Initially traveling to Colombia in order to teach English to the children of the rich, Nijmeijer quickly encountered the extreme inequalities dividing Colombia. She witnessed gated communities, stark disparities separating the northern part of capital Bogotá from the south, and the concentration of wealth and power among an elite while poorer neighborhoods suffered neglect and repression.

Nijmeijer came into contact with FARC militants through her work and began to question the dominant image of the guerrillas as little more than “narco-terrorists.” Instead she encountered people prepared to sacrifice their lives in pursuit of a revolutionary project. Gradually developing a socialist outlook, she began to recognize that the ruling class was blocking any prospects of meaningful, peaceful change. She increasingly regarded armed struggle as not only legitimate but necessary and was convinced that the guerrillas could “take power and plant the seed for a new world.”

Although it was not apparent then, when Nijmeijer went into the jungle, the FARC’s decline was already underway. Right-winger Álvaro Uribe won the presidential election in 2002 on the back of mounting hostility to the FARC following the collapse of the 1999–2002 peace process. Harnessing hegemonic narratives that portrayed the FARC as having acted in bad faith and merely exploited the peace process as an opportunity to expand, Uribe promised a “military solution,” relying on massive US support through Plan Colombia to modernize the armed forces.

By late 2003, seven months after Nijeimer went into the jungle, the counterinsurgency offensive organized through Plan Patriota had reached Sumapaz, where military operations targeted guerrilla fronts in a region central to the FARC’s strategic plan for surrounding Bogotá. Areas over which the FARC had historically enjoyed complete control were now being contested.

The guerrillas later discovered evidence of around sixty helicopter landing sites, army surveillance of guerrilla roads and infrastructure, and reconnaissance teams operating inside jungle territories that the insurgents had assumed were impenetrable.

The state’s expanding war chest enabled significant increases in military personnel, specialized mountain battalions, and airpower. This was supported by satellite imagery and geospatial intelligence, communications interception, and other technologies challenging the guerrillas’ traditional reliance on rugged terrain as a form of defensive protection.

The military’s expanding reach is already evident earlier in Nijmeijer’s account, when she describes the penetration of her units by infiltrators who pulled various stunts as part of a tactic to undermine morale — unlocking weapons, defecating in huts, and cutting up the guerrillas’ rubber boots. The result was that “nobody trusted anybody else.”

Whereas in the past, counterinsurgency campaigns were temporary, with troops eventually withdrawing due to budget cuts and other constraints, now the Colombian army established a permanent offensive presence and pursued the guerrillas into rearguard zones and jungles, closing in on commanders once thought invulnerable.

The shifting conditions led the FARC’s leading military commander, Mono Jojoy, to declare before a crowd of five hundred guerrillas, “Thanks to President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, we are going to learn how to live as guerrilla fighters again! We must go back to basics.”

Improvements in airpower gave the state forces a decisive advantage. Vehicles disappeared, supplies and comforts were reduced, marches replaced a comparatively settled life, and concentration gave way to greater mobility and dispersion. “Our days of easy living,” as Nijmeijer puts it, “were over.”

For the FARC, going back to basics meant adopting an increasingly defensive posture: land mines, often described as a “weapon of the weak,” became an especially useful tool for slowing the encroachments of army patrols. However, they also caused civilian casualties and left the FARC exposed to criticism for disregarding human rights.

To reduce the risk of interception when communicating with urban militants, the guerrillas began sending encrypted messages via satellite internet. But this wasn’t a comprehensive solution. Air surveillance, increased extensively under Plan Colombia, could still intercept such communications. They had to switch off the equipment whenever an approaching plane was suspected, but the introduction of small, largely undetectable drones enabling real-time surveillance in 2006 made it harder to know when they were being watched.

The transition to a more defensive mode of operating affected daily life. Camps were built with deep foxholes; smoking and flashlights were prohibited after dark; vines were strung along paths so fighters could navigate without light; fireflies were used as improvised illumination. The nightly hour of cultural activities, essential for political education and boosting morale, became a thing of the past in Nijmeijer’s units. Meanwhile, massed forces of guerrillas were restricted — a setback from the FARC’s war of movement strategy at the end of the 1990s, in which large concentrations of troops overwhelmed military bases.

True, this was a form of adaptation. Yet adaptation increasingly meant preserving the guerrilla organization under adverse conditions rather than recreating the offensive possibilities of the previous decade. Nijmeijer recounts, “The war changed, and it changed in the army’s favor.”

The psychological impact is described in a way that military histories and government documents rarely capture. Nijmeijer recalls the “pure terror” as bombs drop around her, with nowhere to run for safety, and no visible opponent to shoot at, only the hope that the jungle canopy might offer some protection.

Having to be constantly on the move, often in treacherous terrain, had its physical costs. Long marches left the guerrillas hungry and low on calories, and illness and fatigue, inevitable in such conditions, spread and grew more difficult to overcome. The army had repeatedly blocked Mono Jojoy’s attempts to meet up with Manuel Marulanda, the FARC’s founder and long-standing leader. Nijmeijer describes the resulting two-month march through particularly arduous territory on inadequate rations, which left her body aching so badly that she could barely manage to endure the night watch.

The psychological and physical impact had broader organizational repercussions. Demoralization deepened, and desertion rates increased, which the counterinsurgents exploited to the full. One guerrilla defector recorded the coordinates of Raúl Reyes’s location while sitting on the FARC leader’s bed. Iván Ríos, then the youngest member of the FARC’s secretariat, who had decided to remain with a guerrilla front to tackle problems of indiscipline and disorganization, turned up dead alongside his girlfriend — killed by his own head of security, who hoped to collect a lucrative bounty. Even people imagined to be staunchly politically committed ended up deserting and providing crucial intelligence.

As my own interviews with various former FARC leaders confirm, from around 2007, the counterinsurgents took the FARC by surprise, systematically hiding tiny GPS trackers in items that the guerrillas relied upon to survive. They identified stores in guerrilla areas and forced merchants to cooperate and even pressured family members and the children of guerrillas, as revealed in an interview with a retired strategic intelligence analyst in the Colombian navy. The trackers guided precision strikes on guerrilla camps, such as in the case of Mono Jojoy, whose boot concealed a GPS tracker.

Nijmeijer reflects that “if I had to pinpoint a moment when I began to see we wouldn’t take power by military means, it would be some time before Mono’s death in 2010.”

Yet her growing recognition that the FARC could no longer take power militarily was also linked to the organization’s broader political isolation.

As many former FARC commanders have admitted, kidnapping and extortion, justified by the organization as “revolutionary taxation,” inflicted enormous political costs and enabled the ruling classes to paint it as a group of terrorists and bandits, especially in urban areas where most people were based.

The FARC’s communications strategy — deemed a complete failure by Nijmeijer — also left it politically vulnerable. The state had dedicated task forces whose entire purpose was to undermine the FARC’s claim to political legitimacy. According to Nijmeijer, FARC leader Manuel Marulanda had decided “there was no good reason to respond to falsehoods the state made up.”

Given that the FARC was overwhelmingly rooted in the countryside, and the country was increasingly organized around the big cities, political communication was fundamental. Yet Nijmeijer recounts how long the FARC ignored this issue.

Nijmeijer concludes that while the conflict had no straightforward military victor, the FARC “certainly lost the ideological battle.”

The FARC’s strategy had always theoretically left open the possibility of negotiations alongside the more ambitious goal of taking power through a popular insurrection.

But as the FARC faced military blows and narrowing strategic possibilities, the idea of a negotiated settlement gained prominence.

In November 2011, the FARC’s supreme leader — Alfonso Cano — was assassinated by the counterinsurgents, the first time this had occurred in the organization’s half-century history, a moment Nijmeijer remembers as a “heavy blow” that left even the more radical commanders Iván Márquez and Jesús Santrich sitting in stunned silence, repeating, “We have to go on, anyhow.”

While the FARC was capable of sustaining the war over many more years, its influence had been significantly weakened. Key figures, including Nijmeijer, no longer realistically envisaged taking power through a popular insurrection and the point of war, they saw, was to win it, not simply endure it.

Unable to foresee victory or a realistic possibility of retaking the strategic initiative nationally, the FARC turned to negotiations from a position of relative weakness. The state only agreed to talks on the condition that changes to its fundamental economic model were off the cards — thus leaving intact the exploitative social relations that sustained the conflict.

Ultimately, from the perspective of a former guerrilla fighter who experienced firsthand the FARC’s military reversal, the book reveals that political power does not necessarily grow from the barrel of a gun. To be sure, the FARC became one of Latin America’s most powerful communist organizations, with many thousands of guerrillas, control over territory, and access to an enormous war chest. And yet, this capacity to sustain an insurgency did not translate into nationwide appeal or a credible strategy for taking power.

Pushback is illegal. It violates the individual’s right to claim asylum under international law and constitutes a deportation without trial. Pushbacks at sea also seem to contravene the universal duty to render assistance to those in distress, enshrined in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 1974 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. Given the typical state of repair of the vessels that irregular migrants use to cross, for example, the Mediterranean, their capacity, and the typical condition of the individuals concerned (Akehurst reports multiple instances of pregnant or unconscious passengers), one would think that this duty would kick in automatically for any state agent in a seaworthy boat coming to meet them.

These conventions are only the latest legal formulation of a nautical norm probably as old as seafaring itself. Xenophon’s Hellenica records that it was the failure of the six Athenian generals to rescue shipwrecked soldiers after the Battle of Arginusae in 406 BCE that prompted their trial and execution by the Athenian democracy. In Roman Law, the Lex Rhodia, codified by Justinian I but likely already over a thousand years old by that point, protects the duty to rescue by establishing the principle that any damages from jettison must be compensated by contributions from all those saved (the law of the general average). Similar conventions are present in the medieval pan-Mediterranean compendium the Consolato del Mare and were brought into the new “maritime law” of various states in the seventeenth century. As the concept of “international law” developed in the eighteenth century, influential Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel argued that there was a right of entry into port for a vessel in distress, and that this right existed notwithstanding the opposition of the coastal state. So universally established was the duty to render assistance, so ingrained in the psyche of European sailors, that Nazi Admiral Karl Dönitz felt obliged to issue an order forbidding such rescue after German U-boats repeatedly went to the aid of sunk Allied vessels and most famously attempted to rescue British and Italian survivors of the ocean liner Laconia (when they were attacked by American aircraft).

One can also tell different stories of Europeans’ behavior at sea. The same Rhodian law of the general average was relied upon by the owners of the slave ship Zong when they filed an insurance claim for the loss of 132 enslaved Africans thrown overboard when the ship ran low on drinking water. The same Vattel published an opinion justifying settlement of North America by Europeans who, “finding land of which the savages stood in no particular need, and of which they made no actual and constant use, were lawfully entitled to take possession of it and settle it with colonies.” The development of maritime and international law in the early modern period is inseparable from the development of European colonialism. European states established laws for their mutual conduct and the rights of their people, and in the same sweep drew the physical and ideological lines beyond which they would not apply: the persons who would not be legal subjects and the peoples who did not meet the criteria for statehood, and who could therefore be brutalized. The law was a technology concurrent to military force, economic extraction, and administrative imposition by which Europeans established sovereignty over distant land, in a process Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call “territorialization.”

At Europe’s borders today, exceptions to its “universal” human rights are still being made. The border as Akehurst describes it has become a bitter, one-sided contest between rival regimes of law. Civil and humanitarian groups, of national and international composition, fight for the application of international but also national maritime assistance and asylum law. They are obstructed by international lawfare. (Akehurst cites cases of search-and-rescue volunteers being charged with offenses such as smuggling and espionage. The cases can halt and frustrate rescue operations for years but rarely make it to court, spurious as they are.) Meanwhile, European governments cooperate to maintain states of exception for persons they deem deserving and outsource their lawmaking violence to foreign state and non-state actors. This is not a conflict between state sovereignty and international law but rather between different transnational agents attempting to undermine each other’s governance over social relations in a geographical area — in Deleuze and Guattari’s language, territorializing and deterritorializing actors.

Parallel to post hoc legal justification runs a tradition of European thought, from Diogenes to Franz Kafka, which examines the law not from the perspective of its writer but from the perspective of its sufferer. For the woman experiencing her twentieth pushback at the hands of men with guns in EU-funded patrol vehicles or the teenager in his second year in an offshore detention center waiting to hear whether his asylum claim will be successful, or whether it is even still “under review” at all, what good would be an invocation of the European origins of humanitarian law? The monolith they encounter just is the law. And this monolith, this Castle, this “Fortress Europe” is getting more formidable each year as the death rate rises. How did we get here?

Along the Watchtower contains a fascinating and timely history of European politics since the millennium, one that turns received wisdom on its head. The familiar story is the competition between liberal Europeanists, who favor increased powers for pan-European institutions, perhaps with the end goal of a supranational European state, and Euroskeptics, who want to maintain nation-state sovereignty as they see it. But Akehurst argues that what characterizes recent developments in Europe is a strategic accord, or at least a confluence of interests and convergence of policy, between these two factions.

In the economic and political crisis in Europe after 2007, amid mildly rising levels of irregular migration, the Europeanists sensed an opportunity to consolidate the European project with two key material tools of statehood: an army and a border. A minor agency, based in Warsaw as a favor to new EU member Poland, proved to be the answer. This was Frontex, and it quickly grew from a budget of €6 million in 2004 to €90 million in 2014. After the “migrant crisis” of 2015, it was supercharged, and its 2025 budget was over €1 billion of taxpayer money. It is now the EU’s largest agency. The number of its Standing Corps, the EU’s first uniformed service, is set to reach ten thousand next year. They have been increasingly equipped like a military force. Meanwhile, Europeanist politicians such as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have toured borders from Poland to Greece and claimed them as “European borders,” capable of being “defended” only by diverting money and power toward the coordinators in Brussels.

In this project, the Europeanists found strange bedfellows in the European far right, on an upward trajectory since 2007. They traditionally opposed European centralization and what they saw as the resulting importation of liberal values into the national body politic. They too spotted an opportunity, and one they too were able to escalate after 2015: to reframe economic downturn and national decline as the fault of immigrants and an overly permissive immigration system. As they started to gain power in countries like Austria and Italy, they worked with European institutions to bring about their desired treatment of migrants. It turned out that Brussels’s liberal values were up for sale, and not for a high price. Through bilateral state agreements, partnerships with illiberal external regimes like in Tunisia and Turkey, and victories for the border lobby within the EU, the far right secured the militarized “hot spot” system that Frontex was only too happy to enforce. This system, in turn, funnels irregular migrants into certain dangerous pinch points, from which emerge the spectacles of large groups of people pushing at fences or overcrowded dinghies making landings, which the far right then uses to campaign on.

And so, von der Leyen and far-right Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni will come together for a photo op on Lampedusa, and both have endorsed the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum that took effect this year. The far right get their ritual violence and their spectacle, and the Europeanists consolidate their transnational power. Whether each side believes they are strategically outmaneuvering the other is by the by: the result is washing up at the shores of the Mediterranean every day. (British pro-Europeans optimistic about Andy Burnham’s recent interventions on reversing Brexit ought to be cognizant that this is the EU to which they would be returning.)

So we are stuck in a vicious cycle of immiseration. Every migrant that fails to get through the border proves that Fortress Europe is working: every migrant that succeeds only proves that more resources, more surveillance, more emergency powers are required. Deeply unpleasant regimes and warlords pocket their fees for maintaining Europe’s external border, which they then use to conduct their own internal repressions, producing more refugees. The arms and surveillance technology companies, often in a revolving-door relationship with European agencies, enrich themselves to the tune of billions of dollars, which they use to lobby for more investment in arms and surveillance technology. The far right surges in Germany, France, Britain, and all over Europe as voters choose the real thing over the milquetoast versions of migrant demonization offered by liberal and social democratic politicians unable to resist the trap their enemies have set for them. Historic landscapes of Europe, Africa, and the Near East, gateways of ancient exchange and adventure, mountain passes, river valleys, and coastlines get covered in barbed-wire fences, tents, and patrolling soldiers. And the Mediterranean continues to groan with blood: the latest count is over thirty five thousand lives lost since 2014.

And still people move. It shouldn’t be unfamiliar to Europeans that people move: after all, they’ve always done it. The stories of the European imagination are littered with travelers, voyagers, and migrants: from Homer’s Odyssey to the skaldic poets, from Sadko in the byliny to the Celtic immrama. Without naively imagining this movement as always benevolent, and whatever its rationale, we can recognize that the arduous journeys have been respected; their human cost commemorated; the miracle of rescue honored. In Greek myth, the Aegean Sea is named for the life lost in it. We don’t know all the names of the people who have died in the Mediterranean in the last twelve years. The ones we do know are thanks to the tireless work of legal advocates, humanitarian campaigners, and migrant self-organizations. Akehurst interviews volunteers from I Have Rights in Samos, Mission Wings in Bulgaria, Medical Volunteers International in Serbia, Sea-Eye in the Mediterranean, and many more. We can situate their work in the legacies of civil and socialist opposition to the state, given their utilization of those material concessions won by previous struggles and inscribed within bourgeois law to defend and enact visions of human life beyond capitalist systems of violence. What Akehurst doesn’t give as much detail on is the relation — actual or optimal — between these groups and socialist parties working within national contexts. Nor is his book a theoretical account of the political economy of contemporary migration — a new left-wing popular introduction to which would be welcome. Nonetheless, the stories of these campaigners and the author’s sometimes joyous, normally mad encounters with them and the people seeking safety resonate long after the final chapter.

There are more traditions in Europe than just the imperial, and they include the civil organization of lifesaving at sea, kept alive today by search-and-rescue groups in the Mediterranean. The sea, that “howling infinite,” is not an easy place to territorialize. There is a natural disrule, and everything is more dangerous. This is why it lends itself more to the mythic mode than the juridical. Right-wingers accuse migrants of exploiting this danger in order to claim rescue and asylum. But the reverse is true: it is the European authorities that exploit the remoteness, lack of oversight, and hazard of the water in order to prevent legitimate asylum claims. It should concern us all whether what prevails on the Mediterranean, in the English Channel, and around the world is the law of assistance to those in distress or the law of the pushback.

While we have much to thank these first responders for, they won’t be enough on their own. As migration increases with climate breakdown and capitalism at war, it behooves us all to defend human movement and facilitate its safety. The alternative is becoming increasingly clear: the Mediterranean as mass grave, from the bloody outcrop of Ceuta to Trump hotels on the ethnically cleansed beaches of Gaza; a Europe without enough firefighters to tackle its wildfires, relying on the water cannons of border guards; and a thousand Daniel Thomases in brown shirts patrolling the Channel.

Against such a future, and the present powers who would midwife it, we must build a politics capable of pushing back.

The writing partnership with Roberts has helped win Carchedi a new readership. However, few among the younger generation of Marxists are aware of his early contributions to class theory, especially on the nature of the middle class.

One of his first articles, “On the economic identification of the middle class,” appeared in 1975 in the journal Economy and Society. A second piece, “Reproduction of social classes at the level of production relations,” appeared in the same publication a couple of issues later. They would form two chapters of a book, On the Economic Identification of Social Classes.

After much searching, I managed to get hold of a battered secondhand copy that North Staffordshire Polytechnic had marked “discarded from stock.” As with many niche academic texts of the period, the printers made the plates from the output of an electric typewriter. Only in 2024 did the publisher, Routledge, again make a facsimile of the text available.

Carchedi’s contribution to class theory appeared in the shadow of better-known works by two authors grappling with similar problems. The first was the Greek-French Marxist Nicos Poulantzas, whose Classes in Contemporary Capitalism appeared in English in 1975. The second was Erik Olin Wright, whose first major foray into class theory, Class, Crisis and the State, appeared in 1978. Carchedi’s account, I would argue, offered a more convincing resolution than either of its major rivals.

The new middle class has been a thorny problem for Marxist theory. Karl Marx saw capitalists and workers as the major contending classes within capitalism. He saw the former as the rulers of such societies and the latter as their potential adversaries, capable of overthrowing the rule of capital and beginning the process of forging a communist society.

There was, Marx acknowledged, a substantial petty bourgeoisie, consisting of smallholders of capital, such as shopkeepers or artisans, along with their rural counterpart, the peasantry. Yet as capitalism came to predominate, it would, as Marx put it, “cut up” members of these groups “into two persons,” forcing them to adapt to the new society by operating as both capitalist and worker.

There was no reason to imagine the petty bourgeoisie would vanish, but over long periods of time, the two key classes of capitalist society could begin to absorb such groups. This happens, for instance, when a peasant becomes successful enough to start hiring and exploiting wage labor. Conversely, it happens when a peasant can no longer reproduce themselves without turning to wage labor and subjecting themselves to exploitation at the hands of a capitalist.

But where did this leave the new intermediate layers that modern capitalism created, such as the managers and supervisors that large enterprises required, or technicians and engineers? They worked for a wage, just like workers, but their role set them apart from the mass of wage labor. For some, this called into question the whole Marxist approach to class — or at least blurred beyond recognition the lines demarcating the classes of capitalism.

Poulantzas had sought to resolve this issue by presenting a very restrictive conception of the working class, focused on “productive” workers (those who generate profit for capital) involved in creating material commodities. He assigned anyone who did not meet these criteria — service sector workers, those working in the sphere of circulation, and so on — to a “new petty bourgeoisie” on the grounds of their economic position. To this, he added “political” criteria, allowing him also to thrust managers into this new class, and “ideological” criteria, allowing him to add mental laborers.

As Wright complained, Poulantzas’s approach would make about 70 percent of the US labor force of the time petty bourgeois, many of them on the grounds of ideology and politics. To regard, say, teachers or nurses as petty bourgeois seems particularly out of tune with today’s reality: such groups are clearly subject to the degrading power of capital and are often at the forefront of workplace struggle.

Wright’s own alternative was to deal with these ambiguities through a notion of “objectively contradictory class locations,” avoiding forcing groups such as managers into either the class of capitalists or workers. However, Wright’s approach introduced a complication. He sought to apply his approach both to groups caught between capitalists and workers in the workplace, such as managers, and to other groups — semiautonomous wage-earners and small employers — he identified as lying between the traditional petty bourgeoisie and either workers or capitalists.

This unnecessarily complicates the position of the petty bourgeoisie, whose very nature allows them to shade into the two major classes. The new middle class is a distinctive type of formation, requiring a different approach.

Wright himself would come to reject elements of his earlier contribution. In his later work, he suggested that he had previously overemphasized criteria such as autonomy in identifying class locations at the expense of exploitation.

However, from the mid-1980s, Wright increasingly drew on analytical Marxist thinkers such as John Roemer rather than on Marx’s own approach to exploitation. Roemer was skeptical of the value theory Marx developed in Capital, recasting exploitation as a matter of the different assets that individuals possess. As well as capitalist property, such assets could, in Wright’s new class model, be “organizational assets” or “skills.” The result was a fragmentation of the class structure, leading to myriad different class locations.

Carchedi offered a way out of this morass, drawing on Marx’s Capital. Groups such as managers in modern enterprises must perform two contradictory functions within capitalist production. These are not simply different technical functions; they are social functions, reflecting the imperatives of rival classes.

On the one hand, managers perform some functions of the “collective worker,” including coordinating the labor process, something necessary in any large, complex workplace, in any type of society. On the other hand, they also perform “global functions of capital,” roles of control and surveillance necessary because the workplace sits within a class-divided society. As Carchedi wrote, they are a special group of waged employees forming a “hierarchically organized ensemble, “who collectively perform what used to be the function of an individual capitalist” alongside activities appropriate to the collective worker.

These contradictory functions combine differently in different concrete jobs, influencing whether sections of the new middle class side with workers in struggle or align with their capitalist employers. The configuration of these functions is not static; it shifts with technological change, management culls, and restructurings.

For those Marxists who paid attention, notably Bob Carter, Carchedi’s theory would form the basis for later work, both theoretical accounts of the new middle class and empirical studies of workplaces. It provided a missing link between the labor process analysis that Harry Braverman pioneered in the early 1970s and a sophisticated Marxist class theory.

Carchedi’s early work on class may superficially seem disconnected from his later work on political economy. However, there are clear links. These become apparent in an exchange with Wright in 1989, which appeared in the collection The Debate on Classes.

Here Carchedi criticized two elements of Wright’s methodology. The first was Wright’s embrace of analytical Marxism’s claim that there is no distinctive Marxist method, that the methods of mainstream social science will suffice. In place of this, Carchedi emphasized a dialectical approach.

This meant acknowledging the crucial roles of social structures, which develop independent of the will of particular individuals. However, these structures are not static but subject to dynamism and change.

This concern with method would persist. It is no coincidence that his 2011 book, Behind the Crisis, opens with a heading: “The need for dialectics.” Almost all of Carchedi’s major writings contain a discussion of method, emphasizing Marx’s dialectical standpoint.

Second, Carchedi reasserted the centrality of Marx’s value theory. Here he would offer another pioneering contribution, as one of the progenitors, along with Alan Freeman and Andrew Kliman, of what its proponents came to call the Temporal Single System Interpretation of Marx.

When analytical Marxists such as Roemer and Wright claimed Marx’s value theory was flawed, they were scrutinizing a modified version of the theory.

For Carchedi, their approach drew heavily on an approach pioneered by figures such as Piero Sraffa, which revived elements of the approach of to the labor theory of value of Marx’s predecessor, David Ricardo.

This “neo-Ricardianism” treated production not as a social and historical process but as a primarily technical one, in which a set of commodities gives rise to another set of commodities. The exploitation of labor ceases to play any distinctive role in creating new value. Neo-Ricardians, conceiving of the economy in this way, could model it through a set of simultaneous equations.

As Carchedi pointed out, one of the key weaknesses in this approach was its neglect of the concept of time. Neo-Ricardians unrealistically assumed that the prices of the outputs of a given cycle of production were the same as the prices of the equivalent inputs into that cycle. Carchedi insisted on reintroducing time, following Marx in resisting seeing capitalism as a system in static equilibrium.

One advantage to this approach was that it helped Carchedi to resolve what Marxists call the “transformation problem.” Marx’s Capital proposes that the value of commodities reflects the labor time that their production typically requires. This includes both the “living labor” of the workers producing them and the “dead labor,” the labor that workers expended in the past to create the material means of production that the process uses up.

This had implications for the rate of profit, the ratio between profit and investment. For Marx, living labor had the distinctive role of creating new value. Because labor can do so in excess of the cost of its reproduction (the wage), this gives rise to profits.

But because the ratio of living and dead labor varies between branches of the economy, Marx’s approach implied a different rate of profit in each. Yet even in Marx’s day, economists observed that profit rates tend to converge over time. Marx reconciled theory with reality through his transformation of values into “prices of production.”

Capital migrates toward branches of the economy where profit rates are high, disrupting the price level as social demand and supply shift. Were this process to reach its conclusion, it would redistribute value between capitalists such that each receives the same average rate of profit on their investment. In fact, as Carchedi showed, this was only a tendency, and new disruptions upset any potential equilibrium long before the system could reach it.

Many critics, starting with Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in 1896, followed by Ladislau von Bortkiewicz, Paul Sweezy, and Ian Steedman, have faulted Marx for considering only how this transformation of values into prices of production affects the outputs of production, without also transforming the value of inputs. For those working with an atemporal, equilibrium model, such as the neo-Ricardians, making this further transformation allowed them to detach the system of prices of production from value theory altogether.

Carchedi argued that no such detachment was necessary. When capitalists obtain inputs for a new cycle of production, the value they advance is simply the price of production with which they left the previous cycle. This was what Carchedi termed their “social value.” Prices of production are, he proposed, not merely “determined by values but rather are their concrete form of existence.”

The hallmark of great Marxist political economy is to synthesize the often rather abstract discussions of value theory with an empirical understanding of a dynamic, changing, and crisis-prone system. This was very much on display in what I consider Carchedi’s finest work, Frontiers of Political Economy. Here Carchedi clarified and extended Marx’s approach in Capital while seeking to apply it to contemporary capitalism.

The result is dazzling. Carchedi’s book deals with the intricacies of price formation in the context of uneven and complex processes of intercapitalist competition, first on the national terrain and then on a global scale, where, for instance, wage levels differ sharply. Besides the transformation problem discussed above, he investigated a range of controversies, such as precisely which forms of labor do and don’t produce value and how to account for different skill levels among workers.

At the center of the book, a chapter on “Growth, crises, inflation and crashes” develops themes that would become prominent in his work. Here he focused on Marx’s “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” (TRPF).

Capitalists must advance an ever-greater mass of capital, in the form of dead labor, to grab their share of the pool of profit that the system generates. But because only living labor generates new value, the scale of the employed workforce and the extent of its exploitation ultimately limit the size of this pool. The more dynamic capitalism is in mobilizing a greater amount of dead labor through automation and the expansion of capital, the more this tends to choke off future profits relative to investment, helping pave the way for crises.

The TRPF has been a source of considerable controversy among Marxists. For some, it is an unnecessary distraction from value theory. For others, it is so hedged with counteracting tendencies that no one can grasp an overall pattern. For others still, the empirical evidence has falsified it.

Carchedi argued that the TRPF should remain at the center of crisis theory. It was, he maintained, the ultimate expression of the contradictions of capitalism. This was because, as Marx had proposed, the very processes that impel capitalism forward — exploitation, competition, accumulation — can, through the TRPF, begin to undermine future accumulation.

In his account, Carchedi acknowledged various counteracting tendencies, such as the intensification of exploitation from the 1980s, but argued that, in the long run, the TRPF overpowered these. It might also appear that financial expansion had injected new dynamism into capitalism. Yet for Carchedi, this reflected how the TRPF in productive sectors encouraged capital to shift into the sphere of finance, feeding speculative bubbles and ultimately financial crises. The meltdown of 2007–9 was not, in this account, a purely financial phenomenon but one ultimately rooted in the productive economy, the realm of workers’ exploitation and the site where their potential power concentrates.

I have only touched on a few elements of Carchedi’s contribution. His career saw him explore many other themes, ranging from the class nature of European integration to the relationship between value theory and artificial intelligence. It is far better that the interested reader consults such works for themselves to understand their richness and diversity. Doing so will also make clear the passion that motivated him.

On that, let the final word go to Carchedi himself, from his acceptance speech on receiving the World Marxian Economics Award in 2021. Contrasting the 1960s and ’70s, a time of great hope for those on the radical left, with the present period, he said:

An economic and financial crisis of major proportions is again knocking at the door; the destruction of our natural habitat proceeds unchecked; the divide between the poor of the world and the absurdly rich has never been so great; the dark clouds of a new world war are gathering on the horizon; right-wing ideologies resurrect and even fascism is raising its ugly face again. These are the dangers the new generations will have to face. The difficulties ahead for them will be immense. But the contradictory nature of the system is such that each time capitalism wins, the anti-capitalist forces regroup and counterattack with new forms of resistance. My hope is that my work will be of some help in their struggle.

For Netflix, Possible Love is a prestige project: an opportunity to bring home an Oscar with a highly accomplished director while reversing a viewership slump and enhancing its brand. Possible Love premiered theatrically in South Korea in September, meeting the Academy’s country-of-origin eligibility deadline. The streaming platform has also made Lee’s previous films available for its subscribers.

Possible Love is set against the aftermath of the 2009 brutal crackdown on the seventy-seven-day strike against massive job cuts at SsangYong Motor (fictionalized in the film as SP Heavy Industries). After crushing the strike, management and the government pushed through one of the country’s first massive layoffs by slashing 50 percent of SsangYong’s blue-collar workforce. In the film as in real life, workers refer to their laid-off colleagues as “the dead” and those who managed to escape the cull as “the living.”

Through the crackdown, corporations and the conservative government set a precedent for mass layoffs. After the defeat at SsangYong, corporations could cut jobs by invoking broadly defined criteria of managerial exigency. The repercussions of the strike and its vivid suppression resonated deeply throughout South Korea.

The strike even became part of the backstory of Squid Game, Netflix’s gamified portrayal of capitalist suffering. In his review of the series, Lee Chang-kun, a leader of SsangYong’s labor union, summed up the experience of an agonizing and prolonged factory occupation:

Out of the blue, we were left with no option but to squat at the factory. We first attempted to turn to each other to survive together. However, we were thrown into a life-or-death situation, often with no other option but to betray and dupe each other. At least once, as in Squid Game, we each had to hurt our closest friends.

Many workers or their family members have since died by suicide or from stress-related conditions such as cardiac arrest. There was probably no better place for Lee to begin Possible Love than the funeral of one such worker.

In the film, Ho-seok (played by Peppermint Candy star Sul Kyung-gu) was one of the remaining seven hundred striking workers who faced the violent police raid. He had been a welder, proud enough to name his son “Iron.”

Having been injured in the crackdown and subsequently jailed, he has been drained of his blue-collar mettle and sense of purpose, leaving him with simmering feelings of anger and betrayal. His wife, Mi-ok (Secret Sunshine star Jeon Do-yeon) is a good-hearted, innately resilient former seamstress who does her best to hold the family together against all odds in the wake of her husband’s layoff.

At this point, documentary director Ye-ji — played by Cho Yeo-jeong, almost typecast as the seemingly innocuous upper-class woman after her similar role in Parasite — encroaches on Ho-seok and Mi-ok’s fragile universe with her camera lens. A daughter of a small-business owner turned parvenu, Ye-ji is married to Sang-woo (Hope star Zo In-sung), a private equity investor born into generations of wealth and power.

Ye-ji attempts to love Mi-ok and Ho-seok because she believes herself to be a good person. While she is probably sympathetic to Ho-seok and his family, she is strikingly lacking in empathy for their situation. Her superficial innocuousness is pernicious.

Ye-ji’s interest in laid-off workers from SP Industries began during a vacation at a resort in the middle of the Qatar desert, maintained by workers who, her husband tells her, labored hard behind the scenes. Ho-seok is a subject Ye-ji wants to capture through her camera before he disappears into obscurity.

Ye-ji’s husband, Sang-woo, is kind and well-mannered, probably because he has little reason to be otherwise. In his line of business, everything seems impersonal, reduced to numbers and valuations. Although he possesses greater worldly insight than his wife, he need not concern himself with the consequences of his spreadsheets for people like Ho-seok, who remain invisible to him.

There seems to be nothing Ho-seok can do better than Sang-woo. The latter is the better husband, always supportive of his wife, both morally and financially. He is also the better athlete, having tutored the welder’s son in tae kwon do, the sport in which Ho-seok was once a varsity athlete.

To add insult to injury, he is even a superior musician who can play the oboe while Mi-ok sings at karaoke. Ho-seok keeps his guard up around Sang-woo, but he seems to be free of personal jealousy toward him, as though he instinctively feels that the rift between them is one of class rather than individual attributes.

Rather, what has traumatized Ho-seok is the experience of his coworkers, who are now divided into the living and the dead. He has feelings of envy toward the living; they can still throw a fancy birthday party for their children. Emotionally overwhelmed, Ho-seok cannot open up during a group therapy session, where one of the dead laments that they were defeated despite being on the right side.

It is painful to watch Ho-seok, especially if you understand how strikes and campaigns are defeated — how they implode before they can fizzle out or are violently crushed. We do not walk away from our collective struggles because we abruptly come to fear or love our adversaries. We walk away because we have grown disillusioned or lost trust in the people beside us.

It is before Ye-ji’s camera that Ho-seok finally breaks down in tears and confesses his deepest fear that his wife and former coworkers will discover the anger and sense of betrayal he has kept deep inside. Words like “solidarity” or “resistance” have been reduced to hollow shells of what they used to mean to him.

It is also when Ye-ji finally lowers her intrusive camera, perhaps stunned by the scene, or perhaps realizing she can never genuinely understand (or love) her subjects. Her very innocuity is a form of violence against Ho-seok and Mi-ok. “That’s enough!” both Ye-ji and Mi-ok yell after Ho-seok’s moment opening-up. The two couples part ways.

Director Lee appears to have built the narrative around one of the Ten Commandments, “You shall not covet,” which appears at the beginning of the film. Ye-ji has even coveted Ho-seok’s agonies. For Ho-seok, that suffering still constitutes part of his own dignity. After opening up, he appears to regain part of his strength.

When Mi-ok asks for the first time in the film about their future, “What shall we do?” he answers, “We will keep living on.” “It will rain tomorrow,” his wife says. “It hasn’t today,” her husband replies, as if that were how he has put himself together day by day since the strike was crushed.

Possible Love is difficult to watch because it relentlessly makes you uncomfortable, if not downright pained. Ho-seok is not an idealized figure: he is a wavering worker, trapped in divisions within his own class, rather than a bold and brave militant taking on his boss and the system. However, this makes his character all the more real: like Ho-seok and the film itself, we are all multilayered beings defying any simple definition.

But it is to this patchwork — and its associated “time taxes” — that most of the book is devoted. Through a mix of reporting, social scientific research, and reflecting on her own experience with an autoimmune condition, Lowrey has collected a cabinet of maddening curiosities: impenetrable forms, inexplicable rejections, multiyear wait times, and more. Page after page finds ordinary Americans trying to navigate a twisted institutional terrain seemingly designed by Franz Kafka or M. C. Escher. In the United States, you can buy, bid, and bet with the click of a button. Yet paying your taxes, voting, and getting benefits for which you qualify requires you to do American Ninja Warrior — with the proper forms of ID in hand.

Having cataloged the challenges people face when using public services in the United States, the first section of The Time Tax concludes with a tantalizing glimpse at the Estonian case, which, in many ways, resembles the Norwegian one with which I am more familiar (sans generous welfare state and strong labor rights). The story, as told by Lowrey, is that the small Baltic country, battered and bereft after exiting the Soviet Union, lacked the time, experience, infrastructure, and resources to recreate the comprehensive service architectures of other countries. So it didn’t. Instead, a generation of young and enterprising leaders leaned into speed, convenience, and digital integration to build an innovative e-government. In Estonia, Lowrey has seen the almost frictionless future of navigating government — and it works!

The Time Tax is at its most interesting and convincing when Lowrey is detailing the diabolical busy boxes that occupy millions of Americans. After the brief field trip to Estonia, the book could — and probably should — have ended with her proposals. It doesn’t.

Perhaps drawing inspiration from her subject, Lowrey decides that she requires more of her reader’s time to make her point. After a section break, we leave Estonia and arrive at . . . Fort Pillow in 1864? With Confederate general and future Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest? It was disappointing to discover that The Time Tax was not in fact beginning its descent to a satisfying landing — it had been diverted to another destination: the past.

The middle third of the book draws on the extensive historical and social scientific scholarship devoted to the United States’ welfare system to recapitulate a story that will be familiar to anyone who knows the tortuous history of social provision in the United States. All the beats are there: Civil War pensions, Jim Crow, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Depression, Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Great Society, Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens,” Bill Clinton and the “end of welfare as we know it.” Lowrey provides some useful context for twenty-first-century annoyances but breaks no new ground here, and the long historical detour saps the momentum of her opening chapters.

I worry that it also leads her to draw the wrong conclusions about her time taxes. She laments, for instance, that “diversity creates time taxes” and suggests that we are not Estonia due to “racial makeup.” Could it not be instead that time taxes transform diversity into inequality and hierarchy?

In any case, the final part of the book picks up the threads of the first to make a final appeal and offer Lowrey’s solutions. This appeal takes for granted that the reader has not been entirely swayed by their own experiences or by the book’s emphasis on aggravation, injustice, racism, and inequality. Instead, Lowrey makes a persuasive closing argument that time taxes also hurt our health, teach us the wrong lessons about citizenship and government, and undermine social trust.

She concludes with her blueprint for change. Her proposed fixes include measuring time taxes via “sludge audits,” federalizing what are today state-run programs, reducing the use of means-testing in favor of universalism, and abolishing work requirements and pro forma interviews. These changes would, in the aggregate, make using public services faster, easier, more convenient, more empowering, and ultimately more fulfilling.

But I hesitate to call these proposals “solutions,” because I do not think that they actually address the problem at the heart of The Time Tax. This problem is not time taxes per se but the success of actors who weaponize bureaucracy to undermine our access to the goods and services of the social citizenship for which previous generations have fought and even died. The status quo in the United States is a nightmare not because elites are unaware of the fact that universalism promotes greater public investment and trust in government — it is a nightmare because they are aware. The history of many hitherto existing time taxes is also the history of class struggles.

Lowrey knows this — I think. She condemns TurboTax for helping to kill Direct File, Florida Republicans for fighting the reenfranchisement of convicted felons, and Donald Trump for the disaster of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)–related cuts. She tells us that “time taxes are not just policy failures, but deliberate tools of social control.” And yet The Time Tax’s antagonist is without question “Uncle Sam” (her chosen shorthand for the government) and his “bureaucratic excesses.”

The issue is that while she lambasts “Uncle Sam” again and again, she is hesitant to center the private interests for whom that control is useful and profitable. In her long historical excursus, she can acknowledge that poll taxes and other discriminatory laws were used by racist white elites to exclude black people, make their lives precarious, and destroy governmental alternatives to foster dependency on actors who rarely had their best interests in mind. But while the past has opponents, for Lowrey, the present only has design flaws.

A smaller rhetorical point: Lowrey undermines her cause with the book’s core metaphor. Calling the problem the “time tax” might sell books to tax-wary Americans, but it could reinforce the pernicious idea that taxes do not benefit ordinary people. This is odd, as Lowrey herself acknowledges that a sustainable remedy to “the headaches, snafus, and frustration imposed by Uncle Sam” requires the expansion and improvement of administrative capacity — a development that would almost certainly require, well, greater taxes.

Finally, there is a problem of conceptual imprecision, which becomes apparent in the book’s first pages. Lowrey opens The Time Tax with a montage, juxtaposing disconnected scenarios for the purpose of creating a connective thread — the time tax — between radically different people, places, and challenges. But as she moves from losing the right to vote, to trying to get insurance to cover therapies for an autistic child, to attempting to open a soft-serve ice cream shop, to practicing cosmetology without a license, to handing out burritos to the homeless without a permit, I began to question whether each of these is in fact an example of the same problem. After a while, she more or less abandons any attempt to persuade you that a given obstacle is or is not a time tax. Instead, she just asserts it, identifying one or more annoyances and then adding something like “ — a time tax,” as if it were obvious.

All in all, The Time Tax is laudable as a collection of curios. It is less useful as a blueprint. Though Lowrey knows — and sometimes says explicitly — that this maddening status quo reflects the desires of certain powerful and well-resourced actors, she offers no proposals for organizing to muzzle, defang, or otherwise diminish their influence. She writes that “change does not happen without awareness, and awareness is not possible without numbers and stories.”

But it also does not happen without an awareness of who or what benefits from keeping you trapped in a thousand purgatories and a strategy for organizing against them. The path to a Norwegian-style welfare state is not just a matter of design — it is one of politics, and class politics in particular.

The story of Eugene V. Debs’s life,” writes Gude, “is the story of one man’s radicalization — and of the country he helped radicalize in turn.” During the first decade of his working life, Debs was a conventional railroad unionist often hostile to strikes and largely uninterested or ignorant of the radical currents, social and ideological, that were on the rise in Gilded Age America. He disdained not only the violence of the 1877 rail strike but also the rise of the Knights of Labor, a more inclusive union formation. Debs happily endorsed the “Benevolence, Sobriety, and Industry” that were the watchwords of his Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen.

But soon enough he was mugged by capitalist reality, most dramatically in the depression of the early 1890s that sparked the great Pullman boycott and nationwide rail strike Debs led in 1894. Jailed by the federal government for defying a union-busting injunction, Debs, like so many other imprisoned radicals in Russia, Prussia, and far-flung colonies, now had the time and incentive to read his Karl Marx. After six months in a Woodstock, Illinois, jail, he emerged a socialist.

By the start of the new century, when Debs stood proudly as the nation’s most forceful and popular anti-capitalist tribune, the Socialist Party seemed as American as the corn its members grew in Oklahoma, the copper mined by its Montana adherents, the cars built by Flint autoworkers, the apparel sewn by Lower East Side immigrants, or the sermons and editorials offered by advocates of the Social Gospel. With more than a hundred thousand members, some 1,200 socialists held elected office, including eighty mayors in thirty-six states.

And as Gude rightly asserts, Debs’s great achievement arose not out of any particular vote tally — he would win almost a million votes when he ran for president in 1912 and 1920 — but by making socialist partisans, as well as many of their opponents, believe that the movement he championed arose out of the American political tradition’s most democratic currents, from the revolutionary struggle against the British monarchy to the abolitionist fight against slavery. He was one of America’s great critics of the plutocracy, but more Christian agitator than political tactician. When, in early 1919, Debs was imprisoned for his opposition to World War I, his moral stature was crowned with martyrdom.

As if to even more firmly link his life and fate with that of our own time, Gude references Debs as a “democratic socialist.” That is an anachronistic phrase when applied to the early-twentieth-century movement led by men and women of a Debsian persuasion. In the years before the rise of Stalinism, not to mention German “national socialism,” almost all socialists described themselves as just socialists, or perhaps social democrats, because inherent in the idea of socialism was the democratic control of both economy and polity. (Before 1917, the Bolsheviks were a faction within the “Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.”) Neither Debs nor many of his contemporaries spent much energy thinking about precisely how a nationalized railroad or steel mill would be governed, an issue that bedeviled radicals of a later generation.

It was Michael Harrington who popularized the phrase “democratic socialism” when, in the early 1970s, he proved instrumental in the formation of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, forerunner of today’s DSA. So while semantically inaccurate, Gude’s deployment of the phrase “democratic socialism” to the movement led by Debs serves to make abundantly clear the tutorial purpose of this biography.

Debs was a socialist tribune, a clever and powerful wordsmith whose rhetoric combined outrage and moralism, denunciation and inspiration. He was not an original thinker, avers Gude, but that hardly prevented thousands from coming to hear him orate.

More than any other socialist of his time, writes Gude, Debs had a “seemingly intuitive sense of how to connect with the US working class in all its heterogeneity.” He was an abolitionist opposed to the Old World tyranny of aristocrats and kings.

“Workers weren’t just poor, they were serfs,” summarizes Gude in explaining the Debs appeal. “Capitalism didn’t just impoverish, it enslaved. . . .  And through solidarity would come freedom.“

However, when it came to actually running the Socialist Party and participating in its internal debates, Debs was almost always absent, out campaigning or ill at home, even as his own sentiments and inclinations usually tilted left. Debs was a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, which he projected as a far more encompassing and radical labor formation than the increasingly stolid American Federation of Labor. And Debs was ambiguous when it came to socialist party advocacy of those reforms that might serve the immediate interests of the working class.

Debs did not directly polemicize against the “sewer socialists,” notably those holding municipal office in Milwaukee, Butte, Reading, and other cities, where their innovative public health regimes proved enormously beneficial to thousands of residents. But he was not interested in forging the alliances and legislation that would advance such reforms as an integral component of socialism’s electoral appeal: “What we want is not to reform the capitalist system. We want to get rid of it.”

Here’s an instance where Debs hardly offers contemporary socialists much inspiration. Both Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani would fit easily on the Socialist Party’s right wing, not far from Milwaukee’s Victor Berger or New York’s Morris Hillquit, both of whom often bested Debs when it came to internal party debate. Mamdani boasts of filling thousands of New York City potholes and opening a set of city-owned grocery stores, and he seems to have forged a working relationship with a New York governor several steps to his right. Meanwhile, Sanders links a forthright denunciation of American capitalism with a set of concrete reforms whose realization requires a very messy set of alliances and incremental steps forward that Debs would assuredly find utterly distasteful. And of course, much of this twenty-first century politicking will take place within, rather than in opposition to, the Democratic Party.

Gude did not exactly rediscover Eugene V. Debs, because his life and times have long attracted the attention of latter-day radicals, especially during those eras when the Left has been on the rise. It’s instructive therefore to compare the Gude biography with two other narratives that saw publication in years past when other varieties of American radicalism seemed to have much ideological and social wind at their back.

Ray Ginger published the first comprehensive biography in 1949, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs. Ginger was just twenty-five and still in grad school on the GI Bill. It’s hard to know how he found time to write the book. At the University of Michigan, the army put him in all-day classes learning Japanese, and for a time after the war he worked in a Detroit auto factory. Meanwhile, Ginger had joined the Communist Party in 1944 or 1945, when both the party and the industrial union movement it championed were at their apogee.

Ginger’s biography is not a party-line publication, and there is some indication that he clashed with Communist officials when they read the nearly completed publication. Still, its structure and argument reflects a species of 1930s and ’40s Popular Front Marxism. The table of contents constructs a teleological scaffolding that moves ever upward in both consciousness and organization, from “The Railroad Brotherhoods,” (mere trade union consciousness) to “The American Railway Union,” (Congress of Industrial Orgnaizations–style industrial unionism), and on to “American Socialism” and then “World Socialism,” the longest chapter in a book written during a half-decade when fascism was vanquished and the Cold War began.

Ginger’s career was a tragic one. Harvard fired him in 1954 when his Communist ties became known, after which he took jobs in New York advertising and publishing, all the while writing book after well-received book, most on Gilded Age America. He taught at Brandeis in the 1960s, but lost his post there after an affair with an undergraduate. An alcoholic, he continued to teach and write at various universities until cirrhosis of the liver took his life in 1975 when he was but fifty years old.

While Ginger is as appreciative of the humanity and transcendence of the Debsian revolutionary visions as is Gude, he takes aim at the socialist tribune’s failure to combine his popular appeal with a necessary engagement with the Socialist Party’s complex and contentious inner life. Gude gives Debs something of a pass on this score, perhaps reflecting the high-profile role now being played by Bernie Sanders, who is not even a member of DSA, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose DSA linkages are complex and somewhat attenuated.

But when Ginger was writing his biography, you did not have to be a Leninist to understand the importance of forceful leadership. The progressive trade unions and the various left-wing parties of that day considered it vital to put forth public spokesmen and women fully engaged in shaping the program and politics of the institution over which they presided. Consider Dorothy Healey’s unorthodox leadership of the California Communist Party or Walter Reuther’s skillful rise to power in the United Auto Workers. Both were exciting speakers but also deeply enmeshed in organizational politics. Debs did none of that.

Although he was by far the most popular figure in the Socialist Party, after 1904, Debs refused to attend party conventions or serve on leadership committees. His absenteeism created a vacuum filled by Berger, Hillquit, and others to his right. “Comrade Debs is no doubt a great orator and a fiery revolutionist,” wrote one socialist “rightwinger” quoted by Ginger, “but he is also one of the poorest generals and tacticians that our movement has.. . . .  He has shown himself utterly unreliable in the meeting of the practical problems of the day and the selection of his advisors.”

Ginger’s admiration for Debs was therefore mixed with a certain condescension. He called him “more Midwestern than a worn and rotting plow-handle buried deep in the soil of a Kansas farm.” It is not that Ginger wanted a Vladimir Lenin or a Leon Trotsky, but when the author asserted in the last sentences of his book that Debs’s “finite self seemed to merge with the agonized wanderings of the nameless multitude,” the assessment was not entirely complimentary.

Nick Salvatore’s 1982 study, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, turned much of Ginger’s critique on its head. Debs was indeed as American as that rotting Kansas plow-handle, and that’s the whole point. Salvatore’s perspective, largely echoed by Gude, had a twofold origin. As a militant unionist and civil rights activist, Salvatore, who died in 2025 after a distinguished career as a Cornell historian, was in the 1960s and ’70s looking for a way that could enable the New Left to speak American, to evoke a new radicalism out of native values and context. One could find that impulse in the 1962 Port Huron Statement and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, where Salvatore a few years later wrote a dissertation that became his prize-winning Debs biography.

The rediscovery, by an older generation of historians, of an eighteenth to nineteenth century “republican” tradition gave Salvatore the tools to understand Debsian radicalism as contiguous with many of the main cultural and social currents emblematic of the Protestant small-town America that an earlier cohort of radicals — think H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis — had once disdained.

Salvatore wrote a “social biography” steeped in the “new labor history.” He postulated that Debs’s radicalism arose out of the culture found in Terre Haute, his preindustrial hometown, wherein a “manly” independence, evangelical Protestantism, and a republican understanding of the responsibilities and privileges of a virtuous citizenship engendered a democratic America. Like E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, pioneering historians of working-class formation, Salvatore found nineteenth century radicalism, socialist or otherwise, emerging out of the clash between those republican virtues and the oppressive structures engendered by Gilded Age industrial capitalism.

Encapsulating all this, Gude writes of Debs, “His genius was assembling a mix of ideological ingredients familiar in working-class circles — Christianity and labor republicanism, Marxism and the American revolutionary tradition — and alchemizing them” into an all-American vernacular. “I like the Fourth of July,” Debs told a crowd on his first run for president in 1900, “It breathes a spirit of revolution.”

There was however, one aspect of the Debs praxis that Gude shows to be very much at odds with the dominant culture and the sentiments held by many of his erstwhile comrades. Debs did once assert, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.” Abolishing capitalism was the solution to the Negro problem, the woman question, and the persistence of antisemitism. Until then, it was fruitless to seek any sort of particular amelioration, because the ruling class itself fostered and advanced such discriminations and oppressions. “The Negro is not one whit worse off than thousands of white slaves who throng the same labor market to sell their labor-power to the same industrial masters.”

And not only that: thousands of dedicated socialists were also dedicated racists who saw poorly paid Asian immigrants and African American strikebreakers as debased elements of the working population not all that different from what Marx identified as the lumpenproletariat. This was an era when manliness and whiteness were seemingly intertwined.

But Debs would grow in moral and social intelligence when it came to the causes and remedies of American racism.

On speaking tours of the South he was appalled at the brutal racism and Jim Crow practices he observed. He probably read W. E. B. DuBois’s new book, The Souls of Black Folk, afterward asserting that “The whole world is under obligation to the negro and that the white heel is still upon the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized.” When the film Birth of a Nation was shown in Terre Haute, Debs was aghast at this cinematic celebration of the Ku Klux Klan.

He applauded the anti-racist agitation of the young black socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, and by the time of the bloody race riots of the World War I era, he saw that the battle against racial oppression did require something “special” on the part of socialists and other progressives. As early as the 1912 election, W. E. B. DuBois judged Debs the only candidate, who “by word and deed, stands squarely on a platform of human rights regardless of race or class.”

Debs’s salutary evolution on this issue put him far to the left of most socialists and trade unionists of his time. And that was just the problem, because Debs rarely sought to leverage his popularity to make his party adopt a truly progressive posture on an issue of such vital import to the twentieth-century American left. Thus, in the 1930s and ’40s, it would be the Communists and not the Socialists who would stand out as civil rights pioneers.

Despite the Debsian appeal of a century and more ago, as well as the contemporary enthusiasm engendered by its twenty-first century revival, American socialism was and is a minority current in both politics and culture. The obstacles to its success are legion: sectarian infighting of the sort that helped destroy Debs’s party right after the Bolshevik Revolution; the long-standing religious, racial, and occupational divisions within the working class; and of course the enormous power of capital and its many ideological and political handmaidens.

But I don’t think a socialist movement has to achieve majoritarian hegemony to make an impression on the polity. Conservative denunciations of “creeping socialism” have not been entirely unfounded, either in 1930s or today.

When Norman Thomas, who succeeded Eugene Debs as the Socialist Party’s Great Depression–era leader, complained that “[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt stole our program,” he was also boasting of how a few thousand organized activists can make their presence felt when circumstances combine to offer them historical influence and leverage. The same may be true today.

Naturally, Miliband’s move provoked a roar of condemnation from Israeli political elites. Israel’s president Isaac Herzog, who has been credibly accused by multiple organizations of aiding and abetting war crimes in the Gaza Strip, said that he was “disturbed” by the new sanctions. The Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Miliband of “outrageous lies.”

Israel’s British supporters were also indignant. Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis denounced Miliband’s program, claiming that it was “a dark day for Britain’s Jews,” and that Miliband was seeking to appease “those who harbour a dangerous obsession with the Jewish state.”

This is not the first time Mirvis, an indefatigable defender of Israel, has attacked the Labour government. In September 2024, he denounced a move by Miliband’s predecessor as foreign secretary, David Lammy, to limit the supply of British arms for the Israeli military: “This announcement feeds the falsehood that Israel is in breach of International Humanitarian Law, when in fact it is going to extraordinary lengths to uphold it.”

On that occasion, events proved that Mirvis had little reason to be concerned. The following year, British arms sales to Israel soared to reach the highest level on record. If we look more closely at the details of Miliband’s announcement, a similar picture of tough talk combined with very limited actions reveals itself.

The sanctions focus on the banning of imports into the UK of goods produced in “illegal” Israeli settlements, an expansion of UK licensing refusals for arms exports to Israel, and the nonspecified “strengthening” of penalties against settlers who “support or incite acts of violence against Palestinian communities.”

If we assume that all of these sanctions are actually implemented — Miliband opted for a grace period of up to nine months before the changes take effect — their impact on Israel’s economy would still be very limited. An Al Jazeera investigation found that, since Miliband’s announcement, his government has awarded more than $14 million in public sector contracts to firms that profit from West Bank settlements.

Miliband coordinated his sanctions package with eleven other Western countries, including Canada, Ireland, France, and Denmark, ten of which have recognized a Palestinian state. In theory, if those countries applied the sanctions in a maximal way, they could hit the sprawling and internationally connected network of Israeli finance, fin tech, and construction firms that facilitate the spread of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

But that seems unlikely. In his Commons statement, Miliband made clear that his quarrel was with the settler movement and its sponsors in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, not with Israel itself. “We will continue to support valued trade with green line Israel precisely because we support the two state solution,” he said. “For this reason, I wholeheartedly oppose the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign.”

This argument draws a convenient distinction between “illegal” Israeli settlements outside the 1967 borders and Israel proper. (In fact, in line with Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of civilian populations into occupied territories, all Israeli settlements are illegal under international law). By doing so, Miliband has carefully shielded the infrastructure of British support for Israel from the damage that a broader and more robust UK economic boycott could inflict.

That infrastructure is substantial, because the UK is Israel’s largest European trading partner. Israeli companies supply billions of pounds worth of medicines to the National Health Service every year. Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest defense electronics manufacturer, operates multiple factories throughout the UK, while its subsidiaries export engine components to the Israel Defense Forces.

Israel’s state-owned defense giant, Rafael, owns and operates factories in Newcastle and Hampshire. Through Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, the UK defense sector manufactures approximately 15 percent of the machinery present in every operational F-35 fighter jet, the aircraft of choice for the Israeli military as it has laid waste to Gaza. None of these economic linkages will be negatively impacted by the sanctions.

Israel even maintains investments in the North Sea through Ithaca Energy, which is owned by the Delek Group, a multibillion-dollar Israeli energy conglomerate. Ironically, it may benefit from those investments in the future if the Burnham administration gives the go-ahead for exploitation in the Rosebank oil field, a highly controversial, potentially climate-wrecking development west of Shetland. Ithaca owns a 20 percent stake in Rosebank; a decision on the field’s future is due imminently.

There is also a strong case that the UK has colluded directly on an institutional level in Israel’s campaign of slaughter in the Gaza Strip. As the investigative journalism organization Declassified has exhaustively archived, between December 2023 and March 2025, the Royal Air Force flew a minimum of 518 intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights over the Palestinian Occupied Territories, including Gaza.

Successive UK governments have insisted that these flights were part of a broader effort at “hostage location.” However, given Britain’s long history of intelligence cooperation with Israel, there is good reason to suspect that the Israeli military could also have used the information gathered during these sorties for other purposes. Miliband has made clear that British-Israeli intelligence sharing will go on despite the sanctions. “I’m confident that our security co-operation with Israel will continue,” he told the BBC in September. “We have important intelligence and security relationships with Israel.”

Miliband’s discretely designed sanctions system performs a domestic political function as well as an external strategic one. By publicly picking a fight with Netanyahu ahead of the Israeli elections, and by criticizing his annexationist policies, Labour sent a signal to left-wing voters who had turned away from the party during the Starmer period, when UK criticism of Israel was, to say the least, less forthcoming.

Starmer was a latecomer to Westminster life who appeared to be largely devoid of the ruthless intelligence needed to succeed in the Westminster snake pit. He thought he could build a lasting coalition in the crumbling center ground of British politics. When it became clear that he couldn’t, Burnham stepped in with a plan to reinvigorate Labour by convening a progressive bloc of voters in opposition to the reactionary one rapidly coalescing around Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

In order to do this, Burnham needed to win over the young, left-wing, and vigorously pro-Palestinian parts of the UK electorate that had peeled off in recent years toward Zack Polanski’s “ecopopulist” Green Party. Hence the Labour government’s new and heightened anti-settler rhetoric and its willingness to characterize Israel’s actions against the Palestinians as “war crimes.”

Yet the superficiality of the rhetoric grates against the reality of Labour’s inertia in other areas. In 2025, Starmer’s government imposed a draconian ban on Palestine Action, a campaign group that targeted Israeli defense firms on British soil with acts of civil disobedience and vandalism. It is now legally defined as a terrorist organization, on a par with al-Qaeda and the Irish Republican Army. Since then, the British authorities have arrested more than 3,500 people and formally charged more than 2,250 for peacefully protesting against the ban.

Burnham has not committed to repealing the ban, which the UN Human Rights Commissioner Volker Türk has described as a “disturbing misuse of counter-terrorism legislation.” Last month, his Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood strongly defended the arrest of Palestine Action supporters, comparing them to “a group of skinheads standing outside a mosque.”

In fact, there are growing signs that Burnham may extend authoritarian restrictions on the expression of support for Palestine in British public life. This would include a prohibition on the display of pro-Palestinian symbols by teachers in schools. His government is also urging schools and colleges to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with antipathy toward Jewish people.

In contrast to Miliband, who is Jewish and thought to be genuinely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, Burnham is by instinct a classic Labour Atlanticist who views Britain’s relationship with Israel as a core component of the UK’s strategic loyalty to the United States.

As a junior minister in the Tony Blair government, Burnham was a supporter of Blair’s Iraq adventure who later voted against parliamentary inquiries into the war (though he has since recanted on both fronts). He has also been a member of Labour Friends of Israel since 2015: during his first pitch for the party leadership that year, he dismissed the campaign to boycott Israel as “spiteful.”

None of this will be sufficient to quell Israel’s anger in the face of a remarkably modest set of British sanctions, nor to persuade a skeptical and exhausted Palestinian public that the UK has suddenly become an ally. But British double-dealing on the issue is hardly new.

In his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said reflected on Britain’s pattern of double-talk in the early twentieth century, promising independence to the Arab inhabitants of Mandatory Palestine while simultaneously committing itself to the creation of an autonomous Jewish homeland in the region.

“The history of British imperial policy in the Middle East is a history of systematic duplicity,” Said wrote. “Making promises to all sides that could never be kept.” Time, as they say, is a flat circle — nowhere is this maxim more true than when it comes to the British role in Palestine.

By 1946, South Carolina already had a growing movement for radical human rights. The Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), led by black South Carolinians Modjeska Simkins, John Henry McCray, and Osceola McKaine, built a progressive black alternative to South Carolina’s white-supremacist Democratic Party of South Carolina. Registering black South Carolinians to vote, putting up their own slate of candidates for state and national office, and even traveling to the 1944 Democratic National Convention to challenge the legitimacy of the South Carolina Democratic Party, the Progressive Democratic Party presaged the better-known Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) by twenty years in using grassroots democratic traditions to attempt to upend the old system.

Their efforts to overturn the ironclad rule of the white-supremacist Democratic Party did not result in electoral victory. Osceola McKaine, the black nominee of the PDP who campaigned against incumbent Olin Johnston in 1944, fell short in his campaign. But McKaine’s own personal story is a reminder of why black South Carolina, in 1944, was so thoroughly galvanized to fight back against Jim Crow.

McKaine, a native of Sumter, South Carolina, served in the United States military during World War I. After his term of service ended, McKaine, tired of the hypocrisy of American calls to “make the world safe for democracy” abroad while not doing so at home, settled in Ghent, Belgium, and opened a successful nightclub. Forced to flee Belgium due to World War II, McKaine returned to Sumter determined to fight for democracy in his home state. He was defeated in 1944 by Johnston, who was governor of South Carolina when the state condemned to death fourteen-year-old George Stinney, who some believe is the youngest person condemned to death in US history.

The PDP, like the MFDP twenty years later, was important not due to victory at the polls but due to the organization’s ability to give voters hope who had had none for generations. Thousands of new black voters became part of South Carolina’s voting process for the first time since the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, growing pressure to restore the right to vote for black citizens in the South was also enhanced by the 1944 Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision, which declared the all-white primaries of Southern Democratic parties unconstitutional.

Again, South Carolina played a crucial role in resisting this, with Governor Johnston himself calling a special session of the state legislature in 1944 to pass new laws to continue the white primary. It was not until another federal court case, Elmore v. Rice, originating with the challenge of black South Carolinian George Elmore and decided in 1947, that the white primary was broken.

South Carolina, therefore, had already made itself the nexus of domestic political battles over racism and citizenship. But the state was also important as a site of international debate over the future of peace in the post–World War II landscape. One of the chief architects of the post–World War II foreign policy, which quickly became antagonistic toward the Soviets, was South Carolinian James Byrnes.

Often overlooked in twentieth-century American foreign and domestic policy history, Byrnes holds the unique distinction of being one of the few politicians in American history to hold virtually every possible office in the federal government. He served as congressman, and later senator, from South Carolina in the 1920s and 1930s. As a close friend to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Byrnes briefly served on the Supreme Court before being named director of the Office of Economic Stabilization, and later director of the Office of War Mobilization during World War II. In that role, Byrnes became one of the most important people in America’s war effort. Afterward, under President Harry Truman, Byrnes was named secretary of state in 1945.

But Byrnes coveted the presidency. As was the case with another South Carolinian, John C. Calhoun, in the nineteenth century, Byrnes’s ties to South Carolina and white-supremacist ideology became the chief impediments to higher office. Most notably, liberals and progressives within the New Deal–era Democratic Party stymied efforts to make Byrnes the vice president under Franklin Roosevelt during his 1944 campaign. Still, Byrnes remained a powerful force within Southern and national politics. And as the Cold War intensified, a massive campaign for social change in his home state made perfect sense.

The SNYC, committed as it was to racial justice at home and peace abroad, knew that targeting Byrnes’ home state was a major rallying point for the radical wing of American politics in the post–World War II years. Also, the fact that South Carolina was home to a growing radical movement for human rights helped make it a logical choice for the SNYC’s annual convention.

Bringing both foreign and domestic crises together, finally, was the saga of Isaac Woodard, which galvanized activists and brought global attention to South Carolina. A black World War II veteran blinded by police on February 12, 1946, in Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina, Woodard’s case became a symbol of the brutal attacks on black veterans and their allies that occurred throughout the South after World War II. A backlash similar to the Red Summer of 1919, the post-1945 political and social environment was incredibly difficult and reactionary, but also presented incredible opportunities to SNYC leaders.

The SNYC needed a place to not only bring together their members but a location where a new, militant human rights movement was evolving on the ground. Columbia became that place, due in large part to the work of Modjeska Simkins in welcoming the organization to her hometown.

The 1946 convention in Columbia, South Carolina owed a great deal to Modjeska Simkins. A human rights activist born and raised in Columbia, Simkins had become, by 1946, one of the leaders of a radical human and civil rights movement in the Palmetto State. She became secretary of the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP in 1941 after working tirelessly in black communities across the state as director of negro work for the South Carolina Tuberculosis Association, and after playing a pivotal role in the formation of the state conference in 1939.

Many years later, in an oral history interview with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Simkins argued that the SNYC represented something unique and powerful in the broader human and civil rights movements of the twentieth century. “The power structure,” Simkins stated, “has always feared the combining of the forces of black and white masses.”

This was what the SNYC represented. On the first insert page of the 1946 conference program, the Southern Youth Legislature, which was the organizing body within the SNYC that spoke for the organization, made their demands clear. “We meet in solemn session,” they began, as “militant, courageous Negro youth of the South. Youth. . . . which must and will be served. Youth. . . . dedicated to the struggle for freedom. Youth determined to achieve that freedom in its lifetime.” For members of the SNYC, the opportunity arose to finally make a serious blow against segregation. Or, as the title of Erik Gellman’s groundbreaking 2012 work on the National Negro Congress goes, a “death blow to Jim Crow.”

Some of the leaders of the 1946 conference, like Modjeska Simkins or Dorothy Burnham, would become better known throughout the twentieth century for their work in various strands of the civil and human rights movements. Others, such as Columbia SNYC leader Harold H. Poole or Benedict College student Ethel Bigby, are not as well known nationally or even regionally. But they all were pivotal leaders in a movement that, in 1946, seemed poised to tackle the crises that Dr Martin Luther King Jr so eloquently described a generation later: militarism, racism, and capitalism.

Alas, the Second Red Scare at home and the Cold War abroad destroyed the SNYC. The organization was constantly harassed by the FBI and local police forces in the South. Ultimately, the organization was also brought down, like others, due to its alliance with the 1948 Progressive Party campaign of Henry Wallace. Eugene “Bull” Connor — better remembered for his vicious treatment of activists in Birmingham in 1963 — created havoc for left-wing activists in Birmingham.

Its 1946 convention remains the high point of the organization’s history, leaving behind a legacy of activism in South Carolina and throughout the nation. Many of the members of the SNYC, or those affiliated with the organization, continued to be involved in activism deep into the twentieth century. For example, several of the founders of the legendary Freedomways magazine, which between 1961 and 1985 served as a key periodical for the black left, were veterans of the SNYC. Editors and writers such as Esther Cooper Jackson, Louis Burnham, and even Du Bois himself all had significant ties with the organization.

In that sense, the SNYC is part of the larger connective tissue of twentieth century radical social movements — and the 1946 convention in South Carolina was its moment of triumph.

By leaning into the language of sports, El-Sayed flips the script on the “bro culture,” especially among young men, that has long fueled right-wing politics and Trump-era masculinity. Rather than ceding that terrain, he claims it on his own terms. He repeatedly cast his opponent Mike Rogers as a subordinate “beta” in Donald Trump’s “alpha” orbit, turning the hierarchy of masculine posturing against them. Some skeptics, drawn in by his athletic bona fides, may find themselves unexpectedly receptive. It’s as if El-Sayed is saying: sports don’t belong exclusively to conservatives.

One of his most effective rhetorical strategies was to draw on the local loyalties and rivalries that shape Michigan’s fandom.

El-Sayed repeatedly invoked the long-standing rivalry between the University of Michigan Wolverines and the Ohio State Buckeyes, particularly their annual college football matchup, in which Michigan has the upper hand, sixty-two total wins to Ohio State’s fifty-three wins. His jabs at neighboring Ohio — and at J. D. Vance in particular — may seem strange and personal to outsiders, but they make perfect sense within Michigan’s political and cultural landscape. He was directing the taunt at Vance, an Ohio State alumnus who had repeatedly attacked El-Sayed with inflammatory racist and Islamophobic rhetoric. By turning the rivalry into a political jab, El-Sayed displayed local cultural fluency.

Some athletes agree. One high-profile supporter of El-Sayed is San Diego Padres pitcher Lucas Giolito. Front Office Sports previously reported that Giolito donated $1,250 to El-Sayed’s campaign. On election night, journalist Eli Kronenberg wrote on X that Giolito told him, “Although I don’t live in Michigan, I believe he’ll be a great progressive voice in the US Senate.”

On his book tour, Colin Kaepernick was asked which politicians he was most excited about. He answered quickly: “The ones that are interesting to me are obviously Mamdani in New York . . . [and] Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. I really like the approaches they’re taking. They’re staying very focused on the needs of the people. They don’t seem to be bought or swayed,” he said, adding that they represent a growing rejection of the establishment.

A few days before the election, former Michigan State long snapper Taybor Pepper, who played in the NFL for seven seasons, interviewed El-Sayed. After speaking with El-Sayed, Pepper wrote on X:

I understand why people want sports to be an escape from politics, but the reality is that throughout history, sports and politics have been deeply intertwined. From breaking racial barriers to fighting for equality and civil rights, athletes have played a pivotal role in pushing society toward meaningful social change.

Like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, El-Sayed supports English football club Arsenal FC, whose large, diverse global fan base has much in common with the New York Knicks, another of Mamdani’s passions.

This is not the first time El-Sayed has weighed in on sports’ cultural and political significance. In an April 2021 post on his now private Substack, The Incision, he analyzed the influence of big money on European football and fans’ successful resistance to major clubs’ attempts to commercialize the game further through the European Super League. He drew a parallel to the exploitation of the health care system back home: “If English soccer fans can stand up to fight for their soccer clubs, perhaps we too can fight for our healthcare, our prescription drugs, our schools, and our lives.”

In another post in October 2021, following the firing of former Raiders coach Jon Gruden over racist, homophobic, and misogynistic comments, El-Sayed argued that the problem was more systemic: “The toxic masculinity at the heart of America’s most popular sport — and men’s sports culture more generally — is way deeper than a few emails or a Jay-Z turnaround.”

Finally, about a month ago, El-Sayed’s campaign posted a short video on his social media in which one of his former high school football teammates, Nikita Sanches, speaks about El-Sayed as a teammate. Sanches, who was born in the Soviet Union and was a shy teenager when they first met, recalls how El-Sayed befriended him and took him under his wing. He also described how El-Sayed negotiated Islamophobia in the wake of 9/11. Sanches, now a chef, explains how, a year later, “we elected him our leader and our captain. Not just because he was our friend and our classmate, but because of the way he carried himself.” The same qualities that made El-Sayed a trusted teammate now help him use sports to connect with audiences beyond his political base.

For sure, it’s unlikely that axe-wielding fascists could or would distinguish a Kurd from a Turk or Arab. Likewise, the far-right politicians peddling anti-migrant narratives in Westminster have tended to refer conspiratorially to networks of “Turkish barbers.” Indeed, for better or worse, the Kurds — who number around forty million but have never had a recognized state of their own — have more often remained invisible in British public discourse.

The Kurdish ethnicity only made it onto the UK census for the first time in 2021, meaning that while official figures suggest there are around a hundred thousand Kurds in the UK, community representatives estimate the true figure is several times higher. Some Kurds are assimilated or prefer to refer to themselves as Iraqi, Iranian, Turkish, or Syrian for reasons of personal security or simple brand recognition: many of the UK’s nominally “Turkish” barbers or “Mediterranean” restaurants are actually Kurdish-owned.

On one level, the Kurds are thus simply being swept up in the latest broad wave of anti-migrant sentiment, targeting small boats in the English Channel and small businesses at home. And the same story is repeating itself elsewhere. There are rather fewer Kurds in the United States than in the UK or Europe, but there too recent Kurdish migrants report being caught up in new waves of anti-immigration sentiment. In Germany, cases of anti-Kurdish racism more than doubled in the past year, though this was primarily driven by Turkish, Iranian, and Arabic migrant communities themselves discriminating against the Kurds. Even Japan has seen its own tiny population of around three thousand Kurdish migrants become the key target of a specific xenophobic hate campaign spearheaded by the Asian country’s own far ight.

The latest hysteria in the UK can’t be ascribed to the Kurdish ethnicity in particular. After all, the channel crossing has successively been controlled by groups from various nations: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Albania. But this is just why increasingly frequent British media mentions of the Kurds in connection with organized crime are worth tracking.

While terms like “people smuggler” are weaponized by prosecutors and the media to smear and criminalize innocent migrants, Kurdish criminal organizations certainly do profit from the trade, sometimes on an exploitative basis. The Kurds’ long-term statelessness and the occupation of Kurdish-majority regions by Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria has left many of the Middle East’s estimated forty million Kurds occupying impoverished borderlands. Unsurprisingly, some turn to the grey- and black-market trade in legal or illegal goods to survive, including the Kurdish kolbar porters trekking through remote mountain passes between Iran and Iraq who are killed in their dozens every year. Decades of (legal) Kurdish migration have allowed these networks to extend to Europe, laying the foundation necessary to facilitate continued migration amid increasingly tough policing of UK and European borders, and create a profit for certain Kurdish individuals at the expense of others.

Throughout the Middle East, state violence against Kurds has often been linked to racialized depictions of Kurdish minorities as backward, uneducated mafiosos — as in the universally popular Turkish soap operas that frequently represent Kurds as villainous people smugglers and drug traffickers. Related negative stereotypes of Kurds are already somewhat more prominent in continental Europe, influenced by propagandistic Turkish depictions of the country’s domestic Kurdish opposition as narcoterrorists profiting from the European heroin trade, and may now be leaching into UK public policy. The shift recalls the vitriol previously directed toward Albanians during a prior surge in anti-small-boat rhetoric after 2022, and which academics argue directly contributed to UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) policy targeting migrants from the beleaguered Eastern European nation.

While the Albanians at least have a government that can robustly challenge Farage’s salvos, the stateless Kurds are left even more exposed. Ben Judah, the former adviser to Foreign Secretary David Lammy and centrist critic of UK migration policy, has suggested the Kurds’ weak geopolitical position should make it easier for Westminster to crack down on Kurdish migration networks. For Judah, despite the semiautonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) “being under a de-facto Anglo-American security umbrella since the first Gulf War, there has been an unwillingness to put [people smuggling] first in our relations. . . .  For Britain, the relationship as we know it should be on the line unless these authorities take this gravely seriously.”

In truth, this work is already being done. The FCDO has funded an anti-migration media campaign in the KRI, copying methods it previously deployed in Albania. More significantly, the BBC’s investigation into Kurdish migration networks led to the arrest of a leading Kurdish people smuggler in the KRI in coordination with the Iraqi Kurdish authorities. When I visited the KRI this summer, an official from the governing Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) stressed their ongoing cooperation with the British authorities to curb illegal migration, which was also the headline when Britain’s National Security Advisor visited the KRI earlier this week.

Though never numbering more than a few thousand per year, migrants from Iraq (most of them Kurdish) figured in the top five nationalities arriving in the UK via small boats from 2021 to 2023. They have since dropped out of the rankings. Relatedly, the latest figures suggest overall irregular migration out of the KRI has fallen by half in the past six months. None of this suggests an unmanageable crisis so much as the latest bout in the game of whack-a-mole in which one migration network loses control to another, and another set of desperate people are driven to seek a new life abroad, whatever the risks.

In fact, the UK’s domestic shift against the Kurds comes amid related developments on the international stage. Judah correctly notes that the geopolitically isolated KRI, which was established by Western diktat following Saddam Hussein’s genocide against the Kurds and subsequent US-Kurdish cooperation during the two Gulf Wars, has long been reliant on these partnerships in order to survive. But rather than a cozy, mutually beneficial relationship, the Iraqi Kurdish authorities are currently being placed under severe security pressure by Westminster and Washington.

The US has withdrawn all its troops from the KRI and cut all security, essentially terminating the decade-old partnership that saw Kurdish ground troops defeat ISIS in coordination with Western air strikes, intelligence, and logistical support. The UK has unsuprisingly followed suit, withdrawing its own troops long stationed in the region. These moves repeat recent developments in neighboring Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan), where Kurdish forces that had lost twelve thousand fighters battling ISIS were this January forced to capitulate to the rule of a new Islamist government in Damascus after the United States finally terminated its cooperation with the Syrian Kurds. The Iraqi Kurds are now being left similarly exposed — not only to a potential ISIS resurgence but also to violent attacks by Iran-aligned militias in a febrile Iraq that is set to be the Middle East’s next battlefield and cross-border attacks from Iran itself.

Alongside their newfound status as migrant criminals, some Kurds are still making headlines as key Middle Eastern players — but no longer as heroic Western allies. Tehran has long repressed its own Kurdish population, executing hundreds in recent years. As the United States and Israel launched their disastrous war on Iran, US officials signaled and then rapidly aborted plans to arm unspecified Kurdish opposition groups. Donald Trump subsequently distanced himself from the proposal, announcing he was “very disappointed” with “the Kurds” who just “take, take, take,” adding “I think it’s a disgrace. . . .  I’ll remember that,” and claiming that Kurdish forces illegitimately intercepted weapons shipments. As ever, these allegations were leveled at “the Kurds” in general, painting a whole people represented by a diverse range of political movements as mercenary and untrustworthy.

When I was in the KRI, both the governing authorities and exiled Iranian Kurdish armed groups stationed in the region strongly denied these allegations, with KDP spokesperson Hoshyar Siwaily telling me: “Although we are partners of the US, we would like to stay neutral, because this war is bigger than us. We don’t want to be part of it.” That hasn’t stopped Iran from launching more than seven hundred retributive strikes against the KRI, killing dozens of people — more than any other noncombatant country. The West is gradually closing the door on its erstwhile allies, even as Iran revenges itself on the Kurds.

With the Kurds abandoned by the West and targeted by the East, it’s little wonder that many still need to flee the region. The structural factors that drive Kurdish migration to the UK — and occasional involvement in criminality — are only likely to worsen in the coming years. Seriously tackling Kurdish migration to the West would mean tackling these regional “sources of conflict and insecurities” at their root. Conversely, however, the stage is being set to demonize those Kurds who flee future bouts of instability driven by the West’s regional interventions and repeated instrumentalization of the Kurdish cause. Western governments and right-wing media will find it increasingly convenient to join the likes of Iran in vilifying the Kurds, the one issue on which everyone in the Middle East seems to concur.

Below the line, commenters on right-wing news sites like the Daily Express and Daily Mail still generally confine themselves to the usual diatribes against migrants in general. But some are clearly picking up on the Kurds’ newfound prominence within this familiar rhetoric. Commenting on a story blasting the Kurdish networks between Calais and the UK as “brutal criminal kingpins,” one writes: “Saddam had the right idea about how to deal with these lot. . . . ” It’s a call to repeat the Iraqi dictator’s 1987–89 massacre of around a hundred thousand Kurds, a crime officially recognized as genocide.

New York City currently faces multiple overlapping energy system crises that are on track to get much worse in the coming years.

First, utility rates are becoming unaffordable for New Yorkers, who are now paying 11 percent more for their electricity bills than they did just last year, largely due to the costs of fossil fuel infrastructure and volatile natural gas prices. Second, the city’s supply of energy is constrained by an outdated grid, power plants reaching the end of their lifespan, and lack of needed transmission lines to bring renewable power from upstate New York, leading to blackouts in the summer and even higher risk of service interruptions in the future. Third, the cascading effects of fossil fuel generation threaten the well-being of New Yorkers through dangerous air pollution and increasingly catastrophic weather events.

To address these crises requires tackling the root cause of continued reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets and transitioning to green energy sources.

To date, the state has relied chiefly on market incentives to spur renewable energy development, but this strategy has fallen well short of meeting the state’s climate targets. And New York City has fallen way behind the rest of the state, with 90 percent of downstate electricity still coming from fossil fuels rather than renewables.

The technology to tackle such challenges exists, and renewable energy provides a cheap and clean alternative to polluting fossil fuels. But bringing projects themselves into fruition faces technical, bureaucratic, and cost barriers. Thousands of viable sites for clean energy projects scattered across public schools, hospitals, affordable housing, and other sites are currently underutilized due to the significant amount of time, expertise, and up-front resources required to turn a promising site into an operating clean energy project. Clean energy development is rarely a core competency of institutions or organizations with other primary purposes. While some of this market is served by private developers, navigating transaction costs, small project sizes, complicated sites, and other requirements and economic considerations often means such projects are deprioritized in the short term.

The burden of such delays falls on ratepayers and the public. This summer, heat waves overwhelmed the grid and left thousands of New Yorkers without power during the hottest days of the year. With winter temperatures around the corner, heating oil costs have risen nearly 70 percent since last year. Too often, working-class households are forced to choose between keeping themselves safe or paying their utility bills — even as the climate collapses around them.

We are now facing a stark choice: continue business as usual and suffer the consequences, or embrace a new approach that mobilizes the economic strength of the public sector to ensure the job gets done. As timelines for implementation of Local Law 97 (which mandated strict caps on emissions on large buildings in New York City), broader climate mandates, and escalating climate chaos loom, the city needs a public developer like PowerNYC to rapidly expand the deployment of green technology to electrify existing systems.

PowerNYC would use its position as a public developer to create a financially self-sustaining engine of decarbonization for New York City. While many of the component parts and projects exist across agencies and other institutional actors, PowerNYC would consolidate the support available at various levels and provide a means to ensure renewable energy projects move from the page to implementation.

One major benefit of PowerNYC would be its ability to recycle capital to create a financially self-sustaining engine of decarbonization. After initial capitalization, its ownership of revenue-generating assets would allow it to back funding for further rounds of development. Applying this model to thermal energy networks and other green technologies would leverage the power of aggregated planning to ensure the public sector can tap into the same low-cost revenue sources from which private utilities already benefit.

For example, through PowerNYC, deploying battery storage across the five boroughs would allow the city to package a fleet of batteries’ worth of power to sell back to the electricity grid at peak demand times to displace the fossil power on which the city currently relies. The contract for such a deal could then be leveraged to secure further financing for ongoing development of renewable energy assets.

By accessing long-term, low-cost, stable financing, public developers like PowerNYC can unlock the potential for large-scale infrastructure projects while ensuring benefits are democratically distributed. Instead of taking a project-by-project approach, it would maximize the government’s ability to coordinate at scale with the goals of multiplying affordability benefits for ratepayers and expediting urgent climate action.

Research shows that deploying an initial 200 megawatts of distributed batteries alone via PowerNYC could generate New York City’s Con Edison ratepayers at least $170 million of savings annually by lowering capacity market costs and distribution costs. And publicly developed thermal energy networks, an alternative to gas pipe replacement, could create savings for National Grid customers in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens who are currently paying for unnecessary gas infrastructure investments. Over time, its development mandate could expand to other clean energy and grid infrastructure needed to support decarbonization and affordability.

No single city or even country can take on the planetary scale of the climate crisis alone, but the establishment of PowerNYC is a major opportunity for the largest city in the country to chart a new era of public institution-building to rapidly scale up climate ambitions.

Cities and states across the country have already embraced the potential of green public development. Nearly a decade ago, the Connecticut Green Bank established a similar, successful model for solar that has driven the state to the top of the national list for its percentage of public schools with on-site solar projects. Countries from Costa Rica to Denmark are using strong networks of public institutions to accelerate the planning and development of public power.

Public development is a proven method for bringing public goods to fruition. PowerNYC would use it to accelerate the deployment of green energy systems and begin to fix our toxic, cost-burdening energy system.

Yet Collins has proved to be Trump’s worst VA secretary ever; his main goal is faster privatization of the nation’s largest public health care system. The likelihood that he will control the third-largest federal agency budget and second-largest departmental workforce for another two years is not good news for nine million VA patients.

By the time a Democrat potentially replaces Trump in the White House in January 2029, Collins will have diverted far more than $46 billion annually from their direct care budget to a network of 1.7 million private sector providers and four health care companies who administer it. Just two months ago, he awarded new contracts to the latter worth $1 trillion over the next decade (if not canceled or curtailed by a future administration). As a result, industry giants like United Healthcare and Humana will be profiting from further outsourcing of VA care that is costly, unnecessary, and disfavored by veterans themselves.

VA defenders, inside and outside the Beltway, need a damage control agenda, one that will restrain rather than enable further White House attempts to defund and dismantle the United States’ best working model of socialized medicine. Otherwise, more VA staffing and budget cuts, plus facility closings, in the VA’s own system of 1,380 public hospitals and clinics around the country will be happening soon.

Those most motivated to lead the charge against Secretary Collins on Capitol Hill in 2027 are newly elected pro-labor progressives with personal experience in public health care systems, either as patients or family members of patients, caregivers, or administrators.

Thanks to their successful campaigns against MAGA supporters, these VA defenders now include: former Army paratrooper Richard Ojeda in North Carolina; former Marine drill instructor JoAnna Mendoza in Arizona, who has been treated for military sexual trauma at the VA; former Army surgeon Adam Hamawy, a Gaza war critic from New Jersey who once operated on a helicopter pilot injured in Iraq named Tammy Duckworth, now senator from Illinois; and Fred Wellman from Missouri, a West Point graduate who began rallying fellow vets against Trump six years ago through the Lincoln Project.

Last but not least is VA privatization critic Mitchell Berman, “who spent over a decade serving veterans, active duty service members and their families as a VA nurse” — and now represents conservative Republican Paul Ryan’s old district in Wisconsin. All of the above could help energize a House Veterans Affairs Committee, where playing footsie with Collins (and his predecessor in the Biden Administration) has gone on for too long to the detriment of real agency oversight.

On the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee, the Democrats’ defense of our nation’s largest public health care system would be much improved by adding new senators from either Michigan, Maine, and Iowa. Dr Abdul El-Sayed, the just-elected Michigan public health specialist and Medicare for All advocate, would be following in the footsteps of his longtime ally Senator Bernie Sanders.

El-Sayed could be joined by Troy Jackson, the former logger who ousted five-term Senator Susan Collins with Sanders’s support in Maine; as a state legislator, Jackson long championed the cause of Maine National Guard members who suffered Agent Orange exposure during their Vietnam War–era training but were later deemed ineligible for compensation and health care.

In Iowa, newly elected Senator Josh Turek is not only the son of Vietnam veteran but one who suffered birth defects due to his father’s Agent Orange exposure. As a wheelchair athlete, Turek played alongside disabled vets and worked with them in sports rehabilitation programs. He has pledged to “end unnecessary wars that put American lives at risk” and insure that “veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service get the care and benefits they need.”

A recent report from Democracy Forward by two former VA officials provides plenty of ammo for new members of Congress to use in a long-overdue counteroffensive against Collins. Josh Jacobs, a former VA undersecretary under Joe Biden and Nicole Nedd, a past director of the agency’s national workforce management program, write:

The VA has lost approximately 30,000 employees through attrition, early retirements, deferred resignations, firings, and other departures. These staff had institutional knowledge and skills that cannot be quickly replaced. The staff who remain are bearing an unsustainable burden. Morale has deteriorated, and there is growing evidence that employees feel unable to raise safety concerns without fear of retaliation — a condition linked to more errors and worse patient outcomes.

In their indictment of Collins, entitled “Ready, Fire, Aim,” the authors warn that “the choices being made now by the Trump-Vance administration — at the White House and within VA’s own leadership — will adversely shape veterans’ care for a generation.”

Nobody new or old inside the Beltway — whether in Congress or veterans’ advocacy organizations — will get much done by themselves, without the pressure of grassroots opposition to cuts in VA care and benefits.

Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq War veteran who helped found Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) two decades ago, believes that “both parties are looking for quiet ways to control VA disability spending, which now tops $118 billion a year for 5.1 million disabled veterans.” This fall, Rieckhoff’s new group, Independent Veterans of America (IVA), backed candidates like Navy Veteran and former National Guard member Dan Osborn, who distanced themselves from both major parties. Unfortunately, Osborn suffered a second narrow defeat running as a labor-backed independent candidate for the US Senate from Nebraska.

Rieckhoff fears that “career political operatives” in Washington are still floating “budget options” that include “cutting benefits and raising minimum disability rating thresholds.” To stop these changes, veterans have to “build the media and organizing muscle to mobilize fast when veterans’ benefits are on the line.”

Fortunately, veterans’ groups across the political spectrum had a major victory earlier this year when they blocked the deceptively named “Take Care of America’s Veterans Act” (TACVA). Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs) like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, and Progressive Veterans of America all sounded the alarm about this Collins-backed bill pushed by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.

TACVA would have helped fifty thousand former service members whose careers were cut short due to medical problems collect both their military pensions and VA disability benefits. But as Common Defense Political Director Naveed Shah warned last summer, this multipart bill was heavily booby-trapped. If enacted, hundreds of thousands of other veterans would have been adversely affected.

According to Shah, an Army veteran who served in Iraq, it would have “cut $57 billion from our future tinnitus and sleep apnea claims, tripled the VA home loan fee, allow[ed] disability appeals to be decided in bulk rather than on the merits of each veteran’s record, enable[d] more lay-offs that threaten the quality of VA care, and [laid] the groundwork for handing VA facilities over to private operators.” (Lame-duck Republicans may make a second attempt to pass TACVA before January.)

Veterans for Peace (VFP) has long been the most reliable first responder whenever veterans’ care has been threatened. VFP’s “Save Our VA” campaign has generated thousands of letters to members of Congress about privatization-related problems, too often downplayed or ignored by VSOs that take health care industry donations. VFP members have personally lobbied many members of Congress or their staffers on VA issues.

A newer Common Defense (CD) campaign — called “VA Not for Sale” — has sponsored VA-focused lobby days in Washington, DC, and town hall meetings in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and other states. CD and the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI) also collaborated on a just-issued report called “The Privatization Playbook,” which documents the sorry history of bipartisan support for costly and unnecessary VA outsourcing since 2014.

In California, members of the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) and VFP have joined forces with active and retired VA caregivers to conduct weekly anti-privatization picketing and rallies at their local facility in Sonoma County.

In 2027, there should be hundreds of events like this, in far more locations across the country. And before it’s too late, more protests should target the costly and defective overhaul of VA medical recordkeeping that’s occurring on Collins’s watch.

As Ace Allen, a now retired VA medical oncologist, warned last spring in The Kansas City Star, in every place where the VA’s existing system has been “modernized” by health information-technology corporation Oracle Health, the result has been serious disruption of patient record handling and widespread demoralization among VA caregivers forced to use an inferior system. As a result, “huge numbers have quit or retired early.”

During the president’s first term, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner helped Oracle (formerly Cerner Corporation) get a no-bid contract to replace what Allen calls a “custom built, publicly owned electronic health record (EHR) system that was refined over decades by VA clinician-coder teams to support clinical care, not maximize revenue.”

A contract originally estimated to cost $10 billion has now ballooned to $32 billion in the same “cost-overrun” fashion as infamous Pentagon projects like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. That’s why Steve Friday, an Air Force veteran, VFP member, and former VA social worker in Michigan, is helping to rally foes of Oracle around the country through StopTheRollout.org. According to Friday, this grassroots initiative “brings together clinicians, VA employees, veterans, advocates, union members, and others who understand what is happening and are willing to act.”

They are scouring contracting records, publicizing inspector general and Government Accountability Office reports on Oracle system failures and sharing whistleblower information from patients and providers with members of Congress willing to hold Collins responsible for already occurring patient safety threats.

As Friday explains his involvement and the stakes of the fight for everyone: “the VA, for all its problems, still demonstrates that we can publicly fund and deliver health care rather than turning every patient into a source of profit. Losing that,” he says, “would hurt veterans, workers, and the larger struggle for health care as a human right.” Thanks to last week’s midterm election results, this caregiver perspective will soon be much better reflected on Capitol Hill.