Zohran Mamdani and the Left Made Kathy Hochul Tax the Rich
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No, Western Marxism Wasn’t a CIA Plot
Gabriel Rockhill’s polemic against Western Marxism seeks to condemn a set of postwar left-wing intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse. Heavy on innuendo but light on evidence, the result is more like a show trial than a serious political indictment.
No, Western Marxism Wasn’t a CIA Plot
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<cite>Outcome</cite> Is Jonah Hill’s Inept Hollywood Satire
### Jonah Hill’s new Apple TV Hollywood satire, Outcome, wants to skewer celebrity culture. But even with the likable Keanu Reeves, its muddled script and self‑pitying subtext reveal more about the industry’s narcissism than the film ever intended.
* * *
Outcome is Jonah Hill’s big statement on cancel culture. But even with the uncancellable Keanu Reeves, it’s a narcissistic satire that misses its mark. (Apple TV)
Keanu Reeves is reliably charming in _Outcome_ , a new Apple TV comedy-drama about a beloved movie star, Reef Hawk, who’s making a comeback after several years of secret heroin addiction and a long rehab process. He finds out he’s being blackmailed with a mysterious video that will supposedly wreck his career when it’s released on the internet, and he sets out to meet the people he’s wronged to see if he can figure out who the blackmailer is.
But Reeves’s sweet, laid-back amiability isn’t enough to make this satirical inside-Hollywood tale of redemption work. It’s all been done far better in other movies. Central to the problem is Jonah Hill, who cowrote the underwhelming script with Ezra Woods. He also directs and gives himself far too much screen time as Hawk’s obnoxious crisis lawyer, Ira Slitz. It’s supposed to be one of those hilarious portraits of the crass Hollywood monsters who often make it to the top — Tom Cruise’s brilliant Les Grossman portrayal in _Tropic Thunder_ set the gold standard — but Ira Stilz is a braying weirdo who’s merely tiresome, never funny. One of his questionable jokes, yelled out while he’s standing in front of a wall-sized portrait of one of his supposed clients, Kanye West, is about how the only demographic it’s acceptable to hate in the United States now is Jews.
Which is news to me. This not-too-veiled reference to a global uptick in antisemitism, which is always tied by the US media to rising criticism of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians and similarly merciless war on Lebanon, is typical of the Hill and Woods script. It takes a scattershot approach to subjects that are complex and serious if you stop to consider them for more than a minute, which it never does.
_Outcome_ also features Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer as Reef’s best friends from his school days who’ve been with him through thick and thin. And there are cameo performances by Susan Lucci, Martin Scorsese, David Spade, Laverne Cox, Kaia Jordan Gerber, Drew Barrymore, and Van Jones as himself. No doubt, everybody tries, but there’s not much to work with.
Lucci has a colorful scene as Reef Hawk’s mother Dinah, a TV reality show star who insists she and Reef have their heartfelt talk on camera for her show, because, as she puts it, they’re both “truffle piggies for fame.” And Scorsese does a creditable job as Reef’s first agent, a small-timer who represents talented kids and runs a bowling alley on the side. He guided Reef’s career as far as an appearance on the Johnny Carson show as a singing, tap-dancing kid full of showbiz moxie. This appearance sets Reef on the path to fame and fortune, after which he drops his old manager like a hot brick and never calls him again. In short, Reef’s life has been ruled by narcissistic selfishness. As Reef’s long-suffering ex-girlfriend (Welker White) tells him, “You’re not a good person.”
It’s odd, the film’s insistence that Reef has no idea what he could possibly have done that would destroy his reputation as the nicest star, though it’s a necessary part of the premise if he’s going to have to go interview family members, significant others, friends, and colleagues to find out who hates him enough to blackmail him. Reef’s preoccupation through this ordeal is repeatedly checking social media and googling his own name to find out whether he’s still popular or if he’s now reviled because the video — with its content still unknown — has been posted. It’s basic to the film’s take that everything in the entertainment industry has changed because of the internet and, presumably, cancel culture. Reef’s lawyer has to explain to him that now nobody is safe, even Reef Hawk, who’s always “been so careful” about not being filmed or photographed while committing transgressions.
"It’s quite a cynical move casting Keanu Reeves, the king of likability who’s so inclined to avoid offending anyone."
There’s no ignoring the film’s relationship to Jonah Hill’s own 2023 mini-scandal that supposedly threatened to cancel his career, because he’s constantly referring to it in interviews promoting _Outcome_. It seems Hill’s ex-girlfriend, surfer Sarah Brady, accused him of manipulative behavior. She released screenshots of unverified texts from Hill that used therapy terms in insisting on “boundaries” crucial to him. They amounted to policing her behavior, with stipulations such as no “surfing with men,” no posting pictures “in a bathing suit,” and no “modeling” or “friendships with women who are in unstable places from your wild recent past beyond getting lunch of a coffee or something respectful.”’
Without commenting on the alleged texts, Hill withdrew from the public eye, got married, and had children. _Outcome_ is his first project since. The catalyst for _Outcome_ , Hill says, is this: “When all this cancel culture stuff was happening, I thought, ‘Who’s the person that people would be the most bummed about getting canceled?’ It would be Keanu Reeves.”
It’s quite a cynical move, actually, casting Keanu Reeves, the king of likability who’s so inclined to avoid offending anyone; there are dozens of endearing photos of him mutually embracing famous women in which he’s got both hands held open wide away from any bodily contact so as not to risk the slightest possibility of touching anyone inappropriately. The effect of Reeves on the character is to make the viewer sure Reef Hawk couldn’t have done anything _that_ bad. That is, unless you know about the sins of omission, which Hawk has racked up all his life as he neglects his friends and loved ones and forgets to be grateful to anybody because he’s so self-centered. Reef is no racist spewing slurs like Mel Gibson, and he’s no sexual predator like Kevin Spacey. The movie pulls every possible punch when it finally comes to what’s actually revealed about Reef Hawk.
In interviews, Hill discusses at length how he understands Reef Hawk’s plight because he himself is a victim of paranoia-inducing internet attacks: “To me, the whole movie’s an allegory for social media,” said Hill, which just goes to show he doesn’t know what “allegory” means. The movie’s plot literally deals with the pernicious way social media dominates people’s lives today, especially the lives of those poor defenseless movie stars.
If you’re seeking funnier entertainment than this movie offers, try reading the Jonah Hill interview in which he puts on full display his aching self-pity and vast sense of grievance. It’s so overwhelming, ever since people were mean to him on social media, he’s convinced his tragedy is now the universal contemporary experience. His interlocutor, Martin Scorsese, keeps trying to point out that the fraught nature of movie celebrity has always been this way, even if certain aspects of it are intensified by technology. Basically, it’s still “the nature of building up a god and goddess and then wanting to tear them down,” says Scorsese.
Hill responds lugubriously, “But the truth is, modern entertainment is pretty much just tearing someone down.”
And I admit I’m happy to contribute to the tearing down of Jonah Hill by saying his movie _Outcome_ stinks and you should skip it altogether.
* * *
Outcome Is Jonah Hill’s Inept Hollywood Satire
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The Hollow Crown of ChatGPT’s Head Honcho
### Sam Altman may be the reigning king of the AI boom, but the story that matters isn’t his rise or fall. The sector will still demand scale, speed, and the right to run roughshod over the pesky public interest, no matter who wears the industry crown.
* * *
There is some debate as to what extent Sam Altman and OpenAI were ever truly devoted to the vision of a democratized AI utopia. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
Last week in the _New Yorker_ , Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz profiled OpenAI chief Sam Altman. The piece opens with the company’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, doubting that Altman is the man to have his “finger on the button” of an artificial intelligence more intelligent than human beings.
What follows is the story of Altman’s fall, return, and future, including the details of the key players involved and capital at stake. The profile offers a comprehensive history of the moment, including the anxieties that attend the rise of OpenAI and what that means for us as we sort out what to do about — and with — artificial intelligence.
With AI, the stakes are high for everyone, and the story at hand is both new and familiar. As Farrow and Marantz write:
> OpenAI has since become one of the most valuable companies in the world. It is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering at a potential valuation of a trillion dollars. Altman is driving the construction of a staggering amount of AI infrastructure, some of it concentrated within foreign autocracies. OpenAI is securing sweeping government contracts, setting standards for how AI is used in immigration enforcement, domestic surveillance, and autonomous weaponry in war zones.
# AI: A One-Stop Shop, but for What?
Altman and others have sold AI as _the solution_. To what? To whatever. To everything. If you’ve got a problem, AI will solve it. Farrow and Marantz quote Altman’s own writing, offering AI as a wonder capable of “astounding triumphs” that include “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics.” It’s a tall order. Still, it serves as a reminder that artificial intelligence technology — however overblown — holds a great deal of promise.
It also presents peril that has nothing to do with the threat of the rise of Skynet. Workers risk losing power, both political and economic. It’s not obvious that any state has a plan for what comes after a double-digit percentage of the workforce is turfed by AI.
Farrow and Marantz’s profile of Altman is remarkable for its depth and humanity. It does what a good profile should: offers details and a narrative, assesses its subject without either drinking the Kool-Aid or setting out to do a hatchet job for its own sake. The top-line takeaway is that Altman’s tenure at the company is controversial to say the least. This controversy reflects not only battles over his character as a human and leader but also competing visions for what AI is for. It raises the question of how far we should allow a company to take its development without sufficient guardrails — in other words, regulations.
Bristling at regulations is a classic tech industry tale — think, for instance, of Uber. Businesses in general tend to resent regulation, which is to say constraint, except in the limited circumstances in which it serves as an advantage for established firms that are looking to set up barriers to entry for would-be competitors. Even in cases where a company begins with ostensibly altruistic aims, working for the “good” of humanity, as OpenAI did in its initial incarnation as a nonprofit, market logic tends to assert itself. The profile notes that there is some debate as to whether or to what extent Altman and OpenAI were ever truly devoted to the rosier vision of a democratized AI utopia. In the end, that concern is beside the point.
# Enter: The Pickle Barrel
In moral philosophy, there’s an analogy that helps to explain how good people go bad: the process is the same by which a cucumber becomes a pickle. The cucumber goes into the barrel of brine and, over time, it gets pickled. Once in the barrel, there’s not much the cucumber can do about it. The trick is to stay out of the pickle barrel in the first place.
Humans, unlike cucumbers, have agency. They can choose to go into the barrel or not, or at least in theory, to leave it. But that’s easier said than done — especially if you become, to mix metaphors a bit, a true believer in the process. And what happens if everyone keeps jumping into the barrel?
The development of AI is heavily capitalized and privatized with investments pushing well over a trillion dollars and counting. That’s a big, expensive pickle barrel. Those who invest in AI aren’t doing it for fun or sport or charity but to generate returns and transform the economy through tools and processes that will, you guessed it, produce or enhance profits. AI endeavor may have its star players, but as an undertaking, it is a team effort driven by an established logic of profit maximization and economic transformation — which means displacing workers with machines.
To speak of AI in this context as anything else — as a democratizing tool or assistant or research and exploration force multiplier — is to miss the point. These outcomes will be side effects of the process. The scale of financial backing behind AI, and the concentration of development in a handful of extremely well-capitalized companies, ensures that much.
Altman’s story is interesting in and of itself insofar as it offers a dramatic look inside a high-stakes, high-profile world. It reads a bit like _Succession_ and a bit like _King_ _Lear_ — or maybe _Hamlet_ or _Macbeth_. But readers shouldn’t mistake the struggle surrounding Altman’s place, tenure, and approach for the definitive battle over the direction of AI. Swap Altman for almost anyone else and the fine details of the AI story might change, but it’s unlikely that the narrative arc would. Everyone is in this pickle barrel together.
Absent a structural change driven by the state, or rather, a multilateral effort by several leading states around the world, the development of AI will be reckless and bad for workers and consumers alike. Rather than democratizing economic life and political power, the path of financialized AI will drive further class inequality. Count on it.
# The Future of AI Isn’t Written Yet
However deterministic the development of AI may be under the current paradigm, we ought not to take this state of affairs as inevitable. To say that AI will be predominantly used as a tool for economic dominance so long as it’s developed by an unaccountable cabal isn’t to say it _must_ be so. It’s not as if all this was preordained at or around the time of the Big Bang.
Rather, all things being equal, a specific kind of paradigm will tend to yield specific kinds of results. If we want different results, we must insist on a different paradigm. And if we want a different paradigm, we’re going to have to build it ourselves. We can’t leave that work to Silicon Valley.
In the case of AI, an alternative model entails not just state regulation but democratized decision-making around the development and use of the technologies at scale. Their consequences will be structural and long-term, shaping our employment and capacity to make ends meet. They also contain the germs of possibility — the long-shot prospect of facilitating a productive and inclusive economy and democratic political sphere based on moral equality and some measure of material justice.
As AI’s effects pervade more and more of our lives and workplaces, anger is bound to come to the fore. Over the weekend, Altman’s home in San Francisco was attacked with an incendiary device. Channeling popular rage into what anarchists once called “propaganda of the deed,” his would-be attacker becomes a dark mirror of the tech titan he abhors. But neither high-handed executives nor Luddite avengers will fix this. What’s needed is mass politics and public decision-making.
AI concerns all of us. Its future must be determined by us, under the aegis of the state, not by a handful of tech executives in California.
* * *
The Hollow Crown of ChatGPT’s Head Honcho
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What Viktor Orbán’s Downfall Hasn’t Settled
In Hungary’s election, Péter Magyar rallied urban white-collar workers, business figures excluded from state patronage networks, intellectuals, and youth. It’s much less clear that his new government can satisfy all these groups’ expectations.
What Viktor Orbán’s Downfall Hasn’t Settled
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Is AI creating a new ‘Epstein class’?
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from our Kyndmix "Cold Rain and Snow" Grateful Dead - Gillian Welch & David Rawlings | Capitol Theatre | Relix www.youtube.com/watch == RESIST == #vsn #music #SupportIndependentMedia
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It’s Okay to Like Geese
Geese are the most talked about new rock band in years. But thanks to a recent Wired article, they’re now facing a backlash — accused of being privileged, reactionary, and even a “psyop.” It’s everything that’s wrong with music discourse today.
It’s Okay to Like Geese
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_This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on_ _April 17, 2026_ _._ _It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license._
Iran said Friday that the Strait of Hormuz is fully reopened to international shipping following an Israel-Lebanon ceasefire agreement, prompting thanks from President Donald Trump—who then said the US naval blockade on Iranian ports will continue.
“In line with the ceasefire in Lebanon, the passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire, on the coordinated route as already announced,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said.
Trump first thanked Iran in a post on his Truth Social network. However, about 20 minutes later, the president posted again on the site, writing:
> THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ IS COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS AND FULL PASSAGE, BUT THE NAVAL BLOCKADE WILL REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT AS IT PERTAINS TO IRAN, ONLY, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE. THIS PROCESS SHOULD GO VERY QUICKLY IN THAT MOST OF THE POINTS ARE ALREADY NEGOTIATED.
The US, Iran, and Israel agreed to a two-week ceasefire on April 7 after Trump threatened a genocidal attack on Iran, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if there was no deal that day. Officials on all sides clarified that the truce did not signal the end of the ongoing war.
Friday’s announcements followed the implementation of a tentative 10-day ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon, where nearly 50 days of Israeli bombardment has killed or wounded thousands of Lebanese, including hundreds of children, and displaced more than a million others.
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It is unclear how Hezbollah, which did not take part in ceasefire negotiations, will respond. The Lebanon-based militant group has retaliated for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and attacks on Lebanon with rocket and drone strikes on Israel, and the Lebanese government is largely unable to stop Hezbollah from further attacks if it decides to launch them.
Thousands of Iranians have also been killed or wounded by US and Israeli bombing since February 28, the day the war was launched. That was also the day that a US cruise missile strike on a girls’ school in Minab killed 168 people, mostly children.
About half an hour after Trump’s Friday post confirming the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the president took to Truth Social again, this time announcing that “the USA will, separately, work with Lebanon, and deal with the Hezboolah [sic] situation in an appropriate manner. Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!!”
Lebanese and Israeli media reported that, minutes after Trump’s purported prohibition, Israel subsequently launched a drone strike targeting a motorcycle between the southern Lebanese towns of Kounine and Beit Yahoun, killing one person. The terms of Thursday’s ceasefire do allow Israel to conduct “defensive” strikes against “planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks.”
### _Related_
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# Iran reopens Strait of Hormuz after Israel-Lebanon truce as Trump continues blockade
by Brett Wilkins, The Real News Network
April 17, 2026
<h1>Iran reopens Strait of Hormuz after Israel-Lebanon truce as Trump continues blockade</h1> <p class="byline">by Brett Wilkins, The Real News Network <br />April 17, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on </em><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-opens-strait-of-hormuz" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>April 17, 2026</em></a><em>.</em> <em>It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">Iran said Friday that the Strait of Hormuz is fully reopened to international shipping following an Israel-Lebanon ceasefire agreement, prompting thanks from President Donald Trump—who then said the US naval blockade on Iranian ports will continue.</p> <p>“In line with the ceasefire in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/lebanon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lebanon</a>, the passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire, on the coordinated route as already announced,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said.</p> <p>Trump first thanked Iran in a <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116420194853200133" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">post</a> on his Truth Social network. However, about 20 minutes later, the president <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116420275523158052" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">posted again</a> on the site, writing:</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ IS COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS AND FULL PASSAGE, BUT THE NAVAL BLOCKADE WILL REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT AS IT PERTAINS TO IRAN, ONLY, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE. THIS PROCESS SHOULD GO VERY QUICKLY IN THAT MOST OF THE POINTS ARE ALREADY NEGOTIATED.</p> </blockquote> <p>The US, Iran, and Israel <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-iran-israel-ceasefire" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">agreed</a> to a two-week ceasefire on April 7 after Trump threatened a genocidal attack on Iran, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if there was no deal that day. Officials on all sides clarified that the truce did not signal the end of the ongoing war.</p> <p>Friday’s announcements followed the implementation of a tentative 10-day ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon, where nearly 50 days of Israeli bombardment has killed or wounded <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-lebanon-civilian-slaughter" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">thousands of Lebanese</a>, including hundreds of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/children" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">children</a>, and displaced <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/04/un-experts-condemn-israels-unprecedented-bombing-lebanon-after-ceasefire" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">more than a million</a> others.</p> <p>It is unclear how <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/hezbollah" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hezbollah</a>, which did not take part in ceasefire negotiations, will respond. The Lebanon-based militant group has retaliated for Israel’s <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/genocide" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">genocide</a> in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gaza</a> and attacks on Lebanon with rocket and drone strikes on Israel, and the Lebanese government is largely unable to stop Hezbollah from further attacks if it decides to launch them.</p> <p>Thousands of Iranians have also been killed or wounded by US and Israeli bombing since February 28, the day the war was launched. That was also the day that a US cruise missile strike on a girls’ school in Minab <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-lying-about-iran-school-strike" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">killed 168 people</a>, mostly children.</p> <p>About half an hour after Trump’s Friday post confirming the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the president took to Truth Social again, this time <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116420395293904982" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announcing</a> that “the USA will, separately, work with Lebanon, and deal with the Hezboolah [sic] situation in an appropriate manner. Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!!”</p> <p>Lebanese and Israeli media <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/after-trump-declared-israel-prohibited-from-bombing-idf-drone-said-to-target-motorcycle-in-south-lebanon/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a> that, minutes after Trump’s purported prohibition, Israel subsequently launched a drone strike targeting a motorcycle between the southern Lebanese towns of Kounine and Beit Yahoun, killing one person. The terms of Thursday’s ceasefire do allow Israel to conduct “defensive” strikes against “planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks.”</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/iran-strait-of-hormuz-israel-lebanon-truce-trump-blockade">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342866&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/iran-strait-of-hormuz-israel-lebanon-truce-trump-blockade", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script>
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Iran reopens Strait of Hormuz after Israel-Lebanon truce as Trump continues blockade
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Mexico Is Going All In for Universal Health Care
Mexico’s new national health system aims to provide universal care. At a moment when US taxpayer dollars are being harnessed to destroy health care infrastructure abroad, Mexico is attempting to make a constitutional right to care into a lived reality.
Mexico Is Going All In for Universal Health Care
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Will More Warehouses Burn?
A California logistics worker allegedly burned down a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse in anger over low pay. The billionaire class may have to learn the hard way: you can only pack so much pressure into a deeply unequal system before it blows.
Will More Warehouses Burn?
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Why the Rich Should Get Free Public Childcare Too
Critics see Zohran Mamdani’s inclusion of the wealthy in his new free public childcare initiative as a flaw. It’s actually an integral part of the policy’s design, rooted in the fact that universal programs are far more enduring than means-tested ones.
Why the Rich Should Get Free Public Childcare Too
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The Landless Workers’ Movement, 30 Years After a Massacre
Thirty years after the Eldorado do Carajás massacre, Brazil’s landless poor still find themselves under the heel of Latin America’s most powerful and impudent rural oligarchy.
The Landless Workers’ Movement, 30 Years After a Massacre
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Hungary After Orbán
Viktor Orbán was full of contradictions: a critic of neoliberalism who gave handouts to corporations and a moralist who ended up mired in scandal. But even after his election defeat, it’s unclear how much Hungary will really change.
Hungary After Orbán
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Decarbonizing Housing Means Fighting Landlords
As long as housing remains a profit-driven investment for landlords, the pace and scope of decarbonization will be shaped by their financial calculations. That’s a problem.
Decarbonizing Housing Means Fighting Landlords
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How Flint Sit-Down Strikers Built Their Confidence
We can’t revive labor without reviving workers’ confidence to take action on the job. In 1936 and into 1937, during a period of union weakness, Flint’s sit-down strikers in the auto industry figured out how to do just that.
How Flint Sit-Down Strikers Built Their Confidence
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J Street’s ‘cut off military aid’ PR gambit changes nothing
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‘Let me show you’: Survivors cling to life in Gaza’s tent cities
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Make Lower Manhattan Socialist Again
### Democratic socialist Illapa Sairitupac is running to represent the New York State Assembly’s 65th District in Lower Manhattan, an area that was once a hotbed of left-wing politics. Jacobin spoke to him about his campaign.
* * *
Illapa Sairitupac believes that his campaign might be DSA’s chance to win a Manhattan-based seat in the state legislature. (Illapa for New York)
New York state’s preelection jockeying has seen a number of legislative seats unexpectedly open up, with cascading effects. Following incumbent state assembly member Grace Lee’s decision to vacate the Lower Manhattan–based Assembly District Sixty-Five to run for State Senate, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) tapped Illapa Sairitupac to run.
Formerly a candidate for the seat in 2022 and a recent NYC-DSA Electoral Working Group cochair, Sairitupac works as a housing organizer and has long been involved in the chapter’s ecosocialist organizing. Hoping to build on Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the district last year, and boosted by name recognition from his previous run, Sairitupac believes that this election might be DSA’s chance to finally win a Manhattan-based seat in the state legislature. (State Senator Kristen Gonzalez’s district includes a small slice of Manhattan but primarily covers areas of Queens and Brooklyn.)
_Jacobin_ sat down with Sairitupac to discuss his second run for office, the housing and climate issues facing the district, and how his campaign fits into the Lower East Side’s socialist tradition.
* * *
Roman Broszkowski
Why do you think you’re a stronger candidate this time around than in 2022?
Illapa Sairitupac
I’m familiar with so many folks, and thus voters, in this area now. A lot of folks remember me from four years ago, which is very interesting for us. I think it’s a huge — dare I say — leg up in a way this time around. I have cultivated and retained friendships and relationships with local electeds as well in the last couple of years, whereas as a first-time candidate, that was harder to create.
I have folks in the Rolodex now, people who are talking about endorsing me, who wouldn’t have endorsed me last time. It’s a much more streamlined process this time in many ways.
"This campaign is about showing that even one hundred years later, socialist politics can prevail in Lower Manhattan."
Roman Broszkowski
You were, until quite recently, the cochair of candidate recruitment for NYC-DSA. Can you explain what the process for candidate recruitment looks like in the chapter?
Illapa Sairitupac
As cochairs, we were screening possible candidates, making lists, and looking at the terrain for this upcoming cycle, which I’m now a part of.
We were mapping out who would be good for this district, who would be good for this area — building off what the previous cochairs were doing but also recruiting new candidates. We looked at folks who were involved in any socialist organizing or labor or Palestine activism, people who were present in their communities, people who were unabashed about being socialist, people who were charismatic, and people who were natural leaders, who we thought would be a good DSA fit.
We also experienced the contrary, where we would find a person that we thought would be good, and then when we tried to recruit them, they would say, “No, no, no,” and they would turn us down. Because they understood that to run for office — there’s a gravity to it, a seriousness, and they didn’t want to do it. And we get it: it’s a huge ask. So we met with many candidates, and there were some races that didn’t materialize, because ultimately the candidate would decide not to do it.
Roman Broszkowski
How do you think that you fit into that larger strategy as a candidate?
Illapa Sairitupac
I sincerely did not think I’d ever run again. I was kind of retired, actually. And this late [opening] was quite the shock for everyone. We didn’t think that the incumbent, Grace Lee, would leave the seat at this time. So it caused a domino effect; we had an opening.
As the other candidates started to emerge in this race, and as we ran the numbers and looked at how good this could be for us, I was asked to run again. I said no a few times, but then I decided, “Okay, let’s try this one more time.”
I think I’m stronger now. I can bring a lot to the table now that maybe I couldn’t have last time. And we have over three thousand positive IDs going into this race that we want to recapture. So it felt very viable.
But again, I took it very seriously. I really wanted to think about it, to think about who else might want to do this as a DSA member. And also, to be frank, to have run a very strong campaign last time and given it all to lose . . . it sucks. It’s not something you want to risk having to experience again.
Sairitupac campaigning in the Lower East Side. (Courtesy of Roman Broszkowski)
But as I thought about it, as I talked with my comrades and other folks I trust in the neighborhood, I decided that this is winnable, that it’s much more favorable than last time. Last time, we competed against someone who had just run the previous cycle. She had already built her name recognition, which was hard to overcome. This time, we just feel stronger and better situated to win.
Roman Broszkowski
You are one of three DSA-endorsed candidates in Manhattan this cycle, along with state assembly candidates Conrad Blackburn and Darializa Avila Chevalier. Why do you think DSA has struggled to break through in Manhattan compared to Queens or Brooklyn?
Illapa Sairitupac
Manhattan is tricky. There are enclaves in Manhattan that are conservative and not open to the idea of socialism. If we’re going to have a good shot at winning, it’s going to be downtown or uptown; it’s not going to be midtown. So we are going to keep cracking at it.
Conrad is an amazing organizer. I haven’t met Darializa, but she’s amazing as well. And regarding Lower Manhattan, it has a radical immigrant history. In the early 1900s, the Lower East Side was a hotbed for socialist politics, mostly arising from the harsh tenement conditions and low wages that radicalized the workers, many of them Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
This campaign is about showing that even one hundred years later, socialist politics can prevail in Lower Manhattan. I always say socialism in this country was born in this district, in the Lower East Side.
Roman Broszkowski
Why do you think that the Lower East Side is ready for a DSA representative?
Illapa Sairitupac
Zohran [Mamdani] overperformed here, but also, I did a lot of door-knocking for my campaign, for Zohran’s campaign, and for my job, and I see a lot of hunger for this kind of politics — for housing rights, for leftist ideals. We’re seeing it now in my campaign again and in the interactions we’re having with the petitioning — and that people remember me from four years ago, which is always a nice surprise.
I think the moment is now. And are we going to win the whole district? Probably not. Are we hoping to win a lot of the district, so we can win the election? Yes. And that entails being out there and making good on our previous campaigns, whether it be Zohran’s or mine or Tax the Rich or my housing rights organizing.
Roman Broszkowski
You’ve spoken about housing rights both in this campaign and your previous campaign. Very few politicians and elected officials in New York, and elsewhere in the country, are renters, and we’ve seen a push for more renter-focused politics. Why do you think it’s important to have elected officials who are renters?
Illapa Sairitupac
It’s a lived experience. It gives us an innate solidarity and recognition — a familiarity — with the circumstances of our neighbors. . . . The housing movement has shown me so many folks who are like me in different ways and also immigrants who are going through housing issues as well in the Lower East Side.
"Every single day I’m fighting bad landlords in this neighborhood. I look forward to them sending out mailers against me, as they did last time."
Housing is a really important issue that I would be a champion on. Every single day I’m fighting bad landlords in different ways in this neighborhood; I’m probably on their lists as an enemy. I look forward to them sending out mailers against me when the time is right, probably in June or so, as they did last time.
Roman Broszkowski
Given this moment, when DSA is on the rise and now contesting more races at once than it has before, what do you see as your role in pushing forward the socialist project in general? And how do you view DSA’s role as an organization in pushing forward that project in New York state?
Illapa Sairitupac
I want to be a socialist rep downtown; I want to be a face of socialism down here.
We haven’t had a socialist legislator here in about a hundred years. We have some liberals, and we have folks who are conservative Dems in power, but that’s not good enough. I’m hoping that we can win this time to actualize socialist politics down here and show folks what can be done.
I am a Spanish speaker, a son of immigrants, and a queer person. And I think it’d be good to have that kind of tradition as well down here, as someone who’s very active, a real local organizer, who will be legislating alongside an amazing bloc of socialists up in Albany.
As for DSA’s role right now, we’ve got to keep growing, we’ve got to keep leveling up, we’ve got to keep expanding. It is the moment now to strike. We have a huge slate — we’ve never had a slate this big before, with a total of ten challengers. And we’d be remiss not to swing big this time.
Sairitupac says he wants to be a face of socialism in Lower Manhattan. (Courtesy of Roman Broszkowski)
We’ve got to keep growing our presence in Albany and working together. Even when we only had four or five legislators in Albany, they were still kicking ass. The minute that we got them in the state legislature, we started seeing things changing. That was a very stark realization for me to see that, oh, we can cause change. We work here locally to get them elected, and immediately we start seeing things change in Albany.
That’s the DSA difference: being fearless and espousing our socialist ideals and positions in a liberal world, where politicians are very fearful and hesitant and kind of twiddling their thumbs. That’s not good enough anymore; it never was.
Roman Broszkowski
Ecosocialism is a big part of your campaign and who you are as an organizer. In your previous campaign, you spoke about the flood risk in Lower Manhattan and the effect that Hurricane Sandy and other storms have had. And in the last four years, climate change has gotten worse.
Illapa Sairitupac
I always say as an indigenous person, fighting for Pachamama, Mother Earth, was kind of the catalyst or the origin for me in terms of my climate movement work, my climate organizing.
Lower Manhattan is always on the front lines for extreme weather due to climate change. If we don’t do things properly, we’ll be underwater in a hundred years. It’s a grave thing that I think about a lot. Which is why when I first joined DSA, the Ecosocialist Working Group was one of first groups I gravitated toward because it had a bill it was pushing [the Build Public Renewables Act] — it had amazing ideas in it and it was winnable. That was my home for the first several years in my journey.
We have to get off fossil fuels, we have to get off National Grid and ConEdison. I don’t know why we’re still using these dirty fossil fuels. I don’t know why there are these generators in working-class neighborhoods, which give kids and folks who live around there asthma. It’s a sick system. We need the New York Power Authority to build and operate new renewable energy, to achieve 70 percent renewable energy by 2030 and 100 percent zero-emission energy by 2040. It’s very ambitious, but it’s doable.
"Lower Manhattan is always on the front lines for extreme weather due to climate change."
I have talked to so many neighbors about their concerns about being on the waterfront. There’s a new flood wall/park system being built down here called the East Side Coastal Resiliency project. I’ve been visiting the park; it’s pretty state of the art, and we’re hoping that this holds and this meets the moment. But it can’t be just that, right? It has to be legislation to give us clean power, clean energy — to mandate that all state-owned properties be brought on to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. And also a just transition for workers, requiring the projects to operate under collective bargaining in these new green-power jobs.
Roman Broszkowski
In your previous campaign, you mentioned that you opposed the borough-based jail plan. Do you still oppose that? And if so, do you have a proposal or plan for closing down Rikers and reallocating beds?
Illapa Sairitupac
They’re building a jail in Chinatown in my district, and I was pretty open about opposing that. We lost that fight. So at this point, I would say if it could at least be humane, if we could at least mitigate the harm, that’s super important. I know that Rikers has been a real issue for years — inmates being abused on so many different levels — and we’ve got to figure out a way to close it.
As a mental health social worker, I was working with many folks who were going through the system, in and out, and seeing how these are folks that slipped through the cracks. We need to have more mental health care. And we have to champion the working class that often is populating these jails and these prisons, and find a more equitable way to address [crime and public safety]. The fact that [punishment] is being monetized, the fact that these folks are doing labor [to generate money for the state], is completely contrary to my vision as a socialist.
* * *
Make Lower Manhattan Socialist Again
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Japan Is Building a War Machine in the East China Sea
### Japan’s conservative leader, Takaichi Sanae, won a supermajority of seats in this year’s general election. Takaichi and her allies are using this position of strength to advance a dangerous militarist agenda as part of Washington’s anti-China front.
* * *
Eighty years after suffering devastating defeat in war, Japan again stands at a crossroads, facing a choice over whether to maintain and consolidate the US-led global anti-China front or to commit to building a peaceful East Asian community of nations. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Less than six months after her assumption of office as Japan’s 104the (and first female) prime minister, and two months since her rise was confirmed by a resounding victory in a national election, the grip of Takaichi Sanae on the levers of state is unchallenged, and her support level remains high.
However, thoughtful and historically aware commentators are speculating that a fundamental transition of the state might be underway, one from “peace state” to “war state.” Looking back to the Konoe Fumimaro government of 1937, which in retrospect we can see as taking the steps that led to a catastrophic war four years later, they fear that Takaichi might be replaying that scenario.
# Supermajority
On February 8, 2026, the Japanese people went to the polls for an election to the lower house of the National Diet. It was generally taken to be a test of the latest government led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), formed in October 2025. With the party leader Takaichi enjoying support levels of around 70 percent, the election outcome was scarcely in doubt, but its scale still took many by surprise. Takaichi took the LDP from 198 seats (short of the 233 needed for a parliamentary majority) to 316 seats, giving the LDP a two-thirds supermajority.
"The election outcome was scarcely in doubt, but its scale still took many by surprise."
She confronted an opposition led by the mildly reformist Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA), a new force formed through a merger of the former Constitutional Democratic Party and the neo-Buddhist Komeito, a long-standing coalition partner of the LDP. Having set out to increase its Diet strength, the CRA suffered instead a humiliating loss, dropping from 167 to forty-nine seats.
In the long history of the LDP from its foundation in 1955, no leader had ever performed quite so brilliantly as Takaichi. She emerged from the election with political power greater even than her sometime mentor, Abe Shinzo. Her supermajority in the Diet meant that, unlike previous LDP governments, she could press confidently ahead with her rightist agenda, including steps for constitutional revision.
However, this electoral victory did not necessarily reflect overwhelming national support. The 56 percent turnout was the fifth-lowest in the postwar era. In the single-member constituency seats, the LDP won 49 percent of votes cast, while in the regional party-list seats, it took just 37 percent. Such are the vagaries of the electoral system that the support of 28 percent of all those eligible to vote was sufficient to gain the party two-thirds of all seats.
# End of the “Peace State”?
Eight decades have now passed since the collapse in 1945 of Japan’s Asia-Pacific community, the so-called “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” and the message that many Japanese people took from that catastrophe was clear. Under Article Nine of the constitution adopted in 1946, Japan pledged to renounce “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” adding that “land, sea, and air forces . . . will never be maintained.”
Although periodic polls always show strong popular support for Article Nine, Japan did nevertheless over time build formidable land, sea, and air forces, evading the constitutional proscription by calling them “Self-Defense Forces” (SDF). The pacifist pledge, unrevised but steadily emptied of content, remains, but the 1946 aspiration to create a new kind of state, one resting on the “peace” principle, was largely forgotten. Over subsequent decades, the United States came to regret its recrafting of Japan as a “peace state” and began exerting pressure on it to revive and expand its military.
"The United States came to regret its recrafting of Japan as a ‘peace state’ and began exerting pressure on it to revive and expand its military."
The level of Japanese military spending rose steadily throughout the Cold War, though remaining for long within the self-imposed limit of 1 percent of GDP. The size of Japan’s economy meant that this was still a large amount in absolute terms. However, as GDP growth slowed, in 2022 the level doubled to 2 percent, with an overall target of 43 trillion yen (US$355 billion) for the five-year period from 2022 to 2027.
Roughly on schedule to reach that target, military spending for the first time surpassed nine trillion yen ($58 billion) in 2025. Under Takaichi, we can expect further steady expansion. If we assume that Japan will be an early adopter of NATO’s target of 3.5 percent of GDP for military expenditure, the nine trillion would blow out to 24 trillion yen — roughly $140 billion. This is a staggering sum that would require drastic cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets. If it goes further by adopting NATO’s second target of 5 percent by 2035, which Donald Trump is believed to be demanding of Japan, the sums involved beggar the imagination.
Eventually, and especially under the Abe Shinzo government in office from 2012 to 2020, Article Nine–based restrictions were swept aside, spending accelerated, and Japanese and US military forces were reinforced and integrated. After taking office in October 2025, Takaichi promised further, substantial increases in maritime and air defense (including long-range hypersonic missiles), along with a commitment to construction and deployment of a missile defense umbrella, to be known as a Synchronized, Hybrid, Integrated, Enhanced, Littoral Defense (SHIELD) system.
One of Takaichi’s closest advisers late in 2025 even questioned the commitment to “Three Nonnuclear Principles” — nonpossession, nonmanufacture, and nonadmission of nuclear weapons to Japanese territory — that the LDP government adopted in 1967. The prime minister herself is reported to agree and has been reviewing the “three nons” policy.
Those who celebrated the Washington-Tokyo alliance as “the cornerstone of peace and security in the Indo-Pacific region” took it for granted that Japan would exercise “bold leadership” and that Japan’s forces would constitute a significant component reinforcing US global dominance. Over and under the East China Sea, battleships and aircraft carriers, missile and countermissile systems, fighter jets and submarines — not only Japanese and American, but also British, French, Australian, Canadian, and German — are stepping up their rehearsal of a possible future war between a US-led coalition of the willing and China.
Under such conditions, it is unthinkable that Japan’s heavily armed forces could ever operate independently. They constitute in effect a “second US Army.”
# Okinawa
A significant US military presence — approximately 26,000 US personnel, or half the total stationed in Japan — is positioned on Okinawa Island, where attention focuses on the hugely unpopular and still hotly contested Henoko base being built there by Japan for the US Marine Corps to replace the obsolescent Futenma. Meanwhile, Japan over the past decade has steadily expanded its own military presence on its lesser-known islands.
Under strong US pressure, it has deployed, or is in the process of deploying, missile and countermissile units in a series of new and under-construction bases, decisively changing the character of the Ryukyu island chain that stretches from Kagoshima to Taiwan. The size and population of these islands range from Mage (area 8.5 square kilometers, population zero) to Okinawa itself (area 1,206 square kilometers, population 1.4 million). In geographical terms, a line drawn from Kagoshima City in western Japan to the northern shores of Taiwan passes through these islands. Japan and the United States appear to believe that, if or when the need arises, they can “bottle up” China and deny it access to the Pacific Ocean.
"Japan and the US appear to believe that, if or when the need arises, they can ‘bottle up’ China and deny it access to the Pacific Ocean."
Japan’s southwestern frontier islands of Mage and Yonaguni deserve particular attention. Mage in the north is closest to Kagoshima, while the sparsely populated Yonaguni in the south is just 110 kilometers from the coast of Taiwan. Mage, which is adjacent to the Japanese space industry island of Tanegashima, was initially chosen to house US carrier-based fighter jet takeoff and landing exercises.
This gradually evolved into a project to accommodate all three of Japan’s military forces (Ground, Sea, and Air SDFs) together with unspecified numbers of their US counterparts. The project would be under the auspices of an arrangement that ensures ultimate Pentagon coordination, control, and command of Japanese military operations throughout the adjacent seas. From 2021, a six-thousand-strong workforce was mobilized to this remote island site, and the date for completion of the base construction works was moved forward to 2030.
Yonaguni is close enough to Taiwan that on a clear day, its mountains can be seen. Occasional Taiwanese friendship missions have landed on Yonaguni beaches from motorized jet skis. The community split over the government’s commitment to install a major military installation on the island, although a February 2015 island referendum did not win enough support to block the plan. A site was chosen, and in March 2016, an initial 160-strong Ground SDF unit marched in.
Mage and Yonaguni, both once renowned for the richness of their biodiversity, thus have become centers for the preparation and conduct of war. Military facilities of one kind or another soon followed on the other islands.
# Filling in the Blanks
Throughout the Cold War decades, what distinguished the southwestern islands (other than Okinawa itself) was the absence of US military installations. Undefended, they posed no threat and were themselves unthreatened. Those who knew the islands in their premilitary base days — this author among them — remember them as idyllic.
But to bureaucrats and SDF top brass in Tokyo, not to mention the Pentagon, the absence of such military forces gradually became of paramount concern in national defense doctrine. The raison d’être for these Okinawan islands became their positions as US-Japan bastions from which to project force in the service of the regional and global hegemonic project.
"Throughout the Cold War decades, what distinguished the southwestern islands (other than Okinawa itself) was the absence of US military installations."
The nominal reason for the militarization of the “first island chain” is to defend Taiwan in case of a “contingency.” This is the euphemistic sobriquet by which war over Taiwan between China and Taiwan has come to be contemplated since Abe Shinzo’s statement (repeated by Takaichi in 2025) that “a Taiwan contingency would be a Japan contingency.”
The broader role assigned to the first island chain is to position US-Japan power in a place where it can contain a rising China in the region that has come to be known as the Indo-Pacific. The United States insists on its own “full-spectrum dominance,” meaning global economic, technological, and military hegemony. To the extent that it challenges (or appears to challenge) that prerogative, China “threatens” the US.
A sane defense policy for a country such as Japan — or indeed for any country — would surely be one that attached highest importance to avoiding dispute and building cooperation, rather than striving to “win.” Any East Asian war today or tomorrow would be a missile war, involving naval and air power, and could conceivably become nuclear.
Missile and antimissile units are now being installed on the southwestern islands, including four hundred “off the shelf” Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles for which Japan placed an order late in 2022. Such missiles are said to be capable of attacking forces within a 1,500-kilometer radius (including major centers in Russia, China, and North Korea).
Regardless of who “wins” such a war, damage and devastation would be assured for all sides. Contemplating such catastrophe, Okinawans recall their sacrifice in the spring of 1945 in the final battle of the Pacific War, which took the lives of more than one-fourth of the Okinawan population.
Japan’s authorities might issue an “alert” warning in case of conflict breaking out, as was done on the occasion of several recent North Korean missile launches. But in the 2020s, just as in 1945, there would simply be no time for the Okinawan civilians to withdraw to safety, and indeed nowhere for them to go.
# A Peace Community
Ironically, the Okinawa now being militarized and readied for war with China has a five-hundred-year-long history of friendly interchange between the Ryukyu Kingdom and the Ming and Qing China dynasties. The Okinawan people do not share the militaristic Japanese Bushido ethic. There is no evidence of the Chinese resorting to violence in their relations with the Ryukyu authorities over the course of those centuries, and the exchanges are still remembered and celebrated in Naha today.
"The Okinawan people do not share the militaristic Japanese Bushido ethic."
In contrast, Okinawa’s incorporation into the modern Japanese state was accompanied with great violence, from the torture-induced assent by Ryukyu Kingdom elites to the absorption of the Ryukyu Kingdom and its territories into Japan in 1879. This was followed by violent attempts to crush the distinctive Okinawan language and identity and by the catastrophe of 1945, when Okinawa alone among Japanese territories suffered the horror of land war. The violence continues, with an ongoing assault from the contemporary Japanese state trying to break the Okinawan will for a nonmilitarized East China Sea community.
Under successive prefectural governors, the realization has grown that in order to overcome the threat of war, it is necessary to shift the emphasis from preparing for war to creating peace. This author recalls discussions with former Okinawan governor Ōta Masahide, in office from 1990 to 1998, on the need to combat East China Sea militarist agendas by taking the initiative in building an East China Sea peace community.
Unfortunately, that suggestion went nowhere — shortly after our conversation, an intense campaign by the national government drove Governor Ōta from office. Yet the urgency of taking such steps is so much greater now than it was during Ōta’s term of office.
# Dynamics of War
However much Japan under Takaichi scrimps and shifts resources from social services to its military, the logic of the bottom line is inexorable. The Japan that as recently as 1994 accounted for 17.8 percent of global GDP has now shrunk to just 3.4 percent after a long period of economic stagnation.
Meanwhile, China’s GDP, having been one-quarter of Japan’s in 1991, surpassed it in 2001 and quadrupled it in 2018. The gap has continued to widen since then. With the size of China’s economy now amounting to four times that of Japan’s and its share of world economic output, according to the CIA, a formidable 19 percent, the absurdity — not to speak of the criminality — of any US-Japan design to take down such a country is plain.
Eighty years after suffering devastating defeat in war, Japan again stands at a crossroads, facing a choice — of which its citizens are largely unaware — over whether to maintain and consolidate the US-led global anti-China front or to commit to building a peaceful East Asian community of nations. With her supermajority in the lower house of the Diet, most observers anticipate that Takaichi will press ahead with her long-term dream of constitutional change, deleting or at least fundamentally revising Article Nine.
"However much Japan under Takaichi scrimps and shifts resources from social services to its military, the logic of the bottom line is inexorable."
The post–World War II Asia-Pacific settlement thus continues to morph from the 1947 declaration of peace toward a dynamic of war and war preparation. China, outraged by US-Japanese-led attempts to freeze it out of regional and global institutions, pours a high proportion of its formidable and rapidly growing resources into its military, reinforcing its presence in the East and South China Seas in particular.
Meanwhile, Japan deploys tanks and missiles to its remote islands, conducts evacuation drills, and urges local residents to make contingency plans for war. The US Marine Corps “repurposes” its Okinawa-based units, facilitating their deployment to other islands and arming them with antiship missiles for use against Chinese shipping in the event of any Taiwan “contingency.”
In October 2025, Takaichi had Donald Trump’s enthusiastic support as she ascended to high office in Tokyo. Once in office, she positioned herself as his faithful servant, committed to “making America great again.” One of her first tasks was to put together an enormous “aid” package worth $550 billion (approximately 80 trillion yen) to assist the Trump project and to further Japan’s clientelist incorporation into his emerging global order, opening the door for a “new golden era” (Trump’s words last October).
Takaichi was the only leader of the old G7 who had no word of criticism of the joint US/Israeli war on Iran this year, and she alone seemed to have no compunction about issuing a grovelling public pledge to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Probably no one in the world could share the sentiment expressed by Takaichi on sitting beside the president in the Oval Office on March 19: “It is only you, Donald, who can bring peace and prosperity to the world.”
In this scenario, Japan would be an unquestionable military superpower, number three in the world after the United States and China. Regional states with reason to know, fear, and remember Japanese militarism, Australia included, show little if any interest in Japanese constitutional matters. To the extent they are aware of it at all, they dismiss Article Nine as a quixotic survival from a bygone age. With the constitution steadily sidelined, Japan is already one of the world’s “great” military powers. Paradoxically, the more it builds up its “defenses,” trusting its destiny to the genocidal rogue superpower, the less secure it becomes.
As the constitutional peace state of 1946 morphs into a military superpower, it is surely time that civic groups in Japan and Australia (and other Pacific Rim countries) joined to shift their governments from the war path and toward one of peaceful cooperation. If anything is to be done with Article Nine, it should be to restate, reinforce, and universalize the peace principle, not to delete or dilute it.
* * *
Japan Is Building a War Machine in the East China Sea
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Dwight Macdonald After the Death of Liberalism
### The defining feature of American imperialism is its combination of an enormous capacity for death and destruction with an equally enormous sense of self-entitlement. Cold War journalist Dwight Macdonald understood this outlook better than most.
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Dwight Macdonald’s writing was critical of a Cold War liberalism that spoke in the language of universal rights even as it carpet-bombed Vietnam. Amid a new imperialism unburdened by sentimental illusions, his essays show just how far the US has fallen. (Sylvia Salmi / Bettmann via Getty Images)
Review of _Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century_ by Dwight Macdonald (University of Chicago Press, 2026)
A common refrain of centrist liberals nostalgic for the halcyon days of _West Wing_ –inspired politics is that once upon a time, America was a country. By this, they mean a place where things ran more or less as expected, which is to say more or less the way centrist liberals think they ought to be run.
Like most forms of nostalgia, this variant is not grounded in reality. It is rather a product of an unconscious form of selective forgetting. America’s cult of idolatry around the Constitution, a document treated with as much reverence as the Ten Commandments, proved so incapable of holding the country together in the nineteenth century that a civil war broke out followed by what constitutional scholars call a complete “second founding.”
The twentieth century was as volatile as the nineteenth. For the United States, the Great Depression, two world wars, and bombing campaigns across Indochina took place against the backdrop of civil rights and sexual revolutions, as well as a Cold War that threatened to destroy the modern world.
Politically, the twentieth century was, for better and for worse, considerably more ideologically diverse than it is usually understood to be. The 1930s witnessed fascist proto–America Firsters, Trotskyists, Christian socialists, anarchists and more battling to sway and influence US politics during a peculiarly open-minded time in the country’s history.
It was in this tumultuous environment that the seminal socialist journalist Dwight Macdonald cut his teeth. Ideologically ever on the move, his career charted the aspirations, shattered hopes, and moral integrity of the mid-century American left. _Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century,_ a new collection of Macdonald’s writing, assembles some of his best work for a new generation that is grappling, once again, with the rise of a far-right hostile to democracy.
# A History of Violence
Macdonald was born in 1906 into a prosperous New York family. Precocious and well-loved, he sojourned at Yale before deciding to pivot into journalism just as the Great Depression put an end to the roaring 1920s. The 1930s made him a Trotskyist, and anti-fascism kept him in that camp through much of the World War II. But eventually, dissatisfaction with the rigidity of party Marxism led to a break.
At the outset of the Cold War, he declared he stood with the more open West against the closed East, although this didn’t result in a shift to the political right, as it would for the neocons a generation later. Instead, Macdonald gradually came to be identified with more democratic and libertarian forms of socialism; he spent the final years of his journalistic career fiercely criticizing American imperialism in Vietnam and beyond.
Macdonald cannot reasonably be described as an organic intellectual. He was a child of privilege who absorbed the rarefied literary sensibilities that came with that upbringing. But he was much more materialist than many orthodox historical materialists in his refusal to accept idealized ideological categories and binaries.
He maintained a deep admiration for Christian socialism and good old-fashioned moralism — an outlook that some might dismiss as utopian for its refusal to invest hopes in an organized working-class party. Macdonald compensated for this lack with a savvy responsiveness to events on the ground and a refusal to abstract away from the lives of ordinary people in the name of grandiose ideological projects. At his best, this gave him an ability to shine a bright light on his country’s worst crimes. He insisted, against a nationalist liberal and conservative establishment, that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought Americans down to the moral level of the Nazis they opposed.
> At 9:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped a single bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Exploding with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT, The Bomb destroyed in a twinkling two-thirds of the city, including, presumably, most of the 343,000 human beings who lived there. No warning was given. This atrocious action places “us,” the defenders of civilization, on a moral level with “them,” the beasts of Maidanek. And “we,” the American people, are just as much and as little responsible for this horror as “they,” the German people.
While Macdonald was a product of the Cold War and was often very critical of Soviet authoritarianism, he was never a partisan cold warrior. He was continuously thoughtful and willing to call out morally reprehensible acts wherever they occurred. This lent his work an admirable moral maturity that took the form of a hostility to the juvenile countercultural sensibility that delights in subverting expectations and is terrified of being labeled and possibly negated. Macdonald was never self-absorbed enough to care about these kinds of purely aesthetic concerns.
Even if you disagree with him — I often did — reading this volume, it’s hard to doubt that his ideas are motivated by an open-minded sincerity. When thinking about Macdonald’s earlier essays defending pacifism in World War II, I found myself agreeing with an older Macdonald who came to recognize, in the face of fascist contempt for the “weak,” that no amount of passive civil disobedience would have averted the horrors brought about by that conflict.
But even the young Macdonald was undoubtedly right to force us to accept an uncomfortable truth: while assertions of moral equivalence can be forms of equivocation, they can also be a reminder that we are doing unto others what we condemn as evil when it is done unto us. In an especially brutal essay, Macdonald points out how the Nazis never had the equipment to bomb civilians on anywhere near the scale the Allies did, but if they’d had the means to do so they surely would have.
Often possessing the means to cause immense harm can become a reason to do so. Something like this logic seems to have been at play when Donald Trump ordered an attack on Venezuela, a nation that is orders of magnitude poorer and less powerful than the United States, while he looked on joyfully at the spectacle of the war crimes he was committing and compared it to a television show.
# American Idiots
Macdonald may have chosen the “West” over what he saw as the totalitarian “East,” but he was hardly reconciled to how things were. His reflections on American jingoism are especially acute, even if his armchair sociology ought to be taken with a grain of salt. Macdonald tirelessly emphasized that America, despite its self-presentation as the land of the free and exporter of democracy, was a country on a permanent war footing.
The United States, he saw, combined a world-historical capacity and appetite for violence with an equally unprecedented unwillingness to think about its own motivations or the impact of its actions. It is this combined ability to inflict enormous suffering while maintaining an equally enormous sense of self-righteousness that defines the outlook of American imperialism.
Writing of the US’s wars in Indochina, Macdonald observed that something about our national culture made us capable of what he called “absent-minded genocide.” “‘Sorry about that’ has become the most popular slang phrase used by our troops in Vietnam — ironical, cynical, a little shamefaced.” Later, drawing on Mary McCarthy’s reports on South Vietnam, he describes American officials in unsparing terms.
> The picture she gives, in scrupulous detail, is unrelievedly depressing, and all the more so because the American officials she interviewed were often so sincere-and so obtuse. They had the best intentions — we always do — and were quite unconscious of the ruin their simply being there is inflicting on the South Vietnamese, a ruin caused by our civilian as well as our military presence. “Friend, thou has no business here.”
It is hard to read these essays today and not think about the United States’ ongoing war on Iran. The past few months have seen the alleged “Peace” president indulge in military adventurism on an alarming scale, bringing the world economy screeching to a halt.
In his book _Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War_ , Samuel Moyn criticizes those who see America’s war machines as fundamentally lawless. Not because he wants to defend imperialism as a “humane” enterprise carried out by a civilized people, but because dignifying American military intervention with the trappings of law, humanity, and Habermasian communicative rationality helps ideologically justify ever more interventions. The logic of this line of argument, if followed through, is that America is allowed to intervene whenever and forever, because it alone does so with good intentions and through due process.
By contrast, the kind of naked interventionism of the Trump administration looks very different. Some people have compared Trump to a neoconservative. There are undeniable similarities, not least the belief that macho imperial power need not bow to any “reality-based” community since it can create its own reality. But the neoconservatives and their Cold War predecessors always felt compelled, as Macdonald and Moyn rightly observe, to pay a modest tribute to virtue by insisting — as bad liars always do — that all the bombs dropped paved the road to democratic peace: a _Chili’s_ on every corner of Baghdad.
There is something bracing about the pure avarice and naked “strong do as they will, weak suffer what they must” mentality of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Whatever is underlying it is no longer motivated by the kind of cloyingly sentimental earnestness Macdonald was familiar with. Although that’s no reason to be nostalgic for the rule fetishists Moyn so carefully described.
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Dwight Macdonald After the Death of Liberalism
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The Left Needs an Alternative Cosmopolitanism
### While many critics view rising global chaos strictly in geopolitical terms, political philosopher Lea Ypi argues that it’s really ideological — the result of an increasingly coordinated global right. To compete, the Left must internationalize in equal measure.
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At the annual May Day march in London, demonstrators held sunflowers as a show of solidarity. (Dan Kitwood / Getty Images)
The standard critique of the liberal international order comes from the Right these days: the nation-state is supreme, global institutions are a racket, and cosmopolitan elites have sold out ordinary people. The standard defense comes from liberals who conflate the internationalism of the postwar order with the economic system it upholds and defend them both at once.
Not satisfied with either position, political theorist Lea Ypi instead urges us to develop what she calls an alternative cosmopolitanism — a left-wing internationalism equipped to meet the challenges of escalating inequality, rising authoritarianism, and spiraling war.
Ypi is the Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. She grew up in communist Albania and lived through its collapse as a child, an experience she chronicled in her memoir _Free: Coming of Age at the End of History_. Her most recent book, _Indignity: A Life Reimagined_ , likewise mines her family history to illuminate the interwar rise of fascism. Ypi’s writing integrates personal content with insights from her work in political philosophy — particularly reflections on liberals’ and socialists’ shared value of freedom and its many historical betrayals.
In this conversation with _Jacobin’s_ Meagan Day, Ypi argues that the global right-wing surge is not best understood as a geopolitical realignment but as an ideological convergence, one that mirrors the interwar period in unsettling ways. She dissects the distinction between conservatism and fascism, explains why MAGA’s radicalization follows a recognizable logic of escalation, and makes the case that migration is fundamentally a class issue, not a cultural one.
Ypi also draws on her family’s history to argue that the Left needs to reckon honestly with the twin failures, rooted in the limitations of the nation-state, of state socialism and social democracy, both of which she traces to the limitations of the nation-state, if we hope to build a left politics adequate to the scale of the present crisis.
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Meagan Day
Given the mayhem currently unfolding in Iran, it makes sense to start with the breakdown of the geopolitical order. As we watch the postwar institutions fracture or confront their own impotence — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the whole architecture of liberal internationalism — do you think we are witnessing a failure of those institutions or the exposure of the fact that they never really delivered what they promised?
Lea Ypi
A combination of the two. There is a story about those institutions that says they were always at the service of colonial patterns and a particular economic system, serving elites in the rich countries against the poorer parts of the world. But those institutions were also the result of efforts to counter the exclusionary tendencies of liberalism. They didn’t fully realize their stated value of universal freedom, but they represented an ongoing fight to extend it.
What we have now is a breakdown that people tend to understand in purely geopolitical terms — the rise of China, the crisis of the US’s relationship to Europe. But what we are really seeing is geopolitical conflict driven by ideological alignment: the rise of a right-wing worldview centered on the supremacy of the nation-state. It is ethnocentric, ethnonationalist, and rooted in a critique of liberal cosmopolitan elites.
"What we are seeing is geopolitical conflict driven by ideological alignment: the rise of a right-wing worldview centered on the supremacy of the nation-state."
This is a phenomenon you find in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. It’s an ideological alignment on the Right, centered on the perspective that might is right, the strong do what they have to do, and the weak suffer what they must.
Meagan Day
Is something new emerging on the global right, ideologically? Or is this similar to how the Right has always looked, only newly emboldened and unleashed?
Lea Ypi
It’s very similar to the critique of liberal cosmopolitan elites that you would have found on the Right in the interwar period, when fascism was rising. A lot of people think fascism is just conservatism, but it also has a constructive understanding of where it wants the world to be, a critique of liberal internationalism that was already there after World War I and the financial crisis.
What’s different now is that this seems to be the hegemonic critique of liberal capitalism and globalization. In the interwar period, you had another reading that was also a critique of capitalism and international liberalism, but coming from the Left, from a class perspective. Today the criticism of the status quo is coming overwhelmingly from the Right, with the mainstream left still struggling to recover its own critique of capitalism.
Meagan Day
Can you flesh out the distinction between conservatism and fascism?
Lea Ypi
It’s a distinction in methods. Fascism is a kind of revolutionary conservatism. It feels that the departure from the status quo needs to be more radical, because the status quo is too committed to liberal assumptions. Conservatism takes more of a reformist route — commitments to traditional values and customs but not this idea that you need to break the world to remake it according to some vision of the nation, civilizational superiority, and racial homogeneity that underpins a lot of fascist thinking.
Whereas in conservatism you find more compromise with the liberal order, fascism has a much more destructive and creative energy. There is a Nietzschean understanding of the relationship between morality and power in fascism that is very different from liberal universalism. Fascism, at its core, is committed to the idea that power justifies itself and that moral claims to the contrary are just the complaints of the weak.
Meagan Day
Would you say that the rise of Trumpism and figures like Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro is evidence of a rising fascist tide?
Lea Ypi
They come out of different predicaments. Orbán comes out of the failure of liberal cosmopolitanism in Eastern Europe, the financial crisis, and the shock therapy of the ’90s, while Trump and Bolsonaro emerge from their own histories. But these trajectories, which start very differently, all seem to be converging toward a more utopian fascist direction.
I don’t think MAGA actually starts out fascist. There’s a process of radicalization. These movements need a utopian vision in order to explain why they’re not delivering on policy. Why are costs and prices still so high even though you’re in power? You need long-term ideological misdirection to justify it to your constituencies — an ever-more exclusive utopia of hierarchy.
Meagan Day
I was just reading about a minor scandal in American politics: the Miami Young Republicans had a group chat leak, and in it, right-wing college students are sharing memes about the esoteric Hitlerist Julius Evola and Heinrich Himmler’s concept of Agartha — very niche, occult fascist concepts. To your point, I don’t think that is in MAGA’s DNA. I think that is absolutely an ideological escalation.
Lea Ypi
Exactly. And as I was studying the rise of fascism in the 1920s and ’30s for my last book, you find a similar ideological escalation. When we think about Hitler and the Nazis now, we think about the high point: the Holocaust, the concentration camps. But in the first years of Hitler’s power, liberals who had been concerned about him were saying, “Well, he forced his people to take down the anti-Jewish writings because he understood his base had gone too far.” People were reassured: “It’s not as bad as it looks.” Even in the case of Nazi Germany, there were processes of concessions and withdrawals, a dialectic responding to events as they unfolded.
Meagan Day
There’s almost nothing more chilling than drilling down into the escalation of fascism in Germany and noting how ordinary people found themselves like lobsters in a boiling pot. How much credence do you give to the parallels with the interwar period?
Lea Ypi
I think there are real parallels. The right-wing fascist escalation is a response to liberal capitalist crisis. That was true in the ’20s, and it’s true now. History won’t repeat itself in exactly the same way, but we can read the rise of the Right as a response to the failures of social democracy on the one hand and liberal capitalism on the other, as was the case in the ’20s and ’30s.
"The right-wing fascist escalation is a response to liberal capitalist crisis. That was true in the ’20s, and it’s true now."
Meagan Day
You also had an empowered left in the interwar period, and arguably today you do not.
Lea Ypi
Yes and no. The Spanish Civil War was the last moment in which you had real left internationalism. After that, the Left was committed — in both its socialist and social democratic forms — to the nation-state. And in that sense, it’s not a project that can adequately respond to this crisis, which is ultimately a transnational crisis. What you have now is the inability of the Left to create a broad international front with a clear vision of where it wants to take its critique of capitalism.
Meagan Day
Meanwhile, the Right seems to be very effectively weaving together a cohesive international project.
Lea Ypi
Yes, and it had already started doing that when it was not in power. Think of Steve Bannon and the role he played in connecting the various right-wing movements in Europe and America — there was already broad transnational mobilization around this ideology of the nation and the state. They were able to say that capitalism is transnational and, therefore, any effort to criticize it from the Right also needs to be transnational. These characters went around forming networks: think tanks, news platforms, individual figures who were the connecting links. They weren’t waiting to be in power.
Meagan Day
What accounts for the Left’s relative failure to replicate this?
Lea Ypi
The abandonment of the critique of capitalism as a class project. You have the environmentalist left, the feminist left, the anti-racist left, and there’s been a critique of universalism that has made it difficult to connect these identity-based struggles into one vision. Paradoxically, the Left has inherited the same culturalist approach that the Right takes to understanding conflict — saying it’s about racism or gender without fitting those critiques into a critique of the broader mode of production.
What the Left really lacks is an alternative cosmopolitanism. When I was a student in the late ’90s and early 2000s in Italy, that was the moment of the alter-globalization movement. You had the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, the emerging idea of an alternative globalization. But that movement was suffocated by the hegemony of neoliberalism, which insisted that you didn’t need another politics, you just needed the right policy. All you had to do was cater to the Third Way: policy fixes, a little redistribution, compromise with economic elites.
"Those of us who were on the streets were seen as ridiculous romantics who didn’t understand that the Cold War was over and there was no alternative."
Those of us who were on the streets were seen as ridiculous romantics who didn’t understand that the Cold War was over and there was no alternative. That’s what we lost, and that’s what we’re struggling to recover.
Meagan Day
The Left has been suspicious of the nation-state for good reason. But in recent history, it’s largely been within this context that the weak have been able to express their power. Is there anything redeeming about the nation-state?
Lea Ypi
Pragmatically, yes, because the nation-state is the site of coercive power. If you want to take and exercise power, you need to know where it resides. Otherwise, the social struggle just remains everywhere and nowhere.
But the reason people pinned so much hope on the nation-state was that in the 1920s and ’30s, you had the nation against the empire. Nationalism was a progressive force in the struggle against the imperial order, against churches and monarchies that had zero democratic representation. That’s why it was presented as progressive in the left-wing debates of the period, the writings of [Vladimir] Lenin and [Rosa] Luxemburg and so on.
But now the empire is over. The nation-state is itself a representative of the old order. Nationalism is no longer progressive even in its most favorable articulation. It’s just the exclusion of the other. People want to make distinctions between ethnic and civic nationalism, but ultimately when there is a border, there is a difference between who is in and who is out. It’s inevitably exclusionary. We are at a different moment, and we need a different kind of analysis.
Meagan Day
On that point, how should the Left position itself when speaking to a public that has serious anxieties about migration?
Lea Ypi
First, we need to change the discourse away from the moralization of migration. A lot of the left-wing discussion goes: borders are arbitrary, freedom of movement is a basic right, why can’t people move freely? It’s conducted at such a moralistic level that it’s hard to distinguish the liberal defense of migrants from the left-wing one.
Migration is only a problem when it happens in asymmetrical power relations, as from the Global South to the Global North. Nobody worries about migration from Canada to the United States or from Australia to Great Britain. We only worry about migration when it reflects broader asymmetries of power. And those asymmetries are themselves the result of war, economic crisis, and environmental breakdown.
Migration is a consequence, not a cause. If you really want to solve the problem, you have to intervene at the level of its causes. And that’s where the Right doesn’t have an answer. “We must make our own country great again at others’ expense” can only result in more war, more crisis, and more disaster around the world — and, consequently, more migration.
It’s also really important to bring out the class dimension. Borders have never been more open for some people and more closed for others than they are now, even in places where the Right is in power. When Trump was posting those images of people in chains being deported, he was simultaneously boasting about how easy it was for Russian oligarchs to get investor visas.
"Migration is only a problem when it happens in asymmetrical power relations — and those asymmetries are themselves the result of war, economic crisis, and environmental breakdown."
The golden visas, the citizenship-by-investment programs — the Right has been completely willing to open borders for the wealthy. So if the concern is really about cultural mixing and integration, why does migration become so easy for some people and so difficult for others who come from the same cultural background? Migration is a question of class, not culture.
Meagan Day
You grew up around 1989, and your memoir treats it as a very ambiguous turning point rather than a triumphant one. Is there something in the post-communist experience that gives us useful tools for thinking about this moment of instability?
Lea Ypi
One of the interesting things in the transition literature from the 1990s is the concept of the “triple transition.” Former communist countries had to build market economies, democratic states with structures of legitimation, and resolve the territorial problem, meaning all the nationalist conflicts within multinational units like Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Scholars pointed out that you couldn’t have all three at the same time, and that there were no intermediary institutions in those societies — no trade unions, no vibrant civil society, no real parties.
What’s fascinating is that people were saying this as though the West was staying constant. They took the best of the West — the golden age of social democracy, constraints on markets, mass-member parties — and said the East needed to catch up. But while they were having these discussions, those intermediary institutions were being completely dismantled in the West. This was the time they were destroying unions, when parties were becoming cartel parties. Everything the East was supposed to pivot toward was being lost.
It was an ideological operation that attributed the gains of Western social democracies to liberalism rather than to the labor movement, while at the same time the [Margaret] Thatcher–[Ronald] Reagan era was destroying the labor movement. They were taking credit for what the labor movement had achieved but without the structures that had made those achievements possible. What people had predicted would happen in the East — authoritarian right-wing leaders using cultural issues to distract from economic failures — ended up happening in both the East and the West. The transition went not from East to West but from West to East.
Meagan Day
I want to pluck out a thread from your interview with Aaron Bastani on Novara Media, which has to do with your family history of persecution under communism and continued identification as socialists afterward.
Almost all Americans ever hear on this topic is: “My family lived under communism, they were persecuted, and I am qualified to tell you it can never work.” But many socialists were persecuted under communism and maintained their commitment to socialist values. Can you talk about how that worked in your family?
Lea Ypi
My grandfather was a social democrat and was persecuted by the Albanian communist leadership for it. But a social democrat of the 1920s and ’30s was different from what we mean by social democracy today. The social democrats of that era didn’t think democracy and capitalism were compatible. Social democracy at its origins was a much more radical project than we now give it credit for.
The only real difference between social democrats and communists at the time concerned revolution and, consequently, the relationship between the vanguard and the people. The big discussion between Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg was on the method, reform versus revolution, but the goals were the same. The fundamental assumption was that if you wanted real democracy, you needed to contain and eventually overcome capitalism.
"Social democracy at its origins was a much more radical project than we now give it credit for."
In places like Albania, the project of building socialism was merged with the project of building a nation-state out of the collapse of empire. That meant you didn’t have socialism built with democratic means. You had this weird hybrid: control over markets but no functioning public sphere, no democratic legitimation, no party democracy. It was socialist by some important measures, but it was also very repressive, including to socialists and social democrats who stepped out of line.
By contrast, we can imagine a democratic socialism. It’s possible to have a socialist state with a socialist constitution and different kinds of socialist parties, and indeed a multiparty system really helps with legitimation and accountability. So then why do we take that very narrow understanding of what socialism was, typified by examples like Albania, and make it the definitive definition — contrary to all the alternative socialists who were suppressed by the state socialists?
People sometimes suggest to me that I must not care about my own family. But I don’t see why caring about my family means siding with those my grandfather always thought were wrong. He always thought capitalism was the problem. The fact that he suffered under communism in Albania didn’t mean capitalism stopped being a problem. Staying true to my roots means not letting his enemies define what socialism means.
Meagan Day
I think newer socialists are sometimes confused on this point. They’ve discovered their own critique of capitalism, and now the world seems split into two competing camps, and they want to be on the right side. It’s critical to nuance that picture.
Lea Ypi
Right, when in reality, to rebuild the Left, you need to settle accounts with both failures of the twentieth century: the failure of state socialism and the failure of social democracy in its nation-state-rooted version. State socialism fails because of its weddedness to the nation-state, its lack of democracy, and its neglect of first-generation freedoms such as freedom of movement, association, and expression. You can’t just say, “They had to do it, so it was fine.” Socialism was always about equality, but it was never _only_ about equality; it was always also about freedom.
"To rebuild the Left, you need to settle accounts with both failures of the 20th century: the failure of state socialism and the failure of social democracy in its nation-state-rooted version."
At the same time, we need to also be really critical of the social democrats and how they compromised with capitalism, and where that led: to the waves of neoliberalism in the ’90s. Both failures are connected to the nation-state. An alternative needs to learn from both. We need to recover the critique of capitalism on the one hand and the critique of the nation-state on the other. The nation-state requires structures of legitimation that don’t work with a critique of transnational capital — capital that operates across the Global North and South, that generates imperialism and conflicts over resources at the global level.
Meagan Day
What’s on your mind as events unfold in Iran?
Lea Ypi
War is the logical conclusion of the tendency to respond to political and economic crisis by vowing to make your own country great again. A worldview constructed around the nation-state is necessarily built on the idea that the world belongs to the powerful, and the powerful have a right to destroy everything that doesn’t conform. War is just that logic carried to its end point.
But what’s really interesting about this Iran war is that the United States feels no need to morally legitimize it. When you think about the Iraq War, liberal internationalists went to great lengths to explain that it was about international norms, international justice. There was a need for justification beyond the nation-state. The logic wasn’t just sheer naked power. With this war, there is very little of that.
Meagan Day
That seems to reflect the weakness of liberal institutionalism. We’ve perhaps arrived at the place where the Right can simply have a war on its own terms without appealing to the ethics of the liberal order at all.
Lea Ypi
Yes. But in defending pacifism, it’s important not to defend it just on the basis that we need to respect the liberal international order — because that order was always flawed and asymmetric. Real pacifism is only possible once you’ve overcome both problems: capitalism on the one hand, and the nation-state as an obstacle to the realization of a socialist world on the other. There is a vision of international institutions that isn’t just defending the institutions we have in their current form.
I don’t know that we can lay out a ten-point program for what comes next. You start with an analysis of the present moment and a critique of what went wrong in the past, and from there you build the democratic institutions required to take that critique forward. But I do think it must take the form of an alternative cosmopolitanism. That is the most coherent way of making sense of the conflicts of the globalized world.
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The Left Needs an Alternative Cosmopolitanism
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This story originally appeared in _Mondoweiss_ on April 15, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
The state of Israel and its propaganda machine (officially called “Hasbara”, Hebrew for “explanation”) has long claimed that Jews across the world are under existential threat from terrorists and antisemites emanating from the Muslim world and their “far-left” allies. This narrative asserts that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran hate Jews simply for being Jews; that they seek the destruction of all Jews; and that their opposition to the Israeli regime is driven by this anti-Jewish hatred. Hasbara further posits that Israel is the only guarantor of Jewish safety – and that without it, we are doomed to a repeat of the Nazi Holocaust.
Yet, in the name of Jewish safety, Zionists have colonized Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed its population, and constructed a regime of apartheid to manage ever-shrinking bantustans in the West Bank. In the name of Jewish safety, Israel has annexed Palestinian land and, as part of its Greater Israel project, sought further expansion into Syria and Lebanon. In the name of Jewish safety, Israel has jailed over ten thousand Palestinian political prisoners, turned Gaza into a concentration camp, and has recently adopted a law applying the death penalty _only_ to Palestinians, while Jewish murderers and rapists are defended, even celebrated, by its parliamentarians instead of punished.
Finally, in the name of Jewish safety, Zionists have transformed the overwhelming majority of Jewish religious and cultural institutions into _de facto_ embassies and propaganda arms of the Israeli state.
Because it presents an obvious threat to the Zionist colonial project, the long and extraordinary history of Jewish anti-Zionism has been suppressed, with its proponents sidelined or ostracized.
Diverse Jewish cultures – from the Qırmızı Qəsəbə (Red Village) of Azerbaijan, to the _mellahs_ and _haras_ of North Africa, to the _shtetls_ of Eastern Europe – have been supplanted by an increasingly homogenized and diminished Israeli colonial culture modelled on German “high culture”. Rich creolized languages such as Ladino, Krymchak, Kayliñña, Judeo-Arabic, Yevanic, Gruzinic, and Yiddish are now endangered or extinguished, eroded in part by the imposition of German-accented Hebrew in 1948 Palestine. Under this compulsion to conform, traditional cultural practices such as the _shtetl badchan_ (wedding jester), Sephardic amulet-making, Yiddish theater, and Mekonenot mourning have also been eroded or erased.
Ethno-nationalism targets not only its external enemies. In attempting to manufacture a non-existent _ethnos_ , it also seeks the dissolution of its perceived internal enemies. In this case, Zionism works to eliminate Jewish diversity in all its forms, especially that which directly challenges the Zionist project.
This is why anti–Zionist Jews (like me) are dismissed as “self-hating” and constantly have our Jewishness invalidated. The goal is to either force conformity through intimidation and fear, or to blackball us from Jewish institutions, events, and communities that Zionists want to ideologically “purify”.
This is also why many Zionists dismiss the Lemba of Limpopo – who see Africa as their homeland – as insufficiently Jewish.
And this is why Israel and the United States show little hesitation indiscriminately bombing Iran, even when this risks harming or killing the Kalimi Jews who have lived there for millennia.
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The Kalimi community of Iran – now numbering around 15,000 – are Iranian Jews who refused to join the Zionist project of colonizing Palestine. Despite sustained efforts by Israel to encourage their emigration (their numbers once exceeded 100,000), this remaining community has insisted that Iran — not Israel — is their home.
This presents an profoundly uncomfortable contradiction for Zionism. On the one hand, it insists that Iranian Jews are oppressed by what it describes as “the most antisemitic regime on the plant.” On the other, it is confronted by a community that has forsaken Zionism and, by refusing to leave Iran, directly undermines narratives of Iranian antisemitism.
It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that Israel bombed the Rafi-Nia synagogue in Tehran on April 7, in the middle of the Jewish holiday of Passover. According to reports, confirmed by Israel, the entire building was reduced to rubble, with footage of the aftermath showing Jewish community leaders salvaging prayer scrolls from the debris while calling for unity against Israel. Iranian Jewish leaders, including former MP Siamak Moreh-Sedegh and the current MP, and Tehran Jewish Association leader, Homayoun Sameyah Najafabadi, have publicly condemned Zionism and called for resistance to Israel and the United States.
This is not to claim that Israel deliberately targeted the synagogue; Zionism’s internal opposition to diversity is probably not that crass. It is, however, to recognize a broader logic of Zionism.
The use of the Hannibal Directive, including on October 7, 2023, and the prolonged and fanatical refusal to agree to a ceasefire and prisoner exchange, point to a pattern in which Jewish captives’ lives are subordinate to political objectives. Reports indicate that the Israeli army killed an unknown number of its own soldiers and civilians on 7 October and that many of the captives were killed in the months that followed by Israeli airstrikes, suffocation from bombings, and sniper fire.
That is to say, Israel has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to treat Jewish life as disposable (and at times politically useful) in service of its ideological project.
At a minimum, this logic renders Kalimi Jews acceptable collateral damage in Israel’s pursuit of regional dominance. In fact, the Israeli army has referred to the bombing of the synagogue as exactly that: “collateral damage”. As the “wrong” kind of Jews, their destruction is treated as scarcely worthy of concern.
If antisemitism is understood, not as opposition to Zionism or its manifestation in Israeli apartheid, but as the systemic racial discrimination and hatred of Jews for being Jewish and the consequent devaluation of Jewish life, then how should we understand Israel’s bombing of the Rafi-Nia synagogue?
If we recognize the long and important history of Jewish political, ethnic, and cultural diversity, if we accept that Jewishness is inherently heterogeneous, then any attack on that diversity must be understood as anti-Jewish.
Situated within the broader Zionist project that seeks to erase such diversity in the name of ethnonationalism, the bombing of Rafi-Nia begins to resemble a form of internal Jew-hatred which positions elite Zionist Jews against other Jews. In particular, against the traditional, non-Westernized, diaspora Jew.
Whether Israel set out to bomb the synagogue or not, it operates within a political logic that ranks Jewish lives, rendering such outcomes predictable, even tolerable. Zionism does not necessarily explicitly seek to harm Jews. Rather, it manufactures a hierarchy among Jews in which those who refuse to conform must either be assimilated or be expendable. Is the Rafi-Nia bombing, in some perverse way, not then a general expression of Zionist antisemitism against other Jews?
We must oppose Zionism first and foremost because of what it does to the Palestinians. But this is another reason to oppose it: because the very future of humanity, including Judaism itself, is at stake.
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# How Zionism’s anti-Jewish logic led Israel to bomb an Iranian synagogue
by Jared Sacks, The Real News Network
April 15, 2026
<h1>How Zionism’s anti-Jewish logic led Israel to bomb an Iranian synagogue</h1> <p class="byline">by Jared Sacks, The Real News Network <br />April 15, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:30% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Untitled-design-21.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-272634 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p>This story originally appeared in <em><a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/04/understanding-the-anti-jewish-logic-that-led-israel-to-bomb-an-iranian-synagogue/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mondoweiss</a></em> on April 15, 2026. It is shared here with permission.</p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">The state of Israel and its propaganda machine (officially called “Hasbara”, Hebrew for “explanation”) has long claimed that Jews across the world are under existential threat from terrorists and antisemites emanating from the Muslim world and their “far-left” allies. This narrative asserts that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran hate Jews simply for being Jews; that they seek the destruction of all Jews; and that their opposition to the Israeli regime is driven by this anti-Jewish hatred. Hasbara further posits that Israel is the only guarantor of Jewish safety – and that without it, we are doomed to a repeat of the Nazi Holocaust.</p> <p>Yet, in the name of Jewish safety, Zionists have colonized Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed its population, and constructed a regime of apartheid to manage ever-shrinking <a href="https://sahistory.org.za/article/homelands" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bantustans</a> in the West Bank. In the name of Jewish safety, Israel has annexed Palestinian land and, as part of its <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/26/what-is-greater-israel-and-how-popular-is-it-among-israelis" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Greater Israel</a> project, sought further expansion into Syria and Lebanon. In the name of Jewish safety, Israel has jailed over ten thousand Palestinian political prisoners, turned Gaza into a concentration camp, and has recently adopted a law applying the death penalty <em>only</em> to Palestinians, while Jewish murderers and rapists are <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/9/everything-is-legitimate-israeli-leaders-defend-soldiers-accused-of-rape" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">defended, even celebrated</a>, by its parliamentarians instead of punished. </p> <p>Finally, in the name of Jewish safety, Zionists have transformed the overwhelming majority of Jewish religious and cultural institutions into <em>de facto </em>embassies and propaganda arms of the Israeli state. </p> <p>Because it presents an obvious threat to the Zionist colonial project, the long and extraordinary history of <a href="https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/the-night/the-war-on-memory-learning-from-the-jewish-labor-bund" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jewish anti-Zionism</a> has been suppressed, with its proponents sidelined or ostracized.</p> <p>Diverse Jewish cultures – from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%C4%B1rm%C4%B1z%C4%B1_Q%C9%99s%C9%99b%C9%99">Qırmızı Qəsəbə</a> (Red Village) of Azerbaijan, to the <em>mellahs</em> and <em>haras</em> of North Africa, to the <em>shtetls</em> of Eastern Europe – have been supplanted by an increasingly homogenized and diminished Israeli colonial culture <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_New_Land" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">modelled on German “high culture”</a>. Rich creolized languages such as Ladino, Krymchak, Kayliñña, Judeo-Arabic, Yevanic, Gruzinic, and Yiddish are now endangered or extinguished, eroded in part by the imposition of German-accented Hebrew in 1948 Palestine. Under this compulsion to conform, traditional cultural practices such as the <em>shtetl badchan</em> (wedding jester), Sephardic amulet-making, Yiddish theater, and Mekonenot mourning have also been eroded or erased.</p> <p>Ethno-nationalism targets not only its external enemies. In attempting to manufacture a non-existent <em>ethnos</em>, it also seeks the dissolution of its perceived internal enemies. In this case, Zionism works to eliminate Jewish diversity in all its forms, especially that which directly challenges the Zionist project.</p> <p>This is why anti–Zionist Jews (like me) are dismissed as “self-hating” and constantly have our Jewishness invalidated. The goal is to either force conformity through intimidation and fear, or to <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-05-04-genocide-undebated-how-words-failed-the-jewish-literary-festival-in-cape-town/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blackball</a> us from Jewish institutions, events, and communities that Zionists want to ideologically “purify”.</p> <p>This is also why many Zionists dismiss the <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-lemba-people-how-they-view-their-jewishness-challenges-zionist-ideas-that-identity-is-linked-to-one-homeland-228632?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+August+6+2025+-+3476935404&utm_content=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+August+6+2025+-+3476935404+CID_6b8c93143a544dcaffde5562e122b924&utm_source=campaign_monitor_africa&utm_term=South+Africas+Lemba+people+how+they+view+their+Jewishness+challenges+Zionist+ideas+that+identity+is+linked+to+one+homeland" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lemba of Limpopo</a> – who see Africa as their homeland – as insufficiently Jewish.</p> <p>And this is why Israel and the United States show little hesitation indiscriminately bombing Iran, even when this risks harming or killing the Kalimi Jews who have lived there for millennia.</p> <p>The Kalimi community of Iran – now numbering around 15,000 – are Iranian Jews who <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/13/iran.israel" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">refused</a> to join the Zionist project of colonizing Palestine. Despite sustained efforts by Israel to encourage their emigration (their numbers once exceeded 100,000), this remaining community has insisted that Iran — not Israel — is their home.</p> <p>This presents an profoundly uncomfortable contradiction for Zionism. On the one hand, it insists that Iranian Jews are oppressed by what it <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/1/23/netanyahu-condemns-tyrants-of-tehran-in-holocaust-speech" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">describes</a> as “the most antisemitic regime on the plant.” On the other, it is confronted by a community that has forsaken Zionism and, by refusing to leave Iran, directly undermines narratives of Iranian antisemitism.</p> <p>It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that Israel bombed the Rafi-Nia synagogue in Tehran on April 7, in the middle of the Jewish holiday of Passover. According to reports, confirmed by Israel, the entire building was reduced to rubble, with footage of the aftermath showing Jewish community leaders <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@middleeasteye/video/7626032202664463638" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">salvaging prayer scrolls</a> from the debris while <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reels/DW16LhTgeQD/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">calling for</a> unity against Israel. Iranian Jewish leaders, including former MP Siamak Moreh-Sedegh and the current MP, and Tehran Jewish Association leader, Homayoun Sameyah Najafabadi, have publicly <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-synagogue-bombing-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">condemned</a> Zionism and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VATdsTT1m8g" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">called for</a> resistance to Israel and the United States. </p> <p>This is not to claim that Israel deliberately targeted the synagogue; Zionism’s internal opposition to diversity is probably not that crass. It is, however, to recognize a broader logic of Zionism. </p> <p>The use of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hannibal Directive</a>, including on October 7, 2023, and the prolonged and fanatical refusal to agree to a ceasefire and prisoner exchange, point to a pattern in which Jewish captives’ lives are subordinate to political objectives. Reports indicate that the Israeli army killed an <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-07/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-ordered-hannibal-directive-on-october-7-to-prevent-hamas-taking-soldiers-captive/00000190-89a2-d776-a3b1-fdbe45520000" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">unknown number</a> of its own soldiers and civilians on 7 October and that many of the captives were killed in the months that followed by Israeli <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-hostage-yossi-sharabi-was-likely-killed-as-a-result-of-idf-strike/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">airstrikes</a>, <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/gaza-hostage-deaths/#:~:text=The%20source%20explained%20that%20the,bombings%20to%20harm%20its%20targets.%E2%80%9D" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">suffocatio</a>n from bombings, and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/18/captives-mistakenly-killed-by-israeli-troops-left-sos-signs-in-hebrew#:~:text=Israel%2DPalestine%20conflict-,Captives%20mistakenly%20killed%20by%20Israeli%20troops%20left%20SOS%20signs%20in,Daniel%20Hagari%20said%20on%20Sunday." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">sniper fire</a>.</p> <p>That is to say, Israel has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to treat Jewish life as disposable (and at times politically useful) in service of its ideological project. </p> <p>At a minimum, this logic renders Kalimi Jews acceptable collateral damage in Israel’s pursuit of regional dominance. In fact, the Israeli army has referred to the bombing of the synagogue as exactly that: “<a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-claims-tehran-synagogue-badly-damaged-in-israeli-airstrike-israeli-official-we-dont-target-synagogues/#:~:text=The%20Israel%20Defense%20Forces%20admitted,strike%20that%20damaged%20the%20synagogue." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">collateral damage</a>”. As the “wrong” kind of Jews, their destruction is treated as scarcely worthy of concern.</p> <p>If antisemitism is understood, not as opposition to Zionism or its manifestation in Israeli apartheid, but as the systemic racial discrimination and hatred of Jews for being Jewish and the consequent devaluation of Jewish life, then how should we understand Israel’s bombing of the Rafi-Nia synagogue? </p> <p>If we recognize the long and important history of Jewish political, ethnic, and cultural diversity, if we accept that Jewishness is inherently heterogeneous, then any attack on that diversity must be understood as anti-Jewish.</p> <p>Situated within the broader Zionist project that seeks to erase such diversity in the name of ethnonationalism, the bombing of Rafi-Nia begins to resemble a form of internal Jew-hatred which positions elite Zionist Jews against other Jews. In particular, against the traditional, non-Westernized, diaspora Jew.</p> <p>Whether Israel set out to bomb the synagogue or not, it operates within a political logic that ranks Jewish lives, rendering such outcomes predictable, even tolerable. Zionism does not necessarily explicitly seek to harm Jews. Rather, it manufactures a hierarchy among Jews in which those who refuse to conform must either be assimilated or be expendable. Is the Rafi-Nia bombing, in some perverse way, not then a general expression of Zionist antisemitism against other Jews?</p> <p>We must oppose Zionism first and foremost because of what it does to the Palestinians. But this is another reason to oppose it: because the very future of humanity, including Judaism itself, is at stake.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/how-zionisms-anti-jewish-logic-led-israel-to-bomb-an-iranian-synagogue">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342813&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/how-zionisms-anti-jewish-logic-led-israel-to-bomb-an-iranian-synagogue", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script>
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How Zionism’s anti-Jewish logic led Israel to bomb an Iranian synagogue
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India’s Working Poor Are Being Priced Out of Basic Meals
### For many migrant workers in India, the inability to cook affordably disrupts the economics of city life. As fuel becomes increasingly expensive due to market volatility and supply shocks, families are being forced to ration meals or relocate.
* * *
India’s shift to market-linked LPG pricing is passing global fuel shocks, exacerbated by the chaos in the Middle East, directly to households. As a result, India’s working poor are forced to ration gas, skip meals, or go without cooking altogether. (Sajad Hameed / Jacobin)
New Delhi, INDIA – At the edge of Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station, the morning feels heavier than usual. Families cluster along the platform, their belongings packed into cloth bundles and plastic sacks.
Children lie half-asleep in their mothers’ laps as announcements echo overhead. Trains heading toward Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and beyond are running full. Over the past few days, railway workers say, the crowds have grown noticeably thicker. Entire families, most of them daily wage laborers, wait with little more than essentials, as if preparing for a longer absence.
“Something is wrong,” says Ab Rahman, thirty-four, a porter, or coolie, who has spent more than a decade navigating these railway platforms. “For four to five days now, there has been a heavy rush — mostly poor workers. They are going back.”
There are no official announcements explaining the surge. No single event has triggered it.
Across the platform, fragments of conversation point to a quieter pressure of rising costs, shrinking work, and the growing difficulty of sustaining even the most basic routines of life in the city.
For many, the crisis is not just about wages or rent. It is about something more immediate: the ability to cook a meal.
Among those waiting at the platform is twenty-seven-year-old Ramesh Varma, a street vendor from Bihar’s Barwan Kala village. He had returned to Delhi barely fifteen days ago, hoping to rebuild his earnings. Now he is leaving again.
“LPG [liquid petroleum gas] refills were not available on time,” he says, sitting on the platform floor. “We kept waiting, going from one gas agency to another. Even when the gas cylinder comes, the cost is too high.”
For many migrant workers, the inability to cook affordably disrupts the fragile economics of city life, where preparing food at home is often the only way to keep daily expenses under control. Varma’s decision captures a growing reality across India’s working-class neighborhoods: as cooking fuel becomes expensive or inaccessible, survival itself becomes uncertain.
# Means-Tested LPG and the Crisis
Across India’s cities and industrial belts, a basic act of cooking a meal is becoming increasingly precarious for low-income households.
In the working-class neighborhoods of Delhi and beyond, families report rising LPG refill costs, irregular access, and delays that make everyday cooking uncertain. This is not a sudden breakdown. It is the result of a longer policy shift now intensified by a global supply shock.
Part of that shock reflects spillovers from the conflict in the Middle East. Despite recent ceasefire efforts, geopolitical tensions continue to reverberate through global energy markets, particularly through disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit route for crude oil and LPG.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), these disruptions have tightened global energy supplies and contributed to higher crude and LPG prices, tightening markets for import-dependent countries including India.
India’s LPG subsidy bill, which once exceeded 40,000 crore rupees annually in the mid-2010s, fell sharply by 2020–21 before partial restoration in recent years. Government budget data shows LPG subsidy expenditure has fluctuated sharply over the past decade, reflecting a broader shift toward market-linked pricing.
A decade after expanding liquefied petroleum gas access, India has left its poorest households exposed to volatile fuel markets, forcing millions to ration gas, skip meals, or abandon city life altogether. (Sajad Hameed / Jacobin)
Today LPG subsidies have become increasingly targeted rather than universal. In 2025–26, the government allocated around 12,000 crore rupees to support Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a program that subsidizes cooking gas for low-income houses, reflecting a narrower approach to welfare support.
For consumers, this translated into a steep rise in refill costs. The price of a standard 14.2 kilogram domestic LPG cylinder, which hovered around 400–500 rupees a decade ago, crossed 1,000 rupees in many cities in the year 2022 before easing slightly to around 850–950 rupees. For low-income households, this remains prohibitively expensive.
India depends heavily on LPG imports, making domestic prices highly sensitive to global energy markets and external supply conditions. Fluctuations in international fuel prices and supply disruptions are increasingly passed on directly to households.
# The Numbers Behind the Squeeze
The pressure on working-class households is not anecdotal but is measurable.
While subsidies still exist, many households report receiving little meaningful relief. For a daily wage worker earning 300–500 rupees, a single refill can consume two to three days’ income, making regular use difficult to sustain. Parliamentary data indicates that PMUY beneficiaries use significantly fewer cylinders annually than other consumers, underscoring the affordability constraint.
In Sangam Vihar, one of Delhi’s largest informal settlements, Parveena sits outside her one-room house, an empty LPG cylinder resting beside her like a useless object.
“For the past few days, we have been running from one gas agency to another,” she says. “We are not getting refills on time. Without gas, we cannot even cook one meal.”
Inside the room is quiet. There is no smell of food, no utensils on the stove, no sign of a meal in preparation, but only the stillness of a kitchen that has stopped functioning.
A mother of two and a daily wage worker, Parveena has already begun cutting back. “For two days, my children have slept hungry,” she says. “Prices are rising every day. Even if we find LPG, it is too costly. We are poor; how can we pay so much just to cook food?”
While India has expanded LPG access significantly over the past decade, sustained usage among low-income households remains uneven. In recent months, that strain has deepened. Reports from multiple states, including Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, point to refill delays, long waiting times, and rising dependence on alternative fuels.
In some areas, households have begun reverting to firewood and kerosene fuels associated with both poverty and long-term health risks.
Parveena’s neighbor notes quietly, “We cannot just leave this place. At least the men find some work here. . . . Somehow we survive with that.”
In neighborhoods like these, leaving is rarely a real option. Work is uncertain, but it exists. Survival depends on staying and adjusting. But adjustment has limits. For women in particular, the burden is immediate and physical. When LPG runs out, it is they who must find alternatives like collecting firewood, managing inefficient stoves, or stretching meals across days.
# Cooking With Firewood and Kerosene
In working neighborhoods across India, families report reducing the number of meals they cook, delaying refills, and stretching cylinders beyond their normal use. “We adjust” is how several workers describe it.
Residents say that while LPG connections have expanded significantly over the past decade, sustained usage remains uneven, particularly among low-income households.
Faheem, thirty-two, a migrant worker from Gujarat currently working in Bengaluru, describes the situation as disturbing.
“We can’t get gas here, and now we are being forced to leave our home,” he says. “Cooking has become difficult, sometimes even impossible, and we don’t know how to manage our house and land anymore. Everything has become too hard.”
“Sometimes it’s expensive; sometimes it’s not available at all. Life has really become difficult,” he adds.
For many households, alternatives remain out of reach. Electric cooking is often presented as the next step in India’s clean energy transition, but it requires upfront investment in appliances and a reliable electricity supply.
For precarious urban and rural households, both remain uncertain. As a result, the transition to cleaner energy is unfolding unevenly, shaped as much by income as by infrastructure. In the outskirts of cities, firewood and kerosene are reappearing as fallback options.
_Chulhas_ — traditional Indian stoves once replaced in the name of clean energy — are being used again. Health experts have long warned about the consequences of such reversals.
Prolonged exposure to smoke from firewood and biomass fuels is linked to respiratory illnesses, particularly among women and children who spend the most time near cooking spaces. What appears as a short-term coping strategy can carry long-term health costs.
Anjali, thirty-three, a mother of two and resident of rural Odisha, says, “Since we are not getting refills on time and sometimes have to wait weeks, we are being pushed back to firewood.”
“In our village, most homes once switched to LPG, but nearly 30–40 percent still burn firewood for cooking, even with connections, especially among poorer families.”
“The smoke makes our children cough, and my wife spends hours every day tending the chulha,” Arun Kumar, her husband, adds.
In the outskirts of cities, firewood and kerosene are reappearing as fallback options for cooking as LPG becomes unaffordable. (Sajad Hameed / Jacobin)
# Markets Decide Who Eats
Cooking is often treated as a private act, confined to the household. But in reality, it is shaped by forces far beyond it. Who can afford fuel? Who absorbs price shocks? Who is forced to sacrifice?
Across India, around 60 percent of households use LPG as their primary cooking fuel, according to government data from 2020–21.
Yet in rural areas, a substantial share continues to rely on firewood, dung, or other biomass, even among families with LPG connections.__ Supply gaps, high refill costs, and erratic delivery make consistent usage difficult, pushing households back toward traditional fuels.
As the train begins to depart from Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station, Ramesh Varma climbs aboard.
“I came here to earn,” he says. “But if I cannot even eat, what is the point?”
What makes this crisis particularly stark is its invisibility. There are no dramatic shortages, no official declarations of emergency. Instead, it unfolds quietly in skipped meals, in empty cylinders, in families stretching survival beyond its limits.
In homes like Parveena’s, the uncertainty continues. Across India, in thousands of kitchens, the same question lingers.
For millions of working-class households, the choice is no longer abstract. It is immediate, daily, and shaped by forces far beyond the kitchen: cook — or skip a meal.
* * *
India’s Working Poor Are Being Priced Out of Basic Meals
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The CBC May Side With Trump on the Surveillance Bill
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are staying tight-lipped about whether they will supply the decisive votes needed to pass a Trump-backed bill reauthorizing a warrantless surveillance law exploited by federal police.
The CBC May Side With Trump on the Surveillance Bill
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ICE Just Signed a $12 Million Deal to Track Migrants With AI
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has now inked a $12.2 million contract for an artificial intelligence tool that purportedly maps out immigrants’ daily routines, habits, and real-time locations and categorizes them as potential threats.
ICE Just Signed a $12 Million Deal to Track Migrants With AI
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_This article was originally published byTruthout on April 13, 2026. It is shared here under a __Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license._
As President Donald Trump increasingly uses the U.S. military to carry out his agenda through brute force, organizations that provide counseling services for U.S. servicemembers are reporting growing numbers of calls. These calls have further spiked in response to Trump’s war on Iran, one of the most unpopular in U.S. history.
The United States has carried out the war through intense attacks on densely populated civilian areas, the impact of which was clearly shown in the bombing of a girls’ school, killing well over 100 children. Not even concerned with selling the war to the public, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has leaned into treating the intervention as a “holy war” for Christianity.
Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran and executive director at the Center on Conscience & War (CCW), told _Truthout_ that troops are telling his organization that they don’t want to be involved in the killing.
“That’s pretty much all of the cases that we have,” Prysner said. “It’s all people who don’t want to take part in killing in a war that they don’t believe in, and this war has made them realize that they can’t take part in any kind of U.S. military action ever again.”
The CCW, formerly the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, was founded in 1940 to assist religious communities whose beliefs prohibited them from participating in war. Over time, and as a result of broadening criteria for who can qualify as a conscientious objector (CO), the organization evolved to assist troops of all backgrounds whose values prevent them from being able to participate in war.
Prysner told _Truthout_ that in recent weeks CCW has already been able to help several servicemembers become COs to avoid being deployed.
To reach more servicemembers experiencing crises of conscience, CCW and other organizations including the Quaker House founded the GI Rights Hotline in 1994. Steve Woolford, a resource counselor at the Quaker House, has taken calls for the hotline since 2001 and agreed that the war on Iran, and Trump’s broader use of the military, has caused a spike in calls.
> “This war has made them realize that they can’t take part in any kind of U.S. military action ever again.”
“The biggest increase has come from people who are feeling a lot of opposition to the ways the military’s currently being used,” Woolford said. “That includes people who feel like they don’t want to be sent into cities and point a weapon at U.S. citizens, they don’t want to be part of what to many of them look like war crimes, shooting down speedboats in Venezuela that wouldn’t be able to make it to the United States, and I would say with the invasion, or whatever you want to call it, ‘Operation Epic Fury’ in Iran, there’s been significant opposition to that.”
Woolford clarified that not all troops who call the hotline are able to leave the military by filing as COs. While every member of the military has that right, the process requires applicants to prove that they have deeply held antiwar beliefs. This means that even if someone is opposed to certain orders or operations, they don’t qualify as CO if they aren’t opposed to participation in all wars.
Prysner said that the social pressure in the military can also make it difficult for troops to declare themselves COs.
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“Especially for people who have deployments happening, you’re telling all of your brothers and sisters in uniform that you don’t believe in what you’re doing and you’re not gonna be able to do it with them,” Prysner said. “The thing is, the people that we’re dealing with, they simply don’t have any other choice … They cannot live with themselves participating.”
## Echoes of Antiwar History
This is not the first time that members of the military have questioned their role in U.S. wars. In fact, there is a rich history of GI dissent throughout U.S. history.
The role of antiwar veterans was especially important in bringing about the end of the Vietnam War. During the height of the antiwar movement there was a proliferation of underground newspapers which criticized the war and highlighted the fact that soldiers being sent to die were disproportionately from working-class communities, many of which still faced racial discrimination within the United States. It was common for soldiers to circulate these newspapers among themselves at bases and at antiwar organizing spaces known as GI coffeehouses. By the end of the war, opposition within the military’s own ranks was so widespread that deployed soldiers had developed codes to communicate with Vietnamese fighters to avoid shooting at one another, and the military was recording hundreds of cases of troops throwing grenades at their officers, a practice known as fragging.
This widespread GI resistance contributed to the United States ending the draft in 1973. The switch to an all-volunteer military has made it less likely that troops will resist war en masse.
However, the so-called “war on terror” produced its own share of antiwar veterans.
Millions of people opposed the Iraq War from the start. As the war continued with no clear end, some U.S. troops began to question the war as well, especially as it became known that the United States was carrying out atrocities against the Iraqi people like the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison. Some troops formed the group Iraq Veterans Against the War to demonstrate to the public that as veterans, they were opposed to the wars they had participated in. This organization, now under the name About Face Veterans, continues to organize against U.S. militarism at home and abroad.
As the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s domestic use of the National Guard to wage war on immigrants have led many people to question U.S. militarism, veterans organized in groups like About Face and Veterans For Peace have been at the forefront of opposing these expressions of state violence and connecting them to a larger culture of militarism.
It remains to be seen how in the longer term the war on Iran, recently marked by Trump’s genocidal threat to end an entire civilization, might further change how people in the U.S. military feel about their role in the institution carrying out such violence. Both Prysner and Woolford suggested that the increase in troops reaching out to their organizations could be a sign of a deeper transformation taking place.
“I think you can start to get a picture of the fact that there is quite a bit of opposition from within the ranks,” Prysner said. “That has not yet manifested into a movement or radical actions or people speaking out publicly or refusing to go on deployment publicly, but there’s real potentialities when you have that many people who are this opposed to the war.”
Woolford, comparing the current moment to the early 2000s, thought it was important that antiwar sentiment is already more common.
The war on terror “was very much a boots on the ground, where people were feeling shot at, they were feeling like they were being asked to do terrible things, whereas now, we don’t even have boots on the ground and people are already upset,” Woolford said. When it comes to the troops, “the opposition is way earlier this round.”
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# Trump’s extreme use of military is stirring a crisis of conscience among troops
by Sam Carliner, The Real News Network
April 15, 2026
<h1>Trump’s extreme use of military is stirring a crisis of conscience among troops</h1> <p class="byline">by Sam Carliner, The Real News Network <br />April 15, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-277549 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This article was originally published by <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-extreme-use-of-military-is-stirring-a-crisis-of-conscience-among-troops/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Truthout</a> on April 13, 2026. It is shared here under a <em> </em><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)</a> license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">As President Donald Trump increasingly uses the U.S. military to carry out his agenda through brute force, organizations that provide counseling services for U.S. servicemembers are reporting growing numbers of calls. These calls have further spiked in response to Trump’s war on Iran, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/us/politics/polls-wars-us-support.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">one of the most unpopular</a> in U.S. history.</p> <p>The United States has carried out the war through intense attacks on densely populated civilian areas, the impact of which was clearly shown in the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-school-double-tap" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bombing of a girls’ school</a>, killing well over 100 children. Not even concerned with selling the war to the public, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/christian-nationalists-in-us-government-push-attacks-on-iran-as-holy-war/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">has leaned into</a> treating the intervention as a “holy war” for Christianity.</p> <p>Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran and executive director at the <a href="https://centeronconscience.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Center on Conscience & War</a> (CCW), told <em>Truthout</em> that troops are telling his organization that they don’t want to be involved in the killing.</p> <p>“That’s pretty much all of the cases that we have,” Prysner said. “It’s all people who don’t want to take part in killing in a war that they don’t believe in, and this war has made them realize that they can’t take part in any kind of U.S. military action ever again.”</p> <p>The CCW, formerly the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, was founded in 1940 to assist religious communities whose beliefs prohibited them from participating in war. Over time, and as a result of broadening criteria for who can qualify as a conscientious objector (CO), the organization evolved to assist troops of all backgrounds whose values prevent them from being able to participate in war.</p> <p>Prysner told <em>Truthout</em> that in recent weeks CCW has already been able to help several servicemembers become COs to avoid being deployed.</p> <p>To reach more servicemembers experiencing crises of conscience, CCW and other organizations including the Quaker House founded the <a href="https://girightshotline.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">GI Rights Hotline</a> in 1994. Steve Woolford, a resource counselor at the Quaker House, has taken calls for the hotline since 2001 and agreed that the war on Iran, and Trump’s broader use of the military, has caused a spike in calls.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote alignright"> <blockquote> <p>“This war has made them realize that they can’t take part in any kind of U.S. military action ever again.”</p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>“The biggest increase has come from people who are feeling a lot of opposition to the ways the military’s currently being used,” Woolford said. “That includes people who feel like they don’t want to be sent into cities and point a weapon at U.S. citizens, they don’t want to be part of what to many of them look like war crimes, shooting down speedboats in Venezuela that wouldn’t be able to make it to the United States, and I would say with the invasion, or whatever you want to call it, ‘Operation Epic Fury’ in Iran, there’s been significant opposition to that.”</p> <p>Woolford clarified that not all troops who call the hotline are able to leave the military by filing as COs. While every member of the military has that right, the process requires applicants to prove that they have deeply held antiwar beliefs. This means that even if someone is opposed to certain orders or operations, they don’t qualify as CO if they aren’t opposed to participation in all wars.</p> <p>Prysner said that the social pressure in the military can also make it difficult for troops to declare themselves COs.</p> <p>“Especially for people who have deployments happening, you’re telling all of your brothers and sisters in uniform that you don’t believe in what you’re doing and you’re not gonna be able to do it with them,” Prysner said. “The thing is, the people that we’re dealing with, they simply don’t have any other choice … They cannot live with themselves participating.”</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-echoes-of-antiwar-history">Echoes of Antiwar History</h2> <p>This is not the first time that members of the military have questioned their role in U.S. wars. In fact, there is a rich history of GI dissent throughout U.S. history.</p> <p>The role of antiwar veterans was especially important in bringing about the end of the Vietnam War. During the height of the antiwar movement there was a <a href="https://depts.washington.edu/moves/altnews_GI.shtml" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">proliferation of underground newspapers</a> which criticized the war and highlighted the fact that soldiers being sent to die were disproportionately from working-class communities, many of which still faced racial discrimination within the United States. It was common for soldiers to circulate these newspapers among themselves at bases and at antiwar organizing spaces known as <a href="https://www.coffeeordie.com/article/gi-coffeehouses-vietnam" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">GI coffeehouses</a>. By the end of the war, opposition within the military’s own ranks was so widespread that deployed soldiers had developed codes to communicate with Vietnamese fighters to avoid shooting at one another, and the military was recording <a href="https://libcom.org/article/gi-resistance-vietnam-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">hundreds of cases</a> of troops throwing grenades at their officers, a practice known as fragging.</p> <p>This widespread GI resistance contributed to the United States ending the draft in 1973. The switch to an all-volunteer military has made it less likely that troops will resist war en masse.</p> <p>However, the so-called “war on terror” produced its own share of antiwar veterans.</p> <p>Millions of people <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/february-15/millions-protest-iraq-war-february-15" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">opposed the Iraq War</a> from the start. As the war continued with no clear end, some U.S. troops began to question the war as well, especially as it became known that the United States was carrying out atrocities against the Iraqi people like the <a href="https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/military-history-and-science/abu-ghraib-torture-scandal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">torture scandal</a> at Abu Ghraib prison. Some troops formed the group Iraq Veterans Against the War to demonstrate to the public that as veterans, they were opposed to the wars they had participated in. This organization, now under the name <a href="https://aboutfaceveterans.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">About Face Veterans</a>, continues to organize against U.S. militarism at home and abroad.</p> <p>As the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s domestic use of the National Guard to wage war on immigrants have led many people to question U.S. militarism, veterans organized in groups like About Face and <a href="https://www.veteransforpeace.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Veterans For Peace</a> have been <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/09/gaza-flotilla-veterans-boat-greta-thunberg-palestine-aid-israel.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">at the forefront</a> <a href="https://www.veteransforpeace.org/pressroom/news/2025/09/05/veterans-peace-condemns-deployment-national-guard-washington" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">of opposing</a> these expressions of state violence and connecting them to a larger culture of militarism.</p> <p>It remains to be seen how in the longer term the war on Iran, recently marked by Trump’s genocidal threat to end an entire civilization, might further change how people in the U.S. military feel about their role in the institution carrying out such violence. Both Prysner and Woolford suggested that the increase in troops reaching out to their organizations could be a sign of a deeper transformation taking place.</p> <p>“I think you can start to get a picture of the fact that there is quite a bit of opposition from within the ranks,” Prysner said. “That has not yet manifested into a movement or radical actions or people speaking out publicly or refusing to go on deployment publicly, but there’s real potentialities when you have that many people who are this opposed to the war.”</p> <p>Woolford, comparing the current moment to the early 2000s, thought it was important that antiwar sentiment is already more common.</p> <p>The war on terror “was very much a boots on the ground, where people were feeling shot at, they were feeling like they were being asked to do terrible things, whereas now, we don’t even have boots on the ground and people are already upset,” Woolford said. When it comes to the troops, “the opposition is way earlier this round.”</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/trump-military-crisis-of-conscience-troops">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342802&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/trump-military-crisis-of-conscience-troops", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script>
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‘The rain was black’: A plant explosion set off a toxic bomb in this Louisiana town
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Women’s Work Is Devalued Under Capitalism
### Women are overrepresented in low-paid work, care work, and unpaid labor. Their time, their bodies, and their emotional energy are resources for capital. Feminism cannot succeed without confronting the economic system that structures these inequalities.
* * *
Feminist Marxist social reproduction theory makes it possible to understand both the differences between women and the conditions they share. (VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty Images)
Few questions have haunted feminist theory and the feminist movement as persistently as the deceptively simple one: _What is a woman?_ Some have tried to answer it directly. Others have argued that the question itself is a form of exclusion, a demand for definition that inevitably leaves someone out. Still others have rejected the question altogether, insisting that feminism should not begin from the search for a universal essence.
Different answers have reflected different political moments. In the 1970s, Marxist-influenced feminists approached the question in structural terms, asking what role women as a group play in maintaining the existing social order. In the 1980s, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist approaches shifted the focus to subjectivity: what it means to live as a woman, how femininity shapes one’s relation to the body, to language, to sexuality, and to others. In these accounts, the feminine subject was never stable but fractured and historically produced.
In recent decades, the debate has increasingly taken the form of a dispute over identity. The question is no longer only _what_ a woman is, but _who counts_ as one, and how the category intersects with race, class, sexuality, disability, and nationality. This shift is often associated with intersectional feminism, though intersectionality itself is broader than the identity-centered version that dominates public debate. Within this framework, there is no single answer to the question of what a woman is. Women’s lives are shaped by multiple structures of power that cannot be separated from one another.
This emphasis on difference is often presented as a break with earlier feminism. But the idea that women’s oppression is shaped by class and race did not begin with intersectionality. Black feminists made this argument long before the term existed, and Marxist feminists criticized liberal feminism for isolating the “woman question” from the class question decades earlier. As the Swedish gender scholar Lena Gunnarsson has pointed out, the claim that earlier feminist theory treated women as a homogeneous group often rests on caricatures of earlier generations of feminism.
One of the traditions most often dismissed in this way is Marxist feminism. Yet this tradition offers some of the most useful tools we have for answering the question _What is a woman?_ The answer will not be found by searching for an eternal definition but by asking what role women play in the reproduction of capitalist society.
Feminist Marxist social reproduction theory makes it possible to understand both the differences between women and the conditions they share. It allows us to see how women’s lives are shaped by the same economic order even when their experiences are far from identical. The question is not how to erase difference but how difference itself is produced within a common system. As the postcolonial feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty once asked: What does it mean that we all live within a global capitalist order? And how does that order create shared conditions that can form the basis for solidarity among the majority of women, despite the divisions between them?
# What Is Social Reproduction Theory?
Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism focused above all on production: how workers create value, how commodities circulate, and how crises emerge from the contradictions of the system. But Marx was well aware that production does not stand alone. Capitalism depends on social processes it does not fully control. Labor power is the one commodity capitalism cannot produce by itself, even though it depends on it completely. Marx planned to write more about the state, colonialism, and the credit system, but he never completed the project. His work should not be treated as a closed doctrine. It is a starting point.
As the philosopher Nancy Holmstrom has argued, Marxist feminism does not need to abandon Marx in order to understand gender oppression. It needs to extend his analysis.
Social reproduction theory does exactly that. It asks what has to happen, day after day, for capitalism to continue functioning. Workers have to be born, raised, fed, educated, cared for, and kept healthy enough to work. Families have to function. Schools and hospitals have to operate. Entire systems of care and maintenance have to be in place before a single commodity can be produced.
These activities are not outside capitalism. They are among its hidden foundations.
Nancy Fraser describes them as capitalism’s background conditions — forms of labor and social life that the system depends on but refuses to recognize as part of itself. Much of this work takes place in the private sphere, especially in the family. It is there that workers are produced and reproduced, not only biologically but socially and emotionally. Without this sphere, capitalism could not survive. Yet capitalism constantly erodes the very conditions it relies on by expanding into new areas of life in search of profit, pulling care, family, and social relations into the market.
"Without unpaid work, paid work would be impossible."
Marxist feminists have long argued that women as a group have been assigned a particular role in this process. Women have carried the main responsibility for domestic labor, care work, and emotional support. As the Marxist sociologist Lise Vogel showed, capitalism rests on the interaction between economic exploitation and gendered social relations. Patriarchy and capitalism are not identical, but they reinforce each other.
Silvia Federici famously argued that housework and care should be understood as labor rather than as expressions of pure love. Women sustain men emotionally and physically, and men in turn sell their labor to capital. The political theorist Anna Jónasdóttir described women’s care as a form of “love power,” comparable to labor power, that supports men’s sense of autonomy.
Social reproduction theory often distinguishes between exploitation and expropriation. Exploitation refers to wage labor, where workers are paid less than the value they produce. Expropriation refers to work that is necessary but unpaid, such as domestic labor and care. Capitalism depends on both. Without unpaid work, paid work would be impossible.
Later theorists have expanded the concept to include public institutions such as schools, welfare systems, and health care as well as global processes like migration and slavery. All of these are part of the reproduction of labor power. Capitalism requires not only workers but workers who are alive, trained, housed, and able to show up every day.
Because women are concentrated in these activities, they are affected in specific ways by capitalist development. Most women belong to the working class. Many work in care, education, service, and domestic labor — jobs that are essential for society but systematically undervalued. These sectors are constantly under pressure, as capital seeks to lower the cost of maintaining the workforce. The struggle over profit is therefore also a struggle over how much society is willing to spend on care, education, and welfare. It is a struggle over the conditions of life itself.
# Neoliberalism, Care Work, and the Global Division of Reproduction
These pressures have intensified. Public services have been privatized, welfare systems cut back, and care work increasingly turned into a commodity. Schools, hospitals, and elder care are no longer expected only to sustain society; they are expected to generate profit. Workers in these sectors face worsening conditions, while those who need care are treated as customers.
When the state withdraws, the burden falls back on the family — and within the family, on women. Women are expected to work for wages while continuing to carry the main responsibility for unpaid care. The result is the familiar double burden, sharpened under conditions of austerity. Not all women experience this in the same way. Middle-class women can often buy their way out of domestic labor by hiring others to do it. Emancipation becomes a commodity. Those with resources can pay for childcare, elder care, and private health services. Those without must do the work themselves.
The women who make this arrangement possible are often migrants and racialized workers. As Arlie Russell Hochschild has shown, our lives are sustained by a global care chain in which women from poorer countries perform the reproductive labor that wealthier women need in order to compete in the labor market. Care has not disappeared. It has been outsourced. This logic extends even further in the growing market for surrogacy, where reproductive labor itself becomes a commodity. Poorer women carry pregnancies for wealthier clients, often across national borders. The global care chain reveals how deeply capitalism depends on the unequal organization of social reproduction.
# Social Reproduction and Intersectionality
Contemporary social reproduction theorists such as Fraser, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Cinzia Arruzza argue that feminism cannot represent the majority of women unless it confronts capitalism itself. The fact that some women’s liberation depends on other women’s subordination makes this unavoidable.
Despite this, they rarely describe their approach as intersectional, even though the two perspectives share important concerns. Both analyze multiple forms of oppression. Both reject the idea that gender can be understood in isolation. Both insist that class, race, sexuality, and gender interact.
"Solidarity is not based on sameness but on shared conditions."
The difference lies in emphasis. Intersectional theory, especially in its more identity-centered forms, often treats different structures of power as equally fundamental. The focus tends to fall on lived experience and on the ways individuals inhabit multiple identities at once.
Social reproduction theory asks a different question: How are these forms of oppression organized within a specific social system? The point is not to rank injustices but to understand how they are connected. As Susan Ferguson has argued, intersectional analysis sometimes describes multiple forms of oppression without explaining the social relations that produce them.
For social reproduction theory, capitalism provides the historical framework within which these relations take shape. This does not mean that every injustice can be reduced to class. But it does mean that the organization of production and reproduction shapes how other hierarchies function. The goal is not to deny difference but to understand it as part of a larger totality. Women do not share identical experiences, yet their lives are connected by the same economic order. Solidarity is not based on sameness but on shared conditions.
# Why Social Reproduction Theory Matters Today
The idea of a unified women’s movement is often dismissed as outdated, based on the assumption that women are too different to act together. There is truth in this. Women’s lives differ enormously. Race, class, sexuality, and nationality matter.
But the opposite mistake is just as misleading. Most women, whatever their differences, live under a capitalist system that relies on their labor in specific ways. Women are overrepresented in low-paid work, in care work, and in unpaid labor. Their time, their bodies, and their emotional energy remain resources for capital. This does not mean that women should only organize as women. But it does mean that feminism cannot succeed without confronting the economic system that structures these inequalities.
Social reproduction theory offers a way to think about both difference and commonality at the same time. It shows how the production of life itself is organized under capitalism, how some lives are supported while others are neglected, and how struggles over care, work, and survival are inseparable from struggles over profit. By asking who performs the work that sustains society — and under what conditions — we can see the outlines of a politics that speaks not only for a few, but for the many.
* * *
Women’s Work Is Devalued Under Capitalism
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The Imperial Presidency Must End
The chaos and destruction Donald Trump has wrought has been facilitated by the decades-long expansion of the president’s executive power. Far from checking that power when they hold office, Democrats have expanded it. That has to change.
The Imperial Presidency Must End
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