That politician is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Twice elected president and later elected vice president, she has never lost a national election. Today she is the head of the Partido Justicialista and remains the most formidable figure Argentine politics has produced this century. Her political stature has been likened to Eva Perón’s.

Since June 2025, however, Kirchner has been a prisoner. Because she is over seventy, she serves her sentence under house arrest in an apartment on 1111 San José street in Buenos Aires. An electronic ankle bracelet tracks her movements. Her visitors are restricted by court order. Even her access to her own rooftop has become a matter for federal litigation. This month, an appeals court again refused to loosen those conditions. Her sentence — six years in prison and permanent disqualification from public office — is final. She will not appear on the ballot in 2027. She will not appear on any ballot again.

The case that produced this, known as Vialidad, concerned the administration of public roadworks contracts in the southern province of Santa Cruz. It is worth being specific about what the conviction rests on, because the details comprise the argument. The expert report propping up the fraud allegation examined only five of fifty-one road projects. The tribunal itself conceded it had no direct proof of criminal conduct and had built its case on inference.

The Supreme Court that made the conviction has been whittled down to three judges. Even Raúl Zaffaroni, a former Supreme Court justice and hardly a fringe voice, has observed that no serious country entrusts its highest court to a panel of three. Several of the judges who handled the case at various stages maintain well-documented social ties with Mauricio Macri, the conservative president under whom the prosecution took shape. Kirchner was the perfect enemy for Macri and the Argentinian right: a woman, a Peronist, and a champion of wealth distribution.

It is worth remembering too that the courtroom was not the first venue tried. In September 2022, as the prosecution reached its climax, a man pushed through the crowd outside Kirchner’s home, raised a pistol to her face, and pulled the trigger twice. The gun did not fire.

Years on, the question of who, if anyone, directed him remains unanswered. One of the country’s largest newspapers captured the sequence in a much-discussed headline of the period: the bullet that did not go off, and the judgment that would. The bullet failed. The judgment did not.

Argentines have a word for what is being done to Kirchner, and it is not one they coined for the occasion: “proscripción” — proscription. After the 1955 coup that overthrew Juan Domingo Perón, Peronism — the movement of the country’s organized working class, and for most of that period its electoral majority — was banned outright from national elections for eighteen years. Its leader lived in exile; its candidates were struck from ballots; its very name was, for a time, illegal to print.

The generals and their civilian allies understood something their descendants understand still: when a movement rooted among workers and the poor keeps winning, the simplest way to govern against the majority is to prevent the majority from choosing. What has changed since 1955 is only the instrument. Where they once relied on tanks and decrees, they now use indictments and three-judge courts.

This is what the shorthand “lawfare” names — not a conspiracy theory but a recognizable, recurrent pattern with its own grammar, one that has run through the region this century. Fernando Lugo removed in Paraguay by a two-day impeachment. Dilma Rousseff removed in Brazil over budgetary accounting. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva jailed and barred from office before ultimately being vindicated. Rafael Correa convicted in Ecuador and driven into exile. Evo Morales disqualified in Bolivia. The details differ; the choreography does not: a compliant judiciary, a concentrated media that reaches its verdict before the courts do, a foreign policy establishment that blesses the result, and always — always — a target who governed for the wrong people.

Argentines will go to the polls in 2027 in a country where the leader of the largest opposition party sits under guard in her apartment, barred from the ballot. The votes will almost certainly be counted honestly. That is exactly what makes the situation so instructive and so grim: you can hollow out a democracy without ever touching the count simply by deciding in advance who is allowed to run.

So, return to the thought experiment, because it is not really a hypothetical — it is a translation of what is already happening. If you would recognize the jailing and disqualification of the candidate you meant to vote for as a democratic crisis, then you already understand what is happening in Buenos Aires.

Since the 1990s, unions have sought neutrality agreements with private employers, allowing staff organizers to sign up members and avoid the extreme retaliation workers face in the National Labor Relations Board process. The late labor organizer and strategist Jane McAlevey critiqued this approach for relying on top-down campaigns as “shortcuts” around the deep organizing needed to win strong contracts and sustain a worker-driven movement. The gig economy has magnified this challenge as platforms circumvented labor law through worker misclassification. Uber came to a $100 million class action settlement in Massachusetts and California, agreeing to help form “driver associations.” While the attorney representing the drivers said that these organizations “can play a role similar to a union,” one key difference is that — exempt from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA) and the Fair Labor Standards Act — Uber could play a role in funding these groups.

Uber formed the Independent Drivers Guild (IDG) in partnership with the International Association of Machinists (IAM) in New York and ultimately also brought this approach to both Massachusetts and Illinois. While drivers organized independently in these states for years, IAM and SEIU have sought to make deals with Uber behind closed doors while advocating for state-level legislative reforms. Forming the Massachusetts App Drivers Union, the Machinists joined forces with SEIU and its building service Local 32BJ and supported extending collective bargaining rights. Together they won the right to bargain with Uber not through the mass organization of seventy thousand drivers across the state but through a ballot measure in 2024.

California rideshare drivers won collective bargaining rights through legislation, but drivers had little say in what this legislation would look like. It came through a deal brokered between Gov. Gavin Newsom, Uber and Lyft, and SEIU California. In exchange for the company’s support, SEIU sponsored SB 371, which reduces the companies’ mandate to provide coverage for accidents — from up to $1 million in damages to $60,000 per person — where the app-based driver is not at fault.

Uber’s willingness to work with major unions has been predicated on conceding that app-based workers would not be classified as employees. While this may be seen as a labor victory, app-based drivers will be negotiating from a far worse position than classified employees do. As misclassified workers, drivers have no effective minimum wage. Laws like California’s Prop 22 mandate that drivers be paid 1.5 times the local minimum wage, but it is only based on “engaged time” — the time from when a driver accepts a ride to when they drop the passenger off at arrival. The time between rides, determined by algorithmic management, is unpaid. AB 1340 names earnings as an optional — not required — topic of sectoral bargaining.

Drivers’ low wages are further eaten up by the high expenses on their own vehicles, gas, upkeep, and insurance. As employees, US workers are reimbursed at the Internal Revenue Service rate, currently at ¢72.5 per mile, for driving as part of their job. This all amounts to a significant amount of money that workers must take out of their own paychecks to cover ever increasing gas prices and auto repair costs.

A 2022 collaborative study between Rideshare Drivers United and PolicyLink found that the median net income was $6.20 per hour, and the lowest amount any driver in the study earned was $4.10 per hour, after all expenses and all on-app time were considered. Drivers would earn roughly $11 more per hour if they were classified as employees. As independent contractors, drivers will have to negotiate themselves out of this massive deficit just to attain what should be the bare legal minimum. Large unions are trading away these rights in exchange for sectoral agreements that minimize the voices of workers themselves.

Rather than requiring majority support from a bargaining unit, the legislation and agreements between Uber and large unions all set low thresholds necessary to certify a bargaining agent — 25 percent in Massachusetts and Minnesota, and 30 percent in California. In California, a union will be given the information for all “active drivers” — those who have completed twenty rides in the prior six months — after attaining signatures from 10 percent of the proposed unit. AB 1340 mandates that the unit in California comprise the entire state, an estimated two hundred thousand drivers. With such low thresholds, critics emphasize that workers will not be able “to meaningfully decide, as a group, whether to accept or reject the bargain” to ensure “procedural fairness . . .  and that any bargain is substantively good for the workers affected.”

Although democratic worker-led organizing could help push for stronger sectoral agreements, this approach to sectoral bargaining seems poised to require little rank-and-file commitment or risk. Legal scholar Veena Dubal notes that unions and platform companies have been discussing sectoral agreements behind closed doors since 2019 to the exclusion of drivers. As such, language in AB 1340 ensures that SEIU Locals 721 and 1021 — the major public employee unions in southern and northern California, respectively with a combined membership of 160,000 workers — are effectively the only unions eligible for recognition. Workers didn’t have much of a choice.

IAM has long taken money from Uber to support the work of IDG in New York. Uber has also partnered with existing powerful unions in Australia and the UK to create similar arrangements. The new wave of laws and agreements suggests the expansion of this strategy, allowing for companies to funnel money to unions through deactivation clinic partnerships. Such agreements’ legality are based on gig workers being exempt from the NLRA but being governed under the state-level legislation and enforced by public employee relations boards. Perhaps most devastatingly, the legislation is unclear as to whether drivers have the right to strike as independent contractors. Without the ability to collectively withhold labor, what leverage would they have in negotiations?

At best, the proposed model constitutes a shortcut around deep organizing to gain representation of hundreds of thousands of workers. At worst, it may become a site of corruption where companies and unions work together to manage the political impulses of low-paid precarious workers, a zombie revival of the company union of the 1920s. Company unions weren’t just anti-worker; they were anti-democracy. The corporatism — the integration of the state, big business, and the working class — that they embodied was part of an American fascist movement, similar to formations that took root in Benito Mussolini’s Italy at the same time.

In the United States, company unions were made illegal by the NLRA. As the gig economy carves out exemptions for itself, it undoes the New Deal. Against a backdrop of increasing authoritarianism — with Silicon Valley a visible willing partner — labor’s consent to such terms is disappointing, if not chilling.

In our book Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry, my collaborators and I highlight the struggles of self-organizing digital worker campaigns, many of whom are misclassified and denied full labor rights. Rather than approach this understanding from the perspective of the organizations cutting deals, we examine them from the perspective of workers themselves, in solidarity with their own organizing efforts. As a collaborative effort, digital workers’ inquiry can feed into labor organizing efforts within and against digital capitalism and help develop strategies for a more democratic labor movement.

Independent worker organizing must continue globally. The International Association of App-Based Transport Workers, which was founded after RDU led the global strike against Uber’s IPO in 2019, has played a major role in pushing forward new standards for “decent work in the platform economy” adopted by the International Labor Organization (ILO). The convention calls for member states to “take measures to respect, promote and realize, in the platform economy, the fundamental principles and rights at work” including “freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining.” In addition, states are “to ensure the correct classification of digital platform workers in respect of the existence or non-existence of an employment relationship.” While the United States opposed this, the convention was passed in a vote of 406–8.

Gig workers have, over the course of the last decade, built their own organizations and through their collective activity changed the discourse about platform labor. By fighting their bosses, they have garnered media attention and won the ears of policymakers, making it clear that this is not a “sharing economy” or a way to “get your side hustle on” but a new model of exploitation that uses technology to target the most vulnerable workers. They have done this with minimal institutional backing, funding, and political support. The fight for gig workers to have their labor rights recognized has always been uphill.

Guided by the principles outlined by the ILO, workers in the United States can play a role in supporting their siblings abroad, even as they face legal challenges and, potentially, hostility from bosses and some unions alike. We must make sense of the range of experiences that platform workers have from country to country, and to develop strategies that unite them across disparate experiences to demand justice. Platform labor’s fight has not been won, but neither is it over.

Our study asked participants one simple question (followed of course by some demographic questions). We presented participants with a hypothetical scenario or vignette and asked, “Based only on the information provided, how exploitative is this scenario in your opinion?”

Now, one challenge with this approach is that many real-world examples are too entangled with existing political biases, media narratives, and emotional reactions.

If you ask whether workers in a Bangladeshi sweatshop producing trendy clothing are exploited, you will elicit predictably biased responses that align with the polarized views sketched above. Similar biases are manifest if you transparently ask about theorists’ definitions of exploitation — if you ask whether “the unequal exchange of labor is exploitation” — you will get a yes from those who accept the classic Marxist account and a no from everyone else. To eliminate various confounding factors, we constructed abstract vignettes that centered on a neutral, everyday economic activity: the production, purchase, or sale of mugs (because these are inexpensive, familiar, and morally neutral).

We then pored over existing definitions of exploitation and identified common properties that different thinkers had identified as components of exploitation. These included: inequality, whether the economic gains from the transaction were split unevenly between the parties; power, whether one party held a strong structural advantage, such as being the only available employer; basic needs, whether the terms of the transaction left the weaker party in a position where their basic human needs were unmet; disrespect, whether the dominant party displayed a disrespectful attitude toward the weaker party; and luck, whether the weaker party’s vulnerability was the result of bad brute luck, like a natural disaster. We also included injustice, a property that further distinguished power by denoting that the power advantage was not merely accidental but rather the result of a prior injustice or rights violation.

We tested all these properties in various combinations on two kinds of scenarios. Relational scenarios involved a direct transaction between two specific parties, while nonrelational scenarios described broader patterns of how wealth and resources are distributed across society.

Finally, we developed two baseline cases that excluded any potentially exploitative factors: one relational and one nonrelational. In total, this gave us thirty-one clear vignettes to test. This modular design allowed us to isolate the exact impact, or “treatment effect,” of each distinct property on participants’ evaluations.

Who were our participants? They included 551 professional academic philosophers recruited from top-rated global institutions and 1,546 members of the general public, split pretty much evenly between participants based in the United States (777) and the United Kingdom (769). The participants read through 10 vignettes, one at a time. They were first shown the two baseline vignettes and then eight more from the pool of 31.

Here’s an example of a relational vignette that includes the properties of power, inequality, and injustice:

B wants mugs and A is the only vendor selling mugs because other sellers have been unjustly excluded from the market. A sells mugs to B and the agreed price benefits A more than B.

For each vignette, participants answered the same question: “Based only on the information provided, how exploitative is this scenario in your opinion?” They recorded their judgments using an active slider scale ranging from 0 (“not at all”) to 50 (“moderately”) up to 100 (“maximally”).

One possible concern with this approach is that a score of 35 might mean different things to different participants. We address this concern by using “individual fixed effects” in our baseline empirical model, which allows us to control for constant but unobserved influences on individual evaluations, including differences in “exploitation anchors.”

In practical terms, we estimate how much the presence of power, for example, changes the average reported score for each individual, and then calculate the average of these differences across all individuals. Importantly, the results are much the same when these fixed effects are excluded or observable characteristics are included instead.

So, what did we find? The results were rather surprising. It turns out that experts and members of the public order the properties associated with exploitation in nearly the same way. Neither group thought being relational/nonrelational or the presence of bad luck made much of a difference to exploitation. The scores for both were close to zero. Here’s a table showing the order and scores for the properties that made more of a difference for both participant pools, all of which are highly statistically significant.

As you can see, the two participant groups only differ in the relative importance they attach to inequality and power, with experts rating power over inequality and the public ranking them the other way around. And now to the result teased in the introduction: when we divided the two groups down by political orientation, the ordering of the properties was the same. Liberal and less liberal academics ranked the properties in the same order shown in the table. The same is true for more and less liberal members of the public. Further, we asked philosophers whether they identified as libertarians, communitarians, egalitarians, capitalists, or socialists. Again, the ordering was the same. At least on this issue, libertarians and capitalists agree with socialists and egalitarians: injustice, inequality, and power are the most significant drivers of exploitation.

Now, it is important not to overstate the similarities between these groups. Participants’ sociopolitical orientation significantly impacted how much exploitation they saw. For example, libertarians’ scores were lower across the board. Compared to egalitarians they saw less exploitation in vignettes containing inequality (-10) and power (-15). Nevertheless, the fact that groups associated with the Left and Right gave the same orderings for the properties mean that both agree about what exploitation is. The lower scores from groups on the Right mean they are less likely to say that any particular scenario is exploitative.

There’s one more result that’s worth emphasizing. While power alone, and inequality alone, move the needle for participants, the presence of both properties increases scores more than the sum of their individual effect.

For example, for academics, vignettes containing only power raised scores by +14 and those with only inequality by +8, but when both appeared together scores increased by +34, which is 12 points greater than the sum of both alone. This “interaction premium” suggests that exploitation is more than the sum of its parts. This may be the study’s most important finding because it shows that the core of exploitation arises from a combination of factors. What triggers the strongest moral condemnation is the leverage of unequal power to engineer unequal outcomes.

In other words, exploitation is recognized as effective bullying — the conversion of a structural power advantage into an unfair share of the economic pie. This result overturns two popular approaches to exploitation in the academic literature: purely distributive approaches, which take exploitation to merely be the maldistribution of gains, and purely power-based approaches, which argue that exploitation arises solely from the dominating use of power.

First, as we underscored in the introduction, our results reveal that exploitation is not an arbitrary or highly partisan invention. It is a stable, deeply embedded, and shared social concept. Across different classes, political outlooks, and educational backgrounds, people use a shared moral framework to evaluate exploitation: we look at the historical context, evaluate the balance of power, and measure the equity of the outcome.

While agreement between the Left and Right on exploitation is surprising — especially given the contrasting views of Nozick and Marx presented above — perhaps it should not shock us altogether. After all, some of the populist right’s core anxieties arise from concerns about the cost of living, precarious employment, and the dominance of “big” industries (such as tech, pharma, and finance). And these overlap with perennial critiques from the political left. At their root, both the Left and Right are responding to the same structural reality: the deteriorating material conditions and economic vulnerability of large segments of the population.

Second, the contemporary Left and Right — or at least their populist iterations — share another feature: a concern with political correctness, albeit in different forms. This concern is perhaps more charitably interpreted as a concern about esteem — or respect.

While respect is an important moral value, an overemphasis on interpersonal attitudes and manners can shift the conversation away from hard structural metrics like wages and workplace power dynamics. To align with the current grievances, corporations pour resources into branding and public relations, changing their message to suit different markets. These attempts to humanize their operations by emphasizing themes of respect, inclusivity, and empathy in their corporate culture move the ethical conversation away from the material and power dynamics that really drive exploitation.

Our study reveals a sharp divergence between experts and the public on the value of respect, shedding light on a feature of modern alienation. The disrespect variable had a negligible impact on academics’ scores (+2) — a polite boss, after all, extracts value just as effectively as a rude one. But for the general public, disrespect carried real weight (+12).

This gap helps explain a crucial feature of our current political climate. Public discourse has focused on the increasing feelings of “alienation” and “loss of voice” of large segments of the population over the past few decades. One interpretation of our results is that this increased emphasis across the political spectrum means that for many working people, interpersonal disrespect is not just a breach of etiquette; it is the immediate, experiential manifestation of their structural vulnerability. It is how asymmetric power is lived and felt — whether on the shop floor, in the gig economy, or at the rental office.

The agreement between the Left and Right — and indeed across many other demographic dimensions — that exploitation is the weaponization of unjust power to secure unequal outcomes suggests a path forward for the Left’s political agenda. It is clear that the public is fed up with the ideological defenses of low wages and bad options for work, housing, and health that appeal to the language of consumer choice and flexibility.

If we want an economy free from exploitation that speaks to the material concerns that motivate populist politics on the Left and Right alike, then we must focus on policies that deliberately dismantle power asymmetries and protect vulnerable actors from being forced into desperate terms. That means increasing the power of vulnerable workers, which will require sectoral bargaining mandates to revitalize organized labor, increased minimum wages, and universal public housing and health care. And decreasing the power of the capitalist class, which will require wealth taxes and increased antitrust enforcement and regulation. When power is balanced, the capacity for one side to extract highly unequal, exploitative gains is dramatically curbed.

Let us be clear. The message here is not that those on the Left should moderate their policies in the name of bipartisan harmony. The view of exploitation that emerges from our study is not that the truth lies somewhere between Marx and Nozick. Rather, the headline is that those on the Left and Right agree on a view of exploitation that is located much closer to Marx’s view, one that emphasizes the use of power accumulated through injustice to extract unequal gains.

The interpretation of these results that we want to stress is that they represent an opportunity for the Left. They provide further evidence that the motivations of many populist views across the political spectrum are in fact compatible with historically leftist positions on power and equality.

While contemporary headlines remain dominated by the culture wars, they frequently mask these deep-seated economic anxieties. The corporate preoccupation with etiquette and notions of respect that are not linked to power operates as a tempting distraction — one to which both the Right and Left are susceptible — from workers’ own anti-capitalist intuitions. Our study shows that a structural understanding of exploitation is not a niche theoretical framework but a commonsense shared reality. Rather than playing defense on the terms set by corporate public relations, the Left has a distinct opportunity to reanchor the political conversation around shared material interests and policies that dismantle the very power asymmetries that the public already condemns.

The dispute over the billionaire wealth tax in California foreshadows a broader debate that Democrats will have in the years ahead. As pressure mounts to tax America’s oligarchs, bold proposals like the wealth tax will likely continue to grow in popularity. This presents a conundrum for the party’s centrists, especially those with higher political ambitions. Newsom’s effort to repackage himself as a kind of pragmatic populist ahead of a likely presidential run offers a preview of how establishment Democrats will attempt to appease the party’s increasingly populist base without alienating the big donors who still finance their campaigns.

If the debate in California is any guide, centrist Democrats will frame their opposition to proposals like the wealth tax in strictly pragmatic terms, focusing on unintended economic consequences or the institutional challenges of enacting such policies. In the Golden State, Newsom and other Democratic critics have mostly argued that the proposal would drive wealthy residents out of the state and thus erode its tax base and long-term revenue. Nationally, the “pragmatic” critique will likely center on the constitutional challenges that a federal wealth tax would inevitably face.

These criticisms are not entirely groundless. It is true, for example, that a state wealth tax would be difficult to administer and that the wealthy are highly mobile, especially at the state level. While narratives about wealthy residents fleeing states due to high taxes are greatly exaggerated — often built on anecdotes rather than hard data, which shows relatively little tax-related migration — the California wealth tax lacks any real historical precedent. Though structured as a onetime retroactive tax to curb avoidance and limit economic fallout, it’s not unreasonable to assume that some of the state’s wealthiest residents will leave if the measure passes (whether that’s such a bad thing is a different question).

While a national wealth tax would be far more difficult for the wealthy to escape by simply packing up and moving, it faces its own serious obstacles. Indeed, a straightforward tax on wealth would almost certainly be struck down by today’s Supreme Court, where conservative justices have indicated they would rule against any “direct tax” that isn’t narrowly construed as an income tax.

These challenges are real and shouldn’t be casually dismissed by wealth tax proponents. At the same time, the ostensibly more “practical” alternatives sold by centrists like Newsom would do little to confront the very problems that proposals like a wealth tax are designed to remedy, from extreme inequality and outsize billionaire power to persistent tax avoidance at the top.

Take the proposal to eliminate the “buy, borrow, die” loophole, which first gained notoriety in 2021 when a ProPublica report revealed how some of the country’s wealthiest men routinely avoided taxable income by taking out low-interest loans backed by their assets. While simply taxing wealth or unrealized gains would automatically render this strategy obsolete, centrist Democrats have rallied around a more technocratic fix that would avoid dramatic changes to the current tax code. The most popular proposal is to simply tax loans as if they were capital gains. In June, another presidential hopeful aiming to occupy the “pragmatic populist” lane, Arizona senator Ruben Gallego, introduced a bill that would treat such loans as “realization events” for those with assets over $1 billion. In theory, this would eliminate the tax incentive to take out loans in the first place.

There are a few issues with this approach. For one, it’s unclear how much better it would actually fare in the courts. According to Brian Galle, a professor of tax law at Berkeley, proposals to tax borrowing would “face constitutional challenges that are not especially different from those facing wealth taxes more generally.” Though Galle argues that it would be constitutional “on the best reading of the existing law,” this wouldn’t prevent the Supreme Court from trying “very hard to find ways to strike it down.”

The bigger problem is that a tax on loans simply wouldn’t raise much revenue from billionaires. Recent research has found that annual borrowing from the wealthiest American households represents just a fraction of their total income when untaxed (i.e., unrealized) earnings are included. “[It] turns out that when you are super-rich you already have enough cash flow to fund most of your private jet and megayacht purchases, even if that is a tiny share of your overall wealth,” noted Galle.

In practical terms, this means that eliminating the loophole would hardly touch the real income of the ultrarich. In a column, Rep. Ro Khanna claimed that a tax on loans would generate just one forty-fourth of what his and Bernie Sanders’s proposed 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires would raise.

If centrist proposals fail because they don’t target the true source of billionaire wealth and power, progressive plans like Sanders and Khanna’s national wealth tax would likely fail for the opposite reason: they target it so directly that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court would rule it unconstitutional.

A truly pragmatic approach would avoid the legal pitfalls of a direct wealth tax while still finding a way to tax the wealth of the ultrarich. For a time, taxing unrealized gains was seen as a somewhat more viable option, since it could be plausibly framed as an income tax. That idea sat at the heart of the Biden administration’s “billionaire minimum income tax,” which applied to households with more than $100 million in assets. Since then, the constitutional prospects of this approach have also dimmed considerably. Galle, who helped craft the Biden proposal, noted that it was developed before a Supreme Court ruling in 2024 where conservative justices signaled they would deem a tax on unrealized gains unconstitutional as well.

In a monograph published earlier this year, Galle outlined a new plan that he argues could sidestep these constitutional hurdles while still meaningfully taxing the ultrarich. Galle’s framework, the Fair Share Tax (FAST), offers a sophisticated work-around to the Supreme Court’s strict interpretation of the “realization rule,” under which only realized gains qualify as taxable income. Rather than taxing wealth or unrealized gains, FAST would tax gains only at realization but impose an additional interest charge equal to the asset’s annual return, making it far more expensive to hold assets indefinitely. As Galle explained to me, FAST would “tax investment assets when they are sold, but [also] adjust the tax rate that individuals pay so that after paying the tax they are left with the same amount they would have held if they had been taxed annually.”

In his telling, this would generate the “revenue and economic effects of a wealth-type tax with the administrative ease and constitutional compatibility of a traditional income tax.”

Under the current tax code, any investment gains that aren’t officially realized during the owner’s life are effectively wiped out at death for tax purposes, leaving heirs with a mostly tax-free inheritance (hence the final step of the “buy, borrow, die” strategy). To eliminate this loophole, known as the “step-up basis” rule, tax experts have suggested treating death itself as a realization event. This could be paired with the replacement of the estate tax with an inheritance tax to be paid by heirs. Galle’s plan would eliminate the step-up basis loophole and pass all the gains made during the life of the investment onto the inheritors, accumulating even more interest over time. He also proposes an additional tax on heirs when they sell their inherited property that would kick in at $15 million in property gains.

Ahead of the 2028 election, a real debate is needed on how to tax the top 0.1 percent in a way that is both effective and workable. With a judicial branch openly hostile to such efforts, the more creative solutions there are on the table, the better. But despite recent proclamations about the dangers of concentrated wealth and spiraling inequality, centrist Democrats like Newsom seem largely committed to symbolic gestures that would do little to curb the power or fortunes of the billionaire class. It falls to the Left to articulate a genuinely pragmatic brand of populism instead.

At the federal level, there are currently two somewhat different legal tests for defining who is an employee: the standard used by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hours Division, the agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act; and the standard used by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

These differing standards rest on different underlying bodies of law. The NLRB is compelled to rely on common law (that is, court decisions on prior cases, not all of which are consistent with each other) because the statutory language does not define employee, whereas the Fair Labor Standards Act language does define “to employ” as meaning “to suffer or permit work.” This language is seen as broader than the common law framing and so opens the door to more aggressive treatment of ride-sharing and to joint-employment liability.

As a practical matter, the two standards often overlap, and each depends on a list of job features such as degree of employer control, the scope of whatever discretion the worker has, the length of the relationship, and whether it appears the individual is in business for him or herself. Because the list is long under either of the standards, it becomes a matter of judgment and dispute over how to measure each factor and which to weigh most heavily. Indeed, in 1968, the Supreme Court unhelpfully ruled that there is no shorthand formula or magic phrase that can be applied to find the answer, and instead, all the features of the relationship must be assessed and weighed, with no one factor being decisive. What is important is that the total factual context be assessed.

The consequence is seemingly endless confusion and contestation. The challenges arise in part from inconsistent court rulings, but most problematic are the constantly shifting administrative agency interpretations, which cycle back and forth depending on the political winds. After the Obama administration adopted, in the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hours Division, a broad interpretation of the definition of employee status, the first Trump administration rescinded it and narrowed the definition by putting a heavy emphasis on the entrepreneurial opportunities of the worker. (Hence, an Uber driver could be considered an entrepreneur and therefore not an employee.) The Biden administration then returned to the Obama view, and at this writing the new Trump administration had not yet but was expected to undo the Biden rules. The same back-and-forth occurs with labor law. The National Labor Relations Board in the Obama years ruled in FedEx Home Delivery that drivers were employees, whereas in 2019, under Donald Trump, a new board considering SuperShuttle DFW, with essentially the same fact pattern, ruled that drivers were freelancers.

All of this confusion is complicated even more because some important protective legislation, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, offers no definition of employee status.

The ideal solution would begin with legislative clarification of how to define an employee. A straightforward approach would be federal adoption of the so-called ABC rule, already in use by over thirty states to define employee status for state employment rules and for programs related to minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation. This rule makes the assumption that everyone is an employee unless the employer can prove otherwise, and to succeed, that employer needs affirmative evidence on three criteria: that the work is done without the direction and control of the employer, that the work is outside the usual scope of the employer’s business, and that the person doing the work has their own independent business or trade doing that kind of work.

Simple and clear as this might seem, getting such a thing through Congress seems impossible, and in fact, an effort to do just this failed when the reform bill titled the 2021 Protecting the Right to Organize Act died in Congress. Absent a legislative remedy, the line between employee status and freelancer status will continue to be disputed and uncertain, with the resolution lying less in thinking about the law and more in thinking about who sits on the courts and in the White House.

Legislative primacy also has advantages for DSA’s particular program, coalition, and ideology. In addition to its general advantage of entrenching policy, legislative primacy can help advance some of DSA’s substantive priorities.

Take DSA’s goal of ending the US war machine: if the Left wants to limit American military interventionism, it must assert that a majority vote in each house of Congress is first necessary to declare war. Because of the Electoral College and the Senate confirmation process for judicial nominees, these institutions tilt toward rural, depopulated areas beyond DSA’s current predominantly urban coalition. If socialists are to maximize our political power, we must arrogate authority to Congress — the only branch where we can expect consistent political representation in the short and medium terms. Finally, DSA’s political ideology prioritizes democratic governance. Congress is the only branch where the people’s democratically elected representatives come together, deliberate, and make policy for their constituents. Beyond its political advantages, legislative primacy would be in keeping with DSA’s democratic spirit.

Despite its strengths, legislative primacy also has its weaknesses. As Michaeljit Sandhu, a skeptic of legislative primacy, has pointed out, a focus on which branch should wield which powers runs the risk of distracting a progressive movement from passing substantive and transformative policies. Additionally, as both Baumann and Sandhu recognize, Congress is not a flawless branch. Congress has become sclerotic, unable to pass major legislation beyond an annual budget and one or two signature bills for each president. The Senate itself, meanwhile, acknowledges that it is structurally designed to stymie popular policies. And because of America’s broken campaign finance system, special interests like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee can flood elections with corporate money and force progressives into an uphill battle. Thankfully DSA is aware of this, and its 2026 program calls for addressing most of these deficiencies, while its substantive and popular policy agenda demonstrates that it will not lose the forest of good policy for the trees of how to enact it.

How, then, should DSA restore legislative primacy? Its key reforms of abolishing the Senate and establishing congressional selection of the executive and judiciary are blatantly incompatible with the text of the Constitution as it currently stands, making constitutional amendment the only clear way of enacting them. Amending the Constitution would allow the Left to comprehensively change the structure of the federal government and the distribution of powers therein. It would also allow such changes to be more or less permanently entrenched, as only one previous amendment has been repealed (the Eighteenth Amendment, enshrining prohibition into the Constitution, was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment).

Realizing legislative primacy through constitutional amendment is, however, a near-impossible goal for the left coalition as it stands. Successful ratification of an amendment to the US Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate and the assent of three-quarters of states — presently thirty-four of fifty. In the next Congress, socialists will not hold a governing majority in either house, never mind a two-thirds majority in both and control over thirty-four state legislatures. Counting its primary wins in deep blue districts, DSA will boast only six House members when the 120th Congress convenes in January. Even counting all of the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) — who are by no means uniformly aligned with DSA’s program — that still only comes to around a hundred members in the House, fewer than half of the 218 votes required for a majority (the Senate has only one CPC member, Bernie Sanders). Unless and until DSA is able to build a rural-urban coalition from the ground up, amendment will be out of the question.

Fortunately, we can restructure our constitutional order without changing any of the Constitution’s text. Conservatives have done so successfully over the last half-century, organizing a concerted movement to grant more and more power to the executive branch. We must now use the same means to achieve our own ends.

An organized game plan could look like this: First, Congress must, with the help of a sympathetic executive, pass legislation to pack the Supreme Court and appoint jurists with unimpeachable commitments to a broad construction of congressional authority. Second, Congress must enact a transformative policy agenda with jurisdiction-stripping language that demonstrates its willingness to use governing authority to improve our general welfare. Third, Congress must simply wait for the executive, states, or private industry to challenge some aspect of its program in the name of their own interests and for the Supreme Court to establish new precedent affirming Congress’s authority. This strategy also faces a high bar for implementation, requiring a sympathetic president and buy-in from fifty senators and 218 representatives. This is significantly easier than winning the support necessary for an amendment, however, and is thus the Left’s best shot at rebalancing the distribution of federal power.

There is much room within this broad framework for the Left to devise, debate, and test new ways to reinvigorate congressional authority. For one, it should decide whether it wants to reinvigorate the administrative state and insulate it from presidential control, as Baumann suggests, or whether it wishes to live with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter and to follow Samuel Moyn’s suggestion of incorporating much of the federal government’s rulemaking authority into its own legislative process. The Left should explore these avenues and work with legal experts and historians to test new and old means of restricting presidential and judicial power.

There are also symbolic measures that the Left can take to, as Baumann put it, “abolish presidentialism” — and support for juristocracy — “in the hearts and minds of the American people.” Congress could require the Supreme Court to hear its cases in the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol basement, perhaps allowing them to use their current courthouse only in separation-of-powers disputes. Congress could also receive the State of the Union address in written form rather than by personal delivery, as was the case for presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson.

The glaring flaw in the plan presented here is finding an executive that will set this program of judicial and presidential disempowerment in motion. To appoint friendly jurists and approve its legislation short of a veto override, Congress first needs a cooperative executive. This heightens the importance of DSA’s ongoing presidential endorsement process.

If DSA is serious about ensuring that socialist policies are insulated from presidential abuse and judicial review, it should extract commitments from its nominee to go along with an agenda that reasserts legislative primacy. A socialist president must recognize that his or her power is fleeting, and that to entrench a socialist political program, he or she must cede power to Congress.

Even if they win both the House and the Senate, Democrats will not have a president of their party until 2029 at the earliest, and even in a divided government, socialists will not have an outright majority in the House. What socialist and hard-line progressive House members can do now, however, is organize into a critical bloc ahead of the House Democratic Caucus elections.

These elections, held just before the opening of Congress in early January, will decide Democratic committee leaders, policy and campaign chiefs, and potentially even the speaker. They should prioritize electing their own into positions of leadership and extract from those nonsocialist members they might support concessions to pass messaging bills on socialists’ substantive and procedural priorities. Acting strategically, DSA members can ensure that while they are out of power, they can lay the groundwork to pass and entrench their political program once they are in it.

Rewriting the Constitution to assert Congress’s primacy, as DSA and left commentators call for, is a glaring necessity. But America cannot afford to wait for thirty-four states to come to the same conclusion. To win change for working people, DSA must expand its vision of how to change our constitutional order; in other words, it must develop its own constitutional politics. The form of this constitutional politics should follow from the historical lesson that our country’s most durable programs of transformative change have flowed through Congress, not through the executive or judiciary. Make no mistake: DSA should not prioritize empowering Congress if it means setting aside its substantive policy agenda, but it should recognize that Congress, despite its many flaws, is our best vehicle to enact this agenda.

Certain genre labels endure through vagueness. “Modernism as a notion is the emptiest of all cultural categories,” Perry Anderson once protested. “There is no other aesthetic marker so vacant and vitiated,” he went on, “a portmanteau concept whose only referent is the blank passage of time itself.” And yet few terms have been more perennially reemployed.

You could say something similar of heartland rock. It was a term invented by journalists in the 1980s whose only referent is the blank map of sentimental geography. For some, the American heartland conjures up the Midwest; for others, the heartland stretches into the Texas panhandle and the rural South, or even rust-belt New Jersey and the sexless parts of California and Florida.

Osmon’s Won’t Back Down is the first history of the genre. She opens the book as an agnostic: “A generous person may view the term as a badge of honor — a way to commemorate a group of artists who worked outside of corporate pop music’s trends and garnered acclaim. A more cynical person may say that the term was a product of college-educated metropolitan writers who couldn’t tell the difference between Michigan and Florida.” Yet she quickly takes a pragmatic approach, accepting that heartland rock exists because people talk about it as if it exists and deciding therefore that her book has the intriguing responsibility of fleshing out the most “vacant and vitiated” category in 1980s pop.

Her story is a happy mix of the old and the new. Readers who know little of heartland rock will learn the standard tale of the genre, though relayed with healthy skepticism. Rock’s post-Vietnam middle lane — not punk, not disco, not coffee-shop-troubadour-style singer-songwriter folk or anything glittering with synth — found fame with Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 Born to Run, as “a gifted songwriter from an unassuming area, who looked like a regular person and couldn’t sing all that well, released a rock album rooted in historical sounds and the Everyman, to widespread acclaim.” But Osmon knows that to frame it this way — as a genre that bolted one day out of the vague, rusting, Jersey Shore blue — is to rip the story from the fabric of left popular culture.

Before Bruce, before “Jack and Diane,” before “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” and “American Girl,” there was Bob Seger. Born in 1945 in Detroit and raised as a white working-class townie in nearby Ann Arbor, Seger was a son of Henry Ford and the Popular Front — he was born in Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital amid the backdrop of the antifascist politics of the late 1930s and 1940s. These forces marked postwar American culture with a left-populist streak. Seger’s dad was a medic at Ford’s River Rouge plant whose gaze drifted so far outside Ford’s factory gates that one day he ditched his wife and young son and went west, trying and failing to make it big with his band in California.

Back in Michigan, his son grew up with a single mother and a radio. The radio was always on, and always tuned to the blues, R&B, and soul, the black music that the culture of the Popular Front worked to desegregate. By the time Seger grew old enough to harbor his own music-making dreams, there was a new, post–Popular Front left cultural scene to affiliate with. He grew his hair down to his ass, wrote songs against the Vietnam War, and played rallies alongside the Black Panthers. Then, in 1976, as the New Left receded, he released Night Moves, the smoothest of all heartland rock albums, and blasted into the ether. He became one of the first heartland rock stars and the bridge between the Old Left, the New Left, and the strange ensuing fun house of Reagan’s postmodern mystery tour.

Osmon’s book adds two things to familiar notions of heartland rock: an expanded canvas and a richer sense of history. For her, heartland rock is more about a sensibility than a sound or geography. It was mainstream rock that equated solidarity with a broad, imagined popular class of farmers and workers; reverence for small towns and stranded places, common sense and common dreams; distrust of the supposedly progressive sweep of history, of new fashion, media, and bright-lit megalopolises.

Beyond these, Osmon’s version of the genre is impressive for its protean shape. In this paradoxically inaugural and revisionist history, a supposedly white, masculine music stretches wide enough to include Bonnie Raitt and Tracy Chapman; a famously breezy, mid-tempo sound becomes likewise defined by the lashing 4/4 drums of John Mellencamp’s “Rain on the Scarecrow”; and the stripped-down, disco-skeptical authenticity of heartland rock turns out, by the middle of the 1980s, to want nothing so much as to emulate the freaky, futuristic synths of a very different sort of Midwestern pop star, Prince. Typically, heartland rock’s Mount Rushmore leaves space only for the splayed power stances of four guitar-playing white men: Seger, Springsteen, Mellencamp, and Tom Petty. The cover of Osmon’s book nods to this while adapting it, subbing out Seger for Lucinda Williams and pasting them all atop stars and stripes.

This lightly defamiliarizing story emerges out of Won’t Back Down’s structure. The book is organized not by idea or theme or artist but by year. The first chapter drops us into 1980, the last leaves us in 1989, and in between Osmon goes year by year, tracing heartland rock’s development throughout a halfway-house, purgatorial decade suspended between the Cold War world of welfare states and legible left and right movements and the screen glow of Reagan’s neoliberal future.

A lot depends on how you read this history. For Osmon, heartland rock is a belated form. It belongs to the past and is best heard as the last campfire-pop of an old, universalist, left-populist cultural strategy of framing a broad, inclusive image of the people, unafraid of the symbol of the Common Man. This left-populist legacy was famously misunderstood. Both its supporters and critics wrongly imagined the genre, because of its red-white-and-blue imagery and soaring, ironized hooks — “Ain’t that America, home of the free?” — to be the musical counterpart to Reagan’s Make America Great Again politics. For Osmon, this was due to right-wing cynicism. Reagan kept playing “Pink Houses” and “Born in the USA” at his campaign rallies because he thought he could drain these songs of their real meaning. Meanwhile, Mellencamp and Springsteen kept sending their lawyers after him while writing songs opposing Reagan’s cultural influence.

This view of heartland rock’s misinterpretation has become the consensus. All you have to say is “the misinterpretation of ‘Born in the USA’” and everyone knows what you mean, as if the right interpretation were somehow straightforward and the song were merely a four-minute adaptation of Noam Chomsky’s view on American imperialism.

In truth, the consensus obscures something, and the misinterpretation has been misinterpreted. The fact that heartland rock was a belated left-populist form meant, in practice, that it was not much of a left-populist form at all. Its songs stretched out over the radio into a world without context, shorn of the political movements that grounded earlier moments of left culture. Mellencamp and others made heroic efforts to rebuild this context, coming together with Midwestern farmers during the 1980s farm crisis and organizing a benefit festival, Farm Aid, that still carries on to this day.

But they were outflanked by a wider social logic. The old popular class ways of life, farming and industrial work, were vanishing from the heartland, and with them disappeared the movement legacies, from the Populists to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), that once cohered a shared working-class politics. In its place came a new culture of incoherence. The real power of heartland rock comes from how it caught this shapeless, changing culture in its simple yet vexing imagery, its ambivalence, its scrambled and wistful affect.

There was nothing belated about this music. In a way few other popular genres managed to do, heartland rock gave form to our future. Listen again to Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” or “Small Town.” The symbols of America, the small family house, the hometown. They all represent things you love and take immense, even buoyant pride in that hurt and disappoint and bind you and therefore congeal in a thick, stalemated ambivalence that frustrates any conclusive interpretation. This ambivalence is why heartland rock still speaks to us. It was an apparently authentic, back-to-basics music that was opaque and a backward-looking, nostalgic sound that was actually futuristic.

The best of heartland rock previewed a political culture where the symbols of old — worker, farmer, nation, youth, home — slipped and came unmoored. The one post-Reagan thing we all shared was a faintly conservative, commonsense longing for security in an age when “dreams came and went,” when the place “good enough for me” was perhaps better described as the place where they’d probably bury you.

Criticizing the labor market under capitalism is not only justifiable but rational and necessary. Opting out of the labor market in the face of exploitation is likewise justifiable. But it is a step down from organizing to change the conditions of work. As Albert O. Hirschman noted more than fifty years ago, beating a retreat can empower bosses by weakening the collective capacity of workers. “Exiting” the workplace entirely eventually leads to workers losing what he called “voice.” And in an age where the institutions that amplify workers’ voices — unions, cooperatives, workplace democracy — have already been weakened, the temptation to exit may be stronger than ever.

Be that as it may, for the foreseeable future — artificial intelligence notwithstanding — human labor will be a nonnegotiable part of social life and the survival of the species. Workers would be better off if this labor was organized through a socialist economy rather than a capitalist one. But changing how work is coordinated is not the same as eliminating work altogether.

A vibrant civic culture and the renewal of shared social purpose that we desperately need exists in part as a function of certain kinds of labor. Caring for the ill, teaching others, operating public transportation systems, running museums, growing food, writing books, collecting waste, and keeping facilities clean and accessible are forms of socially necessary labor we’d want under any economic system — even if the model of wage labor were altered. But we might not need all manners of, ah, work.

Bertrand Russell captured the alienation of modern work in 1932 when he wrote that “Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.” Russell anticipated a critique that has now become commonplace.

“The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid,” he wrote. “The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.”

Russel’s conception of labor captures the twentieth century’s turn toward managerial and professional work, as more labor — and eventually politics itself — moved to Madison Avenue.

In the twenty-first century, there are plenty of astute contemporary critiques of labor under capitalism, most of which Karl Marx would have recognized. But iterations of the dropout sensibility based on perceptions that it takes a high-six-figure salary to find happiness, and that anything requiring more than a few hours a day and a laptop — or smartphone — is oppression miss the mark.

Humans like to engage in socially useful undertakings. Low wages, exploitative working conditions, and the absence of worker control over workplaces alienate us from the social good of useful work. But so, too, do what Thorstein Veblen called “invidious comparisons”: measuring ourselves against others through social status, wealth display, educational attainment, and other markers of success.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen wrote of nineteenth-century consumers drawn to “pecuniary emulation”: competition through conspicuous consumption and the deployment of wealth as competitive display in and of itself. Invidious comparison is the habit of evaluating ourselves and others according to visible markers of luxury and ostentatiousness.

The logic remains the same. The same forces run through the nineteenth century to the present. But the status jockeying of today takes place through social media, where personal brands and influencer aspirations fill all of our feeds. Who wants to labor when you can sell “content” instead?

It’s tough to blame the dreamer. Survey the labor market, catch the stench of decay wafting up from late-stage capitalism, or remember that every moment of hope seems to be interrupted by wildfires, floods, and heat waves, and the question becomes almost unavoidable: “What else would you have people do? I mean, look at the state of the place.”

Support for the critique itself provides an answer. Anton Jäger, author of Hyperpolitics, argues that a decline in institutionalization — cultures and norms of joining, especially among workers’ organizations — after 1989 has given way to runaway politicization without the roots established by gathering and belonging.

In the space left by the death of institutionalization, hyperpolitics thrives while the customs of collective organization atrophy. The resulting loneliness and anomie make individualized escape — through personal branding and the like — seem more plausible than collective action. In tandem with the globalization of mass communication and a contemporary culture of instant gratification and attention, the rags-to-riches influencer dream seems a natural way to fill the void.

It won’t. But reinstitutionalization would. Particularly as part of a greater movement to rebuild social trust and capital through strengthening offline social bonds and movements alongside worker-led (and owned) workplaces.

On a social level, reconnecting with one another in the world, and democratizing opportunities to shape and run labor spaces, would provide greater meaning to both communities and work, encouraging a culture of dropping in — and staying for a while. It is also the only way to rebuild the institutions through which workers can recover their collective voice and power, pushing back against hyperpolitics and opening more space beyond work for each of us to create online and offline, to our heart’s content.

Like fixing up people after automobile accidents, higher taxes on the rich are an after-the-fact fix-up to the problem of great economic inequality. And like helping people recover after automobile accidents, higher taxes on the rich are certainly desirable. (A good place to start would be making tax rates on capital gains as high as tax rates on labor income.) But in both cases, these treatments do not address the origins of the problems — the high rate of severe injuries from car accidents and the rising share of income going to the very rich.

There is an added problem. A policy of focusing on repairing the injured people after the accidents can draw attention away from eliminating or reducing the cause of the damage. Likewise, a policy of focusing on taxing the rich after they have become exorbitantly wealthy can draw attention away from the causes of our great inequality and perhaps imply that there is nothing we can do about those causes.

At the same time as we tax the rich, there are things we can do about the causes of great inequality. The severe inequality we face is not simply the result of the way “free markets” operate. Indeed, there is really no such thing as “free markets.” Markets are not simply the “natural” order of things, existing beyond human control. Markets are social creations, constructed by governments and by people with social power. They are not set in stone. Perhaps a few examples will clarify the point.

Consider, for starters, the labor market. In 2022, the US Department of the Treasury issued a report stating, “The American labor market is characterized by high levels of employer power . . . . A careful review of credible academic studies places the decrease in wages at roughly 20 percent relative to the level [they would be] in a fully competitive market.” Among the factors that generate this result are “noncompete agreements,” which prevent employees from taking jobs with other competing firms, and labor laws that tend to favor employers. When the laws themselves don’t favor employers, the administration and lack of enforcement of the laws often serve that function

Then there are international markets. For millennia, governments have been involved in commerce around the globe, setting the rules for who could trade in what, protecting ships at sea, building and maintaining seaports and airports and roads, restricting and taxing trade in many commodities, and establishing trade arrangements among countries. In the current era, it has become especially clear that trade agreements tend to favor the interests of powerful businesses, while placing workers in various countries in competition with one another. One of the interesting — and perverse — aspects of US trade agreements in recent decades is that they are often called “free-trade agreements”; in fact, they generally extend monopoly power by including extensions of US patent and copyright laws. Monopoly power is not confined to international commerce. It has also been increasing within the United States and has provided a basis for rising corporate profits. There are, of course, laws in place to restrict monopolies; these laws are themselves examples of government involvement in the operation of markets. Yet in recent decades (with a brief exception during the Biden administration), these laws have not been effectively enforced. Here, one might say, it was not the anti-monopoly laws that constructed the market, but the government’s choice to ignore those laws. And as is the case internationally, patent and copyright laws support monopoly power within the United States.

There are other important examples of government’s role in shaping markets in ways that impact economic inequality. Long-existing subsidies to fossil fuel firms and operating school systems that continually recreate social inequality are important examples.

And connecting all the markets for goods and services is the financial system, which, through deregulation, has become detached from its traditional role of allocating funds to enterprises — a useful function in a market economy. According to Oren Cass, the chief economist at the American Compass, which the New York Times describes as “a conservative economic think tank,” the “finance industry is a grift.” Cass points out that the industry has generated “financialization,” which he describes as follows:

The term for making financial markets and transactions ends unto themselves, disconnected from — and often at the expense of — the societal benefits that support human flourishing and are capitalism’s proper purpose. Chief among those benefits are good jobs that support families, and products and services that improve people’s lives.

Financialization has made American businesses less resilient, less innovative and less competitive. It has been a major cause of slow wage growth and rising inequality. It has fueled the loss of manufacturing jobs across the heartland.

And financialization has been very profitable for a small group of people and thus an important generator of rising inequality!

The lesson of all this — this brief account of how markets are structured in ways that generate extreme inequality in the United States — is that we had better focus some attention on the way markets are constructed and undertake some restructuring.

One might argue that reconstructing markets is not enough. It would, of course, be good to make labor markets more worker-friendly, to disrupt monopoly power in many markets, and to organize global trade to undermine its exacerbation of inequality — to say nothing of reining in financialization. Yet beyond focusing on these broad markets, we could benefit from a systemic approach through a general extension of social control of economic activity and a reduction in the heavy reliance on markets as the foundation of economic relations. Similarly, returning to automobile deaths, we might argue that the real solution lies in a much more extensive public transportation system, rather than simply safer cars and driving conditions.

These would be reasonable arguments and well worth considering. But neither social control of the economy nor widespread effective public transportation will come into being overnight. In the meantime, we need to do what we can to make society, including transportation, work as well as possible. This will not solve all our economic ills, but it would move things in the right direction.

For decades, US sanctions against Cuba have targeted captive industries like mining and tourism, both of which are important sources of foreign exchange for the Cuban government. During this time, the United States held off on sanctioning entities that import some goods into Cuba, as those transactions result in foreign exchange leaving the country — very often to US firms, paid in full and in advance.

The mining operations and hotel chains that operate in Cuba are used to navigating complex regulatory environments (as are most major companies in those industries). These also tend to be smaller businesses that are not publicly traded. But the State Department’s singling out of GECOMEX and GEMAR, which facilitate the physical import and export of virtually everything entering and leaving the island, raises compliance risks for manufacturing and shipping companies. This in itself is a notable escalation.

For example, a firm like the Bühler Group, a Swiss industrial concern, now faces compliance risks if it sells grain milling equipment to Cuba. Ditto for a third-country company that might sell machinery for cleaning and sorting pulses. If GECOMEX can’t import equipment, its subsidiaries can’t efficiently process agricultural commodities like wheat and beans, which in turn reduces the basic foodstuffs making their way into Cuban households.

The sanctions against GEMAR, the port operator, are even more straightforward, creating compliance risks for any shipping company that pays them docking fees. More than seven thousand containers destined for Havana are now stranded across the Caribbean, after companies like Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM suspended their Cuban operations. So even though there are humanitarian carve-outs that permit the import of food into Cuba by third countries, this new round of sanctions could severely hinder such shipments.

“These sorts of measures demonstrate the genocidal intent behind the United States ‘maximum pressure’ strategy.” says Helen Yaffe, professor at the University of Glasgow and author of We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World. “Food is a terrible vulnerability that was imposed on Cuba by colonial and imperial history. The whole country was turned into a sugarcane field.”

Immediately following the revolution, the Cuban government nationalized the largest agricultural estates, plantations, and haciendas, while leaving many small campesino farms independent. During the Special Period (following the collapse of the Soviet Union), Fidel Castro passed Cuba’s Third Agrarian Reform law, which allocated more land to cooperatives and family farmers through usufruct rights. This decentralized the government’s agricultural production, turning import-dependent state farms into Basic Units of Cooperative Production.

“Farmer-to-farmer networks trained more than 200,000 farming families in agroecological methods,” says Margarita Fernandez of the Caribbean Agroecology Institute (CAI), which advocates for sustainable farming practices and food sovereignty. During the Special Period, urban gardens (organopónicos) proliferated across Havana, with the Cuban government estimating that over 50 percent of fruits and vegetables consumed in the capital were grown there.

In his book The Greening of the Revolution, food rights activist Peter Rosset argues that this was “the largest attempted conversion from conventional to alternative, semi-organic agriculture in the world’s history.”

“For a time, Cuba became a global symbol of what post-fossil-fuel agriculture might look like,” says Fernandez.

At the peak of this movement, in the mid-2000s, 35–40 percent of all calories consumed in Cuba came from domestic agriculture. However, the Special Period eventually ended once Cuba developed a closer trade partnership with Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Once again, Cuba had access to the oil inputs that make industrial agriculture possible.

“As economic conditions improved intermittently, policymakers often shifted back toward conventional industrial agriculture,” says Fernandez. “Agroecology was never fully institutionalized as the foundation of the food system. Instead, it was treated as an emergency substitute.”

Crop and livestock yields were actually declining leading up to the Special Period. During the late ’80s, Cuba’s industrial farming model led to severe soil compaction and degradation, causing the yield of non-sugarcane agricultural production to drop.

Yields had also been declining over the past few years before the United States took over the Venezuelan government in January and triggered the present crisis. Between 2018 and 2023, the domestic harvest of staple crops like rice fell by more than 50 percent. The World Food Programme’s US affiliate estimates that Cuba now relies on agricultural imports to meet 70–80 percent of its needs.

That may not sound like a large reduction, but it’s important to remember that not all calories are created equal. Historically, Cuba has remained 90 percent self-sufficient when it comes to fruits and vegetables, which are filled with vitamins and fiber but contain very little protein. But Cuba now produces less than 1 percent of the poultry it consumes, and its pork industry recently collapsed.

Making matters worse, the present oil blockade has cut domestic agricultural output by 60 percent, estimates the UN human rights chief in a June report. “The ration book is threadbare now,” says Helen Yaffe. July’s sanctions are likely to exacerbate this.

Cooperatives and family farmers now manage approximately 69 percent of Cuba’s agricultural land, though not all of them engage in sustainable agricultural practices. Many remain reliant on irrigation methods that run on gasoline and diesel. And though use of biofertilizers and biopesticides, in lieu of fossil fuel derivatives, is widespread, those rely on stable transportation to distribute live cultures from labs to remote fields before they spoil — a virtual impossibility given the United States’ brutal energy blockade.

Estimates vary, but proponents argue that scaling agroecology practices could reduce dependence on agricultural imports by 35–40 percent. Others estimate that it could provide for 70 percent of all calories consumed in Cuba. This would also help reduce agricultural trade deficits, which organizations like the CAI view as an impediment to greater food sovereignty. Cuban spending on foreign agricultural imports was $2.7 billion in 2024, dominated by meat ($458 million) and cereals ($177 million).

Cuba also has to contend with an aggressive northerly neighbor that is not only limiting their ability to trade freely and receive fuel but remains fiercely defensive of its existing markets.

“Any attempts to grow food for local consumption are opposed by the American agricultural lobby,” says Yaffe.

Of the food that Cuba imports, $403 million comes from the United States, $328 million comes from Argentina, and $282 million comes from Brazil. But again, not all calories are created equal. Cuba imports 85 percent of its wheat from Canada, and — perhaps most important — 80 percent of its poultry from the United States.

Frozen chicken quarters and legs are the most affordable and accessible animal protein in the Cuban diet. Cuba has been one of the top five largest export markets for American poultry for over ten years, ahead of countries with massive populations like the Philippines and China. Last year, the United States exported $298 million worth of poultry to Cuba, virtually all of it frozen chicken quarters and legs.

The latest sanctions are expected to tilt the balance of agricultural trade even further in the United States’ direction.

Canadian agribusiness is unlikely to see upside in continuing CAD$278 million of agricultural trade with Cuba in the face of compliance risks that have already led to one prominent mining firm being distressed into sale to a Donald Trump–allied US buyer. For comparison, Canada did over CAD$100 billion of agricultural trade in 2024, 62 percent of which was with the United States.

“If you’re a third country and you supply goods or services to a blocked party, you can be blocked,” explains Robert Muse, a prominent lawyer who specializes in US laws and regulations relating to Cuba. “Then anyone who supplies goods or services to you can be blocked. . . .  and so on.” Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, which opens private companies to lawsuits if they deal in assets expropriated during the Cuban Revolution, can theoretically be extended limitlessly.

Aside from their desire for market access to the United States, there is at least one other reason why companies don’t revolt against these unnecessary compliance risks: “The international banking system and the supremacy of the U.S. dollar prevents companies from fighting back,” says Helen Yaffe. Dollar transactions, which account for most world trade, need to clear the US banking system.

This leaves Cuba with only one frictionless trading partner: the country that is presently trying to dismantle its government. “American companies will be preferred investors in the ‘new Cuba’ that the US is trying to engineer through secondary sanctions,” says Muse.

Molding Cuba in the model of Latin American countries like Guatemala, locked in a relationship of dependency and unequal exchange with the United States, does seem to be the ultimate ambition of the Trump administration. As for the role of agriculture in this grand strategy, “America’s leverage over the Cuban government increases as the amount of food it imports to Cuba increases,” says Muse.

This may help explain this latest round of sanctions. By leaving the humanitarian carve-outs in place while targeting the port industry and importers, the United States can claim it is not forbidding the import of food to Cuba, even as it causes domestic food production and food imports to plummet.

“The effect is multiplied by existing food shortages. Cuba may be getting 16 percent of its imported food from America, but if you knock out the other 84 percent – now you’ve got a catastrophe,” says Muse.

As for now, most of the world isn’t willing to risk access to the US market and to payment and credit systems by continuing trading with Cuba. Yet pressure for an alternative continues to build as the United States’ mercurial trade policies and unilateral sanctions regime come under increasing stress in the context of trade disruptions related to the Iran war.

“If Cuba still had the rest of the world to trade with, it could prosper,” says Yaffe.

The US government has exploited the limitless reach of the Helms-Burton Act and the hegemony of the dollar to create a regulatory environment and sanctions regime so severe that no rational actor would defy it. Simultaneously, its oil blockade has made food sovereignty via an industrial agricultural model nearly impossible, leaving Cuba dependent on American agribusiness for cheap proteins.

Meanwhile, banking, mining, and tourism sanctions have starved Cuba of the foreign exchange it needs to fund a transition to more sustainable agricultural models. In other words, as the United States seeks to topple the Cuban government and open the country to private US ownership, it is using access to food as the ultimate leverage.

D eneen’s book is a surprisingly brisk work from an author known for taking big swings at bigger targets. Deneen describes its origins as dating back to his years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. He nostalgically recounts “slowly read[ing] The Odyssey with about ten other graduate students” and expresses gratitude for his teacher’s “love of the original Greek and for Homer’s tales, and his charming confusion over whether he was teaching The Odyssey or Ulysses on that particular day.” These formative experiences already inspired one earlier book from Deneen on The Odyssey, so it’s clear the subject is a passion project for him.

For Deneen, Odysseus fascinates on many levels. One is the anthropological. In early parts of the book, he describes how classical heroes and creatures often vacillated between yearning for godhood and descending into a bestial state. While these two poles might appear contrasting, Deneen insightfully notes that the connection between godhood and bestial is tighter than might appear. The “gods and beasts are similar in two respects: they are apolitical, and they share a distinctive kind of acumen.” Gods and beasts are apolitical because they share the capacity to be indifferent to others. The gods don’t need anyone; to the extent they connect with others it is out of a fickle and transient desire to relive the weary boredom of their eternal existence. Beasts lack the reason needed to form deep connections, and so can only relate to others by instinct to gratify unchosen needs.

Gods and beasts are also alike in that they are peculiarly free of curiosity and doubt. Their senses give them “instantaneous knowledge of a thing’s nature, but both gods and beasts are essentially unaware of the broader truth of things that their more narrow, specific knowledge misses.” They have little understanding of the inward experiences of others, which makes them “blind to the suffering and harm their actions cause.”

This means that, in some respects, humanity is a category of being unto itself; less like either gods or beasts than they are like one another. Deneen reads Odysseus as a very human character in this respect. His journey is defined by a yearning for others, longing for “the sight of the very smoke / uprising from his home country.” He rejects immortal life with the beautiful and ageless goddess Calypso to return to his wife, Penelope, in full awareness that both he and she will age and die. Deneen poignantly notes that Odysseus makes this choice in full awareness of the bleakness of the afterlife, which is so devoid of meaning Achilles claims he’d rather be alive and a slave than ruler of the dead.

More tempting for Odysseus, “who is so notable for his ability to hold himself back from temptations,” is the “devastatingly tempting offer of ‘expanded vision.” His yearning to wander and hear the dangerous song of the sirens all stems from Odysseus’s rather philosophical desire to experience and know. This has a tight connection to the yearning for control by acquiring the power of knowledge. Perhaps tellingly, Odysseus is only able to return to Ithaca when he gives up control by casting himself from Calypso’s island on a tiny raft in the hope of reaching anyone who knows the direction home.

Like many other conservative thinkers, Deneen sees great danger in the Promethean longing to escape the limitations of our condition. We can “decide to cease being what our nature intends for us to be” through becoming like gods and beasts living above or below other human beings. But “things will go badly for us if we do, for the city — political community — is our natural home.” Our proper yearning is to transcend, but not escape, our finitude through others.

Deneen’s interpretation of his favorite ancient story is moving and deep — and a welcome contrast to his recent broadsides against progressive liberalism and its rainbow flags. But as the subtitle about our “divided souls” suggests, much of Deneen’s attention is directed to the present rather than the Mycenaean past. Like many before him, Deneen finds parallels between the soul of Odysseus and that of the American people. From the communitarianism of the Puritans to the warm folksiness of Ted Lasso, there has always been a pronounced strain of American culture that has celebrated rootedness, belonging, and the great impact of seemingly small kindnesses.

This is the side of Odysseus that wants nothing more than to return to backwater Ithaca and its problems because, however much a battle against greedy suitors pales in comparison to a world-historical event like the siege of Troy, they are his family’s struggles. On the other hand, Deneen notes how Americans are “creatures prone to discontent, creatures who discover the object of our longing was more attractive in the desiring than in its attainment. The American Dream, at least in part, subsists on this discontent, this drive always to abandon settled comfort for anticipation of the undiscovered.” It is the dialectic between the twin poles of the American spirit that generates both its greatness and its vulgarity.

Deneen thinks that the country is at its best when achieving an Aristotelian “golden mean” between its two poles, while stressing that his instincts lead him to “urge against worsening the disfiguring effects of our widespread national and civilizational homelessness.” There is a melancholic nostalgia to Deneen’s book that is more earned and deeply felt than what one sees in most postliberal philosophy, including his own. This treads very close to reactionary sentimentality when Deneen puts The Odyssey into dialogue with American classics like The Wizard of Oz, Huckleberry Finn, and Field of Dreams.

At times, American Odyssey flirts with “good ol’ days”–style reminiscence of the sort that leads very online advocates of RETVRN to transform their Nintendo 64 childhoods into the embodiment of a lost golden age of virtue and simplicity. The seemingly endless ruminations on Field of Dreams, replete with Deneen’s longing descriptions of “rolling cornfields surrounding a classic American farmhouse, and recalling the sport of baseball as it was played in simpler times” are the worst culprits here. But Deneen usually pulls back before things get too syrupy.

Nonetheless, Deneen’s efforts to enact a dialogue between ancient and modern reveal the limitations of his own analysis. This comes into starkest relief in his half-chapter-long interpretation of the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life.

For those who manage to avoid turning their TV on in December, the plot is fairly straightforward. Bright everyman George Bailey longs to leave pretty but dull Bedford Falls to see and remake the world. Circumstances continuously intervene to thwart this ambition — not least preventing a takeover of the town by greedy capitalist Mr Potter. This means George is stuck settling into town life with a pretty wife and cute kids. A sudden crisis leads George to contemplate suicide before an angel intervenes and shows him how ruined Bedford Falls would be without his generosity and civic spirit. He decides to live and reconciles with his family, and all of George’s friends and well-wishers end up coming to his rescue right in time for Christmas. George realizes that he is, in fact, the richest man in town.

Deneen describes George as a “consummately Odyssean character to the extent that he longs, with profound, existential urgency, to get away.” On the surface, it might appear that the lesson of the film is very much to Deneen’s taste; George comes to accept his beautiful life in the homeliest town in America. But Deneen reads it much more critically. He notes how, while Bailey’s dream of leaving Bedford Falls may have been frustrated, he “does not cease to be ambitious.” Instead, Bailey transforms his town; not least by building very modern affordable housing so the town’s poor can have a decent place where they don’t have to pay up to slumlord Mr Potter. Deneen admits that he “instinctively and appropriately sides with [Bailey] against the vicious and heartless Potter.” But these sympathies obscure the “ambiguous nature of George’s efforts — and their ultimate consequences.” In constructing affordable housing while treating his tenants like equals, Bailey has transformed his idyllic town into something more modern — and ugly.

“If we consider ‘Bailey Park’ not just in comparison to ‘Pottersville” — to which it is clearly superior — but in contrast to downtown Bedford Falls, Bailey Park is clearly inferior,” as Deneen puts it. “The film itself implicitly calls attention to this fact.” As Deneen sees it, “Bedford Falls has an intimate town center. It has blocks of houses with front porches where people sit leisurely and greet the passerby who constantly amble along the sidewalks. Bedford Falls is a town with a deep sense of place and history.”

To a degree, one can sympathize with Deneen’s take. When I see people decry the ugliness of public or affordable housing, I often think, “Why don’t we do better?” There is no law baked into the universe that says giving the poor a place to live requires that it be as artificial-looking and cheap as possible. A socialist YIMBYism should create spaces where there is both a geography of community in the present and a sense of continuity fostered with the past. We ought to be more sensible than Bailey, who builds his affordable housing project atop a cemetery. This reads like a bit of a metaphor for superficial neoliberals trying to do good for the needy — but on the cheap and without giving a sh-t about those who’ve lived and died on that very spot.

But Deneen’s nostalgia for the Bedford Falls of yore misses that the only thing worse than living in alienating modern housing is living in a slum with an exploitative landlord like Mr Potter. We’re given a clear insight into that early in the film when Mr Potter berates George’s late father for not evicting his tenants and their families when they can’t pay the rent. In Potter’s words, without the harsh discipline of the market, Bedford Falls will wind up with “a discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.”

Bailey Jr may have disrupted traditional practices a bit too much for Deneen’s taste by building affordable housing for the working class. But that shows how Deneen cares far too much about the antique plumage of the town, with its picturesque middle-class boroughs, and far too little about the material needs of the many poor people who live day-to-day in Bedford Falls.

This belies a deeper point about Deneen’s interpretation of wandering souls like Odysseus and George Bailey. Bedford Falls doesn’t feel like a home for George Bailey for most of the movie. But a core lesson of the film is that the solution to George’s anomie wasn’t just a spiritual change in attitude, let alone nostalgia for dreams long past. Bailey built a spiritual home and community for himself by literally building homes for other needy people, who in turn demonstrated solidarity with him when he was in need. The lesson is that real home and community is about much more than simply sharing values, let alone 1930s aesthetics. It’s about sharing what we have with each other and looking after the needs of everyone. Especially the least off among us.

The failure to internalize this in sufficient depth is one of the reasons conservative conceptions of community tend to be more superficial than their socialist counterparts. In Why Not Socialism?, the great philosopher G. A. Cohen describes the ideal community as like a camping trip where everyone does their bit and shares goods based on a principle of reciprocity rather than self-interested exchange. Cohen understood that community must have a material dimension to it; otherwise, it’s not much more than an abstract profession of unity. It’s one thing for my family and the family next door to attend the same cute little church together on Sunday. He is not my neighbor if his response to learning my wife is sick and our insurance won’t cover it is to sigh and offer his “thoughts and prayers.” That most American conservatives imagine everyone sharing the same “thoughts and prayers” will a community make shows why they can never build the homes they seek.

In a world where so many at the moment are trying to flatten Homer’s epic into a banal trope in America’s never-ending culture war, Deneen’s obvious love for the source material is refreshing. Much like Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History or Roger Scruton’s guide to the sacred, there is insight and even wisdom leftists can glean from it.

But the book also demonstrates the fatal flaw in postliberal conservatism’s yearning for community. That is its all-too-idealist emphasis on the forms of justice rather than its substance; on values symbolized rather than lived. Deneen describes Odysseus as an admirable human being because he resisted the siren’s call of isolating power and perfection for the warmth of hearth and home. And so he was. But it’s the yearning to build a shared home for everyone that constitutes the fuller reconciliation of the American spirit Deneen searches for but fails to find.

Over the last few decades, a number of writers across the world have developed a framework that has been called minimalist criminal law or radical penal minimalism. I prefer “carceral minimalism” as a clearer and more succinct phrase and will use that instead. Legal scholars and social scientists like Máximo Langer, Luigi Ferrajoli, and Loïc Wacquant have argued that while in most societies the coercive footprint of the state should be significantly lessened, eliminating it altogether is not a viable road to social justice.

In thinking about the proper structure and scope of police powers for the state, Ferrajoli has argued for a framework he calls the “law of the weakest.” The law, he contends, should prioritize protecting the weakest party in each stage of criminal law. At the moment of offending, the law should prioritize the protection of the victim of crime, whose rights are being trampled by another. However, in both the trial stage and the penal stage, the accused and the convict are now the weakest party, standing more or less helpless before the awesome power of the state. As such, in those contexts, institutions and practices must be structured to protect their rights, since they are the ones most likely to have their rights violated.

It’s a very simple framework, and one that is deeply consonant with socialist ideals. Egalitarianism can, as the anthropologist Christopher Boehm has argued, be thought of as its own kind of hierarchy, one in which the weak dominate the strong in order to prevent them from dominating everyone. In egalitarian pre-state societies, this gives rise to a fiercely egalitarian ethos that actively suppresses the acquisition of excessive power by any individual in the group. Equality, in other words, is how the weak guard themselves against domination by the strong.

Socialism, in this account, is simply the proactive prevention of domination by those with the most resources. It is the protection of those with the fewest resources, or the economically weakest.

If this were all carceral minimalism consisted of, abolitionists might object that it’s not a different framework at all. After all, it’s a core contention of abolitionists that getting rid of police and prisons is the only way to protect the rights of the weakest, the main violator of which, they argue, is the coercive power of the state.

Carceral minimalism’s difference with abolition is thus not primarily in the realm of values, but rather in what Vladimir Lenin once called the “concrete analysis of the concrete situation.” Specifically, carceral minimalism asserts two theses concerning how the law of the weakest should be realized that directly conflict with abolitionist arguments.

First, carceral minimalism holds that the elimination of the coercive public safety apparatus will worsen the violation of the rights of the weakest, because crime will increase. And the kind of crime that is likely to increase is not simply the kind of victimless crime or crime of circumstances (stealing when one can’t afford food, for example) that abolitionists tend to focus on. Nearly half of the people held in American prisons and jails are there for offenses legally classified as violent. Poverty breeds crime, and it quite often breeds violent crime.

There is overwhelming evidence that police, and the threat of imprisonment they carry, do prevent crime. Much of this evidence is presented in social-scientific studies that can be intimidating for lay readers, but the basic line of reasoning is clear enough: people who commit crimes respond to incentives like anyone else, and when the costs of committing a crime rise (because, for example, it is likelier that the perpetrator will get caught), people commit fewer crimes. Police, through both their simple presence in areas where crimes are committed and their role in solving crimes after the fact, raise the likelihood of being caught, which leads to people committing fewer crimes.

Abolitionists often respond to this line of argument with their own, which is that it is policing itself that causes the violent crime that it is supposed to prevent. For example, it is often argued that the criminalization of recreational drugs creates a market in which participants must use violence to protect their market and enforce payment. Therefore, abolitionists contend, if drugs were decriminalized, violence would decline and the market for these drugs would be like markets for legal goods.

While the logic here is coherent, the implications of this argument are not at all favorable to abolitionists. After all, the reason that most markets are conducted without violence is that participants’ property rights and contracts are enforced by the coercive apparatus of the state. Abolitionists imagine that abolition will lead to the market for drugs becoming like the market for televisions, but the very logic of their argument implies the result will be the opposite — without any state monopoly on coercive power, the market for televisions would become like the market for drugs. In other words, it will be subject to rule by the strongest.

Rule by the strongest isn’t simply a problem for potential victims of crime. It’s also a threat to those who commit crimes. A state apparatus can be bureaucratically regulated, such that even if a victim’s family feels the sentence a court imposes is too lenient, there is little they can do about the situation without becoming offenders themselves. But in a situation where the state abdicates its role in coercion, victims and their families are bound by no such institutional framework, and the law of vengeance, itself a form of rule by the strongest, becomes the default. The law of the weakest protects the accused as well, but in order for it to obtain, the state must still retain the apparatus of law.

As such, carceral minimalism contends that the coercive apparatus of the state should be radically reduced rather than abolished, in order to protect the rights of the weakest.

The second major difference with abolitionism concerns how the rights of the weakest can be secured in steps two and three of criminal law — that is, trial and confinement. Abolitionists are committed to tearing down the apparatus of both courts and prisons. Many even argue that any increase in the institutional footprint of these structures, such as increasing the number of public defenders or increasing spending on prisons, only legitimizes them and makes them harder to eliminate.

Carceral minimalists, by contrast, argue that the law of the weakest will often require devoting more resources to penal institutions. Take prisons. American prisons are plagued by violence, including sexual violence. This violence is an outrageous violation of the rights of the incarcerated. But all the evidence suggests that what is needed to prevent this violence is more resources spent per prisoner — a demand entirely compatible with, and in fact easiest to meet alongside, a far smaller prison population.

From the shamefully incomplete data we have on the subject, it appears that Florida prisons are some of the worst in the country for sexual violence against inmates. Florida is also one of the states that spends the very least per prisoner (on an age-adjusted basis). Internationally, we observe a similar pattern. Northern European prisons are significantly less violent than American ones, in part because the ratio of prison staff to prisoners is about one-to-one. In the United States, it’s between one-to-two and one-to-five, depending on the state. In Brazil, where prisons are far more violent than even the United States, it’s about one-to-seven. The conclusion is inescapable: ensuring safety for prisoners requires considerable expenditure.

Abolitionists might object that this ignores that prison staff themselves are a frequent source of violence, and one unlikely to be solved by hiring more staff. It’s true that violence against prisoners by staff is rampant in American prisons. From the best data we have, it’s roughly as prevalent as violence by fellow inmates. But looking internationally, we can see that countries that spend considerably more resources per prisoner can do a much better job protecting prisoners’ rights.

In Norway, violence against inmates by staff is considerably less common. Part of this is training. Norwegian prison officers receive two years of paid training, and most have attended some college. In California, officers receive thirteen weeks of training. Another component is smaller prisons, which allow more relationship-building between staff and inmates. Both of these cost more money than the American way of incarceration.

None of this is to say that more spending per prisoner is sufficient to secure prisoners’ rights. It is perfectly possible to spend more without improving the lot of the incarcerated. And the issue of staff violence against inmates also illustrates the need for effective discipline of staff, a bureaucratic feature not directly tied to funding. But the differences in prisons both in the United States and internationally suggest insistently that it is impossible to secure the rights of the incarcerated without spending much more per prisoner than the United States currently does. Calls to defund the prisons will do little to protect the people inside them.

There is much that abolitionists and carceral minimalists agree on. The American justice system is a concatenation of human rights abuses, from the failure to protect the lives of the poorest people against violence to rampant, unjustifiable violence committed by agents of the state to the warehousing of huge numbers of people in institutions that violate their rights daily.

Minimalists would also argue that the policing and punishment apparatus of the state must be shrunk and softened. While, as Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani have argued, it is difficult to imagine the United States achieving Norway-like prison conditions without building a Norway-like welfare state, it is clear that there is room for reform even within the confines of this country’s benighted political economy. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of states released large numbers of prisoners to maintain public health in prisons, and the best evidence suggests that this scale of release (generally between 5 and 10 percent of the incarcerated population) did not increase crime.

There are two consequences that follow for carceral minimalism. First, whatever the limits of reform under capitalism may be, we have not yet reached them. Further work to reduce the prison population by reducing sentence length or using alternatives to incarceration (from fines to community service) must be pursued. Second, in order for the American criminal justice system to live up to the demands of the law of the weakest, a broader challenge to the power of American capitalism is necessary.

It’s a vision of criminal justice that is both achievable in the short term and congruent with socialists’ deepest values.

But the globe is not a single, smooth, uniform space. The people of the world are not subject to a single administrative entity, set of laws, or police force. Nor are they under the authority of an undifferentiated class of rulers.

The planet is instead divided into many distinct political units that have largely taken the form of nation-states. It is precisely these independent nation-states that have assumed primary responsibility for maintaining domination in the world today. This doesn’t mean that the state is the only source of domination, but rather that states are the main enforcers in this inegalitarian world.

Whether one fights racism, patriarchy, or capitalism, one will ultimately have to confront the laws, police, courts, and prisons of the state. Since state power is distributed across so many different nation-states, the fight for emancipation takes the form of a multiplicity of different struggles within and against each of the many different nation-states across the globe.

This is one of the reasons why the Left has historically tended to speak of “internationalism” rather than, for example, “cosmopolitanism.” The term is a reminder that the ambition to remake the world has to take into account the unavoidable reality that the main political units of the existing world order are nation-states. Even in today’s supposedly globalized world, replete as it is with NGOs, military pacts, transnational corporations, and international institutions, the path to the planetary has to pass through a confrontation with the nation-state.

Internationalism is not a moral injunction to help those in need, and neither is it a single ready-made strategy for freeing the world. It instead names the wide range of political problems that emerge from the tension between needing to make change on a global scale and having to strategically take the many nation-states of the world as the primary battlefields.

No nation-state has ever governed a single coherent populace. This is largely because states were historically imposed on already heterogeneous populations. These people did not cross into the new nation-states; the recently invented borders of these nation-states “crossed” them.

These nation-states can never be hermetically sealed: millions of people regularly traverse their borders, and many countries are home to immigrants from other states. This adds to the fundamental heterogeneity at the heart of every nation-state. Quite a few countries are now largely composed of people whose ancestors were born in other parts of the world.

Since every state is home to a diverse population, meaningful emancipatory change depends on finding ways to bring different people together in common struggle — people who were born in different nation-states, who speak different languages, reside in different places, live in different communities, and care about different issues.

Yet the ruling bloc in every country always strives to prevent that unity from being forged. Division is how rulers maintain their domination, and the most effective way to accomplish disunity is to mobilize invented political categories such as race, nationality, or especially citizenship to transform these real differences into insurmountable divisions.

Today the ruling blocs that govern the countries of the world are attempting to neutralize popular discontent by channeling political anger into xenophobic nativism. This strategy can even turn immigrants against one another, including those from the same country. The United States is probably the best example of this, but it is by no means unique.

In this way, one can say that internationalism begins within the nation-state itself. Each nation-state governs a heterogeneous population and legally recodes these differences as ones of nationality. Since these “national” divisions are used to turn people against one another within a fundamentally “multinational” state, effective political work within a nation-state is always already international.

In addition to impeding unification within a given nation-state, the partition of the globe into national borders, national identities, and nation-states make it much harder to organize a unified movement across borders. Although these sharp divisions do not turn everyone into a xenophobe, they tend to narrow the political horizon in a way that encourages people in any given country to prioritize domestic issues over international ones.

This is especially true in the heartlands of insulated imperialist countries such as the United States, where the political system is designed to cultivate a culture of ruthless individualism. If people in these countries do become politicized, it is often — though of course not always — because developments within their own nation-state have had a direct impact on their lives. Gas prices are increasing, groceries are becoming too expensive, employers are monitoring their social media accounts, unprecedented floods are damaging their home, or immigration police are disrupting their neighborhoods.

These are all legitimate reasons to turn to leftist politics, and they are deeply entangled with global processes. But the internationalist dimensions of these grievances are deliberately obscured. The challenge is to connect the dots.

Those who care about emancipation have to explain that local issues are rooted in a global context, and therefore can only be solved globally. They have to convince people that what happens abroad does affect them, and so their fate is bound up with millions of people they will never meet.

Once people choose to concern themselves with struggles elsewhere, there is a great deal they can do to help. In almost every case, those who fight oppression and domination will find themselves sorely outgunned by the ruling bloc in their state. This bloc controls vast arsenals, trained police forces, overflowing war chests, and extensive media apparatuses.

Solidarity can shift the balance of power. It can help comrades fighting in other countries feel that they are not alone. It can spread the word about their struggles, focus the international spotlight on the injustices that they face, and prevent other states from intervening. It can supply them with funds, information, equipment, training, bases, advisers, even volunteers.

The best way to help struggles abroad, however, is not just to provide aid, but also to wage struggles at home. When antiwar activists in the 1960s asked what they could do to help the people of Vietnam, Vietnamese revolutionaries used to say: make revolution in your own country. Che Guevara famously translated this idea as creating “two, three, many Vietnams.” Solidarity is not simply about lending a hand to people struggling elsewhere but multiplying struggles at home.

If the only way to change the world is to wage struggles in the many different nation-states that make up the globe, then the question is how to coordinate this plurality of struggles. Different countries have different laws, histories, popular cultures, intellectual traditions, state systems, organizations, institutions, economies, and political forces. Each country, in other words, has its own distinct terrain of struggle, which in turn informs how struggles there will develop.

This is not to say that struggles in different countries are completely closed off from one another. Those involved in such struggles are almost always aware of one another, and sometimes in touch. But the unification of these heterogenous struggles on so many distinct national terrains into a common international movement is never a given. How can the Left coordinate them?

Leftists are not the only ones who have organized across borders. The ruling blocs of the various states have also historically coordinated their efforts, especially when faced with revolutionary threats.

The challenge of communism after World War II, for instance, compelled the many different ruling blocs of the world to put aside their differences and assist one another. To contain the common threat, they established a number of interstate economic, financial, diplomatic, and military alliances coordinated by the United States.

Many of these rulers willingly accepted US leadership as the primary guardian of the inegalitarian capitalist world order. The United States not only created the conditions for the endless expansion of capitalism, but also propped up vulnerable states fending off liberation struggles, directly intervened against emancipatory movements, and overthrew revolutionaries after they seized power.

The United States is no longer as powerful as it once was, but it is still the dominant military force in the world, and it still has the ability, and will, to intervene anywhere in the world to crush emancipatory struggles. So long as this US-led imperialist alliance exists, emancipatory struggles everywhere will be imperiled.

Even if leftists succeed in bringing down a repressive state, they will still be menaced by coups, sanctions, sabotage, air strikes, and diplomatic isolation. The need to survive these threats will likely force them to adopt draconian measures, which will in turn undermine their emancipatory aims. This might lead them to restrict civil liberties to prevent subversion, reallocate limited resources into defense, and treat dissent as conspiracies organized from abroad.

What, then, must leftists across the world do to successfully hold off the inevitable onslaught of this US-led imperial alliance?

Although virtually every ruling bloc today is committed to preventing a future without domination, and although these blocs often coordinate to keep emancipatory movements everywhere at bay, this does not mean they are on the best of terms. One of the functions of the postwar US-led imperial alliance was to impose discipline on these constantly competing ruling blocs so that they could better resist the common menace of emancipatory movements. Today that alliance is fracturing, and wars between rival ruling blocs are becoming more frequent.

Moreover, there are some nation-states today that are capitalist, patriarchal, inegalitarian, and in some cases authoritarian but which nevertheless oppose the United States and its imperial alliance. This presents a dilemma for those committed to universal emancipation. On the one hand, the goal of ending all domination requires the overthrow of these inegalitarian states, even if they happen to reject US imperial hegemony. On the other hand, the United States remains the single greatest threat to emancipatory movements everywhere.

Although leftists are presently too weak to decisively intervene in these interstate rivalries, their internationalist commitments raise the question of how they should relate to such thorny political situations. Does supporting popular uprisings against states at odds with the United States inadvertently create pretexts for Washington to invade their countries? Does the need to resist the shared enemy of US imperialism end up giving succor to these inegalitarian anti-US regimes? Is there another way out?

The nation-state is incompatible with emancipation. The state’s primary function is to maintain the inegalitarian status quo, which it does by sustaining the ruling bloc, absorbing internal challenges, repressing liberation struggles, dividing the populace, and extinguishing the space for political experimentation. Anyone who fights for emancipation must therefore find a way out of the nation-state.

Internationalism therefore points to a final fundamental strategic problem inherent to emancipatory politics today. As Richard Seymour summarizes: universal emancipation means overcoming the state, but the division of the world into sovereign nation-states means strategically taking those states as the principal site of struggle.