Writing about Musk’s newly minted status at her magazine The Argument, for example, liberal pundit Jerusalem Demsas articulates the position that inequality is of little consequence as long as everyone has a decent standard of living. For Demsas, Musk being a trillionaire isn’t really that big of a deal in its own right. “I just don’t think inequality is that related to the central problems facing society,” she writes, urging us to care about the floor and not the ceiling.

Demsas flatly asserts that “gaps between people, absent material deprivation,” are “simply not a moral problem.” This is a position philosophers call “sufficientarianism.” The idea is that, as long as everyone has enough, it doesn’t matter how much more anyone else has. If “everyone in the world had access to a decent standard of living, but some people were quadrillionaires,” Demsas writes, this would be fine. By contrast, “a world without much inequality but significant deprivation” would be quite bad, and this is exactly how things were for “most of human history when most people lived in subsistence agrarian economies.”

Demsas assumes a moral zero-sum choice between caring about the height of the floor and caring about the gap between the floor and the ceiling. But we can and should care about both.

First of all, the two issues may be distinct in the abstract, but they’re highly interrelated in real life. The political influence of oligarchs like Musk clearly has something to do with America’s tragically underdeveloped welfare state — which is so neglected that, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, we still don’t have national health insurance. More generally, the more wealth and power we let people have on the ceiling, the less hope we have of politics that benefit anyone anywhere near the floor.

Second, even if we could somehow disentangle these things, we should question her assumption that only deprivation matters and fairness is irrelevant. Imagine a world where everyone had whatever you would personally consider to be “enough.” Now imagine that all the black people in this world stayed at “enough” while all the white people were raised to a vastly higher level. Presumably liberals like Demsas would (quite rightly) find this maddeningly unfair, on the grounds that an arbitrary factor like skin color shouldn’t make a difference to anyone’s life outcome. The problem is that exactly the same reasoning should apply to inequalities that stem from, for example, some people being born into the working class and others being born as the heirs to vast fortunes.

It’s one thing to argue that we have to swallow some degree of inequality as a price for a thriving economy — though the burden of proof should be on anyone who thinks we can’t make massive strides toward equality while keeping the floor at an acceptable level. It’s quite another to say that inequality so extreme that it gives us trillionaires doesn’t matter at all.

If the floor is set so low that some people lack medical care or clean drinking water, liberals can acknowledge the presence of an injustice and go to work thinking about what kind of technocratic tinkering would alleviate it. But where socialists think that a wildly unequal distribution of wealth (and hence economic power) is also outrageous, the ideological blind spots of pro-capitalist liberals like Demsas make it hard for them to see any problem at all.

Saying that both considerations matter isn’t some novel attempt to have it both ways. It’s the traditional socialist position. There’s a reason that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels spend the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto rhapsodizing about the effectiveness of capitalism in building up the machinery of an advanced global economy. They didn’t want to retreat to a world of subsistence farming, but they also didn’t think we needed to learn to live with capitalist inequality. Instead, they thought that the way capitalism supercharged global economic development created the possibility, for the first time in history, of moving toward a postcapitalist world that would be better than either one. This vision remains the socialist North Star.

If workers and the larger communities they’re part of collectively and democratically ran their own workplaces and decided how to distribute the product of their collective labor, we might not all end up with precisely the same incomes. Some people might need to be tempted with higher salaries to accept coordinating positions involving lots of stress and responsibility, or to accept particularly dirty and dangerous jobs no one wants to do. What we wouldn’t have is inequality based on a roll of the dice, which spirals so far out of control that we have to add new words like “trillionaire” to our collective vocabulary.

During the fight for our first union contract, we built worker support through structure tests: a series of escalating actions that engage the entire workplace and build leadership, where success is measured by the number of individual workers involved. Between winning our NLRB election in May 2024 and winning our contract in February 2026, Penn Grad Workers led seven structure tests. This began with a survey to collectively determine our initial bargaining demands and ended with signing up for picket line shifts in the event of a strike.

We found that our coworkers are most likely to take action when they are asked to do so by someone they know and trust, and with whom they already have a working relationship. Thus, we built majority support by developing leadership breadth across campus. Moving a workplace of thousands of people to take action together entailed organizing hundreds of leaders, making sure that each was caught up on the status of the campaign and engaged in conversations with their coworkers.

Workers’ organizing was most effective when it operated through existing social and work networks. For people who worked as teaching assistants in classrooms arbitrarily located across campus, it made sense to organize workers by program through the social networks that develop in departmental events. For research assistants who worked together in common labs, floors, and buildings, it was more effective to organize the turf by physical workplace. Such networks are present in any workplace, even though they may take different forms. Regardless of the workplace, workers can use existing social and work relationships to move their coworkers to take action.

Activating thousands of our coworkers required us to have thousands of conversations. During each structure test, workers would physically walk through labs and offices to talk with colleagues about the status of the union campaign and ask them to participate in the current petition, sign-on letter, or in-person action. For each structure test, we ensured at least one walk-through of every building where grad workers worked. Workers held phone banks to call colleagues that we were unable to find in person. A series of emails and social media posts accompanied each organizing drive — every worker got several mass emails during the structure test and at least one email from a colleague in their department or building. During each structure test, we tracked each worker’s participation. And we would aggregate participation at the building, department, and college levels to identify areas where leadership was strong and areas where leaders were needed.

Dense leadership networks also curbed turnover problems. Throughout our campaign, we faced a common problem: a single strong leader in a department could move the majority of their coworkers to participate. However, if that leader graduated or left Penn, or their temporary work position ended, that energy could quickly dissipate. Departments or buildings could be full of union-supporting individuals, but without knowledgeable leaders who could keep them engaged, the typical distractions of graduate school made it easy for them to fall out of touch. Good leaders made themselves redundant by involving their coworkers in leadership tasks.

Running structure tests repeatedly, on top of work and school obligations, can get tiring. Sometimes structure tests would plateau and leaders would get disheartened. As the stakes of our campaign got higher, workers had more questions to discuss before we could move them to action. For example, we found that each strike pledge required about four times as many organizing hours as a signature on our antidiscrimination petition. The secret to overcoming those plateaus was not some convenient shortcut. We simply “turned the crank” harder. More union conversations between coworkers — whether through walk-throughs, phone banks, or otherwise — always correlated positively with more participation.

High worker participation and leadership breadth density helped us overcome new political obstacles under the Trump administration. For example, Penn admin opposed our proposal for strong rights prohibiting workplace discrimination and harassment, something standard in collective bargaining agreements. It was a symptom of our political moment: the Trump administration wanted to demolish all programs that aimed to make higher education more equitable, and university leadership did not want to draw the ire of the White House. Instead of agreeing to include these fundamental rights in our contract, the university hid behind their fear of Trump. We knew we had to build power beyond the bargaining table to win this article.

Ultimately, over two thousand grad workers, the majority of us, signed a public petition demanding protections from discrimination and harassment and enforceable recourse through the grievance process in our contract. And a few months later, over five hundred grad workers took to Walnut Street for an informational picket, where we announced that we were signing strike pledges. The day after this picket, we won our demand at the negotiating table.

The Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants made many international workers fearful of speaking up for themselves. International workers on temporary visas helped our colleagues overcome their fears by becoming visible leaders on the campaign, demonstrating that there was safety in unity. International workers spoke directly with each other on walk-throughs and phone banks. For some of our colleagues, it could take up to a dozen conversations before they moved beyond their reservations to join collective action.

Workers built trusting relationships by engaging consistently over time. As organizers, we had to meet our colleagues where they were. We began by expressing sympathy toward their hesitations, followed by educating them with the facts and then working through how a strong contract could address an issue that motivated them. International workers also served on the bargaining committee, signed public petitions, and spoke openly about our support for our union at rallies, in the press, and on social media. Throughout all of this, international graduate student employees reminded each other that we are part of a bigger movement across the United States alongside thousands of international workers fighting for safer workplaces.

The Trump administration’s threats to cut funding for scientific research, especially from the National Institutes of Health, made many workers who relied on this funding wary of asking for the compensation and benefits they deserved. With the state of federal funding for research in dire straits, how were we supposed to ask for more money? Hearkening back to the concessionary bargaining of the 1980s, some workers became convinced that they shouldn’t be asking for more. Ultimately, we worked through all of these fears by constantly reminding ourselves of the fundamental motivation behind coming together as a union, and the value of the labor we provide. This labor deserves to be fairly compensated regardless of funding uncertainties. Penn can weather the storm. In the past few years, Penn has seen an annual university budget surplus in the hundreds of millions of dollars and it sits on a $24.8 billion endowment.

We successfully fought back against Trump’s threats to research funding by uniting with other groups of organized workers on our campus. Penn is not just an ivory tower; it’s the largest employer in Philadelphia. Penn employs workers in almost every sector: librarians, custodial staff, physicians, clerical workers, security guards, and more. Penn workers built relationships with each other through the Coalition of Workers at Penn, a group sponsored by the Philadelphia chapter of the AFL-CIO. After the Trump administration offered Penn preference on government contracts in exchange for implementing right-wing policy changes, we put these networks into action. Penn Grad Workers joined the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at Penn, which spearheaded an effort for workers to demonstrate their opposition via a petition and a rally.

The day before workers had planned another rally, the Penn administration became one of the first universities to publicly reject the compact. Penn Grad Workers continue to work with United Auto Workers (UAW) members across the country to fight against cuts to research funding that threaten groundbreaking research and endanger our livelihoods.

The success of our strategy was apparent. Without a friendly NLRB, we had no legal recourse to keep the Penn administration bargaining in good faith; they came back to the bargaining table because we were keeping them there. We expanded supermajority support, even as the stakes of our campaign escalated, and the political environment grew more frightening. Eighteen hundred eligible grad workers voted yes in our union election in May 2024, two thousand signed a public petition in April 2025 calling for a workplace free from discrimination and harassment, and in November 2,400 voted yes to authorize a strike.

By demonstrating that thousands of workers supported strike action, we also won increasing support from local unions and elected officials. Teamsters Local 623 promised to turn their UPS deliveries away from picket lines. Our fellow UAW members and elected leadership in Region 9 sustained us along the way and activated their political connections. Dozens of state legislators and city council members signed letters to Penn management calling them to come to a fair agreement.

Demonstrating majority worker participation made our strike threat credible. In the (literal) eleventh hour before our strike deadline, Penn finally came to the table with reasonable offers. And we secured an agreement that enshrined essential workplace rights and raised almost everyone’s wages by 15 to 20 percent, with some workers seeing their pay double. We also won benefits that few other graduate student employees have secured, like retirement benefits and paid medical and parental leave. When we ratified our agreement, 2,600 grad workers voted yes.

Now as UAW Local 5124, Penn grad workers will enforce our contract using the same strategy with which we won it: we will continue to recruit and develop a dense network of worker-leaders across our workplace and exert our power in repeated, high-participation actions. In the past several years, workers in higher education and beyond have faced new political obstacles to organizing. When we do not build durable majorities, we leave ourselves vulnerable to attack, and we deny our colleagues the opportunity to be part of a large, transformative movement. This movement is what will win concrete gains for all of us now and offer a model for future political and economic action throughout our lives, within and beyond higher education.

Workers in any workplace have the power to adopt this strategy. Just two weeks before we won our agreement with Penn, thousands of Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, brought their own worker-led UAW campaign to a victory and won 20 percent raises. On May Day, 2026, Penn Graduate Workers joined our fellow organized workers from Philadelphia restaurants, construction, schools, hospitals, city government, and other workplaces to ratify a Working People’s Vision for the Future of Philadelphia. In fact, high-participation, worker-led unionism may be the only way to build the worker power we need to win.

The Council of the EU has stated: “Europe’s productivity has been lagging behind other major economies in the last 20 years.” In particular, Andrea Butollo and his colleagues’ research demonstrates that China has become a dominant producer of batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines, and a range of advanced industrial technologies, with Chinese companies like Huawei, ZTE, Baidu, and Xiaomi emerging as major global competitors. The concern for the Global North is that China increasingly combines technological development with manufacturing capacity. China has become a necessary partner for producing many technologies — most important, anything that uses batteries.

The EU has responded with a wave of industrial initiatives aimed at strengthening its own high-tech production. The Industrial Accelerator Act passed this year prioritizes EU-made products across procurement, offering support schemes for made-in-EU products. Commissioners representing all twenty-seven member states have been asked to map Chinese activity across every portfolio, from trade and agriculture to defense, health, and digital infrastructure. A Guardian report suggests that Brussels is now seriously considering quotas, tariff-rate quotas, and supplier diversification requirements in strategically important sectors.

In addition to limiting Chinese imports, Reuters explains that the European Commission wants to double the EU market share of semiconductors to 20 percent in the next four years to boost the continent’s technological sovereignty. The proposal includes faster approval processes for data centers and aims to force agreements between manufacturers and buyers to “guarantee future purchases.”

Butollo and his colleagues’ research situates these developments within a broader turn toward economic nationalism, arguing that both the EU and the United States have adopted increasingly interventionist industrial policies in an effort to regain leadership in the global technology market. Edward Ashbee has gone further, suggesting that China’s rise may itself become the driver of deglobalization, as Western states conclude they can only develop by gaining advantage over China. Others, like Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold, maintain that global production networks are continuing to expand despite geopolitical tensions. The EU, now turning toward domestic protectionism, seeks to become an economic powerhouse of its own, much like China. The conditions under which China grew to economic dominance, however, cannot be readily recreated inside Europe.

The European Commission in 2019 termed China “a partner, a competitor, and a systemic rival.” The tension between the EU and China came out into the open with foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas’s outburst at the annual Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn. Although out of line with diplomatic practice, her statement was much in line with the EU’s latest shifts.

The problem is that the EU has long had a trade deficit in goods with China. The prominent area of concern is “China’s drive towards import substitution and self-sufficiency.” The commission has stated, “While the EU welcomes efforts by the Chinese authorities to attract foreign direct investment, EU companies continue to face discrimination in the Chinese market, and it remains difficult for European businesses in China to compete due to the lack of a level playing field.” In claiming that the issue is China’s political system, the Europeans show (albeit without admitting to it) that their own market is lagging behind in development.

The commission is critical of China’s economic approach, claiming that “China’s distortive industrial policies and practices — in particular with regard to widespread support for the manufacturing sector — create overcapacity in China, with negative externalities for a wide range of WTO [World Trade Organization] members.” This again confirms that Kallas’s hostile comparison is part of a bigger narrative shift, comparable to Donald Trump’s strong anti-China slogans, already adopted during his first term.

In their recent work on capitalist value chains, Selwyn and Bernhold argue that debates about deglobalization routinely overlook a fundamental feature of capitalism: capital’s endless search for opportunities to extract surplus value from labor. Their study revealed that leading US firms are not abandoning globalization; they are reorganizing it while trying to contain China’s technological rise.

Despite years of discussion about reshoring and economic sovereignty, global production remains deeply interconnected as companies continue to rely upon international supply chains. As production becomes more technologically complex and the need to keep costs to a minimum stays fundamental, the requirement for access to specialized suppliers, raw materials, and labor markets increases.

As these same authors cite from studies on the semiconductor industry, front-end production may expand in Europe and the United States, but much of the world’s manufacturing capacity remains concentrated in Asia. Firms are increasingly pursuing a “China + 1” strategy, diversifying production into countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia while maintaining extensive international supply chains.

Importing goods from China was not an issue for decades for the Global North, because the labor and thus products were cheap. But now, China has developed to control more and more of the core technologies, and the EU and United States haven’t been able to adapt, as they are not used to playing catch-up.

Selwyn and Bernhold thus conclude that current developments reflect attempts by capitalist firms and leading states to preserve globalization while restructuring it around new geopolitical realities. But if globalization as a process continues, why are Western governments increasingly embracing protectionist rhetoric?

Since the late 1970s, China’s role within the global economy seemed relatively clear, serving as a vast — and relatively cheap — reservoir of labor for Western firms seeking lower production costs. Selwyn and Bernhold argue that China’s economic opening changed the United States’ own approach to international deals:

As the US state facilitated a shift in its domestic economy towards high-tech CVC (Corporate Venture Capital) nodes such as research and development “knowledge,” and professional services, it relied increasingly on importing cheap manufactured goods from China which were often produced under the control of, or for, Western firms.

From this, it follows that the United States’ benefit from China was that American firms, controlling the technologies and the market, could use cheap Chinese labor, which helped, in turn, grow the Chinese technology sector.

But in this development, according to Selwyn and Bernhold, the Chinese state successfully pursued a strategy that first integrated the country into labor-intensive global production networks and later facilitated increasingly sophisticated forms of industrial and technological development.

As they claim, China followed a path of “first low-tech labor-intensive industrialization through integration into capitalist value chains, and later increasingly high-tech development.” China has successfully implemented a plan for long-term development of the national economy, comparable to its Western counterparts’ strategies. China had changed position from a workshop to a challenger to US (and EU) firms.

China’s rise has encouraged Western governments to pursue policies designed to restore industrial competitiveness and technological leadership. In the United States, this trend has become associated with reshoring, industrial subsidies, and what policymakers often describe as “friend-shoring.” Both the Biden and Trump administrations have sought to encourage domestic investment while reducing dependence on Chinese supply chains.

This approach has extended to the EU, with both administrations pressuring the European Union to decouple from China. The first notable example of this was back in 2020 already, when the Guardian reported that the United States urged the EU to bar Huawei from 5G networks. Today EU policymakers speak of strategic autonomy, battery independence, technological sovereignty, and industrial resilience. Tariffs and industrial policy are increasingly viewed as necessary tools for defending European competitiveness.

These sentiments stress how significant the shift is in rhetoric and policy, as the whole point of the EU has been to support the free market: as its own website boasts, “The European Union is one of the most outward-oriented economies in the world. It is also the world’s largest single market area. Free trade among its members was one of the EU’s founding principles, and it is committed to opening up world trade as well.” Now as the trade deficit with China is rising, there is a need for a change.

Europe can invest into new technologies. It can subsidize strategic industries. It can support battery production and semiconductor manufacturing. Indeed, as Butollo and his colleagues argue, both the EU and the United States already have implemented more interventionist policies in a bid to regain technological leadership. Yet what the Europeans can’t do is recreate the conditions that initially facilitated China’s competitive edge.

One simple reason for this is that European economies are not built upon vast pools of low-cost industrial labor, at least not inside the EU. European workers enjoy higher wages, protections, and social rights. As a result, Europe’s pursuit of economic sovereignty remains structurally dependent on globalization and cheap products based on low labor costs. This frustration was emphasized by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who claimed that “work-life balance and a four-day week will not be enough to maintain our country’s current level of prosperity in the future, which is why we need to work harder.”

Global capitalism has relied on inequality of costs and wealth between trading partners. With China, the inequality is leveling. The EU needs to find new “partners” that have low labor costs, if they want to keep down production costs, stop fueling China’s market, and keep the welfare benefits.

As an example, consider the recently concluded agreement between the European Union and Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay) with the goal of securing critical raw-material supplies. These materials will have lower tariffs for the EU, which, based on its own press release, will bring more exports from Mercosur and make the EU more competitive thanks to reduced costs: the EU claims that “removing high Mercosur tariffs will enable EU exporters to save over 4 billion euros in customs duties per year.”

The EU’s strategy increasingly has two objectives. One is defensive: containing China’s rise through tariffs, restrictions, and industrial policy. The other is expansive: constructing alternative global supply chains through Mercosur, Southeast Asia, and other regions.

The system rewards those capable of combining access to labor with technological development. China succeeded in doing both. Europe now seeks to recover its position within the global economy. To compete, the EU must continue relying on new global production networks as an alternative to both Chinese supply chains and domestic production.

This logic might hold were the world not already so deeply globalized. Kaja Kallas’s chemotherapy metaphor is poorly chosen: chemotherapy targets a foreign body, but China is is structurally embedded in the global market. A conjoined twin is the more apt image: painful separation may be conceivable, but you still share a world with the other afterward. The ambition to decouple from China is risky because the EU lacks both the productive capacity and the raw materials for genuine independence, leaving it reliant on new supply chains that China is equally positioned to penetrate.

In what feels like a previous life, I was a professional Muay Thai boxer. I represented the United States at the Muay Thai world championships, the sport’s version of the Olympic Games, and went on to win a minor world title. I would split the year between stints in Thailand, where I lived in a gym and trained and fought full time, and the states, where I worked various day jobs to support my training. I spent four years teaching at a UFC gym in my hometown in New Jersey, where I instructed and trained alongside athletes in MMA, Muay Thai, jiujitsu, and boxing.

Of all fight sports, MMA is the closest to the type of stereotypical machismo you might expect from UFC marketing. There’s just something about the ground-and-pound, MMA’s signature move, that evokes brute male violence in its most primitive and archetypal form. Still, like all sports, MMA takes all kinds. There are MMA-based “active clubs” that recruit white supremacists, and there are openly anarchist fight clubs. There are MMA gyms for people who want to get healthy and have fun and others for elite athletes looking to compete professionally. There are religiously affiliated MMA programs and queer and trans fight clubs.

People seek out combat sports for a host of reasons, such as fitness, confidence, and self-defense. Some people just kind of like getting punched in the face, or punching others in the face, and combat sports are a socially sanctioned way to do it. For me, it was a combination. As a formerly angry young man myself, I needed an outlet for that anger after graduating out of high school football and dropping out of a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program over opposition to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I found boxing, then Muay Thai. Angry young men get a bad rap, often deservedly so, but there are many things to be angry at, many of them legitimate. Say what you will about the violence of fight sports, but at least it’s consensual.

Despite MMA’s association with the political right, at the core of all fight sports is a culture of respect that is grounded in one thing only: what you can or can’t do when faced one-on-one with an opponent who wants to hurt you. No one can save you once you’re in the ring, not your training partners or coaches. The fundamental premise is performance under equal opportunity pressure. Fighters are matched by weight, experience, and fight record, but even when mismatches occur — and these are endemic — the rules are still applied more or less equally. And fighting is the only set of sports that can end at any moment with a knockout. Each fighter in every fight has what we call a puncher’s chance to land the right shot and win.

It’s this idea of proving oneself on a level playing field, not just the aesthetic of belligerence and dominance, that draws Trump and his circle to the sport. Capitalism’s winners want to imagine and portray themselves as having proven their mettle in an environment of pure, unadulterated, equalizing competition. But capitalism is not like that at all. It runs on cronyism, inherited advantage, rigged rules, uneven matchups, and political favor — and the capitalist enterprises behind the fights are no exception.

According to Dana White, UFC’s all-American business success story started with John McCain.

Versions of sport fighting date to antiquity in all corners of the globe. The second event introduced into the Ancient Greek Olympic Games was wrestling, following the footrace. Soon after, they would add boxing and a free-for-all fight sport called pankration, in which biting, eye gouges, and groin strikes were the only banned techniques. The UFC was founded in 1993 with these same basic rules.

In its first incarnation, UFC was part underground martial arts competition, part street fight. There were no weight classes or time limits, and fights, which took place in a chain-link-fence cage, went on until one fighter yielded or was left unconscious. The sport’s appeal lay in the opportunity to answer in real life questions that previously had only been askable in movies or video games, such as, what happens if a middle-aged Dutch karate champion fought a four-hundred-pound Samoan sumo wrestler? That was, in fact, the inaugural UFC fight; the karate guy won by kicking the sumo wrestler in the face after the latter had lost his footing, sending a tooth flying into the crowd.

As the story goes, Senator John McCain soon caught wind of the UFC and was mortified, deriding it as “human cockfighting.” Notwithstanding the fact that cockfighting was legal in McCain’s home state of Arizona at the time, the presidential hopeful went on a high-publicity crusade to ban the human version and very nearly succeeded. By 1997, MMA was outlawed in thirty-seven states and forbidden on pay-per-view, relegating its distribution to the depths of the video stores of that era, somewhere between the pornography and professional wrestling sections — which is where I first encountered it in my youth.

In response to the political blowback, MMA was forced to professionalize. Rules were invented. Judges, gloves, and timed rounds were added. Dana White took over as UFC president in 2001, the year it officially codified its new “unified rules of mixed martial arts,” rebranding as a legitimate sport and lobbying state athletic commissions for approval.

It worked. Slowly working its way up the ladder of public respectability, White balanced a commitment to full legality with a promotional style hearkening to the sport’s brutal underground origins. UFC brought in announcers, including Joe Rogan, who would continually educate audiences about the sport’s rules while reminding everyone that the fighters were serious athletes. Still, UFC broadcasts began with a video montage of Roman gladiators, set to a heavy metal soundtrack. The UFC’s branding threaded a needle between boxing, which is definitely a sport, and professional wrestling, which is definitely a show, to create a niche that would draw in hordes of mostly young men drawn to ostentatious displays of toughness.

But UFC’s rise to the world’s most profitable combat-sport promotion owed to more than an organic fan base of angry young men. It also had heavily invested corporate sponsors. In 2001, the year of its relaunch, a pair of casino executives in Las Vegas bought UFC under a parent company called Zuffa. In 2016, Zuffa was purchased by media management giant Endeavor, which also represented the NFL and NHL. In 2023, Endeavor announced the merger of UFC with the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the main professional wrestling promotion (“professional wrestling” meaning fake, circus-style fighting) into a new company, TKO Group Holdings.

Two years later, Endeavor was wholly acquired by Silver Lake, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, which focuses on technology-sector investing. For TKO, two big moves rapidly followed the buyout. First, a seven-year, exclusive rights deal with David Ellison’s Paramount for nearly $8 billion. Second, a new campaign to take over America’s premier traditional fight sport, boxing, under the banner of yet another new subsidiary, Zuffa Boxing.

Zuffa is trying to do to boxing what Trump has done to the United States government: use legitimate critique of a bad system as justification to impose one that is far worse, with the goal of consolidating more power and profit in fewer, richer hands.

Like any enterprise in capitalism, the professional fight game is organized around money-making, and it’s a famously grimy sector of sports entertainment. Athletes in major team sports like football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and hockey are represented by labor unions. Fighters are not. In combat sports, contracts are negotiated between promoters and managers, if a fighter is successful or connected enough to have one, and otherwise between promoters and coaches or even the athletes themselves. Historically, this has enabled gross exploitation in a sport that exacts a severe physical toll.

In 2000, Congress passed the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act designed to protect boxers from exploitation by sanctioning organizations, promoters, and managers. Introduced by McCain, the Ali Act essentially applied baseline guardrails against corruption and coercion.

The Ali Act was passed in the years following the sport’s devolution into a profiteering mess. Fighters were at the mercy of the deals cut between their managers and sanctioning organizations that dictated athletes’ standing and opportunities. Since the 1980s, there have been four main sanctioning bodies in the world, each with its own champions and ranking systems across weight classes and of course its own fees and networks. The heavyweight champion of the world used to be considered one of the most important titles in sports; now there can be four of them at the same time.

The Ali Act was a vast improvement, but it still left the sport disjointed into cliques, with loopholes enabling different institutions and rules across sanctioning bodies and states. Making “unification” fights — and, depending on the state, making fights at all — hinges on whose pockets get lined and little else, resulting in a sport where fighters couldn’t advocate for themselves and the best rarely fought the best.

Enter the Saudi royal family. As part of its bid to sportswash the country’s well-earned reputation for human rights abuses, head of the Saudi General Entertainment Authority Turki Al-Sheikh made a strategic intervention in boxing. The idea was to dump so much money into the sport that it incentivizes the unification fights fans were craving. Made possible through the application of essentially unlimited resources that the Saudis did not expect to turn a profit on — after all, they were buying legitimacy, not doing business, at least in the short term — boxing was transformed virtually overnight, with Riyadh quickly hosting the biggest fights fans could only dream of in the years prior. Instead of only pursuing the rankings of different sanctioning bodies, fighters and their promoters started auditioning for Turki.

This looked good to Dana White, whose UFC had pursued a similar model with a newer, growing sport. While they are often used interchangeably, MMA is a sport; UFC is a sanctioning body. There are others, such as ONE Championship, Professional Fighters League, and Bellator, but UFC dominates with more than 90 percent of the global MMA market.

For MMA fighters, it’s a bit like being an independent contractor where the UFC is at once the licensing bureau, the recruitment agency, and the only employer in town. One of the consequences is that base pay is extremely low. In most professional sports leagues, athletes’ pay accounts for upward of half the total revenue. In the UFC, it’s less than 20 percent.

For years, UFC has been mired in labor disputes and antitrust lawsuits. But with no major alternatives and without a union like athletes in major team sports have, MMA fighters are acutely vulnerable to exploitation in a business that takes an extreme physical toll. This looked good to Turki Al-Sheikh; he and Dana White cofounded Zuffa Boxing to merge the Saudi approach to boxing with UFC’s near-monopoly on MMA.

Zuffa is sponsoring new legislation, the Muhammad Ali Revival Act, which would allow Zuffa to become a “unified boxing organization” (UBO) governing boxing across states the way UFC functions in MMA. The legislation frames itself as giving fighters a choice between the old system and the UBO, but this is essentially the “choice” of right-to-work laws.

It’s a brilliant intervention in the way Turki Al-Sheikh’s was. Boxing experts and fans have long clamored for a national commission that could standardize the sport and mitigate corruption, and this appears to do just that. In reality, it enables a bad actor to seize control over the entire industry.

UFC Freedom 250 is a crash course in Trumpian politics. The birthday celebration, the fan base, the spectacle of violence and domination on the South Lawn, the exclusive access event are all a gift to curry favor with the self-styled strongman. TKO is expecting to lose at least $30 million on the White House fights, even after bringing in corporate sponsors. Trump, by the way, bought stock in TKO in March.

In essentially putting on the show as a tribute to the president, TKO is taking a page from Paramount’s book — the company run by a close Trump ally and the second richest man in the world behind Elon Musk, now exclusively broadcasting UFC fights on its streaming service. In 2025, while Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance was pending approval by the Trump-appointed FCC chair, the company abruptly agreed to pay Trump a $16 million settlement in a suit Trump had brought against Paramount subsidiary CBS. The merger was approved, and soon thereafter, Paramount bought Warner Brothers in a record media acquisition worth well over $100 billion.

With UFC Freedom 250, Trump gets many things he loves. There’s money, in the form of cage-side seats that are reportedly costing upward of $1.5 million apiece. There’s social power, in the form of an exclusive event where he can handpick the invitees. He gets to merge his own birthday celebration with America’s, a flourish of self-flattering mythmaking. And he can literally reshape the White House for it; he’s now claiming the arena being built will stay.

Is all this technically a bribe to the man who wields unprecedented influence over a party in control of all three branches of government? No. But with pending lawsuits and TKO’s de facto command over American combat sports in the balance, will the gesture hurt their chances? Also no.

Trumpian politics is akin to a series of stage magician’s tricks, constantly drawing attention to a shiny object over here while making a lot of money disappear over there. Rarely, however, does a singular event so tightly converge the political, social, and economic forces that define an era of politics.

Dana White can claim that UFC Freedom 250 is an apolitical event, and there is probably a sense in which he is being honest. It isn’t about “red or blue or politics,” as he puts it. It’s about using flag-waving to squeeze the maximum amount of profit and influence out of everyone, as long as Trump is in on it — a single-minded goal that is the core of the Trumpian ideology.

Adrift in the South is the memoir of one of these workers, Xiao Hai, a poet who has spent much of his adolescence and twenties toiling in the harshest jobs available to Chinese workers.

Like many rural Chinese, his parents covertly circumvented the one-child policy, making him an “over-quota child.” This meant that he would have to be given away to another family for five years to avoid harsh government punishment for having multiple children. While his parents managed to avoid being reprimanded, the cost of supporting two children to study past working age was too heavy to bear, so at fifteen, Xiao left school to become a child laborer.

Xiao’s journey began in Shenzhen, a city now known as China’s Silicon Valley, which became ground zero for the country’s move to high-tech manufacturing after the market liberalization initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978.

Appropriately, Xiao’s journey through the South begins there. His first job is at a large factory on an assembly line putting together battery boxes with a screwdriver. There he works fifteen hours a day and takes one day off each month. For his long hours, he enjoys a meager monthly salary of ¥400, approximately $48. One day, exhausted at work, he dozes off during an overnight shift and is woken by a blade that slices open his index finger, creating a painful wound that gushes blood. His manager comes over, wraps his finger with gauze, and tells him to finish his shift.

At the end of his day, he notices that a fragment of poisonous plastic from the blade has gone into his bleeding wound and has created an infection. Without access to medical services, Xiao must rely on makeshift treatment from a coworker who disinfects the wound with a lighter and a sewing needle.

Stories like this are often lost in breathless accounts of China’s development that rightly point out how extraordinarily successful Shenzhen and other manufacturing hubs have been. Xiao reminds us that this success was built on the backs of millions of workers who felt the worst of capitalist exploitation.

Xiao recounts drifting across southern China from job to job hoping for a better life. In this endeavor, he finds little success. On his journeys he has a series of grim encounters: at a screen printing factory, Xiao is exposed to toxic chemicals that render a female coworker infertile; communal shoes on the factory floor leave him with a fungal foot infection; and whenever a manager thinks Xiao’s work doesn’t meet standards, he’s forced to pay a fine out of his own wages.

The garment industry doesn’t treat Xiao much better. Most of his coworkers develop spinal injuries from being hunched over sewing machines twelve hours a day. In one dramatic episode, his brother’s hand is impaled four times by a machine, with the needle fracturing inside his bone. After a moment of recovery in a clinic, Xiao’s injured brother marches back to the factory to continue his shift.

At one point, Xiao leaves factory work to try his hand in Shanghai’s gig economy. His time in Shanghai highlights the extreme inequality that persists in China. The country’s white-collar middle class love their cheap fifteen-minute delivery, but these services are underwritten by an underclass of migrant workers. As a gig worker, Xiao zooms around the city and climbs dozens of flights of stairs to deliver over a hundred packages a day. Even after a decade in factories, he says delivery work is the most physically exhausting job he’s had. Losing a package incurs a heavy fine, and a customer complaint is a death sentence. While rushing to the next delivery on his tight schedule, Xiao accidentally runs into a car. Lacking insurance, he is forced to hand over cash to the driver to avoid a call to the police.

Despite his miserable working conditions, Xiao finds solace in writing poetry. In some of his earlier jobs, supervision is lax enough for him to steal brief moments for himself. But when Xiao begins working for Chinese tech giant BOE — a company whose workshops combine intense oversight with a rapid pace-setting conveyor belt — even this small pleasure of writing poetry is taken away from him. Over time, he begins to lose his sense of independence from the machines he works. “Our blood and muscles became integrated into the machines — when we pressed the START buttons we too powered on,” he writes. Instead of being a tool to make Xiao’s work easier, the assembly line snuffs out his only source of pleasure.

This isn’t to say that everything is bad. Workers face exploitative conditions all over the Global South in countries that have not enjoyed China’s miraculous levels of growth. During Xiao’s time in the factory, many in the country felt that the hard work was moving the country toward a more prosperous future. Despite the grueling conditions he faced in Shenzhen, Xiao still feels a sense of pride that he played a role in building the city into a shining metropolis.

Yet seen from a historical perspective, China’s rise, while astronomical, has obvious counterparts. In the nineteenth century, Britain saw historically unprecedented growth. The pace of this change shocked foreign observers who were awed by the country’s proliferation of new railways, canals, and bridges, much like how the West today looks at China’s urban development with astonishment. But Karl Marx was keenly aware of the “misery beneath the miracle” and sought to expose the exploitation undergirding this marvelous abundance.

Capital features the stories of child laborers in Staffordshire’s potteries who work 6 a.m.–9 p.m. shifts, just as young Xiao Hai did. The phosphorus of Manchester’s match factories and the toxins of Shenzhen’s screen printers both poisoned their workers. And modern industry reduced both English and Chinese laborers to appendages of a “monstrous automaton.” Despite being separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles, working life in late-eighteenth-century industrial Britain and developing industrial China still look quite similar.

Commentators on China often reject comparisons between China and the West by pointing to cultural differences like those between Confucian thought and Protestantism. But Xiao’s autobiography shows that, under capitalism, our cultures are increasingly similar. Xiao’s accounts of factory life tap into something universal within capitalism: the degradation and alienation of work. But alongside universal suffering there is, Xiao insists, also the universal desire for freedom from exploitation. The book ends with these lines: “I have but one humble wish: to live like a human, with dignity. That’s all I can ask for. That’s all.” In a better world beyond capitalism, Xiao’s wish wouldn’t be “humble,” but a basic right guaranteed for everyone.

Of course, the two struggles are interconnected. Belgian Minister of Defence Theo Francken doesn’t even hide his intentions of funding militarization by cutting social security and public services. Anyone advocating for decent pensions, affordable education, strong health care, or reliable public services will inevitably clash with the war fever that wants to divert public funds toward exorbitantly expensive military orders.

For years we’ve been told the coffers are empty. There’s no money for more health care staff, no money for affordable energy, no money to eliminate waiting lists, no money to strengthen pensions. There’s no money for schools where the rain doesn’t fall indoors, for trains that run on time, or for wages that keep up with inflation. But as soon as militarization is on the table, the tone changes. Suddenly, the coffers aren’t empty, and taking on debt is no longer reckless but courageous. One billion euros is no problem, €10 billion is no taboo, and €30 billion is just the beginning.

In Belgium, the military budget has skyrocketed in just a few years. While almost all departments are forced to make cutbacks, the war cabinet receives massive funding. Over coming years, tens of billions of euros are being earmarked for fighter jets, frigates, missiles, and armored vehicles. Meanwhile, the population is expected to make sacrifices: the new pension penalty for those whose careers are said to be too short forces people to work ever more; the long-term sick are hounded; the unemployed are sanctioned; patients pay more for medication; and automatic indexation of wages and bonuses are under attack. This is the budgetary logic of the war economy.

They say: Security has a price. That’s true. But the question is: What kind of security, for whom, and who pays? Is a single mother safer when her energy bill becomes unaffordable, but a new frigate is ordered? Is a construction worker safer when he has to work until age sixty-seven or seventy while the government spends billions on offensive weapons? Is a nurse safer when her ward remains understaffed while hospitals are being prepared for war scenarios?

War fever does not make society safer — quite the opposite. Fear and panic are stoked to push the weapons buildup and prepare a new generation for war. Militarization is creeping into society: in schools, universities, hospitals, media, and living rooms. Young people are addressed as future soldiers. Military campaigns promise discipline, adventure, and a salary while remaining silent about the brutality of war and death. University research is increasingly steered toward the military industry. Hospitals are presented with plans where health care logic is subordinated to military emergency scenarios. The line between civilian and military is blurring.

This is dangerous. A society preparing for war changes from within. It grows accustomed to orders, distrusts criticism, and applauds to the rhythm of the war drum. Pacifists are dismissed as naive, trade union members as irresponsible, and opposition parties as allies of the enemy. Militarization abroad always goes hand in hand with militarization at home: with the creation of a domestic enemy, the restriction of democratic space, and the normalization of authoritarian reflexes.

We refuse this blackmail. We refuse the dismantling of pensions, social security, and democratic rights that have been built up through more than a century of workers’ struggle. We refuse to accept that young people are cannon fodder and the elderly are budgetary line items. We refuse a future that consists of more weapons and more war, paid for by longer working hours, less health care, and higher bills.

It is naive to think that a militarized, tense, and over-armed Europe will bring us closer to peace. Europe is arming itself to ruin: not to build defense but primarily to intervene abroad. Frigates for the Red Sea, armored vehicles for the Sahel, and a European military presence around resource routes have little to do with national defense and everything to do with the interests of big corporations.

It’s about cobalt, lithium, uranium, gas, oil, and supply chains. It’s about the old colonial reflex in a new uniform. The names change and the technology evolves, but the power structures remain recognizable: Europe is building a new imperialism led by an ever-growing German military apparatus.

You don’t become safer by stepping up threats against others. This leads to a security dilemma: what one side calls defensive, the other sees as offensive, and so everyone arms themselves further. The outcome is predictable: instead of security, the situation becomes more dangerous. What we need is common security, where the security of one does not come at the expense of the other. Those who want peace must prepare for peace. This means diplomacy, disarmament, international cooperation, respect for international law, and security structures where even enemies talk to each other. This is not naivety — it’s the only realism that works. The vast majority of conflicts ultimately end at the negotiating table.

The labor movement cannot remain silent about militarization and war. The peace movement cannot remain silent about social justice. Welfare goes hand in hand with rejecting warfare. Our strength lies precisely in connecting these struggles: the nurse who wants more hands at the bedside, the teacher who wants smaller classes, the worker who wants a dignified pension, the young person who doesn’t want a future of war, the climate activist who knows that militarization also means ecological destruction, the peace activist who demands diplomacy, and the trade union activist who refuses to let social security be plundered.

Feminist, anti-racist, and international solidarity movements are also part of the same movement. They are not just standing side by side, but give each other strength. For the war economy affects everyone: it diverts resources from health care, pushes young people toward militarization, threatens democratic rights, fuels racism and images of the “enemy within,” accelerates the climate crisis, and turns Europe into a power bloc that wants to “secure” the economic interests of major European monopolies worldwide through military means.

The organizers of this Sunday’s demonstration have succeeded in bringing together a unique and broad coalition. The country’s two largest unions, ABVV-FGTB (General Labor Federation) and ACV-CSC (Confederation of Christian Trade Unions), have included the march in their plan of action against the antisocial “Arizona” government (so named after its parties’ colors). They understand that the fight for decent wages, strong public services, and good pensions is inextricably linked to resistance against the war cabinet.

But the June 14 demonstration will also be a crossroads of European resistance. From Italy comes the experience of unions and peace movements that have organized major actions in recent years against war, arms deliveries, and military escalation. Dockworkers, trade unionists, peace activists, and social movements have repeatedly refused to let the Mediterranean become a logistical corridor for war.

From the United Kingdom comes the strength of a peace movement that, together with unions and anti-racist organizations, has brought masses of people onto the streets against war policy, against the genocide in Gaza, and against the complicity of European governments.

From Germany come the youth who quit their classrooms to reject a future as cannon fodder. Their school strikes against conscription and militarization show a generation that refuses to accept that their schools are deteriorating while the Bundeswehr advertises everywhere. The resistance of German health care workers, doctors, and hospital staff against the militarization of the health sector is also an important signal: hospitals should heal people, not be transformed into components of a war infrastructure.

Alongside the world of labor, young people are on the barricades, shoulder to shoulder with the climate movement, women’s movements, anti-racist organizations, NGOs like Oxfam and 11.11.11, peace organizations, and international networks such as Stop ReArm Europe. It is precisely this breadth that makes June 14 so important. The demonstration brings together what they are trying to divide: social struggle and peace struggle, unions and youth, climate activists and health care workers, Belgian movements and European networks like the parties and organizations of the European left.

This Sunday, we will not only take to the streets against war but for life itself. “Welfare, not warfare” is not just a slogan for one day. It is a compass, saying that our society should not be built around fear, competition, and armament but around solidarity, social rights, and peace. It says that the engine of the country does not run thanks to generals and shareholders, but thanks to the people who work, care, learn, teach, transport, heal, and build.

The “turn to industry,” as it came to be called, is perhaps a lesser-known episode in the saga of the New Left. “They’ve really written the reality of the ’60s and ’70s out of history,” Jon Melrod, one such radical who became a rank-and-file autoworker in Milwaukee, told Jacobin in 2022.

You know about the Weathermen; you know about Patty Hearst — these kinds of things. You don’t know about the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) II of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which immediately turned after the breakup of SDS to the working class and in support of the Black Panther Party and the black liberation movement. . . .  At least ten thousand of them that we know went into organizing in the working class — working-class communities and industry.

The campus-based SDS was the central organization of the American New Left, which played a key role in student antiwar activism. As the 1960s wore on, the group became increasingly radical politically, and increasingly wracked by sectarian tensions. SDS blew up at its 1969 convention, splitting largely between different factions of self-described Marxist-Leninists.

One SDS faction, as Melrod mentions, went on to form the guerrilla group the Weathermen (later known as the Weather Underground). But other SDSers believed that young leftists should integrate themselves with the industrial working class on the shop floor, including, like Melrod, those in Maoist-inspired groups associated with the New Communist Movement. Another such activist was Elly Leary of the Proletarian Unity League (PUL), who took a job at a Boston-area General Motors factory in 1977. Reflecting on the experience in 2022, Leary wrote, “PUL always encouraged comrades to leave bourgeois jobs and go colonize [the jargon for cadre getting industrial jobs in targeted unions]. Like Marxist organizations everywhere, we held that the working class was the engine of social and revolutionary change.”

Among these Marxist organizations were also groups broadly in the Trotskyist tradition, including the International Socialists (IS). In his systematic study International Trotskyism, politics scholar Robert Alexander wrote that “the International Socialists would seem to be the Trotskyist group which was most successful in establishing some base in the organized labor movement in the 1970s.” It was the IS that was responsible, in 1979, for the creation of Labor Notes, the media outlet devoted to building, supporting, and cohering democratic, militant reform efforts in largely ossified unions; such efforts were seen as necessary for displacing entrenched leaderships that often advocated self-defeating “labor-management partnerships” and discouraged worker militancy. IS members also played key roles in building a number of reform caucuses like Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the long-running reform group in the Teamsters.

The movement of activists from these New Left groups into working-class jobs, and the groups themselves, largely fizzled in the ’80s. But the groundwork they laid, in terms of organizations like Labor Notes and TDU and the work of committed rank-and-filers who stuck it out for the long haul, helped fuel reform movements in major unions in the coming decades. The experiences and lessons of those activists, and the strategic framework they developed that came to be known as the “rank and file strategy” (RFS), ultimately became important to the new generation of radicals activated in the 2010s.

The basic idea behind the rank-and-file strategy, as laid out in a 2000 pamphlet of that name by former IS member Kim Moody, rested on a diagnosis of two problems. The first is that the American working class suffered from lack of organization, militancy, and consciousness, a situation partly due to unions’ long-standing failure to organize workers and actually defend their interests. The second is the separation of the mostly highly educated socialist left from the vast majority of workers and their class organizations.

The RFS seeks to solve both problems by advocating for socialists to organize on the shop floor as rank-and-file workers, to help revitalize unions as part of a broader strategy of building working-class organizations — including cross-union networks like Labor Notes, community-based groups, class-based political projects, and socialist organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — that foster worker militancy and classwide consciousness.

Occupy and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 helped spur a new wave of left-wing radicalization of young people, its momentum surging and taking more solid organizational form with Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. In the wake of Sanders’s first run and then Trump’s first inauguration, thousands of new members flooded into the DSA, a social democratic holdover from the New Left era, transforming it into the country’s largest socialist organization and pushing its politics leftward.

Much of DSA’s work was focused on electoral politics, the activity that got it the most media attention. But many who joined DSA post-2016 saw connecting with and revitalizing the labor movement as a central task. These members — including some veterans of IS and successor organizations the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Solidarity — pushed DSA to focus on labor work. At its recent national conventions, DSA has officially endorsed the RFS as its position on the labor movement.

Some local DSA chapters, like New York City DSA, coordinated efforts to get members into rank-and-file union jobs, and some members have taken such jobs on their own initiative. But much of DSA’s labor work has had a different focus. The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a joint project of DSA and the United Electrical Workers (UE) founded in 2020, connects volunteer activists with nonunion workers who are interested in organizing their workplaces. The Workers Organizing Workers (WOW) campaign, launched in 2023 by DSA’s National Labor Commission, is primarily recruiting DSA members to “salt” nonunion shops as part of extant organizing campaigns.

Though union density has continued to decline precipitously since the 1970s, the major national unions still command very significant financial and institutional resources. These resources — which unions have for the most part failed to actually put to use in organizing workers or supporting strikes, as Chris Bohner has documented — will likely be necessary, if insufficient, to revitalize organized labor.

Seeing the need for a dedicated national initiative to build a new generation of shop-floor activists seeking to transform unions into vehicles of class struggle and thereby build the socialist movement, as well as the potential for recruiting would-be activists outside of DSA, a number of us in the orbit of DSA and Labor Notes started the Rank & File Project in 2023. RFP is formally independent of DSA, though many if not most of its activists are also DSA members, and RFP has regularly cohosted and cosponsored events with the socialist organization. But RFP’s independence from DSA allows it to consistently prioritize and dedicate paid staff time to advancing the rank-and-file strategy, in particular through building a pipeline of young activists into shop-floor union jobs.

RFP is now in the middle of its second round of “Rank & File Schools,” which provides basic political education and organizing training for budding rank-and-filers. It has active cohorts in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Philadelphia. RFP also launched an initial cohort in Los Angeles, though we are not currently recruiting or running a Rank & File School there. The syllabus includes modules covering the Marxist analysis of class under capitalism, the centrality of the labor movement to winning social change, and guidance for activists in analyzing their unions and organizing their coworkers.

RFP’s activists are taking jobs in health care, education, logistics, construction, and public library work. These are sectors that the group has deemed strategic targets for one or more reasons. Some industries, such as logistics and construction, are targets because their workers directly wield outsize economic power: a strike at, say, UPS could cost billions of dollars in a matter of days. Other sectors are targets because their workers can exercise significant power in other ways: educators and nurses can cause massive disruption, and if they can get communities on their side for “common good” demands — as striking teachers often have in the last decade-plus in Chicago, West Virginia, Los Angeles, and elsewhere — they can win major concessions from political elites.

Relatedly, workers in some sectors have immediate material stakes in policy demands championed by socialists. Teachers have an interest in adequately funded public schools, for instance, and electricians are situated to benefit from and help guide a just green transition. Finally, some sectors have been targeted because they are already sites of established or nascent union reform and shop-floor organizing efforts. (The emphasis on “caring” occupations like teaching and nursing, examples of what Allison Pugh has called “connective labor,” marks a difference in approach from the ’70s generation of rank-and-filers, who focused more on manufacturing. And while RFP has collectively identified certain industries and unions as strategic, individual rank-and-filers are choosing which jobs to pursue based on their own personal interests and needs, rather than following the direction of a disciplined cadre group.)

The group has launched cohorts in cities where a critical mass of current and potential worker-organizers, as well as volunteer supporters, has been interested in starting pipelines into local workplaces in relevant sectors. All told, roughly one hundred rank-and-filers, or prospective rank-and-filers, have completed or are currently working through a Rank & File School curriculum. Activists who have completed the Rank & File School continue to meet with other members of their respective geographic and industry cohorts for political discussion and organizing support.

Beyond affinity with our goals and strategy, many radicals have been drawn to the project because of the prospect of meaningfully integrating their political commitments with stable (if often very difficult) jobs.

“My pathway to becoming an education worker and organizer was a convergence of years of intensive political education and a personal discontent with my position in society — how distant politics felt absent from my professional life,” one RFP activist who wished to remain anonymous, a former urban planner turned public high-school teacher in New York City, told me.

Teaching is challenging for all the usual reasons: managing the moods of 150 teenagers, dealing with the impact of technology on attention spans, and supporting students through difficult personal situations. But beyond that, the biggest challenge is working within a system that is chronically underfunded and deeply neglected. . . .  Despite all this, teaching is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. . . .  Getting to work with working-class kids from Brooklyn — who instinctively understand the world in a way many so-called political experts don’t — is an absolute privilege.

In some cases, RFP activists are drawing on the guidance of mentors from earlier generations of “industrializers.” Tim Marshall, a public-school teacher in Oakland, California, and former member of Solidarity who started working as a teacher in the 1990s, is one such mentor. Marshall is hopeful that committed activists from RFP can empower his union, the Oakland Education Association. “More young radicals stepping up as site representatives would strengthen the union, ensuring leadership stays accountable to rank-and-file concerns,” Marshall says.

In other cities and unions across the country, a growing number of RFP activists are learning from rank-and-file veterans in teaching, nursing, construction, and more.

RFPers at the start of their organizing careers are keeping in sight their long-term ambitions for transforming their unions and building class struggle while focusing on the immediate tasks of forging relationships on the shop floor. “Rank-and-file organizing is tough. You’re tasked with convincing people they have the power to take on their boss, the capitalist class even,” says Ava Guerrero, a third-year teacher, also working in the New York City school system.

One doesn’t need to have all the answers or direct people to any single revolutionary campaign. It’s about learning your trade, being a trusted member of your workplace, and figuring out how to be a better version of yourself alongside others doing the same. Of course, we have our sights set on the big strike weapon. But all of the small moments of being there for the people around you matter when it comes to asking someone to do something big, like risk their job.

This important relationship-building work has included reviving cultures of regular socializing and communication at the individual school level. And as the Trump administration has launched a brutal campaign of repression against migrants, Ava and other RFP teacher-organizers have been involved in building community among teachers, immigrant students, and their families; hosting social nights; working to inform students of their rights in the event of raids by immigration authorities; and helping families come up with contingency plans in the event that students’ parents or guardians are detained. After rank-and-file teachers across New York took the initiative in this sort of organizing, the teachers’ union is now officially organizing meetings to discuss protecting immigrant students and workers. At other schools, RFPers have started becoming chapter-level officers.

RFP members in nursing are also starting down the path of building rank-and-file militancy in their own unions. RFP nurses have helped organize petitions and marches on the boss in defense of working conditions and patient safety at their hospitals; some of them were recently part of a successful effort to elect new leadership at the chapter level.

The goal of building a democratic, left-wing, and militant labor movement is both abstract and very long-term. What that means concretely, and in the shorter run, is something that varies by industry and union, and RFPers are developing their approach in practice. In some unions, the near-term goals include helping build existing reform caucuses to challenge entrenched, antidemocratic leaderships; in other places, rank-and-filers are seeking to build reform movements where there aren’t any. At the shop floor level, near-term goals range from building relationships with coworkers to organizing protests against harmful and unpopular management decisions to taking on shop steward roles — all things that RFP nurses and teachers in New York, for instance, are already doing.

The new generation of rank-and-filers is grappling with these thorny questions while learning the ropes of difficult new jobs, all in a hostile political environment. But whatever else is true of today’s social and political climate, it is one of ever-increasing disaffection with political and economic elites — fertile ground for frightening reactionary politics, to be sure, but also for a revival of the class-struggle unionism socialists hope to build.

“I joined the Rank and File Project out of a desire to see the working class reclaim power,” said Mase, a new nurse in the Bay Area. “Grassroots organizers, rank-and-file membership — this is how we stand up for and take care of each other.”

This January, Executive Order 10998, issued by the US president, placed Senegal on the list of countries now subject to the Visa Bond. This requires applicants for tourist (B1) and business (B2) visas to pay a bond ranging from $5,000 (approximately 2.8 million CFA francs) to $15,000 (approximately 8.5 million CFA francs). In the eyes of US diplomats, these amounts serve as a guarantee against any temptation among admitted individuals to vanish into thin air once they arrive on US soil.

A financial bond of this magnitude appears to be a brutal measure of exclusion based on money, as few ordinary Senegalese will have the means to satisfy the appetite of US consular officials. This is pure Trumpism: every transaction must be an opportunity to rake in money, far removed from the ethics involved.

These deterrent measures taken ahead of the World Cup seem clearly discriminatory. They have their own sordid objectives: to limit to the absolute minimum the number of Senegalese lucky enough to experience the sporting celebration in person; to rake in funds by crudely fleecing as many people as possible; and reaping the political dividends of these diplomatic and administrative blunders by linking them to Donald Trump’s campaign pledges for a zero-tolerance line on immigration.

The hunt for — and surveillance of — the “lucky” Senegalese who get to experience the World Cup in person is therefore unlikely to let up. All of them may feel humiliated right up until the end of the adventure. Indeed, one of the provisions of Executive Order 10998, in addition to the security deposit required (payable on a US government website), requires them to enter US territory through the airport designated for them by the consular authorities themselves. These diplomatic agents, vested with full discretion over each case, naturally appear as the enforcers of a discriminatory machinery tasked with providing the MAGA administration with “positive” statistics to justify the continuation of indiscriminate repression against migration flows.

Even the Senegalese who have cleared the financial hurdle are not out of the woods yet. The Trump administration’s repressive machinery has also erected digital barriers that deliberately violate their privacy and freedom of expression. This inquisition imperiously demands the contents of all their communications from the past five years on every platform they use. An omission or a false statement is treated as an attempt to conceal information, punished by the rejection of the application, without appeal.

Access to US territory has become harder for most citizens of countries whose nationals require a visa. For Senegalese, this difficulty has tended to become institutionalized since President Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025. A year later, the White House dropped an administrative bombshell on tens of millions of people across the globe. The executive order suspends all issuance of immigrant visas, a measure that makes family reunification impossible — at least until further notice. It also blocks global access to the “Green Card” through the annual lottery. For the Trump administration, migrants of all categories are an unbearable burden on US public finances and said to lower Americans’ living standards. Since Senegalese are deemed part of this source of “evil,” the bulk must therefore be prevented from setting foot in the United States.

According to State Department figures, the rejection rate for Senegalese applicants for tourist and business visas (B1/B2) in 2025 was a whopping 74 percent, likely among the world’s highest. The number of student visas (F1) issued between September 2022 and October 2024 had gone up from 393 to 426. But they do little to hide an estimated acceptance rate that declined from 65.2 percent in October 2022 to 59 percent in October 2024.

Clearly, immigrant visas are no longer an option for thousands of potential legal immigrants. Suspicion, prejudice, and the mass-scale rejection of applications dominate the process choosing who “deserves” to enter the United States. Under Trump, hundreds of Senegalese families (or ones of Senegalese background) who hoped to come to the United States through the legal family reunification system now see their plans put on hold indefinitely. According to an estimate by the Department of Homeland Security, in 2022–23 there were approximately thirty-four thousand Senegalese born in Senegal who had immigrated to the United States, with around twenty-five to thirty thousand legal residents. This figure does not include Americans of Senegalese origin. In this figure lie many human tragedies related to the freeze on family reunifications. But the migration crisis is no longer sparing even the sporting aspect of relations between Dakar and Washington. The diplomatic coldness governing US immigration policy is more unrelenting than ever before.

Already in June 2025, the US Embassy in Dakar denied visas to twelve members of Senegal’s women’s national basketball team — including five players — who were scheduled to travel to the United States for a ten-day training camp.

Outraged by this decision, then-Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko canceled the trip and ordered the training camp to be relocated within the country, “in a sovereign setting conducive to performance.”

Among much of the Senegalese public, there is almost total incomprehension — that is, setting aside the views of those who defend the United States’ untrammeled “sovereignty” in matters of immigration. Interviewed by the BBC for a report on the organization of the World Cup, Aliou Ngom, a Senegalese fan who attended the previous tournaments in Qatar (2022) and Russia (2018), laments that this World Cup won’t be a moment for “cultures coming together from all over the world.”

The systemic chaos surrounding the 2026 World Cup, even before it begins, is stirring the entire planet. The organization of the world’s biggest sporting event is in turmoil, bringing together racism, restrictions, discrimination, visa selection based on ability to pay, digital screening, and even attempts to humiliate some of the tournament participants themselves. This organized chaos, compounded by the headache of pricey stadium tickets and the selective body searches of teams upon their arrival on American soil, is being condemned around the world.

The Senegalese players and coaching staff experienced this firsthand when they were searched at Raleigh Airport on their way to San Antonio. Still, in a press release published on its various platforms, the Senegalese Football Federation played down the episode, emphasizing that the frisking of the staff and players “took place in respect for the relevant airport security rules and no particular incident was observed.”

Ultimately, Trump’s tragicomic governance is again a subject of derision. If past administrations built up soft-power tools for “selling” America and its promise to the world’s youth — including in countries like Senegal — this is now badly compromised. At the same time, China, Russia, India, and even Turkey continue to refine their strategies for quietly expanding into new territories and partnerships that could shape the global power balance for years to come.