Since July 2026, the war in Yemen has resumed at a fiercer and more destructive tempo than its original outbreak in 2015. Fighting on the ground is costing hundreds of lives, mainly among the Huthi troops whose leaders are sending waves of young and inexperienced fighters, many of whom were forcibly recruited, to the front lines in pursuit of their offensive.

Fighting continues in the northern areas of Marib and Sa’ada bordering Saudi Arabia. In early September, Ansar Allah took control of the southern part of the Yemeni coast, including both the Bab al-Mandab Strait and Mokha. It achieved this rapid victory thanks to three main factors: its own command efficiency, continued division and lack of coordination among its opponents, and the use of advanced technology, including artificial intelligence misinformation systems.

The period since the 2022 truce allowed the Huthis to strengthen and improve their strategy and acquire even more sophisticated weaponry. Their intervention against Israel between late 2023 and 2025 gave them an international popularity boost. Links and support from Hezbollah and Iran contributed to their military skills, assisted by the purchase of advanced technological elements on the international market.

They have also benefited from AI advances, as was demonstrated recently by their attempted use of Anthropic’s Claude to develop a missile and then to identify the cause of its failure. The Huthis have long since demonstrated the absurdity of dismissing their movement as a bunch of wild, sandal-wearing tribesmen armed with handguns.

Partly as a consequence of the military battering suffered in 2025 from the fifty-two-day US bombing campaign and a number of well-targeted Israeli air strikes, Ansar Allah initially chose to stay on the sidelines of the US-Israeli war against Iran. It expressed support for Iran but only launched a few missiles against Israel in late March, thus maintaining the image of being anti-Israeli rather than pro-Iran.

It is only since the breakdown of the “Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding” in late June that the Huthis have taken an active role in the Red Sea. Instead of closing the Bab al-Mandab Strait altogether, following Iranian statements that this option was an additional weapon in the struggle to control the world hydrocarbon market, the Huthis limited their blockade to Saudi shipping. They made a mutual nonaggression deal with the United States, stating that they would not interfere with shipping from any other country.

One should note that this implies Israeli shipping is also welcome to use the Red Sea, contrary to the Huthi basic slogan “Death to America, Death to Israel!” and raising questions about their ideological commitments. Between March and July, the Saudis had transferred most of their oil exports through the East–West Pipeline to reach the sea, thus minimizing the disruption to their trade resulting from the Gulf blockades.

Attacks on Saudi shipping in August reduced the amount of oil exported from Saudi Arabia’s Yanbu port from five million barrels per day to fewer than two million. This was in addition to the considerable additional cost and time needed to reach the East Asian market, as oil has to be transported all the way around Africa. This has contributed to the world oil crisis.

The Huthis had a number of reasons to initiate the fighting at this time. The twenty million people under their rule are suffering worsening poverty due to the growing economic impact of the US designation of Ansar Allah as a “foreign terrorist organization.” This has been combined with the almost complete withdrawal of humanitarian aid to Huthi-ruled areas.

Although popular suffering is not a major motivation for Ansar Allah, poverty reduces potential sources of taxation, which is needed to finance military salaries and the purchase of weaponry. The closer relationship of Saudi Arabia with the IRG that followed the exclusion of Emirati-backed southern separatists in early 2026 was also an emerging threat. This was linked to efforts to overcome the remaining divisions within IRG-linked forces.

Internationally, the Huthis were concerned about Saudi Arabia’s nascent initiatives, such as the Mecca Defence Alliance with Pakistan and Turkey and the Multinational Maritime Defense Coalition. The latter is a defensive naval alliance formed in July 2026 to protect shipping, international trade, and energy supply lines from Huthi attacks.

The international situation will also have encouraged Huthi leaders, suggesting to them that neither the United States nor Israel was likely to focus on Yemen or Saudi Arabia while preoccupied with forthcoming elections and their ongoing, stalemated wars. Combined with a widespread sense of exhaustion over the “no war, no peace” situation, this will have motivated the Huthis to go on the attack while they were still clearly the stronger military entity.

In July, the Saudis bombed the runway of Sana’a airport to prevent an Iranian aircraft from landing. Ansar Allah used this as a pretext to justify escalation. It demanded an end to all blockades on Yemen and described Saudi Arabia as its main enemy, reviving the decade-old discourse and barely mentioning its Yemeni opponents.

Starting in August, the offensive rapidly shifted from the better-defended Marib region, where the Huthis had failed to break through prior to the truce, to the southern Red Sea coast. Their rapid successes here made it possible to take Mokha and reach the Bab al-Mandab Strait and its islands by September 10.

Although fighting persists in Marib and Saada, the main focus is now Taiz governorate and its capital, which is under siege and suffering both military and humanitarian emergencies. While conditions in Taiz are extreme, the city reflects a wider pattern of IRG fragmentation and offers the best site from which to examine Yemen’s political divisions.

Taiz has been the focus of fighting between the Huthis and their opponents throughout the decade, with parts of the city and governorate under the control of either side. Long considered the country’s intellectual capital, it is home to the strongest elements of all political forces, from Salafis at one extreme to the Yemeni Socialist Party at the other, as well as a multiplicity of armed groups.

As well as resisting the Huthis for the past decade, these forces have also fought against each other. At different times, military groups connected with al-Qaeda, the Islah party, Tareq Saleh’s National Resistance forces, and other elements have fought for control of the city and its sources of income. Today, in the face of a possible complete takeover by the Huthis, their opponents face an urgent need to overcome these differences.

The rapid failure of Saudi-backed IRG forces in September came as a shock. Lack of coordination into a single effective command and rivalries between units demonstrated that the process of military restructuring that had been implemented since February was far from complete.

As elsewhere in Yemen, patience was running thin with the “no war, no peace” situation, and the IRG was getting ready for the resumption of fighting. In response to the Huthi offensive, it launched the “Dawn of Yemen” counteroffensive in early October. This move successfully recovered some territory in the vicinity of the strait, but it has stalled without being able to break the siege of Taiz, despite some gains in the far north.

There is no doubt that the IRG seriously underestimated Huthi technological capacities, and it may also have failed to develop its own skills in that sector. The absence of ground-based cadres certainly contributes to strategic failures, such as the one that resulted in the massacre of seventy-three new recruits and the wounding of more than two hundred in Shabwa on October 19.

The “Dawn of Yemen” offensive aims to defeat the Huthis. To achieve that task, it would require unity, a sophisticated overall perspective, and preparations for a long-term struggle. Yemenis throughout the country desperately long for an end to the war with a reasonable agreement that would allow them to focus on recovery and development.

The IRG is not the Saudi mercenary force that the Huthis speak of in their propaganda. But it cannot win the war on its own for both financial and political reasons, so it needs Saudi backing. Unfortunately, Saudi political influence remains a fundamental feature of the scene in Yemen that we cannot ignore.

Ansar Allah has also been launching missile attacks on Saudi Arabia that are regular and often lethal. This has had a considerable impact on the Saudi economy. The latest highly publicized international event to have been postponed to better days was the annual “Davos in the Desert” investment conference. This followed a series of less prominent cancellations, all of which have affected the regime’s reputation and its ability to attract investment.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman must bitterly regret his initial decision to go to war against the Huthis in 2015 and has been trying to extricate his country from the Yemen quagmire since 2020. Negotiators were close to reaching a deal in late 2023, but the Gaza genocide and the US-Israeli war against Iran put paid to those efforts. While Iran is unlikely to be directly responsible for Huthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, the contribution of those attacks to pressure on world hydrocarbon supplies helps Tehran in its stand-off with the United States.

In the long run, Saudi vulnerability also weakens its potential for regional domination. The kingdom’s malaise has revealed the failure of the massive bribes it has dispensed over the course of decades to buy support in its hour of need. In spite of the recent international agreements, the rulers of Egypt and Pakistan are only offering limited assistance.

British and French contributions will not change the course of the war, and the billions Riyadh has promised to Trump have not persuaded Washington to throw its weight on the scales. Having spent billions more on high-tech weaponry, mostly from the United States, the Saudi military finds itself unable to stop Huthi missiles, due to a lack of interceptors and the vastness of their country. Saudi Arabia now stands alone, facing the Huthis directly within its borders.

Saudi Arabia’s experience since 2015 has confirmed that air strikes alone do not win a war. This has certainly contributed to the regime’s hesitation about deploying its military in Yemen once again — a military that already has a reputation as a “parade” force. But the IRG ground forces will need aerial support if they are going to reverse the Huthi gains of recent months.

Huthi calls for major financial and political concessions from the Saudi regime become more and more unrealistic as they continue their strikes on Saudi infrastructure, raising the issue of Ansar Allah’s objectives. The dilemma for the Saudi regime worsens by the day: if it wants to reach a deal with the Huthis, that will require unacceptable and unfeasible concessions, but if it continues launching air strikes against their forces in Yemen, there will be more retaliation against targets within the kingdom.

It is difficult to see Iran’s offer to mediate with the Huthis as anything other than an attempt to persuade the Saudis to make major concessions. Quiet mediation by Oman is also unlikely to achieve much while the Huthis believe they are on a winning streak. Meanwhile, millions of Yemenis are now in a state of deepening crisis, with hunger and the lack of medical supplies compounded by the risk of bombing, and without any end or hope in sight.

Vancouver’s housing crisis formed the backdrop to COPE’s victory. More than half of the city’s households rent. In 2021, approximately 39 percent of renter households spent at least 30 percent of their income on shelter, while roughly one-quarter were in core housing need: their homes were unaffordable, unsuitable, or inadequate, and they could not afford acceptable alternatives. The problem extends beyond the poorest residents. Even relatively well-paid workers can struggle to find housing near their jobs, while homeownership is increasingly out of reach for younger people. Economic insecurity has become a defining feature of everyday life in the city.

ABC Vancouver came to power promising to address the problem by speeding up approvals and building more housing. Its administration can point to real increases in housing approvals and rental development. But more construction hasn’t made Vancouver affordable for many of the people who need homes.

In September 2026, a report found that more than five thousand completed condominiums across Metro Vancouver remained unsold, with an estimated value of $4.45 billion. The chasm between new housing and what people can afford was stark. Mayor Ken Sim’s city council also shuttered the Vancouver Renters Office, which provided resources and information on tenant rights and how to navigate the legal system.

Homelessness also increased in Vancouver under ABC. In contrast, COPE’s platform called for the city to acquire existing apartment buildings and convert them into permanently affordable public housing and co-ops. It also proposed a tax on properties worth more than $5 million to fund efforts to end homelessness, tripling the Empty Homes Tax, as well as stronger tenant protections. It put housing and care at the center of its strategy to respond to the city’s interlocking problems.

That emphasis was particularly significant in the Downtown Eastside, where COPE has historically maintained a strong base. The neighborhood has been at the center of Vancouver’s overlapping problems of poverty, housing insecurity, and drug poisoning. Its residents have endured these conditions through successive governments that have promised to restore order without providing the necessary housing and care.

On Election Day, volunteers reportedly knocked on more than ten thousand doors. The campaign gave voters a positive vision of the city, championing socialized housing, public grocers, and expanded public services like Wi-Fi, libraries, and washrooms. Its “Fight for Vancouver” platform set out a high-level road map.

The slogan, “Evict Ken Sim,” aimed at the outgoing right-wing mayor, became a meme, appearing in art, on buttons dotting the city, and on campaign merch like T-shirts. COPE’s younger candidates, including Solomon Yi-Kieran, Vancouver’s youngest-ever city councilor, and Chloe Leslie, brought passion and vitality to the party’s communications. Rather than imitating Zohran Mamdani’s style, they drew on Vancouver’s own culture, making high-energy, often playful social media videos.

The new council has an opportunity to reverse some of ABC’s policies and pursue shared progressive priorities. But a progressive majority is not the same thing as a socialist government, and the parties will not necessarily agree on how to use their power. COPE’s platform went much further than the Greens’ on important questions of public ownership and the role of municipal government. Its proposals for public acquisition of housing and taxes on high-value properties went beyond simply making private development easier.

The question is how much of this agenda COPE can persuade its coalition partners to adopt. Will the new council commit to a more ambitious public housing program? Will it restore tenant protections and supportive-housing investments? Will it redirect resources toward public services?

Just as important is how COPE will maintain its independent political identity while participating in a governing coalition. Building a movement from outside city hall can be easier than sustaining it once its representatives become responsible for budgets, compromises, and the day-to-day operations of government.

COPE’s members now have to decide how to use their electoral mandate. They can negotiate for improvements inside the council while continuing to organize tenants, workers, and neighborhoods to demand more from the new administration. The two approaches can complement and strengthen one another: COPE’s ability to mobilize people outside city hall may determine how much it can achieve inside.

The challenge will be to keep the routines of municipal government from displacing the organizing that made the victory possible. Sean Orr, first elected in a 2025 by-election, has demonstrated that he can be a serious legislator as well as an organizer; COPE’s new batch of councilors can draw on his experience as they orient themselves to the workings of city hall.

The coalition also faces a profound public safety challenge. Ken Sim’s council majority put two nonbinding plebiscites on the ballot: one asked whether the city should toughen laws against open-air hard drug use in public spaces; the other asked whether the city should push the province to create a secure medical facility with voluntary as well as one-hundred-plus involuntary beds. Voters backed both questions by roughly 68 percent.

COPE and the Greens opposed putting the question to a vote, but the results largely refute any claim that the new progressive majority has a clear mandate to counter these proposals. It is very likely that some of the same people who voted for COPE voted yes to the plebiscites. Vancouver has been at the center of Canada’s overdose crisis, and the incoming council will be responsible for addressing conflicting expectations about the best way to respond to visible street-level poverty, public drug use, and complex mental health and addiction challenges.

COPE will have to demonstrate that an approach rooted in housing, harm reduction, and public services can address residents’ concerns without abandoning its commitments to the people most affected by the crisis. The election does not resolve these questions. It makes them more urgent.

One part of COPE’s rebuild was reconnecting members with the party’s history. Organizers made a slideshow of its victories since its founding in the 1960s, giving members a sense of that history and purpose. From declaring Vancouver a nuclear-weapon-free zone to Sean Orr establishing an arts and culture land trust, COPE exists in a long line of struggles for better housing, care, and socialism in the city.

On October 17, the members gathered in a packed auditorium had good reason to pop champagne bottles, sing, and celebrate. They had done something many thought impossible. Socialism was back in Vancouver.

The price of bonds issued for the borrowing that undergirds the build-out of data centers has sharply dropped in recent months, as has the bond price for “neocloud companies,” middleman firms that provide the computing power for AI firms who may not have their own data centers. The largest of these neoclouds, CoreWeave, recently saw its bonds enter distressed territory.

What does that mean? In short, that investors are suddenly abandoning the AI-related debt they’d happily financed until just a few months ago when it seemed like a great investment, because they’re starting to suspect these firms are not actually going to end up being able to pay it off. Nearly half of the bonds raised this year to finance data center projects by some of the biggest tech firms are now rated “junk.”

At the same time, the market for credit default swaps (CDSs) for AI is booming, with the value traded of CDSs linked to major AI firms having more than quadrupled between July and September. Made famous by their role in the 2008 financial crisis, CDSs are basically insurance against future debt defaults, another sign of investor doubt that AI industry firms are actually good for the money they’ve borrowed to fund their build-out.

To put it plainly: the people who move money around for a living are starting to have serious doubts about how sustainable the AI boom actually is, and we know they are not because they’re just saying so, but because they’re making financial decisions as if they are.

What’s changed to bring this shift about? A number of things, including the fact that, some voices in the financial world now are saying so.

The AI industry’s current unprofitability was acceptable as long as it seemed plausible that, at some unspecified future date, this technology would actually start making money. But a spate of recent news and analysis has underscored the fantastical math behind AI firms’ accounting.

According to one highly cited Brookings Institution paper, the colossal amounts of money already being plowed into the AI build-out mean that US consumers and businessses will need to spend enough on the technology by 2032 to generate $3.5 trillion worth of revenue, or just shy of 9 percent of the country’s GDP, to make good on it. There is quite literally no precedent for this in American history — the railroad boom involved capital spending more than an entire percentage point of US GDP smaller than the AI build-out. According to the Wall Street Journal, that would mean the nation spending around the same amount every year on AI as it currently does for food, or seven times the amount it spends on the internet, phones, and other communications combined.

Needless to say, this looks unlikely.

Last month, the chief economist of asset management firm Apollo pointed out the wide gulf between the huge future operating cash flow that analysts are expecting for the tech sector specifically, and the much smaller future operating cash flow analysts are expecting for companies in other sectors. In other words, the businesses that are in theory meant to be the tech world’s customers are not even seriously expected to have the money on hand that tech firms are boasting they will extract from them.

Someone’s math here is off, and it’s reasonable to assume that it’s the AI firms’. Years of overoptimistic revenue projections and consistent money-losing from the sector were dramatically illustrated earlier this month when one prominent firm, Character.ai, filed for bankruptcy. In its filing, the company revealed that it had been losing around $8–9 million per month over the course of this year — which it said was an improvement from previous years — and that its subscription revenue had only ever been a fraction of the amount it was spending on the computing needed to run its AI.

These fears were heightened by some bad news around several high-profile AI firm initial public offerings (IPOs), when a privately held company starts selling its shares to the general public for the first time.

First, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, delayed its IPO over internal worries that it might end up a flop, because retail investors — basically, you and I if we got into the stock market — may not actually end up as eager to buy its shares as they hoped. Among the reasons why were general market uncertainty caused by the Iran war, growing skepticism toward AI, a spate of damaging headlines about the technology’s safety issues, and a stagnated user base for ChatGPT. The company has now had to pare back its valuation for its latest round of funding due to a palpable drop in enthusiasm from investors.

Meanwhile, Claude’s maker Anthropic has made headlines for a prospectus — the document put out by a firm going public that explains the business and lays out its financial reality for possible investors — that has seemed to prove true every worry just laid out about AI’s business model. The latest version of the document, obtained by the Wall Street Journal this week, showed the firm posted a more than $80 billion loss this year, while its spending on computing and infrastructure is exponentially ballooning, its demand for computing capacity outstrips what is available, and its list of possible risk factors are longer than the company description.

One of those risk factors has become a major general concern for AI investors: the growing public hatred of data centers and the push to restrict or even outright stop their continuing construction. Popular distaste for data centers cuts across party and ideological lines and has become a central issue in the upcoming midterm elections, making it more likely a government clampdown on them intensifies.

Just in the first half of this year, environmental activists and local residents have blocked more than a hundred data centers worth roughly $198 billion in capital. That included a major project of Oracle’s in New Mexico that pushed the company into declaring force majeure — meaning, tear up a contract because of an unforeseen act of God — after having already spent millions.

This is yet another, and an especially big, reason for investors in AI to worry they’re not going to get their money back. For AI companies to have any hope of meeting their already unrealistic revenue goals, data centers have to be built somewhere; but voters across the country are vehemently opposed to having them built in their neighborhoods, because they find them noisy, intrusive, harmful to the environment, and have a habit of driving up their electricity bills. So they’re organizing to have them restricted or outright banned, which is what they have done in more than five hundred counties and municipalities. Something will have to give here.

That’s not to mention investor fears that they could be left holding the bag on data center debt. The Brookings study mentioned earlier estimates the AI data center build-out will cost a total of $10.3 trillion by 2032; market research firm Gartner estimates that AI data center owners will have to generate a staggering $8.5 trillion in revenue through 2030 to cover the build-out while making a decent return. These are enormous sums behind something that is being financed largely by massive and rapidly growing levels of borrowing.

On top of this is the fact that the chips AI firms rely on, and which they spend billions of dollars on, are becoming obsolete quicker and quicker — much more rapidly than the lifespan many of these companies initially budgeted for. It’s another case of wishful accounting by the industry, and another reason to worry for investors, since borrowing by AI firms is often secured on the back of chips that will lose their value before the lifetime of the loan is up.

So it’s no wonder that investors are now souring on AI and hedging their bets in anticipation of a bubble bursting. That could come sooner than we think: Oracle, considered a “bellwether” for the wider AI credit market, has seen its bonds downgraded to just above junk status. One economist believes that if its bonds ever do hit that nadir, it would be a “sign of contagion” for the sector more widely.

The stakes here are high. By some estimates, AI is now a leading pillar of the economy, making a bigger contribution to GDP growth than the dot-com bubble did in 2000 before it burst, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. So any AI slowdown would likely affect the wider economy, particularly the construction industry, where it’s driving a blue-collar job boom.

But maybe more important are the ripple effects it could have on the financial system. The Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund have both singled out the shoddy economics behind the AI boom as a potential threat to global financial stability.

Jason Thomas, the head of investment firm Carlyle Group’s global research and investment strategy, has warned repeatedly that he sees similarities between AI project financing and the subprime mortgage crisis. Lenders right now are not giving out money based on the economics of a project itself, he said, but on the ability of the firm sponsoring the project to swallow the liabilities if need be — similar to what they were doing in the years leading up to the 2008 crash. He warned that, given this, investors have far too much exposure to the industry than they should to breathe easy.

What’s notable about this is that Thomas isn’t just an analyst, but has skin in the game: the firm he works for, Carlyle, is heavily invested in the AI sector.

Tied up in this risk is the fact that many AI firms are building data centers without adequate insurance, since the projects are simply too expensive, complex, and risky for many insurers to take on, leaving the companies building data centers on the hook for what could be billions of dollars of losses if something derails their construction. Also tied up in it is the $3 trillion private credit industry, or what used to be called “shadow banking”: the private equity firms, asset managers, and other nonbank entities whose systemic risks have long worried financial analysts, since they act like banks but without any of the accompanying regulation, oversight, and government backstops.

This doesn’t mean that a 2008-style crisis is necessarily in the cards. There is an ongoing debate about the level of risk AI poses to wider financial stability, and there are some experts who believe AI’s contribution to the US economy is overstated. We won’t know exactly what the end of the AI boom will look like or how badly it will affect the rest of us until such a thing happens.

But it does seem implausible at this point to believe it won’t mean at least some significant amount of pain for US workers and households more generally.

What we can safely say is that the math behind both AI firms’ business model and their future fiscal projections simply don’t add up, and that we can be sure of this because the people who have actual money on the line — investors, bond traders, insurers — are acting like it. Despite the supposed rationality of markets and the private sector, the AI boom is looking more and more like yet another historical episode where herd thinking and hype is driving the high-risk decisions of private capital.

Beyond everything else, it’s a colossal waste of money. The gargantuan sums we’re talking about are comparable to what we should have started spending years ago on the renewable energy transition in order to prevent a climate catastrophe — a catastrophe that the AI build-out, perversely, is making worse.

Instead, because this money is concentrated in private hands, these resources are being plowed into an industry that doesn’t actually make money and seems to be built on wishful thinking. We see a similar thing happening in China, where, because these decisions are made similarly undemocratically, vast sums are also thrown into one big bet on AI while the rest of the economy stagnates.

If this all does fall apart and the ripple effects of that collapse are as bad as some predict, it’s more than likely that taxpayers will be asked to foot the bill for another bailout. If and when that time comes, remember that there were umpteen warning signs and that it all could have been avoided.

Chris Wickham was born on May 18, 1950, into a middle-class family in the Welsh village of Rossett. He attended a private school in Somerset, England, before beginning his studies at the University of Oxford in 1968, from which he graduated in 1971. During these years, he frequently traveled to Italy, becoming familiar with its early medieval landscape.

When he decided to undertake postgraduate research at Oxford, Wickham departed from the themes that were predominant at that time in British medieval studies, such as Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian France. He focused instead on early medieval Italy with a thesis titled “Economy and Society in Eighth-Century Northern Tuscany,” which he completed in 1975.

After his PhD, he continued to teach at Oxford, traveling from time to time to Italy, where he started to participate in excavations with eminent archaeologists such as as Graeme Barker, Riccardo Francovich, and Richard Hodges. Fieldwork in Italy was certainly one of the experiences that shaped his approach to history for the rest of his life.

A second turning point in his career was his move to the University of Birmingham in 1977. Although this university no longer reflected the working-class lifeblood of the pre–World War II town, Birmingham still had a far greater number of students from middle-class and working-class backgrounds than Oxford and Cambridge did in the 1970s and ’80s.

Rodney Hilton, the most renowned historian of the medieval English peasantry, also taught there. Hilton belonged to the group of British Marxist historians that included such figures as E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm. Their work shaped the emergence of history from below from the 1950s onward.

Hilton had an enormous intellectual influence on Wickham as well as on other young scholars, like the Byzantine historian John Haldon and the social scientist Gregor McLennan. They were all involved in politics, and Haldon and Wickham both joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Hilton had also been a party member before he resigned in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. By the 1970s, the CPGB was rather more critical of the USSR and had condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Given his ties to Italy, Wickham also became a member of the much larger Italian Communist Party, which he saw as a model because of its history and ideas. Unfortunately, the effort of this small group of historians and militants to push the CPGB toward a Eurocommunist trajectory failed, and they all left the party before the end of the 1980s.

In our numerous conversations, Haldon very fondly recalled the meetings at Hilton’s house where the junior participants presented their Marxist interpretations of history to their severe but open-minded host. Hilton’s circle was a true laboratory of ideas in the 1980s.

In this cultural milieu, Wickham began to revise the dogmatic Marxist approach to medieval history that was still predominant at that time. In two seminal essays published in 1984 (“The Other Transition”) and in 1985 (“The Uniqueness of the East”), Wickham rejected the idea that a contrast between slavery and serfdom marked the transition from the ancient to the medieval world. Instead, he argued that these two historical periods had different political and economic organizations that he called “tributary” and “feudal” modes of production.

In the tributary regime, power was concentrated strongly in the hands of a ruling elite at the top of the political system. Tributary political structures ultimately depended on their capacity to extract sufficient revenues from the agricultural population to fund their centralized machinery of power, such as a court, a bureaucracy, and a salaried army. In feudal societies, in contrast, the means of coercion were in the hands of local landholding elites, with a fragile structure of rule at the top. The crucial factor for exercising power in such political formations was the direct ownership and control of the land.

Wickham also argued that when landlords or the state were not able to appropriate the surplus from the peasantry in a systematic way, an economic organization that he called the “peasant mode of production” became predominant. We can find several examples of such peasant economies in Europe and the Western Mediterranean from the sixth to the eighth centuries. He labeled the period between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Carolingian Empire as a sort of “golden age of the peasantry.”

In the following years, Wickham demonstrated his ability as an unorthodox and open-minded Marxist historian by refining his interpretation on the basis of theoretical dialogue with other scholars as well as the results of his fieldwork. We can find evidence of his intellectual achievements in two monumental volumes written eighteen years apart: Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (2005) and The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180 (2023).

In these works, Wickham rewrote the economic and social history of the Middle Ages, overturning some interpretative paradigms of past historiography, including his own original conception of “modes of production.” He made clear that his reinterpretation of the transitions from one historical period to another was deeply influenced by the theoretical reflections of two members of the Birmingham historical materialism group: John Haldon and the Turkish historian Halil Berktay.

In his new formulation, Wickham used the concept of modes of production exclusively to mark the passage from a preindustrial economic logic to that of capitalism. From this perspective, categories like tributary, feudal, or peasant no longer identified a given mode of production in the traditional Marxist sense. Instead, they referred to specific configurations of the societies predating the advent of capitalism.

Expanding on this new interpretation, Wickham argued that three major cycles — ancient, medieval, and modern — have framed the economic configuration of Western Eurasia and Africa in the last two millennia. Beginning from a unified Mediterranean in the second century BCE under Roman expansion, the ancient trade cycle peaked in the imperial period (first to fourth centuries CE).

From that point, it began its decline in Western Europe around 500: at the same time, the Eastern Mediterranean kept flourishing for at least two centuries, until the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire led to the fragmentation of the Mediterranean economic space. The second Mediterranean trade cycle emerged around 900 in southern and central Mediterranean regions such as Egypt, North Africa, and Sicily. The localization of Mediterranean economic life led to slow but steady growth over the following two centuries, expanding to encompass northern and central Italy in the twelfth century.

The differences between the ancient and medieval periods lie in the varying interventions of the state and landowning elites in the peasant economy: on the one hand, tax-raising by states; on the other, rent-taking by landlords. Their points of convergence “lie in the fact that, in both types of society, the peasant majority controlled the basic production process.” The state and the elites created infrastructures of exchange, but the access of peasants to larger surpluses and, consequently, the market for food and handcrafted goods made it possible for production and commerce to significantly increase.

This means that the scale of production, circulation, and consumption of bulk commodities generated by peasant demand was the most obvious proxy for the level of economic sophistication that ancient and medieval structures attained. Luxury goods historically entered the market only in response to the purchasing power of quantitatively limited elites. In this framework, “states and landlords could affect the production process by demanding different types of taxes or rents, thus curtailing the levels of commercialization of the peasant surpluses. However, they did not have a structural role in production, nor did they exercise forms of direct control over it.”

The start of the third economic cycle on the eve of the modern era saw the economy reorienting itself toward the Atlantic — a factor that historians have typically interpreted as the end of the medieval economy. The trade ties between Europe and the rest of the world greatly expanded in this new economic cycle, bringing with them new types of exploitation. According to Wickham, this final cycle, which gave rise to capitalism, deviated from the economic rationale of the other eras.

It was only at this historical juncture that peasants ultimately lost control of production and were forced to relocate to cities or factory towns, where they struggled to survive as proletarians completely exposed to the fluctuations of the market: “Under capitalism, in fact, capitalists dominate the labor process directly, and the exploitation involved is hidden by the apparently free nature of the wage-labor contract.”

As a historian of the Middle Ages, Wickham was capable of moving from the minute study of local societies to the macroeconomic factors that shaped the world economy in premodern times. After his dissertation on Tuscan rural societies, he continued his research on Italian rural communities, from the countryside surrounding Lucca to the remote areas of Valva and the Biferno Valley in the central Apennines (Studi sulla società degli Appennini nell’Alto Medioevo, 1982; Il problema dell’incastellamento nell’Italia centrale, 1985; The Mountains and the City, 1988).

In these studies, he examined every aspect of people’s lives: How did peasants behave toward local authority figures, from the bishop or the aristocracy to the landlords? What strategies of negotiation or resistance did they undertake in court or on the ground to resist their powerful counterparts? Where did they live, and what did they produce and eat? What did they exchange, and under which conditions did this trade occur?

In essence, the key question Wickham asked in his research was why the society he was investigating worked in the way that it did. To answer this question, he moved to explore comparable communities in the Mediterranean and Europe, from the villages of Aphrodito and Jeme in central and Upper Egypt to those of central Anatolia, and from the interior of the Iberian Peninsula to the large plateau of the Île-de-France.

In Framing, he also invented a village, which he called Malling, to describe the archetypal rural community of Anglo-Saxon England. In a 2017 article, Wickham expanded his range of case studies enormously, even comparing Northern Italy and the Jiangnan region of China from the tenth to thirteenth centuries. As in his previous studies, Wickham concentrates on the structures of production and consumption of these two “highly complex economies by the standards of the period.” As he explains, no matter how global we want to be, “most of the economic interaction lay at local and regional levels.”

The recurrent theme through all these studies was the question of how a small minority of people loosely defined as elite managed to appropriate and channel the wealth produced by the rest of the population — the 90 percent addressed in the work of Kim Bowes — while transforming (or failing to transform) the peasant economy from a local to a global-oriented structure.

In a fascinating interview from 2022 with historians Charles West and Maria Elena Cortese, Wickham revealed that during his formative period at Oxford, he never had someone whom he considered his mentor. He built his scholarship through a massive and at times disordered reading of diverse literature and by exchanging ideas with his peers.

His intellectual formation was the result of a lateral collaboration between students of history rather than a vertical transfer of knowledge from a senior to a junior scholar. Wickham pursued this strategy even in the later stages of his career by participating in collaborative projects in which everybody was welcome to offer their contribution. For this reason, perhaps, Wickham never created a proper school in the traditional academic sense: a group of scholars who can be recognized as his students.

That said, he had an enormous impact on the way many of us write about history. A small group — including myself — embraced his Marxist approach to history, even though, in keeping with the leftist tradition, we never agreed on a single Marxist interpretation (Chris was glad of this variety). The majority appreciated his rigorous methodology, his ability to combine history, archaeology, and anthropology, and his deep familiarity with the scholarly tradition of each country he interacted with, through his research and through his personal and intellectual relations.

But the human factor made the true difference. Since he could not change the world the way he wanted, he introduced a sort of intellectual socialism in the academic world. We did not all have (or want to have) a master to follow, and we could not all go to Oxford to learn history, but we all had the chance to share our ideas with Chris Wickham: he was always there offering advice, comments, or criticisms.

Chris has left us an enormous legacy, a gift I like to call, paraphrasing the historian Giovanni Levi, “immaterial inheritance”: a rich and polyhedric constellation of methods, questions, and ideas that have fostered — and will indubitably keep fostering — deeply meaningful academic connections.

Google’s first antitrust suit concerned its control of web search, and it was ruled to have operated a monopoly yet was given only a slap on the wrist. Rather than being broken up or forced to sell off any of its major corporate units like Chrome, the court imposed rather toothless “behavioral” remedies, barring exclusive default-search deals and requiring the company to share some search data with rivals.

A second case was brought by the Department of Justice in 2023 over Google’s “ad tech” business, an industry term referring to the segment of the company’s ad business that helps independent websites (such as news publishers) sell ads on their own pages. Google owns what are by far the dominant tools for this market, including the exchange itself (known as AdX) where advertisers find publishers as well as the servers that deliver the ad content. The company charges a 20 percent fee to run ad auctions for websites, which occur in fractions of a second as your browser opens the webpage in question.

It should be said at the outset that ad tech is a small part of Google — the $30 billion in revenue it brought in for 2025 comes to just 7 percent of Alphabet’s total revenue, and that share has been in decline for years. The Justice Department wanted the court to force Google to sell off AdX.

The judge’s full opinion remained under seal for weeks while both sides were given the chance to redact confidential information from it. The now-revealed remedies include a requirement for Google to make its ad exchange interoperable with competitors, meaning that using Google’s marketplace for finding bidders wouldn’t lock publishers into using its other tools. It also forces the company to share some real-time bidding data with publishers.

But unsurprisingly, in Google’s second monopolist verdict in two years, the company was still not subjected to any form of breakup. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema found such a measure to be “neither realistic nor needed.” Instead she settled for narrower measures such as those mentioned above as well as obliging Google to retain a court-appointed monitor with limited power over the firm. The “remedies” will stay in place for only six years, rather than the fifteen years that the government sought. And Google of course plans to appeal the finding of monopolization, which will take some years.

The company is now an adjudicated monopolist twice over, but the liberal state has failed to even partially rewrite Alphabet.

Meanwhile, the private arm of the techlash appears to be producing more serious consequences. Years of attempts by litigants to sue the platforms for their harmful content have failed, due to strong legal protections shielding the companies for material posted by users. But more recently, users have hit on the legal argument that the designs of the platforms themselves are harmful, and intentionally so.

Reporting and disclosures about such design choices have bolstered these cases, from the Wall Street Journal in its damning “Facebook Files” series that drew on leaked internal Meta research to company documents unsealed in court. (An illustrative quote: “Targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago [and today]. Like we’re seriously saying ‘we have to hook them young’ here.”) These revelations showed that company engineers and executives were quite aware of the addictive properties of now-common social media and online video platforms, including the infinite scroll of social media feeds, the autoplay algorithm of online video sites, and the regular barrage of push notifications that attempt to pull users back to the platforms.

Juries are finding for the plaintiffs in these cases, most famously for litigants in Los Angeles and New Mexico, where Meta is supposed to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in total penalties. In August, Meta reached a major settlement with most of the US state attorneys general, which have sued the company on similar grounds of user harm.

That settlement involved both a cash payout and promised changes to Meta’s app designs. The settlement awards up to $18 billion to the forty-eight states, Washington, DC, and three territories taking part in the suit, to be apportioned based on the states’ populations. However, Meta will only pay out 70 percent of this amount unless YouTube and TikTok adopt similar changes and together pay an amount equal to the remaining 30 percent, about $5.3 billion. Even if Meta ends up paying the higher amount, the figure is quite small — according to the corporation’s most recent 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, its last quarterly profit was $15.8 billion. So the settlement represents the company’s net income for just three months, but paid out over a decade, and at a time when Meta is firehosing money into a dubious data center build-out. For a payout that settles so much liability, and over two decades of operation, this sum is a wretched pittance.

The “behavioral” penalties, rules that the company is now obliged to follow, are also less than inspiring. Facebook and Instagram nominally require users under eighteen to use teen accounts, which are now mandated to include “night mode,” which blocks most app features between midnight and 6 a.m., and “school mode,” which prevents push notifications during school hours; minors will also be limited to two hours of use per day. Unless, of course, teen users can figure out how to circumvent the changes — for example by using their parents’ often-on phones to change the settings and disable these modes. But what teen is more tech savvy than their parents?

The public and private legal processes continue to grind along, with a Justice Department case against Apple and a Federal Trade Commission case against Amazon still pending, and Meta continues to deal with thousands of civil lawsuits from individual users and school districts. But so far, neither of these legal routes looks very promising in terms of reining in the power of the Big Tech platforms.

What will it take to impose real penalties or constraints on the tech giants? Tech workers are seeking to organize and use their leverage to demand change at the companies from within; meanwhile, politicians like Bernie Sanders have called for taking a 50 percent stake in the major artificial intelligence companies. Seeing the continued failures of the legal strategy to rein in Big Tech, it increasingly looks like we need organized tech workers and a political movement for real regulation and public control — up to and including the socialist solution of nationalization of their pivotal algorithms and networks. For companies that are apparently too big to break up, socialism may succeed where liberal regulatory efforts have failed.

At Saddleback, small groups consist of about a dozen people who meet weekly to collectively study, volunteer, break bread, and lend support to each other. They meet in homes because homes are free, relaxed, quicker to get to in sprawled-out Orange County, and “infinitely expandable.” Volunteer leaders run the small groups, with trained lay pastors overseeing group clusters.

Warren warns that when church is all lecture (“Sit still while I instill”), people can attend for a year without making a friend. He urges including some relational activity in every gathering and swears by weekend retreats: “The amount of time a person spends with other members at a single forty-eight-hour retreat is greater than the time they will spend together on Sundays over a year.”

Behind all this is a simple finding about why people stay. As Warren writes, “Relationships are the glue that holds a church together.” National surveys find that about 40–60 percent of megachurch Sunday attendees participate in at least one small group.

Apart from strong union organizing committees, most of our organizations have no equivalent to evangelicals’ weekly small groups or the Belgian Workers’ Party’s analogous groupes de base.

Warren explains that people sit at different levels of commitment and that an organization’s job is to move them up the ladder, step by step. Saddleback pictured this as five concentric circles, with the following mid-1990s figures:

•Community: 31,000 people who had visited at least four times in a year

•Crowd: 10,000 regular weekend attenders

•Congregation: 5,000 official members

•Committed: 3,500 members who had signed a covenant to pray daily, tithe, and join a small group

•Core: 1,500 lay ministers who ran the church’s work

The point is to systematically move them inward. “A crowd is not a church — but a crowd can be turned into a church,” he writes. And the process doesn’t end at the center: “What happens when people finally get to the core? We move them back out into the community for ministry!”

To make the ladder concrete, Saddleback used a baseball diamond. At each base, newcomers completed a class and signed a covenant: membership (101), maturity (201), ministry (301), and evangelism (401).

In most churches, members stall halfway around. To avoid this, Warren insists that the organization, not just the newcomer, is responsible for making the climb happen. “Many churches mistakenly assume that once a person has received Christ, the sale has been consummated, and it is now up to the new believer to follow through with his commitment and join the church. This is nonsense.” Instead, “It is the church’s responsibility to take the initiative in assimilating new people into the congregation.”

Many progressive and leftist chapters have some form of ladder of engagement, but few groups have made it anywhere near as visible and systematic as Saddleback. Too often, the ladder collapses into two rungs: a mass event (a rally, a canvass shift, an email list) and a small, burnt-out staff or volunteer cadre who do everything else, with few clearly laid-out steps in between.

As exciting as it is that DSA is now 130,000 strong, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that roughly two-thirds of members who joined during our first big surge after 2016 left within five years, and that almost half of all former members left after just one year. As was explained earlier this year in Democratic Left, “overall, member retention rates are basically unchanged since 2020.” Imagine, instead, a clear path from event attendee to dues-paying member to small-group member to trained organizer who recruits others, with a short class and a clear commitment at each step. And not just in big electoral campaigns, but year-round.

Megachurches are often dismissed as superficial spectacles consisting of little more than charismatic preachers, self-help fluff, and smart marketing techniques. That’s true enough for some fringe Prosperity Gospel–type churches, but such a critique misses the mark when it comes to Warren’s theory or Saddleback’s practice.

Community and appealing services help get people in the door, but ideology is also indispensable to the model, especially because it inspires the conviction needed to sustain members’ commitment. “No one stays with a difficult task unless they are convinced there is a good reason for doing so,” he notes. During Saddleback’s early years, when volunteers had to set up and tear down everything each Sunday, Warren found himself exhausted, lugging equipment after half the crew failed to show. His lesson: “You must know why you do what you do or else you’ll be defeated by discouragement.”

But Warren didn’t rely on sermons to spread conviction. “Conviction is contagious: People acquire it by being around other people who have it.” Proximity to conviction, Warren notes, is a major reason Saddleback emphasizes small groups.

Nor does Warren think recruitment can depend on big ideas alone; immediate needs are normally the main motivating factor: “While most unbelievers aren’t looking for truth, they are looking for relief. This gives us the opportunity to interest them in truth.” Once people were inside, Saddleback emphasized systematic ideological education, offering nine-month Bible study courses and a theology course covering twelve foundational Christian doctrines, taught twice weekly over twenty-seven weeks.

Progressive activists feel strongly about many issues but often lack an overarching way to make sense of the world and give meaning to individuals’ efforts within it. Socialists do have such an ideology — and a mass membership organization through which to cultivate it. But unlike the relatively small, self-selecting, college-educated layer currently drawn to DSA and progressive causes, most people won’t be attracted by ideas alone.

As with churches, the initial draw for millions of working people will be relief from immediate problems. Once people join an organization, form relationships, and take on meaningful responsibilities, their convictions and views can deepen. Yet too many liberals and radicals remain captive to a particularly college-educated faith in the transformative power of ideas alone. Organizing normally requires a different sequence: bringing people together around immediate needs, deepening their convictions through participation, and helping them expand their understanding through collective study.

Many activists assume that asking too much will scare people off, but Warren argues the opposite is often the case. “I’ve discovered that challenging people to a serious commitment actually attracts people rather than repels them,” he writes. The reason is that people are hungry for meaning: “Many unbelievers are fed up and bored with what the world offers. They are looking for something greater than themselves, something worth giving their lives to.”

Not everybody can make big commitments; some will stay in the crowd, and that’s fine. But if you don’t regularly make big asks, you don’t provide others with the opportunity to step up.

Apart from a few fringe sects, most American Left and progressive organizations set a low bar for formal entry (though their insider culture often undermines mass recruitment and retention) but rarely help members take on more. Warren’s approach shows how to pair big asks with manageable steps. Saddleback’s maturity covenant, renewed annually, asked for three concrete habits (a daily devotional time, a tithe of 10 percent of income, and weekly small-group attendance), and members carried laminated covenant cards in their wallets.

This approach has financial implications. Whereas the vast majority of the nonprofit industrial complex is funded by wealthy foundations, 91 percent of the annual income of megachurches comes from tithes and dues. If your organization can’t rely on self-funding from below, that should raise major red flags about whether you are building meaningful stakes and ownership.

Warren observes that membership in many organizations and churches today is thin to the point of being almost meaningless. He tells of preaching at one church that “had over a thousand members on its roll but had less than two hundred people attending services! What is the value of having that kind of membership?”

Saddleback took the opposite approach. To join, you had to take Class 101, a four-hour class taught in a single day, with a quiz at the end on the church’s purposes. Then you signed a membership covenant, which included a pledge to invite the unchurched and to welcome visitors. Warren explains the logic: “I believe the most important class in a church is the membership class because it sets the tone and expectation level for everything else that follows. The very best time to elicit a strong commitment from your members is at the moment they join. If little is required to join, very little can be expected from your members later on.”

Membership also came with warmth. For years, Warren and his wife hosted a monthly “Pastor’s Chat” for new members and visitors in their home, and older members paid for the meals at quarterly banquets for new members. His test of whether assimilation is working is a nice one for any organization: “The community talks about ‘that church,’ the crowd talks about ‘this church,’ but the congregation talks about ‘our church.’ Members have a sense of ownership. They are contributors, not just consumers.”

Warren cites a Gallup finding that only 10 percent of church members were active in any ministry (i.e., volunteering within the church or through its community service). He adds that the “encouraging news that Gallup uncovered is this: 40 percent of all members have expressed an interest in having a ministry, but they have never been asked or they don’t know how. This group is an untapped gold mine!”

Warren learned this the hard way. In Saddleback’s early years, he and his wife Kay did nearly everything: setting up, taking down, printing bulletins, cleaning bathrooms, storing equipment in their garage. After a few years, he was burning out. So, at a midweek service, he confessed that he couldn’t do it all and offered the congregation a trade. “I’ll make you a deal. If you agree to do the ministry of this church, I’ll make sure you’re well fed!” Delegating responsibility worked. “After making this decision, Saddleback exploded with growth.” Today, 30 percent of megachurch members volunteer regularly.

Once people step up, trust them. “At Saddleback, the implementers are the decision makers. The people who do the ministry get to make their own decisions about that ministry. We do not separate authority from responsibility, but trust people with both.”

His favorite example: “One time a woman came to me and said, ‘We need a prayer ministry.’ I said, ‘I agree! You’re it!’” She asked whether she needed to be elected or approved first. He told her to just announce a meeting in the bulletin and start it. As he puts it, “You bring out the best in people by giving them a challenge, giving them control, and giving them the credit.”

Delegation and decision-making are trickier in democratic unions and political organizations, where individual initiative should remain consistent with agreed-upon goals. But within that framework, scaling up depends largely on empowering members to take on work and leadership responsibilities. As with all the lessons laid out here, we should experiment and see what works.

Warren rejects the idea that dedication is enough to grow, writing that “it takes more than dedication to lead a church to grow; it takes skill.” He even goes after prayer: “Somebody needs to boldly state the obvious: Prayer alone will not grow a church. Some of the greatest prayer warriors I know are pastors and members of dying churches.”

So Saddleback trained people constantly. Members attended one-day Life Skills Seminars covering specific skills, including how to get along with other people. “People must be taught how to develop relationships. Although this seems obvious, very few churches take time to teach their members how to relate to each other.” And Warren warns leaders never to demand something without showing people how to do it: “Exhortation without explanation leads to frustration.”

The Left has its own versions of “just pray harder.” One is “just stick with it, things will eventually turn around.” Another is “just have the right politics.” Dedication matters, and organizational solutions can’t solve bad politics. But especially in our hyperatomized society, organizing is a skill that must be learned, and even building relationships requires deliberate cultivation. The best unions already treat organizing this way, with regular trainings and mentoring that follow a learn-one, do-one, teach-one model. But beyond such progressive pockets, sustained training is rare.

It’s hard to see how the Left could recruit widely beyond self-selecting college-educated radicals until we give our members the skills and confidence to actively recruit their neighbors and until we make our organizations more welcoming, as laid out in part one of this series and in the work of Hahrie Han. A 2021 national survey shows that over 80 percent of DSA members have a bachelor’s degree or higher — compared with 44 percent of nondenominational evangelicals.

“Jesus did not say, ‘I have come that you might have meetings.’” Warren argues that the average church would be healthier if it cut half its meetings, since “[o]ne of the reasons church members don’t witness to their neighbors is because they don’t know them! They are always at church, attending meetings.” People’s time is scarce. So if a member offered four hours a week, “the last thing I would do would be to put him on some committee.”

Saddleback had no committees at all, relying instead on seventy-nine lay ministries. “Committees discuss it, but ministries do it.” Warren also notes who complains the most: “In a war, you always find the highest morale and sense of camaraderie among those serving on the front line. . . .  The biggest complainers in any church are usually committee members with nothing else to do.”

Milwaukee’s “sewer socialist” leader Victor Berger made the same observation a century ago: “when people are constantly absorbed in doing things, and in preparing for still greater things, the petty jealousies and small causes for strife and dissension disappear.” Leftists should try to focus as much of our energy as possible on external work, not interminable factionalism and internal bureaucracy. Focusing outward, however, is challenging not just because democratic deliberation is essential, but because many of us prefer talking to each other, which is more comfortable than going out and trying to win over skeptics.

Warren is blunt about the cultural enemy: “Our culture’s preoccupation with individualism and independence must be replaced with the biblical concepts of interdependence and mutuality.” And he admits that changing this is hard: “Believe me, it is an incredibly difficult task to lead people from self-centered consumerism to being servant-hearted Christians.”

Warren defines fellowship as mutual obligation: “In our church we define koinonia (fellowship) as ‘being as committed to each other as we are to Jesus Christ.’”

Leftist theory agrees that none of us are islands. But too often, we don’t build that belief into our culture. Instead, we often reproduce individualism by focusing on online posting and self-expression over pragmatically building collective power. Putting organization and collective goals ahead of individual egos and moral self-satisfaction should become our cultural norm.

“The way we spend our time and the way we spend our money show what is really important to us, regardless of what we claim to believe,” writes Warren. This principle was evident from the start: before Saddleback’s first service, members of his tiny Bible study went about $6,500 into debt on their personal credit cards to pay for outreach. Warren describes the spending as an investment and warns that “[w]hen finances get tight in a church, often the first thing cut is the evangelism and advertising budget. That is the last thing you should cut. It is the source of new blood and life for your church.”

On the Left, how much money goes to reaching new people, and how much goes to maintaining existing operations? Solid numbers are hard to come by, but my impression is that only a tiny sliver of nonprofit and progressive funding goes toward external growth. And the labor movement certainly fails this test badly. Unions are sitting on over $35 billion in assets, yet most spend only a small share of their budgets on organizing the unorganized.

Warren is a big believer in strong leadership. “The most critical factor in a new ministry isn’t the idea, but the leadership,” he writes. In 1979, as a seminary student, he surveyed the hundred largest churches in America and found that many had long-serving pastors. For Warren, the lesson was that leadership continuity allows people to build the trust and relationships needed for lasting growth. But he also emphasizes that “healthy churches are built on a process, not on personalities.”

Much of the Left is still averse to leadership, or at least to strong leaders. That’s a mistake. We need to identify, develop, and empower people with the experience and skills to guide large numbers of people through struggle. And one of the most important tasks of strong leaders is to develop new leaders at all levels.

Of course, there are dangers: leaders can ossify or become detached from the membership. But the answer is robust democratic accountability, not a culture of horizontalism or musical chairs at the top.

Warren’s most important lesson may be his method. Saddleback treated retention and development with the same experimental spirit it applied to recruitment. Every month, the staff reviewed a six-page “Saddleback Snapshot” tracking how many people sat on each rung of the ladder. “The Snapshot forces us to take an honest look each month at how well our church is fulfilling its purposes. Bottlenecks in the system become easy to spot.”

Saddleback also ran three continuous feedback loops: first-impression cards from visitors, feedback cards from regular attenders (processing them took two full-time secretaries and a dozen volunteers), and staff evaluation sheets covering everything from parking to the sermon. Warren compares this to National Football League players reviewing game film every Monday. “Growing churches should always be asking, ‘How can we do it better?’ They are ruthless in evaluating their services and ministries.”

He’s equally skeptical of easy success stories. “Anytime you hear a pastor attribute the growth of his church to one single factor, realize that he is either oversimplifying what has occurred, or he may not be recognizing the real reason his church is growing.”

Saddleback was also part of a much larger ecosystem of learning. The Church Growth Movement, built on the research of Donald McGavran and others, spent decades studying what made congregations grow or die. Over the years, countless pastors have compared notes at seminars, and hundreds of reports have been published detailing what’s working and what’s not. Beyond exchanging lessons, evangelical networks and denominations raised funds, trained organizers, and provided seed funding to launch new churches and initiatives.

In Left organizations, by contrast, we tend to cherry-pick our wins, blame our losses on external factors, avoid honest postmortems, and stick with siloed routines instead of scaling up successful initiatives. If we want to build durable mass organizations, that should change.

None of this means copying evangelical churches wholesale. Not every practice will work for us, especially since Left organizations should operate democratically and confront oligarchic power.

Rebuilding connection and purpose in atomized America ultimately requires challenging big business, whose increased dominance over our workplaces, our neighborhoods, and our political system has left us alienated and alone. But taking on that power requires structures that can do more than recruit the already convinced: they must build lasting relationships among disconnected people, develop them into organizers, and equip them to recruit and lead others.

Three decades ago, evangelicals figured out how to build community in a disconnected society. Our challenge is to turn community-building into the collective power to change society itself.

Creativity beguiles us because it dangles before us a beautiful synergy. “The Lamp That Lit the World Can Light Your Life,” declared the first chapter of one of the first big creativity self-help books (published in 1948), and what it meant was that the mental faculty that gave the world its thrilling art and music . . . the mental faculty that made America productive and prosperous above all nations . . . this same mental faculty would also make your humble, everyday life more vivid, more remunerative, more spiritually satisfying, even. Creativity would make you a better worker and a better person at the same time.

It was an irresistibly appealing idea. Unlike high-IQ brainpower, which is not accessible to most of us, creativity was supposed to be an almost universal faculty, a thing that everyone could access if they tried hard enough and read the right self-help book. Creativity is thus a democratic vision of human inequality, if such a thing is possible — “democratic yet elitist,” as the historian Samuel Franklin put it in his brilliant 2023 book, The Cult of Creativity. With a little work and a little guidance from experts on the imagination, it was said, we could all claim a personal chunk of the ineffable power wielded by Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso: a life of prosperity and joy as we studied the great business tycoons and learned to think like artists.

Of course, some people always turned out to be more creative than others. Everyone had some helping of the newly discovered ability, yes, but the literature focused almost entirely on the creative potential found in the highly educated people at society’s upper reaches: executives, not line workers; military officers, not enlisted personnel; professionals, not the people who followed their prescriptions. Creativity was about human excellence, about individuals who succeeded — this is who we were to mimic, and this is who we were to become.

Creativity eventually became a project for government as well as for individuals, the central idea in a sweeping social vision that is espoused today by educators, tycoons, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and presidents. What sparked the idea’s leap was the launch of Sputnik in 1957, a Soviet triumph that deeply shocked an America that had taken its technological superiority as a matter of faith. Instead of hunting for traitors in physics labs and the State Department, as we had done earlier in the Cold War, the country chose to look inward this time. What Sputnik revealed, commentators concluded, was a national failure of the imagination. A chorus of Jeremiahs scolded us for having grown conformist and apathetic, beguiled by suburban homes and tail-finned cars. Thanks to our long, relaxing bath in the “easy artificiality” of affluence, warned the president of Yale University in 1958, “the fine edge of our faith has been dulled, our creative powers atrophied.” What we required, wrote two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, were “innovators, not organization men.” We needed “Creativity for Survival,” as a 1958 magazine headline put it. We had to celebrate nonconformity if America was to prevail.

The Sputnik-induced panic over insufficient creativity eventually morphed into one of those grand theories of Progress and the American Character of which our ancestors were so fond. Creativity, the experts declared, was a sort of precious raw material desperately required by complex technological societies like ours. Change was accelerating, blue-collar workers were in decline, and creativity at the top was the thing that would keep our corporations from becoming sterile and stagnant in capitalism’s ceaseless gale. Before too many years had passed, this theory had a name: the “postindustrial society.” America was now said to be a country in which “innovation,” creativity’s twin sibling and our national superpower, drove a kind of economic growth that would soon propel us far beyond the rest of the world.

Middle-class culture was saturated with creativity thought in those days. Education commentators pleaded for creative kids who didn’t fit in. Advertising executives began a “creative revolution,” selling cars and soda pops to help us smash the bonds of convention. Creativity was prized by student protesters of the era and also by the university presidents whose offices they occupied. Psychedelic drugs were said to be devices for instant creative enlightenment, and the young people who took them were reported to be exploring ultracreative forms of liberated consciousness.

It was an Age of Aquarius for middle-class Americans in their dawning postindustrial society. It was a world of enchantment and magic; of sprawling universities and national research labs; of nuclear power and supercomputers — each of them a testament to the great but unknowable life force of creativity. War and protest are what we remember the ’60s for today, but at the time it seemed like the beginning of a golden age, with moonshots and soaring modernist architecture and science enthroned in its majesty. At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, we rode the Carousel of Progress and marveled at the gifts given to society by the educated and the enlightened — and given by America to the world.

And then, it all seemed to go wrong. Military failure in Vietnam, gross corruption in Washington, the oil shock and the energy crisis, epidemic drug use, an economic recession concurrent with inflation — these were crushing blows to Americans’ understanding of themselves.

On top of it all was the growing sense that the progress machine had run out of gas. Here is the first sentence of a Washington Post story from November 1978: “It is hardly a matter of doubt anymore: America’s ability to innovate just isn’t what it used to be.” And here is the headline of a different Post essay on the same subject: “Something’s Happened to Yankee Ingenuity.”

The alarm was not misplaced. US economic growth had slowed. A trade deficit had opened up; manufacturing was struggling; the Detroit automakers were clearly in trouble. But what were we to do about it? President Jimmy Carter opted for the usual thing, appointing a blue-ribbon advisory committee to study America’s innovation system and find out what ailed it. It in turn produced a massive report that made only minuscule recommendations.

Others, however, spoke out with what seemed like brilliant clarity. This time around they did not blame conformity or crass, chrome-plated cars. It was Big Government, they said, that was crushing America’s creativity. Their solutions were simple and direct, and they got their way. In 1978, Congress slashed capital gains taxes on the grounds that doing so would reinvigorate the spirit of innovation. The Steiger Amendment, the measure was called: written by a Republican, passed by a Democratic Congress, and signed by a Democratic president, it was the first shot in the long and noisy tax-cut revolution that goes on to this day.

A curious detail about Ronald Reagan, the man who defeated Carter in 1980 and put the rollback of government into high gear: he was very fond of the word “creative.” The Creative Society was the title he gave to a collection of his speeches, and unleashing creativity was his polestar as he launched his market-oriented revolution. In 1988, he looked back with satisfaction on his achievements and spoke of a “new economy,” a sort of accelerated version of postindustrialism, in which capital was free to zip around the world electronically and “labor” had come to mean “the creativity of the writer of computer software.” This new economy, Reagan said, was outside the control of any kind of establishment: “It’s driven from the ground up by our new heroes, the entrepreneurs, the explorers of the modern era, who conceive, create, and produce, and in doing so discover the future one piece at a time.”

In this new understanding, creativity was identified not so much with artists or countercultural youth but with the act of entrepreneurship, the starting-up of a business. As the supply-side philosopher George Gilder put it in 1984, “The key to growth is quite simple: creative men with money. The cause of stagnation is similarly clear: depriving creative individuals of financial power.” Creative people would deliver prosperity, so long as we deferred to them and made sure their taxes were low. Gilder went on: “An economy is governed by the will and imagination, creativity and persistence of its entrepreneurs. All that matters is that they be encouraged . . . to do their work well.”

The disassembly of the old liberal state has been a decades-long project, and at every step in the demolition, these ideas were what got the job done. Creativity and innovation were, persistently and comprehensively, the cover story for the neoliberal revolution. We privatized university research — and universities themselves, in effect — on the grounds that the profit motive would reinvigorate the creativity of the highly educated. We deregulated banks because we thought “financial innovation” would make us all rich. We wrote trade agreements that undermined the livelihoods of the blue-collar class because we knew it did not innovate. We offshored manufacturing because, in a postindustrial “new economy,” only creative work was worthy of protection and respect.

A zenith of some kind was reached during the presidency of Barack Obama, who understood innovation as the paramount object of enlightened governance. In a famous speech in 2011 he acknowledged the “painful disruptions” that were tearing the middle class apart, but even so, he insisted that in an “innovation economy” the only real answer was more and better education. Obama mentioned “innovation” or “innovators” in all seven of his State of the Union speeches, he proposed an “Innovation Agenda,” he published a series of innovation manifestos, and the executive branch resonated enthusiastically to the new imperative. The State Department, for example, launched the Transatlantic Innovation Action Partnership, the US-India Innovation Exchange, the NEXUS Innovation Initiative, the Global Innovation through Science and Technology program, and the American Innovation Roadshow. The Smithsonian dubbed 2015 the “Year of Innovation.” So committed was the Defense Department to the golden idea that, in one thirty-eight-minute speech in 2016, Secretary Ashton Carter managed to use some version of the word “innovation” sixty-seven times, calling for greater creativity in every aspect of warmaking and carefully name-checking the era’s great tech CEOs.

All these momentous efforts, undertaken over the decades to revive innovation and creativity . . . and yet the twin gods have never really returned. Writing and music and liberal-arts academia are career dead ends today, as everyone knows. Culturally speaking, the country is obviously stagnant, with its classic rock and its superhero movies. Politically, we are in an endless loop of the old identity politics versus backlash wars of the 1970s. We still drive cars and live in suburbs and travel on jet planes and blast our enemies with B-52s. And despite our tax cutting and our deregulating and even despite our very real advances in computers and telecommunications, productivity growth today lags well behind the pace of the ’50s and ’60s. Even in the unhappy year 1978, the economy grew at a rate of 5.5 percent, much greater than what we ordinarily achieve nowadays.

But we modern Americans have succeeded in discovering levels of inequality unknown to our ancestors. Today what economists call the “labor share” of national income is at all-time lows, as blue-collar workers are tossed overboard from the middle class. What we might call the “creative share,” meanwhile, is at all-time highs. In 1978, there were only two known billionaires in the United States. Today there are close to a thousand, cornering this market or that one, jacking up the price of medicine, injecting millions into political campaigns, collecting art, dispensing wisdom to the eager crowds at SXSW, building their end-times fortresses, chirping about how AI might end humanity, achieving remarkable levels of spiritual enlightenment, and absorbing the praise of the world for their innovativeness, their amazing powers of creativity.

Sometimes it feels as though the old middle-class society was undone by its dreams. “Equality is the antithesis of creativity,” an education magazine instructed Americans back in 1960. But we never understood the contradiction or considered the oligarchic downside. We loved equality and yet valued creativity over almost everything else: this is what we wanted for every child, the vague but all-American form of brilliance that would give us artistic achievement and spiritual satisfaction at the same time. It was a short walk from there to the cultlike adulation we routinely express for Steve Jobs, innovator and prophet, billionaire son of the old middle class.

Maybe the truth is that those creative billionaires are the only ones who really matter. “The creative person in a sense does something for all of us simply by being,” the psychologist Frank Barron declared back in the heady year 1969, “and perhaps we help ourselves when we help such persons in the process of their own creative unfolding.” Maybe their creativity trickles down to the rest of us the same way material prosperity is transmitted. Maybe building an elite that breaks things and smokes weed and cavorts around onstage with a deregulatory chainsaw is the best any nation can ask for. We gape and cheer and marvel at their enlightenment, for we know they elevate the rest of us simply by being.

In any case, You Can See Everything is a terrifically entertaining entry in the canon of documentary filmmaking for the age of the uncertainty principle, in which the film knows, and is at a basic level interested in, the fact that the act of observation is an act upon the object of observation. One is seeing people who are constantly, acutely aware that they are being seen, and they try their best to be seen a certain way. This calls the documentary genre into question, and radically so — which is no innovation on Fielder and Oppenheim’s part, but it is notable that they managed to pull it out of art house cinema and onto commercial screens, and that it is currently causing about as much ink to flow as any recent blockbuster has.

Given the directors’ previous work — Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven (2020), Ren Faire (2024), and Primetime (2026), and Fielder’s television projects Nathan for You (2013–18), The Rehearsal (2022–present), and The Curse (2023–24), his collaboration with Benny Safdie — it is unsurprising that the film resists an explicit political interpretation.

But the portrayal of the Holmes–Evans couple is an almost caricatural embodiment of the milieu out of which they emerged, one whose influence over our debased present is difficult to overstate. Consider the evolving representation of Evans, an MIT graduate who in the beginning of the film seems a culturally liberal sort, conversant in therapy/wellness speak — it’s he who utters the words “radical transparency.” This stretch of You Can See Everything was filmed, appropriately, in coastal Southern California, where the couple spends the majority of their time together before Holmes departs to serve her sentence. Even there on the beach, however, Evans’s performances of empathy are often comically inept, a violent rage just barely concealed beneath an “I hear what you’re saying. . . . ” Another tense moment sees Billy somewhat forcefully wrest a bowl of cracked eggs from Elizabeth, who is presumably beating them too gently. Is Billy in fact a controlling partner? And wouldn’t that be a little convenient, particularly given that Holmes’s defense of her own conduct relies in part on being prey to another controlling man: Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her former lover and chief operating officer of Theranos?

Just before Holmes’s prison sentence begins and midway through the film, the family relocates from California to Texas to be near the minimum-security facility where she’ll be incarcerated. Evans is now in Austin. As has been known to happen for other tech entrepreneurs making the move from California to Texas, his physical displacement is accompanied by an explicit embrace of hypermasculinity and extremely online right-wing politics. His Austin home decor is minimal, though there are a number of pet reptiles crawling about, and a framed motivational poster of Winston Churchill adorns the wall above his desk. The Billy of the latter half of You Can See Everything is suddenly a gun-toting Charlie Kirk admirer with “vengeance in [his] heart.” He would also like for you to know that he’s a very talented lover — a boast that’s less surprising after an earlier shot in which Billy has seemingly invited the camera for a close-up of his penis.

In the late sequences, Billy’s aggression is on full display, as when he berates Amanda Seyfried, as much on the late Kirk’s behalf as on Holmes’s. Or when he attempts to shut down Fielder’s line of questioning with one of his and Holmes’s collaborators, who is in the process of acknowledging, if only by implication, that the original version of the Theranos blood-testing device did not in fact work.

That the film exists at all is itself a monument to the hubris of Holmes, whose adoption of the tech industry’s modus operandi of empty mythology as marketing allowed her to get as far as she did. It must have been as stupefying as it was exhilarating the first go-round. Why wouldn’t she think it could work once more? Alas, pathological liars who never completed their Stanford degrees seem to be about a dime a dozen.

Regarding Elizabeth Holmes, insofar as you can see everything, it’s because there’s not a whole lot there. But Fielder and Oppenheim’s considerable achievement lies in their ability to elevate such material into a genuinely compelling work of art. Go see it with someone; you’ll be talking about it for days.

The Fatimid regime was dismantled in 1171 by the Kurdish warlord Saladin, whose Ayyubid dynasty was in turn overthrown in 1250 by its own Mamluks — Turkic and Circassian slave soldiers who subsequently established a military-patronage state that controlled Egypt, Palestine, and Syria until 1517. Despite the perennial hum of coups and infighting around the sultan’s throne, 250 years of relative administrative continuity lent the regime enough time and resources to build towering institutions of religious welfare and political legitimacy, patronize a literary renaissance, and organize Egypt as the focal point of Mediterranean and Indian Ocean commerce.

Nevertheless, the limited safety net and trade money were parts of a system far more extractive than the Fatimid state had ever been. Mamluk captains, trying to control a potentially restive population and needing money to keep buying new Mamluks from the slave markets of Crimea, parceled out iqta (revenue assignments) among themselves and hoarded supplies to an unprecedented degree. The traditional lines between military and civilian roles blurred as some captains in turn leased their iqtas to non-Mamluk administrators, while they themselves lobbied the sultan for lucrative administrative positions, like that of muhtasib, the office responsible for policing the markets. Compounding disasters then made a bad situation far worse: the black death of the mid-fourteenth century wiped out the rural workforce, dikes and canals silted up (which meant the Nile had to rise higher for a sufficient harvest), and the effects of the Little Ice Age made the river itself far more erratic.

Matters came to a head in 1403 during the rule of the teenage Sultan Faraj ibn Barquq, when the Nile once again failed to rise just after the Turco-Mongol warlord Timur had ravaged Mamluk Syria and another wave of the black death approached. Mamluk amirs, or commanders, responded by fighting each other and squeezing their tenants even harder to keep their own ledgers balanced. Faraj and his government, unable to materially solve any problems or admit to their own failures, resorted to massive public prayers for rain and crackdowns on supposed expressions of moral decay like alcohol, prostitution, and religious minorities who flouted sumptuary laws. Adam Sabra writes in Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250–1517 that during the 1403–4 crisis, chroniclers made no mention of any state-sanctioned relief efforts, though individual sultans and amirs were typically more generous with their alms whenever they themselves fell sick, hoping God would reward their charity with a cure.

The sense of insecurity and trauma brought by calamity and misrule may have encouraged Mamluk-era historians to increasingly supplement their record of events with commentary on the conditions of the wider city and common people. Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), the most prolific among them, opined that the Nile disasters were not merely acts of God or unlucky natural patterns but a product of three human causes: a corrupt government lubricated with bribery, extreme rent-seeking and hoarding behavior by the moneyed and landowning classes, and the reckless policy of flooding the market with low-value, inflationary copper coins.

“Whoever reflects on this occurrence from its beginning to its end and knows its origin and development realizes that what has befallen the population is caused solely by the malfeasance of the leaders and rulers and their negligence with regard to the public interest,” he wrote in his treatise Helping the Community by Examining the Causes of Its Distress (Ighathat al-ummah bi-kashf al-ghummah). “Indeed, wherever the causes are known, it is easy for the knowledgeable person to remedy all conditions, whether significant or insignificant. I seek God’s help in facing both difficult and easy matters; indeed ‘He tells the truth and He shows the way.’”

The people in the streets had reached the same conclusion on their own. And when the powerful pushed too far, they pushed back.

Al-Maqrizi’s chronicles record the constant protests that emerged in reaction to state depredation. Throughout the Middle Ages and even more frequently during the Mamluk period, ordinary people channeled their frustration through tax evasion, smuggling, blocking the sultan’s or governor’s processions, collective petitioning (shouted or in writing), and, in extreme cases, violence.

Those activities often came hand in hand, with petition typically following demonstration. Protest had no realistic chance of overturning state power (nor was that its purpose) but could apply sufficient pressure on authorities hoping to maintain their government positions and protect their property from physical damage. In pursuit of material reward and social correction, crowds applied violence systematically, indicating that they had a clear sense of a moral economy and the wrongness of transgressing it.

One favored tradition of anti-profiteering protesters was finding the local muhtasib they deemed responsible and stoning him. The Mamluk-era historian Ibn Taghribirdi recorded how in 1435, a crowd in Cairo sent the muhtasib fleeing into the Citadel for protection. Another example of this occurred in 1487, when, amid rising grain prices, the muhtasib of Damascus was found to be mixing his government duties with his private involvement in the grain trade. Shams al-Din ibn Tulun recorded that an organized crowd found him patrolling the market and proceeded to unload its displeasure on him. These two officials may have suffered a nasty shock and some injuries, but they were fortunate compared to the governor and deputy governor of Damietta in 1417, who, as al-Maqrizi records, were “arrested” by the crowd, humiliated, and then struck dead.

The elite response to such protests was varied. Amina Elbendary writes in Crowds and Sultans: Urban Protest in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria of the fluidity of such crowds and indeed of social categories in general. The protesters, consisting not just of the “structural/permanent poor” but also artisans, shopkeepers, and lower-level clerics, often sought out members of the clerical establishment (ulama), or even a muhtasib they considered to be morally upright, to intercede with the government on their behalf. In the case of the 1417 incident at Damietta, the crowd brought some of their local religious judges to register a case against the same governor they were about to lynch.

These actions sometimes elicited refusal or even more punitive taxes. Other times, the protest and subsequent petition secured localized, temporary alleviation rather than structural reforms. But the broader tradition of protesting economic predation was understood by both rulers and the people as a constant threat or leverage that punished anyone who overstepped the line.

Muslims are instructed by the Qur’an and hadith to enjoin good and forbid wrong — a commandment that extends beyond personal survival and piety to the proactive pursuit of social justice. Innocent victims of misfortune could be seen as casualties of elite misconduct or, if they bore their suffering patiently, even as martyrs. But a society that accepted unjust rulers and did not rise up against them was itself complicit. Both sides, then, took their case to God. In a crisis, the ruling class organized mass public prayers for rain. Protesters often shouted “God is great” before a demonstration, and chroniclers described such moments by writing that “prayers against the sultan [or governor] increased.”

The Mamluk regime did not survive the collapse of its trade revenue, driven by Portuguese naval ambitions, and the Ottoman advance into the Levant and Egypt. Qansuh al-Ghuri, the penultimate Mamluk sultan, regarded by chroniclers as the most avaricious among the rulers of that period, supposedly died of a stress- and battle-induced stroke on the plains of Marj Dabiq in front of his Qur’an readers.

A change in regime, however, did not keep people off the streets whenever greed or misrule threatened their livelihoods. In 1591, not long after the Cairenes “prayed against” him, Awis Pasha, the city’s governor, died of a stroke.

I worked as Mike’s researcher for almost fifteen years, from the fall of 2011, the season of Occupy Wall Street (when Mike would look the other way if we’d skip a seminar or two to march on the banks) to the fall of 2025, just before the general strike in Minnesota’s Twin Cities began last winter. One generation gave way again to the next. We were drawn together by a shared commitment to finding a usable past and a shared conviction that the only way to do this was to write the whole city down.

While I assembled two of Wallace’s 2,500-source bibliographies — and as I wrote thousands of comments on drafts of Greater Gotham and Gotham at War — the months became years, then a decade and a half. What began as an apprenticeship became a search for the whole of human experience in the city. Only Mike’s droll, cheerful, and humanistic Marxism could really capture it all, that unique Wallace vision of history.

In uno plures:“in one, many.” Here also was the Gotham project’s research design and historical method from the very beginning, the necessary result of synthesizing all the new history from below — as Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows set out to do nearly fifty years ago, when they began to write the city’s history anew “from the Beginning of the World,” as its first biographer Washington Irving had envisioned in 1809. Gotham would be a new coming together of women’s history, working-class history, black and native history, immigration history, the history of sexuality, the history of mass culture, and the collision of a million different folkways transformed by the tenements — arraying all that new history from below against the new history from above: the history of capitalism.

This was not your old man’s “synthesis” — not the simple additive method Wallace learned from his teacher Richard Hofstadter. But perhaps Wallace turned Hofstadter on his head. “Social Darwinism” was, of course, a Richard Hofstadter coinage: one of several enduring ideas that he has passed down to us. Hofstadter’s classic wartime dissertation Social Darwinism charted the origins and trajectory of a homegrown American fascist ideology with roots deep in the American experience: “A people long familiar with Indian warfare on the frontier and the pro-slavery arguments of Southern politicians and publicists had been thoroughly grounded in notions of racial superiority.”

Summing up the origins and trajectory of this ideology, Hofstadter quoted a particularly bloodthirsty 1845 American expansionist: “The Mexican race now see in the fate of the aborigines of the north, their own inevitable destiny. They must amalgamate or be lost in the superior vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race, or they must utterly perish.” Wallace, for his part, did not fail to trace the origins of a “Manifest Destiny” ideology of American conquest to New York boosters, but followed his teacher’s 1944 aside: “Yet it is possible to take another view. . . . ” Mike also showed us that Gotham and its people fought back, in how some New Yorkers have always demanded an end to imperialism, pulling for the victory of the oppressed in homelands all over the hemisphere and in every corner of the world.

Gotham at War records that ever “since Francisco de Miranda’s 1806 expedition sailed from the East River in its doomed attempt to liberate South America from Spanish rule, New York had been the premier base of operations for rebel Latin Americans. Once the Wars of Independence triumphed in the 1820s, leaving Cuba and Puerto Rico as Spain’s only hemispheric possessions, an array of exiles, from Félix Varela to José Martí” made Gotham not just the seat of American expansionism and settler colonialism, but also held out the promise that New York could be the tomb of imperialism.

Certainly, in the city from a very early date, visions of racial conquest and extermination were anathema to a creed emerging from the streets. As Mary Louise Booth wrote in her 1859 History of the City of New York, Gotham was already “blended with all the races of the earth; and if it be true, as one of our most eminent philosophers asserts, that a mixture of many materials makes the best mortar, there is no reason to regret it.”

This was decidedly not the consensus in many layers of New York society in the middle of the nineteenth century. As Wallace and Hofstadter argued together in 1970 in American Violence, the brutal downtown nativism of Bill the Butcher — who cracked heads and stole ballots at the polling places of immigrant workers on Park Row and the Bowery in the early 1850s — was just muscle for the millionaires uptown. “A high proportion of our violent actions,” Hofstadter wrote in his introduction to the sources Wallace excavated and arranged, “has thus come from the top dogs or the middle dogs. Such has been the character of most mob and vigilante movements. This may help explain why so little of it has been used against state authority, and why in turn it has been so easily and indulgently forgotten.”

Overlaid by the capitalist ethos of domination by the strong, premised on natural hierarchies and scientific racism, this peculiar American vision was crystalized in the Gilded Age maxim attributed to (but never actually uttered by) the New York robber baron Jay Gould: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

As the nineteenth century gave way to the crisis of imperialism and World War I, this elitist current in America came to espouse a politics of panic over “threatened Anglo-Saxon power throughout the world.” In a United States “submerged by a flood of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants,” the white men of America could assert “fitness only through a national reawakening.”

In some ways, Hofstadter suggests, American social-Darwinist ideology and practice was a model for European fascism. Picking this thread up where his teacher left off, Wallace shows us in Gotham at War that Jim Crow segregation and American race law (the one-drop rule and otherwise) directly inspired Adolf Hitler. The Führer taunts us from the pages of Gotham at War that the United States was “the first to draw practical political consequences from the differentiation of races.. . . .  Through its immigration law, America has inhibited the unwelcome influence of such races as it has been unable to tolerate within its midst.”

The children of the new immigrants roared back from City College, where the young radicals of the 1930s wore pins that said: “I am a guttersnipe. I fight fascism.”

Among the most famous false prophets of this early American fascism was the Upper East Side’s own Madison Grant. The pseudoscientist, professional racist, and prominent advocate of immigration restriction lived in a mansion at 960 Fifth Avenue between 77th and 78th Streets, overlooking Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In these sumptuous digs in 1934, Grant gratefully received a letter from Hitler hailing The Passing of the Great Race as “my Bible.”

Where Hofstadter was often (and with age, increasingly) preoccupied by the dark currents in American life — social Darwinism, the paranoid style, anti-intellectualism — it took Wallace and the revolution in history from below to find what his teacher had shown only glimmers of: solidarity and pluralism as the working class’s antidote and answer.

In 1943 and 1944, as the war shuddered into its nightmare end, and as the question of the postwar order hung in the air, the young Hofstadter looked back a generation, to the Progressive historian Herbert Croly’s injunction: We must overcome the “traditional American ‘mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism’ in favor of a more positive attempt to realize the national potential.” Sneaking in his own youthful Marxism the best he could, the twenty-seven-year-old Hofstadter quoted a dissident scholar’s 1906 anti-eugenic salute to “the proletariat, the working class, the hewers of wood and drawers of water” — and concluded “that the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa.”

As Angela Davis — who lived on the corner of St Marks and Kingston in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as a teenager, having fled Alabama in the middle of the 1950s to attend high school in Gotham — would put it years later: “One cannot be free alone. Freedom is collective.”

Mike made a point never to preach, often even avoiding arguments about the meaning of events in the sweep of history. The pointillist, humanistic method would show the truth.

But Mike was a radical, active in the movement to remake American history from below in a struggle with the city’s ruling class. As Hofstadter’s research assistant, Wallace had the keys to several buildings on the Columbia University campus — and while his teacher veered from a wry and erudite consensus liberalism into bitter attacks on the “book burners” and ruffians of the New Left, it was Mike who quietly opened the doors to these buildings so that his comrades in the black and antiwar student movements could occupy them in April and May of 1968, in solidarity with the people of Harlem and the people of Vietnam.

Wallace maintained these commitments throughout his life. As a junior scholar at the City University of New York’s John Jay College, he coauthored the Newt Davidson Collective’s 1974 Crisis at CUNY, immediately recognizing in the “fiscal crisis” an attack on the social democratic victories of generations of working-class youth movements in the city’s public university system. The bankers’ abolition of CUNY’s free tuition — a policy that had stood since City College’s inception in 1847 — was realized by 1976, as were the first limitations on the open admissions policy that guaranteed every graduate of a New York City high school a spot in a CUNY college: a victory secured by black and Puerto Rican student radicals in the City College sit-ins of 1969 and only completely eliminated by Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration in 1999.

Mike’s instant recognition of the rise of neoliberalism in Gotham helped shape his colleague David Harvey’s view that the first salvos of a coordinated attack on working-class power and social democracy were waged simultaneously in Abraham Beame’s New York and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. In 1973 — the last time the Knicks won the NBA championship — CUNY was free and open to every New Yorker. The Knicks have won again, and it is high time to retake that higher-education victory too.

As a professor, Wallace reveled in the atmosphere of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, teaching working-class kids and first-year cops in rough-and-tumble night school sessions. He told me he usually got along with the rookie cops and the kids because, unlike the ivory-tower liberals, they often shared a materialist understanding of the city and the world (“follow the money”) and most also shared the streets of New York as a first teacher.

Mike was born in Brooklyn in 1942 and came up in Fresh Meadows, Queens; he spent a spell as a child in San Francisco (where his uncle Al was a Latin jazz and swing bandleader); and he graduated from high school in Great Neck, Long Island. Wallace’s standard assignment for a final paper was to interview the oldest New Yorker you knew about their life coming up in the big city — showing students that we are all a part of history, and that we can all write it too.

A generation of City University and Wallace-trained scholars continue the work in his wake: Emily Brooks (Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II–Era New York City); Michelle Chen (among many other works, “Radical Defense: The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and the Movement for Deportation Resistance and Immigrants’ Rights,” in Journal of Migration History); Andy Battle (“New York 2140: Climate Change and Gentrification in Tomorrow’s Ruined New Yorks,” in Capitalism Nature Socialism; “On the Auction Block: The Garment Industry and the Deindustrialization of New York City,” in International Labor and Working-Class History); and Katie Uva (“1964 and the State of the City,” in World’s Fairs in the Cold War), among many others.

New York will never have another teacher or partisan like Mike. Everyone who has ever lived here, or traveled here, or dreams of this place inherits the life work of the city’s singer and the keeper of its memory. Mike Wallace died on July 4, 2026. Whenever someone speaks a word or takes a step anywhere in the five boroughs, we weave a new thread in the story he wrote down, for all of us to keep forever.

On the East Side, where Le Corbusier’s United Nations complex was built over the ruins of slaughterhouses on land long owned by the Astors, New York became the headquarters of the world (if not ever truly the capital of the world).

This was one of the many ways that Wallace thought he’d conclude Gotham at War. Seeing parallels in the postwar corporate economy — the skyscraper headquarters of multinational capital towering over Midtown, the canyons of brick and concrete rippling out from Wall Street — the sleek glass and steel tower of the General Assembly of the United Nations (at 405 East 42nd Street and First Avenue) reflected a world order orbiting New York City, in the city’s image, and in its model of consolidated corporate capital. Gotham presumed only to be the central and highest node in the organizational chart of a worldwide network of offices. And like the corporate boardrooms atop the multinationals’ skyscrapers, the world powers convened a security council, where the real power from above was.

Here then are the architectonics of the whole Gotham trilogy, the big argument now assuming full form. The city came into being as a colonial periphery, then it was a model and metonym for the nation, now it was the headquarters of the postwar world made in its image: pluralistic, multilateralist, free trade, linked to the center by Wall Street finance, the city itself governed as a social democracy with a restive and powerful working class but an even more powerful ruling class: they’re about to be the masters of the universe.

For all of the explanatory power of Mike’s (usually) unstated argument, Gotham as the song of the city is at most revealing when it is on the ground, with the people, in the city. Wallace’s prelapsarian image of the Bronx — before the development wave at the turn of the twentieth century that turned it into an instant garden city — is gorgeous social history, a landscape of “Romani tinkers, scissor grinders, fishermen with shad from the North River,” when Morrisania

and Melrose were chiefly German. Villagers worked in the local breweries.. . . .  They worshiped at local Lutheran and Catholic churches and shopped and amused themselves along Courtlandt Avenue — known as ‘Dutch [Deutsch] Broadway’ for its German saloons, beer halls, and gymnastic and singing societies.

Meanwhile:

Highbridgeville, an Irish settlement since the building of the Croton Aqueduct, afforded work for railroad section hands, stevedores along the Harlem River docks, and gardeners.

Wallace had an eye for old, deep histories that would generally go unremarked, little jetties of liberation in the larger streams of municipal history. Like the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church of Staten Island, founded by free black workers as early as 1801, anchor of a black community in Stapleton for the last 225 years.

The welter of working-class life in Gotham produced solidarity and pluralism — not out of neighborly love or multicultural idealism but out of sheer necessity. Wallace, in rare argumentative interludes in Greater Gotham, makes it plain. For workers in the twentieth-century city:

Forging alliances with other ethnic groups was a practical necessity if they were to build a collective base of resistance to exploitation. . . . there had always been strenuous inter-ethnic competition over jobs, housing, and access to public resources, a jostling exacerbated by economic crisis, ethno-racial-religious tensions, and repercussions from overseas conflicts.

Confronted with these obstacles, workers in New York sought to

overcome them, by learning each other’s languages, celebrating together on birthdays, at baby showers, and at weddings, and organizing the labor movement side by side. Picket lines and Labor Day parades were routinely multi-ethnic affairs, marchers hoisting signs and banners in multiple languages. Industrial unionists were particularly determined to bridge ethnic fault lines: there were, as Big Bill Haywood put it, “no foreigners in the working class.”

This is to say: the United Nations already existed on the streets of Gotham — and in that and other ways, New York was a model for, metonym of, and capital of the emerging postwar order.

Mike’s last story is the madcap tale of the real estate deal that brought the United Nations to town in 1946. This evokes nothing so much as Washington Irving’s original Gotham — a city of ridiculous “bulbous-bottomed burghers” spreading “forth over the land until they covered the actual site of this venerable city.”

In literal landownership and in spirit, Wallace’s last tale about the Astors and the slaughterhouses and the land that became the United Nations harkens all the way back to old John Jacob Astor himself: “If I could live all over again, I would buy every square inch of Manhattan.”

There’s an important question here about the “capital of the world” argument that Mike leaves to us. What about New York as the center of the postwar world was historical necessity amid the longue durée?

What about the big architectonics — class struggle in uno plures; what Samuel Stein has called New York’s “real estate state;” the city’s place in the military-industrial complex; Wall Street; the diasporic links New York already had to the rest of the world — made the contingent possible, sealed the deal? How then can we account for the very contingent, uncertain, touch-and-go way it came about?

There’s something to be said here on New York and the “real estate state” — its longue durée in Gotham. All I know is, as O. Henry once said, “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.”

As Mike once wrote, at the end of Greater Gotham: So far, so good.

Dramatic as it is, the labor share decline understates how much income has moved away from ordinary workers over the last forty years, because it tells us nothing about the vast inequalities hidden within the labor share itself.

According to research by economists at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), nearly 80 percent of the productivity-pay gap — the widening gulf between productivity growth and pay gains for nonsupervisory workers — has been driven by inequalities within the labor share, with the shift toward capital accounting for the remaining 20 percent. Before 1979, wage growth for the vast majority of workers tracked closely with productivity gains and with the growing compensation of high-income earners. Since then, most of the gains from productivity have flowed to top earners and shareholders.

EPI’s analysis shows that the bottom 90 percent of workers captured nearly 70 percent of all earnings in 1979, while the top 1 percent of earners took in a little over 7 percent. By 2021, the share of the bottom 90 percent had fallen by more than eleven points to 58.6 percent, while the top 1 percent of earners had doubled their share to nearly 15 percent — the highest point since the data became available in 1937. This trend was even more pronounced for the top 0.1 percent, whose share of earnings more than tripled, from 1.6 percent to 5.9 percent. Subtract the top 1 percent’s earnings, and the labor share falls well below its current historic low, by a much wider margin than in the past.

In an email, EPI Chief Economist Josh Bivens told Jacobin that the fall in the labor share and the growing inequality within it both stem from excess employer power in the labor market and decades of wage suppression. “Basically, I think a set of policies aimed at wage suppression have successfully slowed wage growth for the vast majority of workers,” Bivens said, “and this left a large and growing ‘excess’ wedge of income that went to much more privileged actors in the economy.”

Before 2000, most of this excess wedge showed up as rapid pay growth at the top of the income scale; during that period, as Bivens put it, “there was not a huge shift in the labor/profit shares.” Instead, top executives like General Electric CEO Jack Welch, poster boy of the shareholder revolution and ruthless union-buster, saw their pay explode. Between 1978 and 2000, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio at America’s top companies ballooned from under 25-to-1 to nearly 400-to-1.

Since the turn of the century, the excess has flowed more directly from labor to capital. “Post-2000, you see less of a wedge in pay growth between the very top and typical workers (still a big one, just not as big), but you start to see a noticeable rise in the profit share,” Bivens said. Part of this reflects changes in how business owners and executives report their income. The post-2000 shift away from labor coincided with a time when “a bunch of tax policy and regulatory policy changes made it more advantageous for super-privileged actors (corporate executives mostly) to report their income in forms that don’t show up in the labor share but do show up in the profit share.”

But reclassification explains only part of the shift. Profits also claimed a genuinely larger share of what the economy produced, boosting stock prices along with them.

Whether it flowed to executives or shareholders, this redistribution of income has been a driving force behind the rapid growth of both income and wealth inequality over the last half century. As Bivens and EPI President Heidi Shierholz point out in a recent essay, estimates suggest that “anywhere from 40 percent to nearly 100 percent” of the nominal gains in the stock market since 1989 can be attributed to capital’s growing share of the national income.

The implication, they write, is clear: “The wage suppression of recent decades is not just by far the biggest driver of the rise in income inequality; it is also by far the biggest driver of the rise in wealth inequality.”

The recent acceleration in the labor share’s decline has unfolded alongside an explosion in corporate profits and the strongest stock market bull run since the dot-com era. Yet these surging profits and asset prices have been driven less by genuine productivity gains than by financial speculation and a series of market shocks — from the supply-chain disruptions of the pandemic years to the recent spike in energy costs triggered by the Iran war.

Apart from these disaster-driven profits, the stock market boom has been powered by a handful of superstar companies concentrated in the tech sector. The top ten companies listed on the S&P 500 now make up roughly 40 percent of the index’s total market cap and generate over a third of its earnings, buoyed by the debt-fueled artificial intelligence boom.

These record profits are unlikely to last. If the current AI boom goes bust, as a growing number of market watchers now believe it will, earnings will plummet, and the profit share will decline relative to labor. But workers, not shareholders, invariably bear the brunt of recessions. Labor currently has little to gain and much to lose from the breakneck development of AI, especially if it proves as disruptive to jobs as many economists and AI boosters predict. Yet workers have even less to gain from a recession triggered by the collapse of the AI bubble, which would create ideal conditions for capital to further discipline labor — this time with some of the shiny new AI tools developed over the last several years.

The path to avoiding these outcomes and reversing the long-term decline of the labor share lies in a revitalized labor movement. As long as labor is weak and fragmented, workers will continue to see their share of the economic pie contract as billionaires and CEOs reap the rewards of the new AI economy.

The recently reelected president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Shawn Fain, wasn’t being hyperbolic this June when he described the development of AI and the push for mass automation as a “profound threat and challenge to our way of life.” The compounding threats that workers now face have, in turn, increased public support and sympathy for labor unions. In September, Gallup’s annual survey on the labor movement showed that more than seven in ten Americans now approve of unions — the highest level since the 1960s — along with a record-high plurality of 47 percent who say that unions should have more influence.

Fain is among a cohort of new labor leaders who have pushed for a bolder and more combative labor movement willing to take the fight to capital. The UAW’s successful “stand-up strike” against the Big Three automakers in 2023 was part of a new wave of labor action in the post-pandemic years. New organizing efforts have also helped to slowly reverse the long-term decline in unionization, with data from the BLS showing the number of workers represented by unions rising to a sixteen-year high in 2025.

Whether the labor movement can sustain its current momentum is far from certain. What is clear is that its strength and influence will need to grow substantially in the years ahead if it is to meaningfully shape the emerging AI economy and shift the balance of power back toward workers. Until then, the economic gains touted by political and industry elites will almost certainly continue flowing straight to the top.

Zack Polanski became the leader of the English and Welsh Greens in August 2025 with resounding support from party members for his “eco-populist” agenda. At the time, Polanski’s leadership campaign was one of two projects that sought to capitalize on disillusionment with the Labour Party. The new Green leader declared his willingness to cooperate with the new left-wing party that Jeremy Corbyn and his allies were planning to launch in the next few months.

In the best-case scenario for the British left, the parallel projects would have proved to be complementary. But there was a huge gap between the objective potential of the situation and the subjective readiness of Your Party’s founding team to exploit it. A faction fight between rival camps grouped around Corbyn and Zarah Sultana dominated the first months of the new party’s existence, while the enthusiasm of the previous summer gradually drained away. During a period of unprecedented volatility in British politics, Your Party proved to be much less than the sum of its parts.

While all of this was happening, Polanski and his allies pressed ahead with their own project, and they made some very significant political gains at Labour’s expense during the first half of this year. In February, Hannah Spencer delivered the first ever Green by-election victory in the Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton after a three-way contest with Labour and Reform, the hard-right party led by Nigel Farage. Labour sources explicitly stated that they would have preferred Reform to win the seat, because Spencer’s breakthrough showed that progressive voters no longer felt obliged to support Labour.

Popular anger at the genocide in Gaza and Starmer’s endorsement of Israeli war crimes was an important factor behind disillusionment with Labour. Polanski and the Greens explicitly charged Israel with genocide and strongly opposed the ban on Palestine Action that resulted in hundreds of peaceful protesters being arrested and charged with terrorism. The fact that Polanski himself was Jewish merely added to the fury of his critics, who had grown accustomed to branding the Palestine solidarity movement as a putrid cesspool of antisemitism.

The local elections in May represented another big step forward for Polanski’s party, which now overtook Labour in terms of projected vote share. For every English vote that Labour lost to Reform, it lost nearly four to the Greens. The Greens in Scotland have a separate organization with its own leadership team, but Polanski joined them on the campaign trail before they achieved their highest ever vote for the Scottish Parliament. The election results prompted a dramatic change of approach from the Labour Party, at least in terms of style and presentation.

Under Starmer’s leadership, Labour treated left-wing voters with undisguised contempt and sought to compete with Reform on its chosen political ground. After Starmer’s meltdown, Labour turned to the Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, as his replacement. Burnham was the most high-profile Labour politician who was not tainted by association with the Starmer project. He brought with him a new kind of rhetoric that contrasted sharply with the familiar tropes of Starmerism.

Starmer had praised Margaret Thatcher for “setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism.” Burnham now declared his belief that Britain had spent “forty years on the wrong path” since Thatcher’s neoliberal Great Leap Forward. He promised that his government would be a “circuit breaker,” working to establish “a new political model and a new economic model.”

There was also a clear discursive shift in relation to Palestine, with Burnham’s Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband taking the lead. His comments at this year’s Labour conference reflected the pressure of the solidarity movement, including its impact on the field of electoral politics:

We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank. We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. And we match words with actions. We will ban the import of goods from illegal settlements. We will disrupt the supply lines of British finance, British construction, and British services for illegal settlements.

If we look beyond the rhetoric, the substance of Burnham’s new regime doesn’t measure up to his sales pitch. When he announced his first cabinet, he reappointed ministers like Pat McFadden, an influential figure who wants to roll back what is left of Britain’s welfare state and shares Tony Blair’s conviction that Labour should abandon its goal of phasing out fossil fuels by 2050.

John McTernan, an unapologetic Blairite who nonetheless seems to recognize that Britain has changed radically since 1997, urged Burnham to defy a critical chorus by nominating Ed Miliband as his chancellor: “The journey of ending neoliberalism starts with one appointment.” For McTernan, shirking this “easy choice” would mean “surrendering, on day one, to economic orthodoxy and conceding to those who oppose your fundamental agenda.” Burnham disregarded his advice and surrendered to orthodoxy by selecting John Healey instead.

There is also a big gap between language and policy when it comes to Israel. Miliband has ruled out applying any sanctions to Israel as a whole and condemned the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. But the “illegal settlements” are in no way external to the Israeli state. The overwhelming consensus of the Israeli political class defines those settlements as an integral part of Israel itself.

Moreover, the war crimes Miliband correctly identifies in Gaza were obviously not the work of “settler terrorists.” It was the regular armed forces that turned Gaza into a charnel house. Since Miliband delivered his conference speech, the British government has capitulated to Israel over the order to evacuate the British consulate in East Jerusalem. According to the reporting of Peter Oborne, this act of surrender was a victory for Burnham’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, who successfully imposed his line on the foreign secretary.

The selection of ministers and advisers who are deeply committed to the economic status quo and Britain’s traditional role in world affairs gives us a much better sense of what Burnham’s project is going to deliver than his speechmaking. But we have to recognize that most voters won’t be paying close attention to the details of his appointments. For now, his language about “the break we are making with the flawed thinking of the last forty years” clearly does appeal to a section of Labour’s target electorate.

Even if Burnham was deadly serious about his stated goals, it would not be possible to reverse four decades of economic policy in the space of a few months. Many people will be inclined to wait and see if he can deliver on his promises, especially when Labour still seems to offer the best chance of blocking a government led by Reform. In the month of the Gorton and Denton by-election, the average polling gap between Labour and the Greens was less than 5 percent. By September, it was almost 15 percent.

In itself, this is enough to explain the outcome in Holborn and St Pancras. If Polanski had run for the constituency when Starmer was still the Labour leader, he would probably have won — but in that scenario, of course, there never would have been a by-election in the first place. To some extent, Polanski and the Greens have been victims of their own success. By forcing Labour to hold out the promise of a genuinely transformative agenda, they have inadvertently reduced the political space available to them, at least temporarily.

Under these circumstances, the best course of action would be to remain patient, avoid panicking, and look for opportunities to expose the gap between Burnham’s rhetoric and the substance of his policies. If it were up to Polanski alone, or the members who voted for him, this would surely have been the main line of argument from the Greens as they sought to move on from the by-election defeat. But the result in Holborn and St Pancras supplied an opening for Green politicians who never wanted the party to challenge Labour from the left in the first place.

It would be a mistake to speak about the right wing of the Green Party as if it were merely a smaller version of Labour’s dominant faction, since the two organizations have very different relationships with the British state and the capitalist class. As things stand, there is no Green counterpart of Peter Mandelson, who was passing on information about the Labour government’s economic plans to his friend Jeffrey Epstein while serving as a cabinet minister. Nor is there a Green version of Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader under Corbyn, who has recently taken up a job as a lobbyist for Palantir.

At the same time, there are clear ideological differences within the Green Party that were on display during the 2025 leadership campaign. Polanski defeated a joint ticket comprising two of the Green MPs elected the previous year, Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns. A New Statesman profile described Ramsay and Chowns, without any hint of malice, as “eco-centrists.” Ramsay claimed that Polanski’s approach would alienate more potential supporters than it gained, while Chowns insisted that the Greens were “way past those kinds of old ideas of politics being binary, left and right.”

There is no reason to think that the experience of the last year has prompted them to rethink their basic political outlook. When Ramsay spoke recently about the need for his party to establish “a broad base of support,” it was more than a platitude. He would like the Greens to position themselves as an ecological version of the Liberal Democrats instead of competing aggressively with Labour for urban left-wing voters. This is a recipe for being all things to all people and nothing much to anyone in particular.

It is important to note here that Ramsay and Chowns are Westminster MPs, while Polanski and the two Green deputy leaders elected alongside him are not (Polanski is a member of the London Assembly; Mothin Ali and Rachel Millward are local councilors). No matter how democratic a party constitution may be, elected representatives still occupy the key positions of influence, with MPs at the top of the hierarchy.

There was a spectacular increase in party membership after Polanski took the reins, from 66,000 in September 2025 to 215,000 by the following spring. However, as the examples of Labour and the Scottish National Party from the last decade show, an influx of new members will not change a party unless there is a wider transformation of its program and personnel.

Caroline Lucas, who was the first and only Green MP between 2010 and 2024, endorsed the unsuccessful leadership ticket of Ramsay and Chowns. On the eve of the English local elections this year, Lucas issued a statement that generated the following headline in the Guardian: “Greens must take immediate action against antisemitism in party, says Lucas.” She seemed to be very pleased with the results of her handiwork: “I felt that it needed to be said . . . I hadn’t seen it being said in quite those terms.”

You don’t have to be an expert in codebreaking to decipher the criticism of Polanski that Lucas was putting forward here. If it were simply a question of stating that prejudice against Jews has no place in the Green Party, there would have been no need for Lucas to stick her oar in, since Polanski has made that point over and over again. She clearly felt that the current leadership was being much too combative in its response to allegations of antisemitism instead of taking them at face value.

We can find a good example of what those allegations really amounted to in another Guardian article published during the election campaign. The Labour politician Steve Reed claimed that Polanski had opened the floodgates to antisemitism: “Some of the worst antisemites that we kicked out of the Labour Party not only joined the Green Party, but are now standing for the Green Party.”

Remarkably, the Guardian did not ask Reed to identify any of the Green election candidates he had in mind. It would have been very easy to check whether he was telling the truth about “the people that the Labour Party kicked out for being antisemites” if he had supplied a list of names, or even a single name. One can only assume that Reed chose not to offer any concrete examples because he knew that it would have undermined his case instead of bolstering it.

A Green spokesperson contemptuously dismissed the accusations that Reed made against their party: “Bad-faith attacks are all Labour has left.” Long experience shows that this is the only principled and pragmatic way of dealing with people who lie about antisemitism as casually as they breathe. Caroline Lucas would no doubt have preferred a meek and deferential response, promising to do better. Her style of politics relies heavily on a politically structured understanding of niceness that will always leave her exposed to the stratagems of a charlatan like Reed.

This episode was a foretaste of the much more virulent controversy over a motion passed at this year’s Green conference that defined Zionism as “a political ideology which called for the creation — and, now it exists, the continuity — of an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population.” The motion also expressed support for “the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants.”

These were the main aspects of the policy statement that provoked the ire of British media commentators. Surprisingly perhaps, few seem to have picked up on another clause that affirmed the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation “by all available means under international law.” Guardian pundit Jonathan Freedland did highlight this aspect of the motion, claiming that the Green policy was “more extreme than mainstream Palestinian opinion — they’re saying violence is now legitimate.”

In reality, Palestinian support for armed struggle has fluctuated over the past three years, from a high point of 63 percent in December 2023 to a low point of 27 percent in August this year. This does not mean that Palestinians have changed their mind about the moral legitimacy of violence. It is a tactical debate about what methods are likely to prove most effective. The Green motion does not say that Palestinians should or must take up arms against the Israeli occupation forces — it merely defends their right to do so if they consider it to be the wisest course of action.

Green politicians such as Caroline Lucas objected to defining Zionism as a racist ideology, but their arguments were unconvincing and inconsistent. At first, Lucas objected on the grounds that “Zionism can be interpreted in so many different ways,” as if theoretical versions of Zionism that have never had any political impact should be given the same weight as the actually existing Zionism of the Israeli state from the Nakba to the present day.

During the conference, she changed tack by suggesting that Zionism was “both racist AND a response to racism” against European Jews. Having acknowledged that for Palestinians, “Zionism was and remains a violent settler-colonial project, exclusionary and yes, racist,” Lucas then reverted back to her original line about the irreducible plurality of Zionism after the motion was passed: “It tries to have a singular definition of Zionism when we know that there are many.”

Lucas also complained that the motion was “divisive.” This was hardly likely to persuade anyone who was not already in her camp, since any position the Greens adopt in relation to Palestine is bound to be divisive. The real question is whether it draws the line of division in the right place.

If Lucas and her allies had a stronger grounding in the politics of Palestine solidarity, they might have developed some more convincing arguments. For example, instead of claiming that it is impossible to define the core tenets of Zionism, it would be more useful to ask whether this is the most effective line of attack for a political party. The evidence of the past few weeks suggests that supporters of Israel are only too glad to spend their time on hairsplitting debates about the possible meanings of Zionism.

Let’s return for a moment to Jonathan Freedland, who has spent much of his career pretending to feel sad about the oppression of the Palestinians while relentlessly defaming anyone who proposes to do something about it. Freedland was evidently delighted to have the opportunity to splash around in this paddling pool of discourse — much safer than venturing into deep waters, where he might have to speak about the material realities of what the Zionist state-building project has involved for the Palestinian people. In a characteristically vicious column, Freedland managed to compare the Greens to the Spanish Inquisition — any echo of Monty Python was presumably unintentional — without offering so much as a sideways glance at the Nakba.

There will always be chancers like Freedland clogging up the public sphere with their disingenuous talking points. The issue is whether focusing on the correct definition of Zionism is the best way to put them on the back foot. Freedland and his ideological peers can spin their wheels from here to eternity talking about how Zionism “means different things to different people.” They will be much less comfortable making the same argument about the Balfour Declaration, the Deir Yassin massacre, or the destruction of Gaza’s health care system.

A similar point applies to the motion’s call for a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine.” This is an entirely legitimate goal, and there should be no question of imposing a two-state model based on the 1967 border as the only acceptable framework. However, it is not essential for a political party in Britain to adopt its own programmatic view of what the final outcome should be, so long as it supports the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) issued a statement that strongly defended the Green Party and its members from a wave of attacks after the motion was passed. In the course of doing so, the PSC carefully noted that its own position is one of principled agnosticism: “Our longstanding policy, shaped in dialogue with our Palestinian partners, is that it is for the Palestinian people as a whole, rather than the solidarity movement in Britain, to decide what form Palestinian self-determination should take.” There was a proposed amendment to the motion that would have taken the same basic line, but it did not receive enough votes to pass.

It is perfectly normal and healthy to have tactical discussions about the best way to formulate arguments and weaken the pro-Israel bloc in British politics. But it is a very different matter to present the ideas in the conference motion as if they were fundamentally illegitimate for a mainstream political party. That is precisely what figures like Adrian Ramsay and Caroline Lucas did after the vote.

Ramsay said that he was “deeply upset” about the motion and implied that Jewish people had reason to feel threatened by it, while Lucas claimed that it was “dangerous.” She appeared to be particularly concerned about the call for a single state in historic Palestine: “Supporting a motion which effectively denies Israel’s right to exist crosses a very significant red line.”

It would be interesting to ask Lucas for a detailed account of why she thinks the motion crossed “a very significant red line.” Is it a matter of principle for her that Israel must always continue to exist within its pre-1967 boundaries? That version of a two-state model would give Israel almost four-fifths of the territory of historic Palestine. The Oslo accords collapsed because that still wasn’t enough for Israel’s leaders: from Ehud Barak to Benjamin Netanyahu, they have all insisted on grabbing more of the remaining 22 percent.

In principle, one could support the idea of a two-state model while insisting that historic Palestine should be evenly divided between Israelis and Palestinians. After all, there has never been a single day since 1967 when Israel treated the so-called Green Line as if it were a permanent boundary, so the idea that Palestinians must always do so has neither logic nor justice on its side.

The most likely explanation is that Lucas hadn’t thought very much about the precise rationale for her “very significant red line.” Her main priority was to indicate to the British media that she strongly disapproved of the motion, because the commentariat was furious about it. The predictable effect of her intervention was to invite further attacks.

The bias of the Tory press goes without saying, not to mention its unconcealed racism, so let’s turn to the liberal end of the media marketplace. The Observer published a story that set aside any claim to journalistic credibility for the sake of ideological warfare, with the headline “Greens face ‘existential threat’ as membership plummets after anti-Zionist motion.”

On closer inspection, the claim about members leaving in droves relied upon a single piece of data: “One local party has seen a two-point drop in membership since last Sunday, with similar falls reported in other areas. If this were replicated across the country, it would mean 4,400 people had resigned.” Even if this exercise in speculative statistics proved to be accurate, it would mean that the Green membership was well over three times higher than it had been before Polanski took over.

Scraping the very bottom of the barrel, the author of the piece, Rachel Sylvester, turned to Ian Austin for a hostile quote: “They’re zealots, they’re extremists and they’re obsessed . . . you win elections by being reasonable and pleasant.” Austin himself is one of the most unreasonable and unpleasant individuals you will find in British politics, a swivel-eyed extremist who categorically denies that Israel bears any responsibility for the carnage in Gaza.

This former Labour MP never has to worry about facing the voters again, because Boris Johnson gave him a peerage after he campaigned for a Tory victory in the 2019 general election. Andy Burnham decided to keep Austin in his post as the UK trade envoy to Israel — a post that he has previously used to encourage a sense of impunity among Israeli government officials.

Burnham himself seized the opportunity to go on the offensive against the Green Party, claiming that the conference motion was antisemitic and ruling out any coalition with the Greens at Westminster. Polanski hit back hard with the following statement: “I’m the only Jewish leader of a political party. I’m a victim of antisemitism every day and I’ve made it clear Jewish people are welcome in my party. You’re a prime minister who arms a genocide and locks up pensioners for opposing it.”

The Green Party leader responded in similar terms when the Labour politician Bridget Phillipson issued an edict to Labour councilors around the country, telling them they must break off governing pacts with their Green counterparts unless they explicitly denounce the motion: “Antisemitism is serious. That’s precisely why it should never be weaponised as a political football.”

This is the right basis on which to hold the line against Labour, a party that has absolutely no standing to issue certificates of moral legitimacy. As Tom Blackburn has argued, capitulation to Burham’s demands would be futile as well as unprincipled: “Were the Greens to renounce Zionism is Racism, the goalposts would be shifted once again, and they would be placed at the centre of some other concocted crisis.” The aim is to tilt the balance of forces inside the Green Party so that it no longer poses any threat to Labour.

In the midst of this contrived hysteria, the Guardian published an article by Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust that put the attacks on the Green Party in their proper perspective. Rich set out to demonize everyone who acknowledges the overwhelming evidence that Israel has been deliberately targeting children in Gaza:

Without doubt, it is deeply upsetting that thousands of Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza, and many feel that Israel could have done more to minimise civilian casualties. But to describe this not as the result of a tragic and unbearable conflict, but as a “war on children,” is to imply that killing children is the whole point: a charge that echoes the medieval blood libel. From that assumption to Jihad al-Shamie yelling: “This is what you get for killing our children” as he tried to batter down the doors of Heaton Park synagogue last Yom Kippur is not as big a leap as some might wish.

For Rich, the only acceptable response when an Israeli sniper carefully aims his rifle before shooting a child in the head and chest is to wring one’s hands ineffectually about the “tragic and unbearable conflict.” He smears and slanders everybody who expresses outrage about such crimes by associating them with the man who attacked a Manchester synagogue last year, killing two people.

No matter how brazenly he denies the evidence of Israel’s genocide, Rich will never lose his status as a legitimate figure in the eyes of the British media. The Community Security Trust, a body that works closely with the British state and its police forces, will not face any pressure to distance itself from his morally repugnant views. These are the standards of the British political mainstream, whose gatekeepers now presume to exclude the Green Party from their most exalted company.

Before Unifor won in Mississauga in 2024, there had only been two prior union certifications — official government recognition that a group of workers is represented by a given union, creating a legal obligation to bargain — at Walmart facilities in Canada. One was at a store in Windsor, Ontario, in 1996 with the United Steelworkers, and it was only certified by labor board order in 1997 due to Walmart’s serious unfair labor practices during the election. The union never got a contract and was eventually decertified. The other was with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in 2005 at a store in Jonquière, Quebec, which Walmart closed just after the union requested binding arbitration from Quebec’s minister of labor. As will become important in this story, Quebec, the neighboring province to Ontario, has strong enough labor law that certification there will almost always result in a contract. This is the dynamic that led Amazon to shutter its entire operation in the province last year.

In the United States, the only successful election at a Walmart was in 2000, to unionize ten meat cutters at a Supercenter in Jacksonville, Texas. Days later, Walmart responded to what would otherwise have been minor news in rural East Texas by announcing that it was getting rid of all meat cutting in their Supercenters across the nation. In 2011, the UFCW attempted to organize the company as a whole with the multimillion dollar OUR Walmart campaign, organizing workers to engage in a wide variety of actions. Union elections, however, were not part of the mix, reflecting the recognition that the official path to unionization in the United States had been effectively blocked in cases where the employer was a corporation as well-resourced and with as much anti-union animus as Walmart. OUR Walmart had some notable wins, but the UFCW pulled funding from the campaign in 2015 when Marc Perrone assumed the presidency of the union.

I am less familiar with Walmart’s arrangements with unions in Mexico, but it appears that many of the contracts that Walmart has signed there are so-called protection contracts, i.e., a collective bargaining agreement made without the workers’ knowledge or consent. By claiming to represent workers, those contracts, often signed by politically connected unions, “protect” the employer from any efforts by its employees to bargain more aggressively. Many such contracts were targeted by reforms promised by Andrés Manuel López Obrador­­ after he won the presidency in 2018. The next year, when the Revolutionary Confederation of Laborers and Farmworkers (CROC) planned a strike on a number of Walmart facilities, the company averted it with a 5.5 percent annual wage increase. But it is not clear that any new contract was signed between Walmart and CROC as a result of the settlement.

So when Marty Gaouette, a worker in the shipping department at Walmart’s Mississauga Regional Distribution Center (RDC), reached out to Unifor Local 252 in December 2023 about the possibility of starting a union that would secure its gains through a legally binding contract, there was no real template in North America for doing so.

But there were plenty of worker frustrations. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Walmart had temporarily offered a wage bump (“hero pay,” the company called it, as part of the broader pattern of pandemic wage increases in the in-person retail sector) and flexible working hours. As unemployment numbers climbed, however, Walmart understood it had a relatively captive workforce and reversed course, eliminating the wage bump after just six months. “It was like the worst thing that they could have done to us,” explained Rhaddy Que, a utility associate in the maintenance department and eventually a member of the workplace’s bargaining team. “We were committed to work, but [they were] taking those dollars away from us.”

Forced overtime was also a major issue. Unlike Amazon’s “mandatory extended time,” which is mostly enforced around holidays and Prime days, forced overtime became a year-round regularity in Mississauga, leaving workers with little control over their work-life balance. Speedup, in addition to longer hours, was increasingly an irritation. The Mississauga distribution center does what Walmart calls “store replenishment” — filling trucks destined for retail locations — and so has not traditionally been under the same management pressure as Amazon fulfillment centers, with their rapid delivery promises. But competitive pressure from Amazon has led Walmart to invest in its e-commerce capacity, offering last-mile delivery from its stores, and as it has done so, the need for greater and greater efficiency in replenishing inventory at Walmart stores has increased. Rodolfo “Tito” Pilozo, who was also on the Unifor bargaining team and works in receiving, says that the volume increase in the shipping department was what pushed Gaouette to contact the union. Management would say that they would have to process a certain number of cases of goods per hour, when in reality the amount was 10 percent more than announced.

Speed-up, forced overtime, clawed back wages and benefits offered during Covid: these were swirling in the well of worker frustration in late 2023. The organizing work went quickly at first. A number of workers at the facility had been working there more or less since 1994, when Walmart first came to Canada. Back then, the warehouse had been located in Brampton, a neighboring auto manufacturing town also part of the greater Toronto area. It had been owned and operated by a third-party company, Tibbett and Britten, though those working there understood it was a warehouse for Walmart. Many of the workers who would lead the organizing in Mississauga had been previously involved with a unionization effort with the Teamsters at the facility in Brampton in the late 1990s. Tibbett and Britten moved the operation to Mississauga in 2002, according to Pilozo, and Walmart took full control of it in 2014. It was workers like Pilozo, with a great amount of seniority, who formed the core of the organizing team.

Around April 2024, however, the organizing momentum slowed. Walmart’s captive audience meetings began to have an effect. “There was a lot of fear,” Que says about that moment. “They gave us that fear. We would have meetings, and they would just say how it’s not worth having a union. And that the company will do what the union is promising you.” Angela Drew Kimelman and Gary Rumboldt, the Unifor staff organizers assigned to the campaign, met with key worker organizers and they decided they were ready to make the campaign more visible. They formed “Team Red,” a group of workers who were willing to wear Unifor red to work on Wednesdays and who would leaflet outside the warehouse about the union. Unifor got so-called protection letters sent to Walmart on behalf of many of the organizing workers, which reminded the company that it was a violation of the rights of pro-union workers to be treated any differently than other workers. This gave Team Red the cover and confidence to organize publicly rather than in secret, as is often done in the early months of union drives.

Justin Gniposky, Unifor’s organizing director, credits the strength of the team for patiently building strong connections during this time:

We had a really strong inside committee. They spent the time, did the work. . . .  Sometimes you don’t have that kind of structure on the inside, but these guys built that structure, they built it to succeed, and it showed. They had the respect of their co-workers, and respect’s one thing, but their co-workers also believed they had their best interests in mind. They had their trust to move through this.

Part of building this trust lay in making sure that all union materials were translated into Punjabi, Tagalog, and Chinese. It also lay in getting workers who spoke these languages to reach out to other workers directly. This proved particularly important for getting the sizable part-time workforce on board with the union program. Most of the part-timers were international workers, some on temporary visas. Que estimated that even though at least 30–40 percent of those workers are no longer with Walmart, most of them supported the union when they were at the warehouse, despite many knowing they would not be around long enough to benefit from a contract.

The Mississauga workers voted for their union from September 10 to September 12, 2024. Participation was high, and the union won with a reported 56 percent majority. Que expressed the disbelief that many felt about the victory:

We weren’t sure at all [that we were going to win]. It was sort of embedded in our heads that Walmart is anti-union. You heard a lot that it was impossible to have a union, and that Walmart will not allow it. That’s what they made us feel. But later on, we started to feel like there was more power in people wanting to have the union than in Walmart not wanting one.

The day after Ontario certified the union to represent the Mississauga warehouse workers, Walmart issued an across-the-board wage increase for every single logistics worker in Canada (warehouse workers and drivers both) — except for the eight hundred workers who had just unionized. As Gniposky summed it up, “Here’s the congratulations on getting a union. You are now making less than every single one of your coworkers.” Walmart also brought in workers from temp agencies to staff the Mississauga facility, signaling to the newly unionized workers that they could be easily replaced.

Meanwhile, Unifor had other battles to fight with the company. In October 2024, the month after the election victory in Ontario, 120 Walmart truck drivers in British Columbia won card check certification. Soon after, 280 Walmart truck drivers in Alberta did the same. Peter Pearce, a driver out of the Nisku, Alberta, depot and member of the bargaining team there, said that it was “favoritism, nepotism, and unfair treatment by certain supervisors” that led the Alberta drivers to organize for union representation. To stem the tide of pro-union sentiment across the company’s Canada operations, Walmart issued yet another across-the-board wage increase. This made for two unprecedented countrywide wage increases in the span of a month and half, but the company made the message of these wage increases clear with the workplaces it excluded — the Mississauga RDC workers and the two units of truck drivers.

Due to the particularities of Canadian labor law, the Mississauga warehouse workers’ and the western Canada truckers’ campaigns were run slightly differently. The warehouse workers petitioned for certification at the provincial level by the government of Ontario, while the drivers petitioned the federal government, as truck drivers crossing provincial or international borders are regulated federally. In Ontario, unions need 40 percent of workers to sign a union card before filing for an election, and a simple majority in an election to be certified. Federal elections are run by “card check,” meaning that a union need only get 50 percent plus one on cards to certify. Canadian labor law also has what is called a “freeze provision,” which prevents employers from altering workers’ terms and conditions during a certification drive, including by withholding standard wage increases. As the wage increases and other retaliatory actions by Walmart clearly violated the freeze provision, Unifor filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges at both the provincial and federal levels. The Ontario labor board delayed the decision on the union’s charges until after collective bargaining ended, but the federal ULP was settled in November 2025.

In the meantime, in May 2025, Walmart had sold off its Canada fleet service to a third party named Canada Cartage. This meant Unifor had to update its certification, which delayed negotiations, and Canada Cartage began a decertification drive. Pearce, the Alberta truck driver, described those negotiations as “extremely difficult.” The bargaining team pushed for a three-year contract, a 2.5 percent wage increase per year, and a limitation on “lease ops” subcontracting to no more than 10 percent of their work. Even though the federal labor board halted the decertification drive, as decertification is not allowed during active collective bargaining, Canada Cartage management did everything to slow things down. During the negotiations, the bargaining team got word that a sizable group of previously anti-union drivers in Calgary decided they now wanted the union to sign a sweetheart deal: a one-year contract, a 1.5 percent wage increase, and a lease ops limitation to 25 percent. “It made absolutely no sense,” Pearce said. “It scream[ed] of manipulation by management. ‘Please don’t give me extra money.’ I’ve never heard anybody say that.” The Unifor drivers eventually settled on a one-year collective agreement with Canada Cartage that expires in May 2027. But things ended quite differently for workers at the RDC across the country in Ontario.

Collective bargaining in Mississauga finally started in May 2025, eight months after a majority of the warehouse’s workers voted for Unifor representation, and the same month Walmart sold off its Canadian trucking operations to Canada Cartage. As is often the case with intransigent employers, Walmart offered Unifor only a few sporadic dates over the subsequent months when it would be available for negotiations. With longer deadline rules for negotiations than there are in Quebec, Walmart intended to drag out the Ontario process as long as possible.

Unifor’s bargaining team consisted of seven workers as well as Unifor’s national bargaining representative, Shayne Fields, and the longtime president of Local 252, Eamonn Clarke, who the year before had won a strike by four hundred workers at a plant owned by Nestlé. This team brought an intimidating amount of collective experience at Walmart. According to Pilozo,

The good thing about our bargaining committee is that the people chosen were very senior people: twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, twenty-eight years with the company, and so on. When we first introduced each other, they [the Walmart negotiators] were very impressed. Their facial expressions showed that, “Wow, these guys have been there for a long time, almost since the beginning.” Even their lawyer was stunned.

To negotiate, Walmart sent a delegation of nine company representatives. There was little indication that the company intended to bargain in good faith. According to a few of my interviewees, company management was actively supporting a decertification campaign, giving some anti-union workers special lockers in the building to hold decertification petitions and anti-union literature. Some workers who spoke out against the union got special treatment. Verbal altercations would break out, and at one point there was a physical fight between two employees, one pro- and the other anti-union, both of whom were suspended and later fired. According to Que, however, on the basis of Team Red’s inside connections, most workers understood these altercations to be a product of Walmart’s actions, not the union’s.

I asked everyone I interviewed for this story if there was ever a moment where it felt like negotiations shifted, where Walmart seemed to turn a corner and begin to negotiate in good faith. That moment never seemed to come for anyone. It seemed more that, unlike in the United States, there was a limit on just how long the company could drag out negotiations because in Ontario, Unifor had the right to apply for an arbitrated settlement if collective bargaining ran aground.

On May 7, 2026, a year after negotiations had officially begun, Walmart and Unifor announced they had reached an agreement. The resulting two-year contract was, by everyone’s account, not the “best” contract they could have gotten, but it was a meaningful one: wage parity with other warehouses; retroactive back pay for violating the freeze provision, in the form of a lump sum payment in the range of $4,000 to $9,000 per worker in July of this year; a “me too” clause preventing Walmart from raising wages elsewhere without raising wages in Mississauga, as they had done in the fall of 2024; planned wage raises in 2027 and 2028; a grievance procedure; and a limit on temporary workers. That last bit, according to Gniposky, got the biggest applause at the contract ratification meetings. The next day, Local 252’s Walmart members ratified the contract by a whopping 93 percent.

Que and Pilozo told me that management is slowly acclimating to the new environment. Pilozo said he corrected a manager the other day who was complaining to workers about “your” contract: “It’s our contract, because it was signed collectively by the employer and us.” The manager apologized on the spot. Que said the new grievance procedure is working well, and that communication between stewards and management has improved to the point where they only invoke it occasionally. When I was interviewing them for this story, the lump sum payment was just days away, and workers were giving knowing nods to each other around the warehouse. In Pilozo’s words, where tension had existed not so long ago, “you’re starting to see smiles.”

“Workers at Walmart in the US and Canada have long made it clear that they want a union,” Nelson Lichtenstein told me. “To actually have a signed contract is a major breakthrough and something genuinely new when it comes to the largest private employer in North America.” Still, this story might seem a bit anticlimactic: big union wins are supposed to end in heroic confrontations before the company concedes. But no dramatic confrontation ensued here. Again, the billion dollar question is: Why was this the moment for Walmart to finally cave and sign a union contract? Are they getting soft in their old age, without Sam Walton’s infamous hatred of unions to guide the way?

I would boil down the key factors in this historic victory to four: location, resources, regulatory constraint, and leadership. First, the fact that this happened in Mississauga was no accident. “Mississauga is a hub for most of Ontario and Quebec,” Gniposky explained. “That facility is important. It’s not as easy for them to move.” The company regularly warned workers that a pro-union vote could lead the facility to shut down, but the threat was a weak one. For one, the facility was an RDC and not a store (unlike the location in Jonquière, which Walmart shut down after they won union certification), and, in the Walmart supply chain, the RDC is in a key staging ground for two of Canada’s major metro markets, Toronto and Montreal. Walmart doesn’t have distribution centers in Quebec — having already closed them allegedy on account of the province’s strong labor law — but that market is easily supplied from Mississauga.

Unlike the largest warehousing area in the United States, the sprawling Inland Empire in southern California, Canada’s primary warehousing cluster is nestled in a narrow corridor of the west Toronto suburbs. Stretching from Mississauga to Brampton, it is constrained on all sides: to the south by Lake Ontario, the east by Toronto, the west by suburban residential development, and the north by lack of infrastructure (and eventually Lake Huron). In other words, it would be a huge pain for Walmart to relocate this RDC. Distribution centers are already more strategic organizing targets than stores, on account of the disruptive impact that labor can theoretically cause through their organization. But distribution centers that can’t easily be moved are ideal targets.

Choke point analysis — based on the idea that organized labor is going to be most successful at points in the production and distribution process where the disruptive impact of labor actions is relatively high — has a mixed reputation in the labor world. In part, this is because it involves the idea that some sites of work are more structurally important to a company’s operation than others, and thus that some workers’ struggles are more strategic or important than others. But when it comes to the contemporary logistical economy, in which the flow of commodities has increased in speed and efficiency but also fragility, and at a moment when labor is limited in the resources it can allocate to any organizing campaign, choke point analysis matters more than ever. Organized labor ignores it at its own peril.

None of this is to say that Walmart will not attempt to move the RDC in Mississauga. Unifor and the RDC workers are well aware of this, which is why Pilozo, Que, and their fellow members of Team Red have been leafleting at other Walmart distribution centers all over the western suburbs of Toronto, aiming to saturate the area with union drives to give Walmart no geographic out. When Mississauga workers had been excluded from the prior wage bumps, their plight served as a cautionary tale for other Walmart workers, who benefited from disengagement. But now that the Mississauga workers have a hefty lump sum of back pay and contractually guaranteed raises set for 2027 and 2028, Unifor can persuasively make the case that the Team Red workers at Mississauga have been setting the standard for warehouse workers throughout the entire region.

Second, this was not simply a scrappy, bottom-up drive. Unifor had invested serious resources into becoming Canada’s warehousing union. Gaouette reached out to Unifor because he had heard of the union’s Warehouse Workers Unite campaign, the fruit of its strategic analysis of the warehousing sector. Unifor was 100 percent committed to seeing the campaign through and leveraged the threat of arbitration, a costly and time-consuming process, as well as the combination of federal and provincial ULPs, to push the Mississauga campaign to the finish line. Note that the federal disclosure from the trucking negotiations hung over the provincial proceedings only because Unifor was willing to pursue Walmart on multiple fronts. This is the story of a committed group of trusted workplace leaders, but it is also one of a union with a long-term strategic vision and the will to back up that vision with resources.

Third, Unifor strategically used the constraints of Canadian labor law to make it so that Walmart ultimately had nowhere to go. This is the big difference between the Canadian and American contexts: especially now, when most of the gains of the Biden-era National Labor Relations Board have been reversed, it’s difficult to imagine even a very skillful union in the United States using ULPs and the lingering possibility of arbitration to push toward a contract, as Unifor did in this case. This is not to say, however, that the question of regulatory constraint is not applicable, simply that it must be asked differently: in New York City, for instance, the Delivery Protection Act under consideration by the city council could upset Amazon’s delivery driver subcontracting model, providing the conditions for major wage gains and organizing drives. In many states, and many more municipalities, ballot initiatives can be used to put such regulatory questions governing employment relationships directly before voters. Looking longingly over the border at Canadian regulatory constraint should be cause not for lamentation, but for creative approaches to improving the odds of union drives in the United States.

Finally, it’s overwhelmingly clear that the Mississauga RDC has a robust layer of trusted workplace leaders who not only bore an intimidating amount of collective work experience at Walmart and were committed to the union but also had the respect and trust of their colleagues to easily weather any storm that the company created. “Walmart saw that they weren’t going to be able to manipulate and turn these workers against each other,” Gniposky said. “Certainly there were anti-union people, as there are in any workplace, but they were a minority, and the majority was clearly on the side of their union. This was the strongest inside committee I’ve seen in my career.”

It’s notable that there were no strikes, walkouts, or even marches on the boss in this story. As Que explained, “We educated all our members and said, ‘Maybe the best thing would be to have a strike.’ But we didn’t have to to get this collective agreement done.” If a strike was what was needed, Team Red was prepared to make it happen, and, by all accounts, it would have had high, if not total, participation. But they were reluctant to go down that road. Most stories of successful first contract fights will not be so free of confrontational workplace actions, but they will certainly feature workplace leaders focused more on the resolution than the conflict — people who want to work, to put in the work, and to proudly wear a union shirt while doing so.

That leaves, as potential audience members, those who don’t know much about Elon Musk or are totally indifferent to him. And obviously those lucky, oblivious citizens aren’t going to create a rush of ticket-buying either.

Oh, and one other tiny group of possible Musk-watchers includes cinephiles who are always interested in what’s being done in the documentary form. They’re all flocking to see the other documentary that opened last week, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything, a total wow of a film that’s drawing in crowds far beyond the size of the usual audience for documentaries. It took in about $15 million its first weekend; Musk made about $315,000 on more than four hundred screens.

But if some of those spectators go above and beyond the call of cinephile duty and watch Musk too, they’ll be depressed at best, and appalled at worst. It’s a sloppy job, Musk, reflecting a juvenile sensibility. It’s constantly presenting slapdash footage and recorded voices that aren’t identified or attributed to any source, and it’s loaded with what I guess must be Alex Gibney’s idea of infotainment stylings intended to make documentaries popular with the masses. Because Musk wouldn’t sit for an interview, for example, Gibney mined his interviews with other filmmakers and journalists and podcasters to digitally generate an AI avatar of Elon Musk who speaks as he might speak if he could be persuaded to speak to the filmmaker.

This is clearly Gibney’s idea of a big “gotcha” triumph, cleverly turning Musk’s massive AI investment against him. But really all it accomplishes is more misery for the half-dozen spectators in the theater, getting forcibly returned over and over to the bizarrely big-headed Musk avatar, made unaccountably handsomer than the actual golem-like real-life Musk, tricked out in leathers and enthroned in a gaming chair to deliver further inane commentary, such as musings on the possibility that we’re living in a simulation or that humans might turn out to be nothing more than “the biological bootloader” for digital superintelligence.

In general, Alex Gibney seems to have made an attempt at form-follows-function in creating a documentary that’s extremely Musk-like, resulting in an overall sense of slovenly gigantism that’s nevertheless unimpressive: a film as crude, outsize, erratic, and shambling as the man himself. For example, Gibney resorts to endless comic book and video game effects, favorite Musk pastimes, in order to present Musk’s rampage through the world. The first time we see a lengthy sequence involving first-person-shooter-style animation to represent Musk’s takeover of Twitter, blasting thousands of employees who actually know how the business runs, mass firings that help Musk turn a sometimes profitable company into a free-falling flop called X, it’s barely endurable. But then we have to watch the same extensive pew-pew-pew gamer massacres a second time, now with Musk’s notorious chainsaw repurposed as a firing weapon, to represent DOGE’s rampage through various US government buildings. It stands for the firing of legions of highly competent officials early in Donald Trump’s second term, before Musk had a spat with Trump and DOGE was shut down. By this point, it’s merely infuriating on too many levels to count.

The message of Musk, just to save you the trouble of actually sitting through the film, especially if you’re a leftist thinking that you really ought to go see it, is that it’s hopeless to resist Elon Musk’s fascist takeover. It’s already too late. Musk has amassed so much wealth, accrued so much political influence among the worst of the worst of global leaders, and created such extensive surveillance systems worldwide, the only thing to do is wait for him to officially declare himself as a comic-book supervillain come to life, having finally achieved world dominance, and probably called something stupid like GreatX, Overlord of the Galaxy.

And the attitude Gibney adopts — gloating over our guaranteed collective doom — serves the lunatic right, the fascist Musk-lovers of the world, very well. Why bother organizing when we’re all going to die?

Musk starts and ends with the sublime imagery of outer space, which is promptly despoiled by Elon Musk and his imagined colonization of all of it (“I want to die on Mars,” he once mused), which began with SpaceX, represented in Musk as his most successful company in spite of all those crashing rockets. If the film succeeds in its mission to induce widespread cynical despair, you’ll be thinking the human race needs to end if only to prevent Musk from getting his big dumb mitts on other planets after he destroys the earth.