For nearly a year now, LIV has been nearly the only thing anyone in golf has talked about, though likely that excludes many Jacobin readers. Professional golf, after all, is known for such incivilities as possessing a “Caucasians only” clause in its bylaws until 1961 — not exactly a progressive pedigree.

Yet the story of the Saudi Arabia–backed LIV Golf, its recent deal with the CW television network, and its larger war with the best-known organization in professional golf, the PGA Tour, may have effects far beyond the sports pages, because it is the story of how what one golf writer called a “rogue’s gallery of assholes,” backed by a brutal, authoritarian petro-state, are leading perhaps the strangest workers’ rights movement of all time.

LIV Golf first reached the public’s consciousness at the beginning of 2022, when golf writer Alan Shipnuck published an interview with Phil Mickelson. The long-hitting left-hander is one of the sports’ leading players, having won sixty-four tournaments as a professional (forty-five of them on the PGA Tour), including six majors (the last as a fifty-year old, the oldest ever to do so). While talking to Shipnuck, Mickelson outlined how the new tour would be supported by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), a sovereign wealth vehicle with assets in the realm of $600 billion.