathes of the population. In her view, only “the middle class and elites,” segments that tend to dominate the Brahmin Left, are thoroughly wedded to permissive individualism in morality because “their range of freedom as consumers makes it appear as if they are truly autonomous.” Meanwhile, “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.” If this is true, then the vast majority of people incline towards external, collective standards of goodness, while only the rootless PMC insist on an incoherent individualism in ethical consideration. If this were the case, the socialist moralist’s job would be simple: clear away the bad thinking habits of this restricted group, whose form of life warps their moral sensibilities, and re-connect with the moral intuitions of the vast majority.

Sadly, the task is harder than Cisneros leads us to believe. If we recognize that a form of life can negatively shape moral outlook, then we must account for the positive conditions required to form the collectively oriented, externally anchored moral outlook that she recommends. And if the development of a pervasive non-individualistic moral outlook has necessary social conditions, then we might discover that we are sorely lacking the required social infrastructure and institutions.

Practical Identities and Morality

I want to consider the uncontroversial claim—one that I think Cisneros would agree with—that repeated, habitual daily practices powerfully shape our ability to recognize reasons for actions. Such practices allow us to fulfill social roles that place practical demands on us beyond our personal preferences, grounding deferential attachments to projects and to people and the capacity to recognize “external” goods or reasons for actions in the sense that Cisneros describes.

Philosophers have used different terminology to describe the connection, but the idea is straightforward. If I am involved in a practical role such as, say, a teacher or a doctor, there are standards to which I must adhere and ends I must desire in order to practice the role at all. To be a good teacher or a good doctor is to internalize standards of excellence that are not dependent on my “authentic self”, my feelings, or my desires. To truly be a teacher is to attempt to be a good teacher; I have no choice but to recognize a set of goods bound up in the occupation and to be motivated by them. My “individual,” original motivations for adopting the role (“I heard that I can have a secure retirement”, “people think doctors are hot”) become less relevant as I take on the practical identity and the motivations internal to the practice. A “practice” or a “practical identity” are a condition for having reasons at all for action beyond my own immediate desires.

Here is how philosopher Christine Korsgaard defines practical identities:

… a description under which you value yourself and your life worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. Conceptions of practical identity include such things as roles and relationships, citizenship, membership in ethnic or religious groups, causes, vocations, professions, and offices.... Our conceptions of our practical identity govern our choice of actions, for to value yourself in a certain role or under a certain description is at the same time to find it worthwhile to do certain acts for the sake of certain ends, and impossible, even unthinkable to do others.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s account is not so different:

By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

Note that practical identities don’t refer only to jobs, titles, or crafts. The same connection between the recognition of external goods and a practical identity holds for the kinds of everyday relational roles to which Cisneros alludes. To be an aunt or a co-worker entails at least some form of external standards of goodness and motivations to adhere to them.

Note also, however, that having a practical identity doesn’t just mean “having a job.” Under the two descriptions above, there’s quite a lot that doesn’t qualify. Packing Amazon boxes as directed by a management app and separated from other workers such that any communications or sense of collective project is impossible won’t do. Neither will the routines of white-collar “flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters”, high-paid or low-paid, college-educated or not. Neither will parasocial relationships on social media or internet-based social networks. There is a floor to practical identity, and quite a lot of what we—speaking broadly, “we” as Americans—do does not meet it. For this outlook to really hook in, it can’t be isolatable—you can’t just “clock out” and leave your practical identity at the door.

Practical identities are the social nucleus out of which we are educated into a moral outlook that integrates external standards of goods and sensitivity to the collective (what Cisneros calls the “not me, us”) aspects of those goods. They are where our deferential attachments to external projects and people are nourished. From this nucleus, we can see how a broader moral outlook might develop that carries the structure of good-oriented desires and reasoning over into the broader, overarching practical identities of our lives. We can even see, as MacIntyre argues, that there are certain goods of character and virtues that are required to perform a practical identity well: honesty, courage, and so on. We can see that ultimately this training in making our desires conform to real goods in order to legitimate them would have positive consequences for social behavior and coordination, and commitment to common goods that require political coordination to provide.

Practical identities are a premise for developing any philosophical reflection on morality. Aristotle takes it as a given that you must internalize these patterns of practical thinking in order for moral philosophy to be anything more than mouthing words. Korsgaard and MacIntyre hold radically different views in moral philosophy, but they all hold more or less to the same view about the habituated practical social nucleus of morality. If our society cannot provide most people the opportunities for robust, overlapping networks of practical identities—the prerequisites for moral reflections—then, debates about what kind of morality socialists ought to embrace put the cart before the horse.

Social Atomization’s Moral Aspect

If such nexuses of practical identities are in most cases conditions for developing the moral outlook that undergirds Cisneros’s socialist morality, then far more of us are deficient than just the “middle class and elites” with untethered consumer power—the widespread withering of practical identities has a far more significant impact on moral reasoning. As Americans, we’re all falling short on the necessary conditions and institutions to develop practical identities and the corresponding commitment to external goods beyond personal preference.

Those on the Left are familiar with the facts on US social atomization. Employment trends in the US continue to suffer deepening rounds of de-skilling. Employment growth is concentrated in low-wage, low-skill industries designed for high turnover. Civic mediating organizations are little more than a memory. Neighborhood and local-level organization is a farcical front for the NGO-industrial complex. Unions are bleeding out. The number of Americans who live in the same neighborhood throughout their lives (let alone through multiple generations) is dwindling. Church-going and participation in religious life continues to decline. Policy wonks describe a “friendship recession”, and the Surgeon General reports there is an “epidemic of loneliness”. Even NPR is now reporting on dwindling births and family life. The litany goes on.

Social atomization is much discussed, including in these pages. The relevance here is that this atomization destroys the requisite conditions for practical identities and the “external” moral outlook Cisneros is after. It is never fully destroyed, of course—nobody can really live without at least some practical identity—but the prospects for richly inhabiting a set of practical identities that force us to orient ourselves to reasons beyond our personal preferences are poor.

Short of a practical context that creates social roles that facilitate a nexus of practical identities en masse, projects for reviving a socialist morality will remain intellectual and rhetorical as similar calls to re-moralize politics are on the Right. We can exhort people to reject an atomized vision of personal autonomy, embrace the search for common goods, debate on the order of goods in common life, and promote both the personal virtues and institutional measures that facilitate these goods. But without mass remedial re-socialization, this all remains something between a philosophical exercise (we can construct arguments about the common good, about the incoherence of liberal morality, and so on), or political rhetoric to be judged on the merits of circumstantial effectiveness. Is the Left in New York City more likely to garner support for the new mayor’s ambitious childcare initiative if we frame it around freeing up autonomy for parents to continue living their lives and careers and making their own choices, or as a normative policy that encourages young people to have children and take root in the city in such a way that motivates a commitment to the common-good institutions of civil society?

The scale of the problem is enormous and so ought to be the scale of a solution. As firms like Amazon transform our labor regimes in much the same way that Ford did a century ago, and new technology threatens further social dislocation, all sorts of discussion of how to reverse-engineer civil society are back on the table for the Left and Right and whatever the hell you want to call what is going on in Silicon Valley. My point is that these programmatic discussions will be improved by recognizing that practical identities are the psychological and ethical core of a strong civil society and the moral authority of external reasons that Cisneros wants. New Deal Programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps facilitated the mass production of practical identities by institutionalizing collective living and experience in common projects, socialization across class, racial, and geographic divisions, rigorous physical training combined with training in skills in engineering, construction, and technology essential to the competitive advance of industry.

Today’s candidates for programmatic fixes—comprehensive industrial policies, jobs guarantees, educational reforms, national mandatory service programs, etc.—can use the same tactics to facilitate practical identities to an atomized populace, while at the same time supplying the labor force and the skills that are needed for overhauling the US’s crumbling transit, energy, and communications infrastructures (to name just a few). There is a gnawing chicken and egg problem here—is it possible to win socializing programs without the pre-existing sociality that makes them appealing?—but at least we’re beyond mere appeal to moral intuition. Though it would never cut it as a political slogan, “Practical Identities For All” is the prelude to getting beyond the pervasive normative authority of personal preference and authenticity.

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Scott Jenkins is a labor educator and an advisory board member at ASU’s Center for Work and Democracy.

A quick internet query or flip through the dictionary will tell you that the difference between a missile and a rocket is that one is guided and the other not.

Otherwise, they are really just the same thing. Everyone is familiar with the story of Werner von Braun, the Nazi scientist who designed the German war machine’s V2 rocket (confusingly also described as the world’s first ballistic missile), and how he is also the aerospace engineer who oversaw the program that launched America’s first satellites and the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon more than a half century ago.

There exist critics of space exploration who draw attention to this identity of the rockets of science and missiles of war, who do not tire of reminding us of the dark, militarist origin story of the American space program. They argue that this link never truly went away, noting that the companies who built rockets for the Apollo missions also manufactured weapons to bomb Vietnam. You cannot have rockets without missiles, they say. The Guardian tells us that the Artemis program, returning humanity to the moon after more than five decades away, is a “dangerous distraction” from the Earth’s myriad environmental crises, and that most of the discoveries from space-faring “seem to involve finding better ways to kill each other.” Plus, “there is nothing to see” anyway, the paper’s columnist-curmudgeon Zoe Williams concludes. “Let’s stop going to space.”

Beyond the straightforward rebuttal that space science is earth science; beyond the fact that the development of our understanding of climate change depended in no small part upon our scientific investigations of Venus; beyond how we are able to track forest loss and glacier melt and the scale of so many other environmental challenges thanks largely to the decades-old Landsat satellite program, this technological determinism gets things thoroughly backwards. The science and engineering of rockets do not necessarily produce missiles. Instead, it is the pathologies of our political economy that necessarily produces far more spending on one rather than the other. Space doesn’t come cheap, but still, recent budget proposals for the 2026 US military budget hit $1.5 trillion; meanwhile the Artemis II launch cost an estimated $4 billion, or a quarter of one percent of the former.

Imagine what we could do as a species, not just here on Earth, but in space as well, with those military trillions spent differently, if only we could liberate ourselves from these pathologies!

Since its launch on March 27th and return to Earth on April 10th, millions of people around the world found themselves profoundly moved by the Artemis II mission, not merely entertained. Atop this, there has been an uncanny synchronicity between this humanist “moon joy” people have described as having experienced and the rich, warm, humanist feeling audiences experienced watching the Hollywood space drama Project Hail Mary. These two mass events seem to have resonated deeply with our being.

But why? What happened here that so affected so many? I think perhaps, contra Williams’s assertion, there has been in fact everything to see.

What We Are For

With the Artemis crew, we saw humans operating at the very limit of our capability—of courage, endurance, intellect, athleticism, curiosity, cooperation, and even love. A crew of staggering competence and accomplishment, trained for years, held up by some one thousand support staff, from engineers and mission controllers to janitors, drivers and secretaries.

Mission specialist, electrical engineer and astrophysicist Christina Koch, for example, has been a firefighter and glacier search-and-rescue operator in Antarctica, a field researcher in northern Alaska and Greenland, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric station chief on American Samoa, and spent 328 days without interruption on the International Space Station—the longest single spaceflight by a woman. A rock climber and triathlete on her days off, Koch also managed to find time to learn Russian just for her ISS mission.

So many of us here on Earth were deeply inspired at such practical achievement because we recognized instinctively, viscerally, that this is the fullest expression of what humans can be. Put another way, we were watching human nature thoroughly realized. This is what we are for.

This mission back to the moon, mounted by NASA, a public-sector agency, is a robust confirmation of Neil Armstrong’s humanist warning against the privatization of space research. A private company can only ever do what is profitable. Returning to the moon may one day result in profitable activities downstream, but the mission itself could only ever be undertaken by the public sector because it is not possible for the mission to be profitable. Elon Musk’s SpaceX can radically reduce the cost of escaping the Earth’s gravity well, but the company can only ever be a contractor to a public-sector mission (as it will be on future steps in the Artemis program).

Armstrong, the first man on the moon, was a Democratic Party moderate and no socialist, but in his critique of the commercialization of space, he intuited the core critique that socialism mounts regarding human unfreedom under capitalism. A crude but common reading of this argument is that socialists see feudalism’s authoritarian rule by kings and lords and bishops as being replaced by authoritarian rule by bosses and shareholders. But in truth, the argument drives deeper than that: under capitalism, humanity is not ruled by bosses but instead by an unconscious, amoral abstraction, one that is—to steal a term from artificial intelligence discourse—unaligned with human values: the profit motive. In this way, even the bosses are beholden to what the market demands of them. Humans thus do not truly govern ourselves; we remain instruments of some other design.

However, when we do decide for ourselves what to do, which can only be done through democratic government—and it must be fully democratic for this to be the case—we achieve self-mastery. Anything SpaceX does can only be done using humans as instruments in the service of profit. Public-sector space exploration, meanwhile, is the expression of humans acting as genuine ends, not means; we do this not because it is profitable, but because it is worth doing.

And all this human excellence has occurred at the very moment, back on the ground, that we are witnessing an expression of humanity’s most malign capacities: what seemed dangerously close to the opening guns of a new World War, with all three sides murderous, religiously dogmatist, authoritarian regimes that gleefully massacre civilians, that target elementary schools, hospitals, the water supply and power grids. Surely few can escape the contrast. On Earth, it is not as it is in the heavens. Perhaps most diabolical of all, in the middle of this glorious human Aretê high above us, President Donald Trump warned, perhaps hinting of a nuclear strike on Tehran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again.”

“Mom, take a picture of me!”

There are two images from the last few weeks that I cannot get out of my head.

These are not the images of the far side of the moon taken by the joint American-Canadian crew of the Orion (dependent on a service module designed by the European Space Agency), as staggering as these are.

No, the first image that sticks in my mind instead is that of eleven-year-old Hilt Boling waiting for the Artemis II lift-off in Florida, his shoulders strapped into a red backpack surely filled with all the essential provisions of a trip to a space launch (candy, chips, and books about space, obviously), and his still plump adolescent-baby cheeks framed by a black NASA ballcap with a GoPro camera clamped to the brim. When CNN asked this little space dork why he was excited about the launch, he replied bluntly: “Because we’re going back to the fucking moon!” The Kennedy Space Center then took understandable public-relations advantage of the virality of Hilt’s cute-vulgar outburst to offer his family a special tour, which then produced yet more images, this time of Hilt’s gob-smacked wonder at the center’s historic space-faring artifacts.

Boling’s adventure reminded me of when I was six years old, and my family emigrated from the UK to Canada. On the way to our new home in the Toronto suburbs, my parents stopped off in Florida to take my little brother and me on a side-trip to Walt Disney World and that same Kennedy Space Center as something of a bribe or recompense for uprooting us. I was a baby-faced little space dork once too, obsessed with space Lego and, very Britishly, Doctor Who. I wasn’t too different from Hilt, a child besotted with the mysteries of the universe and the technological triumphs of humanity. And as an adult, there is something beyond mere nostalgia when beholding a child’s awe in the face of these splendors. With the experience of age and an education of the past, we are able to recognize their experience of joyful amazement as a continuation of the grand chain of exploration and understanding unique to our species. As the astronomer Carl Sagan put it, we are the universe becoming aware of itself, and through our works, we come to know the universe ever better.

The second image—of the last few weeks of rockets and missiles, of space and of Earth, of the better world we could have and the injustices of the actual world that we are burdened with—that I have been unable to shake from my consciousness is a photograph of an Iranian child not much younger than Hilt Boling.

No less viral than the footage and photos of Hilt’s charming impudence, this image is of third grader Mikaeil Mirdoraghi in Minab, Iran, similarly baby-faced, equally backpacked, and from his comportment—I am almost certain—comparably nerdy, waving to his mother as he heads down the steps of his apartment building and off to school. “Mom, take a picture of me,” he said, according to his mother, who never saw him again. Shortly after, Mikaeil was killed either by a rocket or a missile, that was either American or Israeli, that landed on, perhaps targeted with the help of artificial intelligence, his elementary school, like so many other schools and hospitals.

Why does one child win the thrill of a lifetime watching a rocket take off, while the other loses his life when a rocket lands on his school? Hilt did not do anything to deserve his day of awe and wonder, and Mikaeil did not deserve his death. There is no way to rationalize this: instead, the vagaries of fate with regard to both boys simply call upon us to strive toward a better world where all children are free of war, free to dream of being astronauts (or whatever else they want to be).

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Greater Love Hath No Man Than This

Audiences’ response to Project Hail Mary, a Hollywood blockbuster, may seem—and indeed is—of far less moment than the majesty of a real-world mission to the moon. But the stories we tell ourselves and, crucially, about ourselves are nevertheless extremely important. And here, once again, we encounter the uniqueness of the human: we are, after all, the only species that tells stories.

The author of the book upon which Project Hail Mary is based, Andy Weir, has complained that science fiction has been taken over by a bleak dystopian misery. In place of this, Weir says, “I write stories of hope where human nature is positive and uplifting. At least, that’s what I’m shooting for.”

Project Hail Mary’s main character, middle-school teacher and failed microbiologist Ryland Grace, finds himself alone aboard a starship struggling with amnesia. Over time, he begins to remember how he got there: he was sent by an international consortium of governments (another respite from the real world’s international antagonism and war) and scientists that built and sent his ship on a one-way journey—unable to return, and thus a suicide mission—to a distant star system to try to learn about a space-faring microbe. The life-cycle of these bacteria, which they name astrophage, causes a rapid dimming of the light from our sun and that from other stars. Within a few decades, Earth will be reduced to a sort of permanent nuclear winter, and most of the planet’s food web, including us humans who depend upon it, will go extinct. But in one system many light years away, the astrophage exist but mysteriously do not dim its star. Grace and his crew, of which it turns out he is now the last surviving member, had been dispatched to find out why, in the hope that what they learn will be sufficient to figure out how to save everyone back home.

At his destination, Grace encounters an alien spacecraft from a planet in yet another star system, 40 Eridani A, that also suffers from the astrophage star-disease. The craft, similar to his own ship, is home to just one surviving Eridian astronaut, after the rest of the crew were killed by radiation poisoning. The alien is a rock-encrusted, five-legged creature with no face or eyes that Grace befriends and names Rocky. They devise a way to communicate despite radically different evolutionary histories, and together, using the formidable powers of science and engineering and friendship, they ultimately succeed in learning enough about the astrophage—including discovering its natural predator, an amoeba-like organism that Grace names Taumoeba—to save both Earth and Erid.

At one point in the gravitationally fraught, high-risk process of these two buddies’ “science-ing”, Rocky almost dies trying to save Grace’s life. Moreover, as Grace’s amnesia slowly wears off, he realizes that he did not in fact volunteer for the mission as he had been too scared of dying. He only ended up on the ship because the mission’s director drugged him and placed him aboard against his will, knowing he was the only human with the knowledge and experience sufficient to pull it off. Grace had been a coward, perhaps the worst coward in all history, for he was frightened to join a one-way trip to save all mankind. At the story’s climax, in return, Grace risks his own life for his Eridean friend. The film is not a religious work, but one of its elements that touched so many viewers was surely this echo of Jesus’s maxim of John 15:13, one that no atheist could gainsay: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Grace comes to realize this imperative thanks to Rocky’s own act of sacrifice. He has undergone a grand moral progression—an arc common to so many of our best stories (the infamous “hero’s journey”), but Weir has infused this time-honored storytelling structure with an urgently necessary celebration of humanity.

Trees Make No Progress in Wisdom

Project Hail Mary recognizes that to be a person is no mere phylogenetic category; it does not require belonging to the species Homo sapiens. To be a person is instead to have the full set of attributes that have supreme moral value: things like consciousness, reason, self-awareness, to seek purpose and meaning-making, and above all, the ability to make moral choices, to be capable of virtue, and therefore the capacity to undergo moral progress. Rocky is certainly no member of our species, and it’s not even close! Earth bacteria would be more closely related to us than his species. But Rocky is absolutely a person, for he has all these qualities. He is closely related to us in moral value, not in genes. Grace instinctively recognizes this within minutes of meeting him, and vice versa.

Compare this to how the microbial lifeforms of the astrophage bacteria and Taumoeba are treated in the story: to save humanity back on Earth and Rocky’s species on Erid, the two main characters’ goal is to deliberately drive astrophage to extinction on their worlds. And the way they do this is by genetically engineering a version of the Taumoeba to be a radically different, far more hardy species. In other words, extinguishing one species and transforming the “way of being” of another have no negative moral consequence.

Audiences might respond: “But of course microbes are less important than humans or Eridians; they’re just microbes! We don’t need to be told this!” And this is indeed an unassailable position. What is noteworthy is how this instinctive response rubs up against critiques of anthropocentrism—the belief that some species have greater moral value than others, and that humans enjoy the greatest moral worth—popular in some corners of academia and the animal rights and environmental movements. But the Hollywood audience instinct, in this case, is the correct one. It is the fashionable rejection of human exceptionalism that is incoherent.

The North African philosopher and theologian Saint Augustine is perhaps most well known for wrestling with the crooked nature of Man, illustrated most famously by his one-liner of a youthful prayer, “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet!” But his less well-known arguments on the nature of human exceptionalism are worth revisiting in an age of commonplace human self-loathing. Core to what he regarded as the attributes that suggest our superior worth is our ability to morally reason—even as our powers of reason are fragile. This capacity for morality enables us to recognize a kinship with any other rational beings and form a community of rights and law. Other organisms cannot do this, as they are governed by instinct rather than reason: “The wolf will as long as it lives be a wolf, and will not listen to any preachers and give up killing sheep.”

Cruelty to animals must still be prevented, but we remain at the apex of this chain of being above all, Augustine argued, because we are the only creature capable of moral progress. And there would be no need for moral progress if there were no moral frailty. “Trees make no progress in wisdom,” he writes.

But Ryland Grace can make progress, moving from cowardice to self-sacrifice, just as American society can move from acceptance of slavery to its abolition. Women can keep being denied the vote until they win it. And one very fine day indeed, the whole world will move from war to peace.

Radically Different

Project Hail Mary is not the first time that Weir has put on his hard-sci-fi humanist show. In his breakthrough hit, The Martian, the main character Mark Watney, a botanist and engineer who finds himself stranded on Mars, must use his scientific wits to find a way to survive long enough until a new mission can be mounted to return to the red planet and rescue him many months later. The book and subsequent film version from director Ridley Scott show just how well Weir’s shot has hit that humanist mark. The entire enterprise of the rescue mission, posing not inconsiderable danger to the many lives of the rescuers and costing presumptive billions in treasure, plows, well, a rocket straight through the idea that humans can be used as an instrument in other designs.

Beyond the fact that Weir’s stories are unputdownable, ripping yarns, it’s his recognition of how special humans are that resonates with what most readers and movie-goers already feel deeply. I say “most” because we live at a time of widespread and growing misanthropy. Many of the environmentally minded declared during the Covid-19 pandemic that “We are the virus.” Anti-humanist philosophers argue in the pages of the New York Times that the world would be better without us. The billionaires of the Tech Right lend even greater power to such ideas: Peter Thiel struggles to say whether he wants the human race to endure, while Elon Musk reckons the most important thing is the spread of intelligence throughout the universe, regardless of whether that intelligence is human—though it would be nice if AI superintelligences let us humans come “along for the ride.” There is even a growing fringe of Silicon Valley thought leaders who argue that we should strive for AI superintelligences to replace us, for they would be a “worthy successor” superior to us in all capabilities.

What is remarkable about the synchronicity of Weir’s celebration of humans alongside audiences’ instinctive embrace of this celebration, and the humanist “moon joy” experienced by so many watching the Artemis II mission, is how robustly these two mass events counter an otherwise widespread ambient misanthropy from the green Left and the tech Right. They have performed important work reminding humans of how precious we are, reviving—at least in an emotional register—recognition of how radically different we are compared to the rest of nature.

But it is not enough to leave this question of human exceptionalism and moral hierarchy in nature at the level of instinct and emotion. We need to formally clarify what these attributes of moral value are, or put another way, rigorously define what it means to be a human as distinct from other species, and in so doing, ask what humans are for.

There are two causes for urgency in this endeavor. First, amidst the current and all too real ecological crisis of a warming Earth system, a misanthropic approach to climate change, biodiversity loss, and other challenges misunderstands what the project is about: the conservation of optimal ecological conditions for humans, rather than “saving the planet.” The misunderstanding often produces counterproductive policies based on restoring some unscientific balance of nature. Organic agriculture, for example, founded on the belief that “natural” fertilizer and pesticides are good for the planet and synthetic ones harmful, represents not merely an unscientific fear of chemicals, but can also exacerbate biodiversity loss as organic food’s land footprint is often greater than that of conventional agriculture.

The second cause of urgency arises from the explosion of investment into artificial intelligence. Some potential applications of AI go beyond enhancing productivity and reducing drudgery and would eliminate human-meaning making itself. It is one thing for robots to replace humans down mines, but what will it still mean to be human if all our art, science, and math are performed by an algorithm?

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In Defense of Planetary Defense

Our return to the Moon offers at least the start of this new but also ancient task of defining the human, of asking what humans are for. Contra the Guardian’s Zoe Williams’s assertion that there is nothing to see up there, one of Artemis’s primary scientific objectives acts in service of the most important undertaking ever mounted.

Our current best theory of how the Moon formed suggests that some 4.5 billion years ago, a gargantuan rock the size of Mars—which scientists call “Theia”, after the Greek Titan and daughter of Uranus and Gaia—smashed into the early Earth. Its impact ejected a tremendous volume of debris into orbit, which in perhaps as little as a few years coalesced to form the Moon.

Were a Theia-sized body to hit Earth today, the likely result would be a complete sterilization of the planet. Even extremophile microbes living deep in the Earth’s crust would perish, as the shockwaves and heat conduction raised the temperature of the entire planetary interior far beyond the limits of protein stability. Thankfully, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office reckons it has identified almost all of what it calls “planet-killer” asteroids, and has cheerfully reported that nothing larger than 140 meters is likely to hit the Earth in the next 100 years.

Our evidence for the lunar “Giant Impact Hypothesis” comes from Moon rocks gathered by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and ‘70s, which showed a composition almost identical to the Earth’s mantle, suggesting in turn a deeply linked origin story.

Those manned Apollo missions were essential to our coming to this understanding. Comparisons of manned and unmanned space missions have demonstrated how much more scientific discovery results from the former. An astronaut trained in geology can accomplish in one week what it would take a robotic rover a year to perform. Current AI capabilities cannot (yet) match humans’ superb capacity for situational awareness. And we can walk freely through loose sand or scattered rocks that are pure grief for wheeled rovers, and perform complex drilling tasks that (again, current) robotic hands cannot manage. Robots and other machines are fantastic, and we can send them to many places humans cannot go—such as the visit to the surface of Venus by the USSR’s unmanned Venera program. But most capable of all is a combination of human and robotic capabilities, each helping out with what the other cannot do.

The fact that the US and its allies are in a new space race against China does not undo the need for such science. The first space race between America and the USSR did not undermine the value of the research delivered from those Venera missions. One can only strive to build a democratic world where all nations cooperate to better and more rapidly achieve such goals.

One of the primary objectives of the Artemis program as a whole is to better understand the origin of the Earth-Moon system. Artemis II astronauts undertook extensive geological training across lunar analogs in Labrador and Iceland. But future missions aim for even more hands-on geological research from a surface landing and ultimately a lunar base in the 2030s. Such studies would offer a unique field laboratory where we can better understand the physics of such catastrophic collisions, which in turn is essential for defending the Earth against any potential future strikes.

It is possible over the next few decades, or even just the next few years, that we are able to detect the chemical signatures of life in the atmospheres of exoplanets, or perhaps Mars missions will discover bacterial life on that world. The discovery of life elsewhere does not diminish our need to maintain the flame of life and consciousness alive on Earth, not least by avoiding nuclear war that an increasing volume of scientific evidence suggests humanity could not survive. But it is also possible that in our search of the heavens, we continue to find nothing. If life does not exist anywhere else, or even if it is incredibly rare, this increases the burden on humanity’s shoulders to be a good shepherd to this world.

Capybaras cannot build asteroid deflector technology. Whales and octopuses and redwoods, and other species that we love, cannot staff a planetary defense office. And an AI aligned to human values can certainly offer great help in this task, but why would an unaligned AI even be interested in it?

Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman said upon his return, “It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.”

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Leigh Phillips is a science writer and geologist. He is the coauthor of The People’s Republic of Walmart.

Earlier this week, left-wing Twitch celebrity Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino appeared on a New York Times video podcast to discuss “microlooting,” a new term for shoplifting concocted by the New York Times seemingly for the sole purpose of the podcast. Both Piker and Tolentino endorsed the practice on the grounds that rich corporations steal from ordinary people all the time. Why shouldn’t us poor schmucks steal back?

Of course, despite the guests’ airy defenses of petty theft, the conversation was also full of plenty of hedging. After arguing that there was nothing wrong with stealing a car and insisting that he would do it himself if he could get away with it, Piker admitted that he has yet to steal so much as a candy bar. Tolentino, who copped to boosting four lemons from Whole Foods, was quick to explain that this had been undertaken solely for the benefit of a needy neighbor, through a mutual aid group she’s been part of “since 2021.”

You can log these among the infinite number of times the well-educated and well-heeled have failed to preach what they personally practice. But the excitement over the prospect of low-level social disorder that was on display in the discussion provides a glimpse into what has become a widespread attitude among upscale progressives: that we ought to excuse or overlook bad behavior by the everyman because bad behavior by the uber-rich is so much worse; that all antisocial behavior is downstream from larger antisocial structures; and that it’s ultimately the “global design of capital” that incentivizes that behavior. Politically, the conclusion is that social disorder is not an issue that progressives need to confront, at least not directly.

Tolentino and Piker are correct that the social contract has collapsed in our new Gilded Age. Many feel that working hard and playing by the rules amounts to holding up one end of a bargain that no longer exists. On top of that, extreme wealth and income inequality has bred widespread social resentment. If Bezos, Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Trump, Epstein, and the like are all above the law, why shouldn’t the rest of us sink below it when it’s convenient?

But while this impulse may be understandable, a tit-for-tat moral code is a recipe for political disaster. Yes, the fish rots from the head down, but that doesn’t mean it smells any better at the tail. The truth is that rising disorder makes achieving the kind of social reform that could reverse today’s obscene inequality much harder. And left-wing ambivalence about antisocial behavior only worsens the problem.

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Since 2020 or so, the main progressive response to the creeping, noticeable rise in antisocial behavior has been an injunction to ignore it. That’s partly because today’s progressives are horrified by the notion of involving the police, partly because many are incapable of saying no to anybody at any time, and partly out of a morally admirable urge to protect the down-and-out from further scapegoating. Disorder is only a symptom of a larger disease, they say, so we need to address the root causes, not the downstream effects. The theory is simple enough: if people had decent and dignified lives to begin with, they wouldn’t steal, litter, or vandalize.

The trouble, however, is that the very presence of public disorder makes resolving the upstream causes of it much harder, if not impossible. A rise in antisocial behavior fractures public trust and social cohesion. The inability to maintain basic order in turn draws more people toward civic nihilism and begets a self-perpetuating cycle.

Step on a subway car in Philadelphia today and you’ll immediately notice that it’s clogged with smoke, public drug use, half-eaten, half-rotten food waste, and mystery fluids greasing the floors (not to mention assorted smells of human origin that the smoke actually helps to mask). A decade ago there was nothing near this level of wanton disregard. Some progressives may shrug: who cares? But allowing public transit to exist in a perpetual state of shambolic disorder keeps riders away, wears on taxpayers’ nerves, and continually demoralizes the workers charged with cleaning up the mess day in and day out. Patience runs even thinner when riders see people hop turnstiles to join them on a journey they dutifully paid for. Good luck asking for more transit funding when the crummy subways we already have seem wildly overpriced.

Or consider America’s infamous lack of public restrooms. It costs a fortune to install these things, partly because, as travelogue writer Chris Arnade has colorfully pointed out, they have to be made “asshole proof” as a condition of their existence. Keeping public restrooms tidy and functioning requires nonstop vigilance against the assholes, figuratively and literally. And even then, the assholes always find a way. As a result, public restrooms hardly exist in this country, and in their absence, public life is worse.

To convince the public to invest in public life—in social goods and services—you must first convince them that you care about maintaining a state of relative order. If it isn’t pleasant to play in public parks, ride public transit, attend public school, or simply be out and about in the city because everyone is constantly breaking the rules, all at once, all the time, you will never find the political will to make those public goods any better. After all, any renewed social compact will necessarily be built on a renewed sense of social trust. And trust is in short supply in a society pock-marked by evidence of chronic theft and vandalism.

Yes, rising social disorder is a symptom of a larger antisocial disease. But very often it’s the symptom and not the underlying disease that kills the patient. And for progressives, disorder is a politically lethal symptom. For one thing, progressive promises for more public investment will fall on deaf ears when basic commitments to order are routinely overlooked. Worse, when affluent progressives, from Brownstone Brooklyn to the Hollywood Hills, casually laugh off the very things that make working people’s day-to-day lives more difficult or unpleasant, they will only succeed in inspiring a different kind of class contempt.

Already right-wing rags are having a field day painting Piker and Tolentino as the poster children for an out-of-touch liberalism. The political implications should be clear. Social disorder is notoriously the cheapest, most reliable fuel for right-wing growth. A society in disarray, reactionaries insist, requires an old-fashioned Strong Man to clean up the mess. Of course, conservative solutions will only make the upstream causes of disorder worse. But if the Left continues to hand-wave away—or worse, celebrate—antisocial behavior, reactionaries will fill the void. And their appeals will have an audience.

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

Karl Marx did not care to speculate in much detail about what comes after capitalism. That stray remark in The German Ideology, about how in the future it would be possible “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,” has excited a thousand fancies, but it has invited as much scorn from critics who take the passage as a telling example of utopian naivete. Marxism, they say, fails to take human nature seriously. It is supposed to enable production without alienation; without having to incentivize (or force) workers to do what they do not necessarily “have a mind” to do. But this is impossible: workers will not produce unless they are incentivized, because no one “has a mind” to work. They must be given a mind to do what is necessary. Every actual communist regime has discovered this truth, to the dismay of citizens who soon find that they will hunt or fish or rear cattle as the state requires, and will certainly not do any criticizing after dinner, assuming they get any. Better the capitalist way, in which the directives are issued by the free market, and are therefore no directives at all, since the market makes us free.

So say the critics. It’s interesting to observe that under the actual capitalist regimes of the present day we are taught to envision the future of work as an expanded and upgraded gig economy of endlessly varied options, in which everybody will be freed from alienating work by platforms and AI agents to change careers as whim and chance provide, and granted our independence from the stifling corporate and factory environments of yesteryear, with all their nasty pensions and benefits. In the hands of a skilled propagandist, or an undergraduate marketing major, it can almost sound like we are all going to start hunting in the morning and criticizing after dinner and fishing and cattle-rearing throughout the day. Although hunting is problematic, as is rearing cattle, since their meat makes us fat and their farts cause global warming. I don’t know about fishing. Maybe we should make it the subject of our next after-dinner struggle session.

Interesting, yes, but only one among many examples of capitalism’s admirable talent for marketing itself as the end of capitalism, of a piece with Lululemon selling resistance in the form of luxury yoga pants. Nothing new to see here. But there may be something new to see, or at least a fresh way to see something old, if we reflect on Marx’s idyll more obliquely, from the perspective of a resident of the twenty-first century whose most conscious experience of alienation may not come primarily from the way she is “minded” (by other people) to labor, but from what she is minded by others to do when she is supposedly not laboring.

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In Marx’s image, hunting and fishing and farming and criticizing are all forms of labor that have been transformed into forms of leisure because they have finally been disalienated. They are not weekend entertainments; they are creative and indeed productive activities, even if the kind of life marked by these activities is made possible only because the problem of the “general production” and distribution of necessities has been solved. A just political economy for Marx is not one in which you don’t work; it is one in which work is self-consciously “chosen” and the artificial distinction between work and leisure is relaxed. That distinction is convenient for capitalists who need carrots and sticks to keep people in line (you work for money that pays for your entertainments; you work for the weekends; you work so you don’t have to work), and who have by means of that system smashed the feudal order and vastly increased our capacity for production. But it is not convenient for human beings, who naturally want to work, and are therefore equally unhappy when they have no work to do and when the work they have to do is unleisured because it is not done for its own sake, as we “have a mind” to do it. Marx looks forward, not merely to a world without bad work, but to a world with good work in abundance. Which is to say: he looks forward to a world of leisure properly understood.

How disappointing then to consider that our understanding of leisure has only deteriorated as some of our least immiserated workers have labored hard to ensure the nearly universal distribution of quasi-magical technologies that are supposed to reduce drudgery and increase productivity and generally accelerate the arrival of a work-free utopia. Let us forget, for a moment, the obvious facts that drudgery has increased in what seems like direct proportion to the number of tasks our devices enable us to perform simultaneously, and that productivity seems to have decreased in similarly direct proportion to the number of people who have been convinced that multi-tasking is a thing. Even if so-called artificial “intelligence” really does deliver a world without alienated labor, by delivering a world without any labor at all, it is already adding here and now another layer to the same world of frantic boredom built on the back of the smartphone and the social media platform. And to the extent that we actually do have less bad work to do (which for some people in some ways is true), we all are spending more and more of our “free” time working (scrolling, swiping, producing this eerie new commodity called “attention”) onscreen, entertaining ourselves by making other people richer and ourselves less free. Perhaps one reason it is easier than ever to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism is that the most valuable corporations in history have managed to supplement and maybe even replace the false distinction between work and leisure with a new form of “leisure” which is actually a new kind of alienated work, and is therefore what we might call “alienated leisure.”

Alienated leisure is as good a term as any for the peculiar experience of living in the “attention economy.” Indeed, it is a better term than most, because it is not swaddled in the kind of therapeutic claptrap that invariably, in the service of mental health, leads to calls for more mental health care, as if the problem were in your head (sorry, in your brain: it’s certainly never your fault!) and not in the heads of the mercenary psychologists who deliberately addicted you to short-form videos. Nor is the term saddled by moralistic concerns about distraction and dissipation, as if it really were just your fault, when of course it is not, even if you can and should avoid succumbing to distraction and dissipation. “Alienated leisure” puts the focus where it belongs: on a material system that has spiritual effects, one of which is a diminishing capacity to be sufficiently offended by what is happening to our ability to choose what we do with the “eight hours for what we will” sought by the old labor movements, before the colonization of those hours by the builders of some particularly shiny new “labor-saving devices” that have saved very few laborers from their traditional fate.

Consider what alienated labor is, for Marx: it is labor marked by a series of forced separations. First, the laborer is separated from the product of her work, both in the simple sense that she does not own it, and in the more profound sense that it owns her, because others own it, and use it to dominate her life. Second, the laborer is separated from the activity of working, by being confined to the performance of one task in a series over which she has no creative control (as on an assembly line), a confinement that damages her physically or mentally or both, depending on the work in question. Third, the laborer is separated from other laborers, who are turned from companions into competitors and reduced to obstacles or tools in the service of her own private ends. Finally, the laborer is separated from her human nature, which—it must be emphasized—wants to labor, and for that reason hates to be alienated from her labor by those who profit by doing so.

The parallel to leisure in the attention economy is easy to see. The product of our most determinedly “unproductive” hours (for Gen Z, over 6 hours of captured attention per day) is used to generate massive profits that we do not share, and to enable pervasive surveillance. The activity of scrolling (or clicking, or whatever) is intensely piecemeal, by design: we are algorithmically sorted with godlike efficiency into various silos and echo chambers that cut us off from any context that might salvage our act of attention from the constant fragmentation (cat video follows live beheading follows stock tips) that has been quite helpfully characterized as a form of “human fracking.” It goes without saying that we are unprecedentedly isolated from all the other people with whom we are supposedly more “connected” than ever before in human history. And, most importantly, we are increasingly cut off from our natural desire to spend our “free” time doing something that is free—something that is active and creative, something that strives for coherence and depth, something that involves not “connection” (that is what machines do) but honest-to-god relationships.

Unlike most on the “Left” today, Marx certainly thinks there is such a thing as human nature (what else would our material circumstances be alienating us from?). Marx’s conviction that humans naturally want to work, and that when their work is self-directed it is less distinguishable from leisure (and conversely that true leisure takes work; Homer Simpson drooling at the TV is most certainly not at leisure) will only become more important and more subversive if capitalism in the twenty-first century keeps its promises to automate vast swaths of alienated labor while opening up vast new territories of alienated leisure to those lacking the special “reality privileges” apparently enjoyed by Marc Andreessen. False consciousness is a thing, but in some ways it is easier to become and remain aware of your alienation when what is alienating is a job you feel forced by necessity to take (especially if it is a poorly-paid shit job, or even a highly paid bullshit job, in David Graeber’s sense). It is harder to stay alert to the fact that you actually hate your phone, since after all you keep scrolling on it, and nobody is “incentivizing” you to do it by paying you for your time. How can it be alienating if it’s freely chosen? Is not that the definition of leisure itself: free time spent on “what we will”?

So we have been made to think. Only by redefining leisure as no more than the absence of alienated labor has it been possible to so alienate us from our leisure that even our free time now becomes one more form of alienation, refined within an inch of its life, sliced and diced and parceled out into profit-generating chunks of captured attention. And now, it is with some horror that we realize—if we can—that even if we are quick to nod our heads in agreement, we are less and less capable of viscerally feeling the attraction of Marx’s quaint vision of leisure as hunting and fishing and cattle-rearing and criticizing, not only because all of those activities strike us as far too much work, but because all of them require the sort of slow and luxurious attention that is itself no longer for us a simple pleasure but an offputting slog. The insidious triumph of digital capitalism is to have turned attention into something we literally pay to others. And what they give us in exchange is nothing less than a steadily diminishing capacity to enjoy ourselves without making them rich.

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Adam Smith is a Professor of Political Philosophy and Director of the Honors Program at the University of Dubuque.

On November 13, 2025, Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, not only successfully launched its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral, but recovered its first stage rocket 375 miles downrange from the launch site. This had been the norm at SpaceX, which had achieved reusability almost a decade ago. The US government had awaited a launch competitor for SpaceX to emerge, and with Blue Origin having achieved reusability, a contender appeared to be on the horizon.

More recently, on April 1, 2026 NASA launched Artemis II, a ten-day crewed trip that looped around the moon. NASA administrator Jarred Isaacman proclaimed, “Artemis II will be a momentous step forward for human spaceflight.” Artemis II broke the distance record formerly held by the infamous Apollo 13, at one point reaching a recorded distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, besting Apollo 13 by 4111 miles.

With all of this good news, things appear to be on the upside for US space prospects. Yet nothing happens in a vacuum. Back in the fall, then NASA administrator Sean Duffy spent a good amount of his time giving speeches with a singular message: “We are going to beat the Chinese to the moon.” The urgency of that sentiment may be unclear—after all, NASA first landed astronauts on the Moon back in 1969 and five more times after that (Gene Cernan was the last person to step off the lunar surface on December 14, 1972). That race ended long ago. Politics and budget cuts scrapped the remaining planned Apollo missions.

The difference between now and then is that the race is now about more than geopolitical prestige. The plan is now to get to the moon and stay there. If the Apollo landings targeted the region around the Moon’s equator, the current target is the Moon’s southern pole where there is an abundance of frozen water, along with some amount of rare isotopes such as Helium-3 (on most of the Moon the brutal heat of a lunar day doesn’t give ice much of a chance; hence the focus on the permanently sheltered poles). The idea is that water can be used for hydration and be split into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel for further missions. Helium-3 is currently used for medical imaging, but one day it could possibly be the fuel of fusion reactors. It remains to be seen how any of these resources will be exploited. Doing things in space is quite difficult, but the China hawks want to get a head start.

And many of them are getting quite nervous about this. China is targeting 2030 for a moon landing. Former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe was quoted regarding China: “There is no question that the technology they have is verging very close to being in competition with us. Two years ago, I would not have said that, but they are really improving to the point [the 2030] objective is conceivable.” Last September, another former NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstein, was more blunt: “Unless something changes, it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China’s projected timeline to the Moon’s surface.” More recently, Issacman put it this way: “They may be early. And recent history suggests we might be late.”

In May 2024, then NASA chief Bill Nelson stated that the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to moon. In an interview with NPR, Nelson stated:

I don’t want them to get to the South Pole, which is a limited area we think the water is. It’s pockmarked with Craters. And there are limited areas that you can land on the South Pole. I don’t want them to get there and say “this is ours. You stay out.”

Taking this line further, testifying before the House Natural Resources Committee in December 2023, Dr. Greg Autry (coauthor of Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier) and Professor Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at Ole Miss, were asked by Congressman Mike Collins: “What is the worst-case scenario if China wins the race for space mining, and how will that impact the United States?” Their answers?

Dr. Autry: I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but if China wins the race in space, we’ve ceded the entire strategic high ground militarily and ceded the entire economic future, and the United States will be relegated to the backwater position for the rest of human history.

Prof. Hanlon: I agree with Dr. Autry. The Chinese will have the opportunity to block our access not just to the moon but to all of space, and humanity’s future lies in space.

China became the third country capable of human spaceflight in October 2003 and wouldn’t take its first steps into deep space until 2007. In June 2024, China, with its Chang’e 6 probe, became the first nation to land and bring back samples from the far side of the Moon. This past December, Landspace, a leading Chinese private space-launch company, became the first non-American company to attempt to return a rocket stage to Earth for reuse with its Zhuque-3 rocket. The test ended in a grand explosion, but it won’t be too long before reusability is achieved in China. Established commercial Chinese firms, including Space Pioneer, iSpace, Galactic Energy, CAS Space, and Deep Blue Aerospace, are close to getting their own reusable rockets to the pad.

Meanwhile, the US space program post-Apollo is a story of indecision and bloat. The shuttle era ended on February 1, 2003, after the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere. With the eventual retirement of the Space Shuttle, NASA became entirely dependent on paying for rides on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station. Each incoming president has had a different and often contradictory vision for NASA, preventing the formulation of a coherent space policy.

The roots of the current Artemis program go back to the Obama administration. The Constellation program, tasked with redeveloping moon-landing technology, was a mess from day one, and Obama sought to scrap it. But Congress, under the lobbying from legacy contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, wasn’t having it. In 2011, Congress preserved part of Constellation, which became the Space Launch System (SLS). The problem: a 2023 report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed that SLS totaled $23.8 billion in expenses since 2012, resulting in a dizzying $4.4 billion cost per launch!

By the 2020s, when SLS finally launched Artemis I, Space X had emerged to reestablish launch capability from the US. Space X was chosen as a contractor, but the key to its plan to get back to the Moon relies on an orbital refueling technology that has never before been successfully deployed. As Bridenstine put it in his testimony to Congress: “By the way, that whole in space refueling thing has never been tested either. We are talking about cryogenic liquid oxygen and cryogenic liquid methane being transferred in space, never been done before, and we’re going to do it dozens of times, and then we’re going to have a human rated Starship that is refueled that goes all the way to the Moon.” Artemis III was originally scheduled to be the first to land astronauts on the lunar surface. This has now been pushed back to Artemis IV, with the plan to eventually send two missions a year. In late March, NASA announced plans to spend $20 billion for a moon base to be built over the next seven years.

Whereas the first space race was carried out by states to the end of national prestige, the current race back to the Moon is a much more literal extension of this-worldly battle for economic and geopolitical hegemony, but it is today being carried out by private entities more concerned with their stock price than the feasibility of the technology being deployed. In the mid-1960s, NASA consumed 4.41 percent of the US federal budget. Now, with all these visions for space flying around, NASA gets 0.5 percent.

Still, with all of these private entities pushing their extra-planetary endeavors, and China hawks dominating both sides of the aisle, it’s not hard to see the seeds of conflict blossoming in the barren soil of space. In 2019, NATO added “space” to land, sea, air, and cyberspace as an operational domain, and in 2021 established a space center at its Air Command in Ramstein, Germany. 2019 was also the year the US officially established its Space Force. In November 2021, Russia launched a missile from Earth’s surface that destroyed a defunct Soviet-era satellite (the satellite had been in orbit since 1982), creating 1500 pieces of orbital debris. Both China, in 2007 using a kinetic kill weapon, and the US, with a missile against a malfunctioning spy satellite at a lower orbit, have also destroyed satellites. India too conducted a kinetic anti-satellite test in 2019. In the gameified and human-less reaches of space, it is not difficult to imagine what could happen when all these countries meet each other on the lunar surface.

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Joseph Grosso is a writer and librarian in New York City and the author of Emerald City: How Capital Transformed New York (ZER0 Books). His writings have appeared in various publications including Quillette, Compact, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, Science for the People, and Counterpunch and he can be found on Substack.

Review: Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Monthly Review Press, 2025)

The history of Marxist theory is replete with figures who lament the sectarianism of everyone except themselves. In his new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, Gabriel Rockhill stands in this august tradition, hurling out accusations of bourgeois treachery while painting his “own theoretical practice” as above the degradations of his Western Marxist teachers.

Sometimes Pipers is an almost spiritual autobiography of the author’s life as a left-winger, with Rockhill as our postmodern Augustine. We learn how he studied at “premier institutions in Paris” and attended “all of the lectures and seminars by the thinkers who were the most renowned in the United States, as well as those who had potential to become so…. I also shunned those doing work that sounded old school or unsophisticated.” When none of these philosophies proved edifying, Rockhill then found a sterner creed. His discovery of the one true faith is also chronicled in Pipers. Rockhill presents theoretical apologias for a very orthodox version of dialectical and historical materialism. He claims that Soviet-style materialism is a “science” which operates at a higher level than “bourgeois social sciences, including their disciplinary divisions” which are “a direct outgrowth of the material social relations of modern capitalism.”

But the core of Rockhill’s book is in his claim that most Western Marxists functioned to combat the “real existing socialism” of the Soviet Union and its allies throughout the Cold War. After 9/11, he writes, he began to develop a “materialist analysis of the system of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption within which I had been trained.” One of the “ultimate objectives” of this materialist analysis was to sharpen “an objective ideological critique of the material system of ideas that produced an ideological subject like me and, much more importantly, legions of others indoctrinated into the same brand of imperial ignorance.” The practical upshot is to show how Western Marxists directly or indirectly abetted imperialism. This remains true, in Rockhill’s telling, to this day. It’s even true, he argues, where radical intellectuals and academics fancy themselves to be opponents of the system:

One of the most intriguing and strategically significant tactics that is encouraged, which is essential to understand for a complete picture of the history of Western Marxism, consists in a subtle, soft-sell campaign against communism…. By putting Marxism itself in the service of doctrinal warfare, intellectuals convinced by Marxist theory were thereby encouraged to hold on to a purportedly authentic version of Marxism while using it to vilify Marxism in practice and—at a minimum—accommodate capitalism.

Rockhill’s materialist analysis and critiques has what he calls “objective” and “subjective” dimensions. Objectively, his book paints a vast web of associations, conspiracies, pressure campaigns, funding schemes, etc. by American power to combat communism. Rockhill claims this includes using American money and soft power to prop up Western Marxism for its perceived value in undermining the legitimacy of Soviet and Chinese style communism on the Left. Subjectively, he tries to show how Western Marxists propagated arguments and analyses detrimental to really existing socialism, and consequently provided ideological cover for imperialism, capitalism and even fascism. The latter accusation might seem extraordinary, but Rockhill insists that even if critical theorists “subjectively considered themselves to be antifascists and, more important, worked to uproot fascism through bourgeois democratic means (which, again, is a laudable tactic), they remained accommodationist toward the capitalist system, the seedbed of fascism, while fighting the truly antifascist communists.”

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St. Gabriel the Red

One of the first major problems is that Rockhill uses the term “Western Marxism” in a very sweeping and transparently skewed way. His targets have very different motivations, political opinions, and philosophical orientations. Foucault, Habermas, Marcuse, Zizek, Derrida, Arendt and others all come in for a ribbing, and all, despite their own criticisms of Marx, somehow participate in the tradition of “Western Marxism.” According to Rockhill, what “they all share in common, and what becomes visible via a materialist analysis of the social totality, is their opposition to actually existing socialism, with only the rarest—and absolutely explainable—exceptions.” This is a bad criteria with which to lump very ideologically different figures together, bordering on crude “friend/enemy”-level Schmittianism rather than dialectical nuance. As a point of comparison, no leftist would accept a Heideggerian quoting Introduction to Metaphysics and claiming liberalism, socialism, and all other modernist philosophies were “metaphysically the same” simply because of their opposition to fascism.

In fairness, some of the material dealing with how ideological figures were funded offers a clear indication of how the United States worked to manufacture consent on a global scale. The expansive map of CIA agencies, covert ops, shell foundations, academic liaisons, and connections he draws showcases both the extent and sophistication of American Cold War imperialism, which had a canny awareness of the popularity of left-wing causes and realized more nuanced weapons were needed in the fight against communism. Moreover, Rockhill and Domenico Losurdo (a significant influence on Pipers) are undoubtedly right to chastise Western intellectuals of a previous era for their willingness to call out racist imperialism and genocide in Europe, while adopting a far more tepid and even critical attitude towards colonial aspirations for independence. When Rockhill goes after Max Horkheimer for defending the Vietnam war, or Arendt for her racism and excessive hagiography of the American founders, it’s easy to cheer. In these circumstances the accusations of gross hypocrisy and descriptions of how selectivity in the application of bourgeois principles reinforces capitalist imperialism have real bite.

For all his insistence on materialist analysis, Rockhill frequently indulges in psychological speculation to prop up ad hominem attacks. He describes most contemporary Western Marxists and critical theorists as being “petty bourgeoise.” They find themselves “sandwiched between the bourgeois politics of capitalism and the proletarian politics of socialism, often dreaming of an enchanting but nonexistent third way beyond this pitched class struggle. Fearful of proletarianization, but attracted to a bourgeois lifestyle, the petty bourgeoisie is sometimes resentful of its corporate overlords and capable of celebrating jacqueries, while nonetheless lacking a concrete, long-term collective political project of its own.” Lest one think the scarlet letter ought to be pinned exclusively on posh Western leftists, Rockhill makes it clear his criticisms also apply to “imperially trained” intellectuals from developing countries that were victimized by imperialism and who have since “generally seen their working-class movements crushed and leftist culture decimated.” These intellectuals too he sees as nothing but “snake oil salespeople” brandishing “prestigious credentials” in order to sell “poison.”

Anyone who has spent any time on the academic Left has met the kinds of people Rockhill is talking about: self-described Marxist radicals who wear BLM t-shirts to class before rejecting a job applicant because she completed her undergrad in the global South. An essential problem with Rockhill’s book is that he takes the annoying experience of an encounter with this kind of person and universalizes it. One can admit that the Western (and non-Western but anti-communist for that matter) intellectual Left can be and often is hypocritical. But is this the entirety of it? Rockhill’s methodology textual misinterpretations leave one unconvinced.

Lyndon Larouche Redux

Pipers’ empirical and textual claims are deliberately vague and frequently misleading, if not outright false. Along the “objective” dimension, much of the evidence Rockhill presents is circumstantial (so and so met so and so and took money from this foundation with ties to this person) or ideological (X wrote an anti-Soviet book to cheers from some liberal academics, so for all intents and purposes X must have been anti-socialist). In a pinch Rockhill will insinuate wildly, conclude nothing, but accuse doubters of lacking faith to see and being shills for the status quo.

He implies, for instance, that Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse might have been a stooge of the CIA and various other organs of American repression and imperialism. As discussed in A.J.A. Woods’s recent, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, this accusation has a long history going back to Lyndon Larouche. Larouche was a radical leftist turned right-wing conspiracy theorist who accused Marcuse and other Frankfurt School theorists of being shills for the American state. One might have hoped this bleak example would be the end of it. But, first as tragedy…

Rockhill’s main rhetorical strategy is casting a sinister aura onto Marcuse’s well-documented time working for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)—a predecessor to the CIA—and the State Department. In his recent guide Marcuse, Jacob McNulty describes this as part of Marcuse’s wartime effort to support the Allies against Nazism. Marcuse later participated in the State Department’s denazification and anti-Soviet efforts. McNulty acknowledges and lightly defends Marcuse’s never hidden anti-Soviet animus; for instance, in books like Soviet Marxism, which grew out of his time working in OSS. But he stresses that “Marcuse was no cold warrior, and it is clear that he viewed liberal capitalism as sharing the totalitarian tendencies of the Eastern bloc.”

Rockhill isn’t satisfied with this well-documented history. He reheats L.L Mathias’s charge that Marcuse was actually a CIA agent who worked with the “notorious Nazi general Reinhart Gehlen” as part of an anti-communist intelligence agency. Asking whether it is “possible, then, that Marcuse was a CIA agent,” Rockhill admits he was “never overtly employed by the CIA.” But Rockhill muses that since Marcuse spoke German and worked on anti-communist agitation for the State Department, it “seems unlikely that their [Marcuse and Gehlen’s] paths would not have crossed, either in person or via intermediaries and overlapping projects.” Moreover, isn’t it suspicious that in 1951, “...Gehlen was given a VIP tour of the United States to meet the leaders of the U.S. national security state and develop their plans for a common war on communism, which was one of Marcuse’s fundamental tasks.” Or that Gehlen “met William Donovan, the chief of the OSS and Marcuse’s boss during the war, as well as three major figures in the CIA, two of whom had served in the OSS, whom Marcuse almost certainly knew in some capacity: Walter Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles, and Frank Wisne.”

If all this seems circumstantial, wildly speculative and conspiratorial, Rockhill has a rebuttal. You’re probably one of the many “Western academics” and intellectuals who “ignored or rejected out of hand all of the allegations mentioned above” because you have a “direct stake in the Critical Theory franchise.” This slippery rhetorical process is tirelessly and tiresomely repeated throughout Pipers: strongly imply nefarious connections and convey conspiratorial associations, never get pinned down by claiming you’ve decisively proven anything, repeatedly suggest you’re just asking questions others don’t have the balls to consider, and when someone doesn’t reach the party line conclusions by filling in the blanks, accuse them of elitism and shilling for the capitalist class.

The same oily rhetorical strategies are applied when discussing Marcuse’s late career. Speculating on how Marcuse became a cultural icon, and referencing his connections to elite academia and culture, Rockhill suggests it’s “highly unlikely that the mainstream press was simply acting on its own in contributing to Marcuse’s renown,” implying that media coordination with nebulous state and private entities was responsible for Marcuse’s popularity. Lacking direct evidence for his extraordinary claim, Rockhill insists we can still infer the truth that the American government must have signed off on Marcuse’s work. How else could he have become popular if he was a true radical?

Things get darker still when Rockhill tirelessly tries to snare second-generation Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas into a sufficiently tangled web of fascist associations while hoping readers will extrapolate the worst. Early in Pipers, Rockhill describes Heidegger as an “unrepentant Nazi after the war, as his former students Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas helped demonstrate….” Later he claims that Habermas “had himself been a member of the Hitler Youth and studied for four years under the ‘Nazi philosopher’ (his description of Heidegger).” Elsewhere, discussing Ludwig Friedeburg’s arrival at the Frankfurt School, Rockhill reminds us how Habermas “had, like Friedeburg, served in the Hitler Youth.” He elaborates in a footnote, saying: “Habermas himself, we should recall, was a member of the Hitler Youth and would later support the Persian Gulf War and NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia.”

As with his treatment of Marcuse, Rockhill motte-and-baileys mightily to insinuate a connection between Habermas and Nazism without unambiguously asserting it. The effort is tortured. Habermas was indeed a member of the Hitler Youth, but Rockhill fails to mention that this was mandatory for all German boys over the age of ten after 1939. Moreover, Habermas never studied under Heidegger in any formal capacity. In fact one of Habermas’s early public interventions was a 1953 op-ed condemning the latter’s unrepentant Nazism; the first of several major critiques of Heidegger. This might be the reason, as Rockhill is grudgingly forced to acknowledge, that Habermas has always foregrounded Heidegger’s Nazism. Habermas’ political limitations are obvious enough without having to fantasize about fake ones.

Criticizing the Critical Critics

On the subjective side of things, Rockhill reads texts in lopsided ways to make the case that Western Marxists supported or abetted anti-socialism and anti-Marxism. Oftentimes, all that’s needed to see the problem is to check the original text.

The most egregious example is Rockhill’s treatment of Adorno. He suggests there was a “palpable shift in the Frankfurt School’s political orientation” in 1940 when the Institute “turned its back on class analysis in favor of privileging race, culture and identity.” He points to a letter Adorno wrote to Horkheimer in 1940 where the former claimed that “everything that we used to see from the point of view of the proletariat has been concentrated today with frightful force upon the Jews.” Rockhill uses this to blame Adorno for setting the “stage for a more general shift away from historical materialist analysis grounded in political economy toward culturalism and identity politics.” The reason two left-wing Jews exiled from Germany might be concerned with reactionary anti-semitism circa 1940 is something Rockhill largely passes over in silence, while he tries hard to project contemporary animosity over liberal identity politics into the past.

More embarrassing still is Rockhill’s discussion of a short Adorno essay, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” which was noticeable enough to generate an internet micro-scandal. Rockhill claims that Adorno suggested “that the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union could be retrospectively justified due to the fact that the Bolsheviks were—like Hitler himself had said—a menace to Western civilization. ‘The threat that the East will engulf the foothills of Western Europe is obvious,’ the famed philosopher proclaimed, ‘and whoever fails to resist it is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement.”

What Rockhill deliberately doesn’t acknowledge is that in this passage Adorno was clearly satirizing and criticizing Cold Warriors who make just these kinds of equivocating claims. He even claims that by doing so Cold Warriors retroactively legitimate fascist arguments for attacking the Soviet Union. Here is the quote from the essay in full:

It is a quick jump from the statement ‘Hitler always said so’ to the extrapolation he was also right about other things. Only edifying armchair warriors could quickly ease themselves over the historical fatality that in a certain sense the same conception that motivated the Chamberlains and their followers to tolerate Hitler as a watchdog against the East have survived Hitler’s downfall. Truly a fatality. For the threat of the East will engulf the foothills of Western Europe is obvious, and whoever fails to resist it is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement. What is forgot is merely—merely!—the fact that precisely this threat was first produced by Hitler’s campaign, who brought upon Europe exactly what his war was meant to prevent, or so thought the appeasers.

There’s an essential irony to Rockhill’s project. He is right that Western Marxism emerged in part as a response to the perversions of Stalinism and Maoism. A motivation for Western Marxism was a desire to speak truthfully about the world without having one’s work reprimanded for not toeing the orthodox party line. Or worse, having your writing manipulated and censured to demonize its author. By engaging in these kinds of tactics throughout Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, Rockhill has done more than most to reinvigorate worries about these longstanding tendencies amongst Soviet apologists while staving off an honest assessment of the academic critical theory industry. This means that Rockhill has also done more than most to vindicate Western Marxism.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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