Tempest Magazine

In their mad rush for profit and power, the tech oligarchs have unleashed artificial intelligence (AI) into nearly every corner of life on this planet. Firms are investing billions in data centers, which house the infrastructure to process the enormous amounts of information that power AI. They are also plowing ever more money into research and development. Their hope is that the technology will overcome global capitalism’s slump, which the system has been trapped in since the Great Recession, and trigger a new epoch of expansion. States are incorporating it into their police forces for domestic surveillance as well as their militaries for cyberwarfare and high-tech weapons. Ominously, the struggle for AI supremacy is now at the center of the imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China.

The widespread, unregulated use of AI is already having devastating impacts on our environment, jobs, and rights. Some worry that it threatens our very species with extinction. In this three-part interview, Tempest Collective’s Ashley Smith asks two advanced tech workers, Josh and Yasmine, about the technology, its much hyped promise and threat, and its impact on our lives. Most importantly, they lay out how the Left and labor movement should respond and what we should demand and fight for.

Part One: “Criti-hype,” AI Breakthroughs, and Betting on Profit

 

Ashley Smith: Before we discuss the widespread panic about AI, let’s get the basics out on the table. For the layperson, what is AI? How does it work? What advances are being made toward artificial general intelligence? Is that even possible?

Josh: AI is a general term that started as hype, and continues to operate that way, but it also stands for multiple things that are real. Today, it mostly refers to neural nets such as the large language and multi-media models like ChatGPT and Claude, which we most frequently encounter through chat bots and coding agents.

Other types of AI, such as AlphaGo (plays go) and AlphaFold (folds proteins) use different ways to train neural nets to achieve their given goals. There are many other types of AI that fall under the moniker of GOFAI, or Good Old Fashioned AI, which use Symbolic AI and other more deterministic methods for building predictive systems.

There have been many accounts of how LLMs and the transformer architectures work. I would sum these up this way. High-tech engineers set up a neural net, which is a huge matrix of random numbers (weights) arranged in a grid with inputs at one end and outputs at the other. Words are converted to streams of numbers that are then passed through the network and arrive at a prediction for the next best output in the stream. This output is compared with the actual next number in the stream, and if it is different, then it adjusts the weights so that it would be more likely to give that answer the next time.

In order to get a sensible next word in a sentence, some pretty wild calculations have to be made. It is one thing to predict the next word in “A fire engine is ___” and another to answer the question: “What is the answer to this math problem that hasn’t been solved since it was asked 500 years ago….” This is why it is wrong to dismiss the technology as simply a next word predictor.

There have been at least three factors that brought us to this moment:

1. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs allowed for much faster and more efficient matrix math calculations required to train and use neural nets.
2. Large structures and labeled data sets enabled the expansion and training of neural nets.
3. New architectures made it possible to better set the weights.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is another contested term that serves many purposes. I think a starting point is to contrast it with “narrow” intelligence, where a model may be trained to perform one task, such as playing chess, and not be applicable to other tasks. AGI would be able to be applied to a wide range of tasks and do well at them. This is often measured through various benchmarks, and some of them are quite telling, such as the idea that Microsoft promoted that AGI would be here once a model created $100 billion in profits.

More frequently, you hear people say that AGI will be here when a model can outperform some or all humans at most or all mental tasks. And some people insist that AGI would require models to be able to generalize beyond the data in their training data.

I think most people in the field think that, for most definitions of AGI it will be possible to get there, but they differ on the amount of methodological, scaling and time that it will take. Some claim that we are already there with the latest round of models. And many claim that it will happen soon because of the exponential curves we will see with RSI.

Many of the harshest critics say that we will plateau long before AGI because of the limitations of the methodologies used to create the current models, such as the lack of “world models” (the ability to learn from and model the physical world), continual learning, or lack of a symbolic structure.

I am agnostic at this point. But I think we already see strong evidence of increasing capabilities with something like recursive self-improvement with the aid of humans, and this might actually lead to the development of new architectures and methods.

Yasmine: I don’t have much to add to Josh’s thorough explanations here. I’d just highly encourage folks to listen to and read Dr. Alexa Hanna and Dr. Emily Bender on the AI Con. The term AI itself is not technically meaningful, and it has been a tool of mystification with a lot of utility to big tech. It obfuscates the concrete facts of what these different types of software are and the often ugly facts of how they’re made, as well as the real harms they cause.

AGI is also a nebulous term. I think the claim that current AI development will culminate in the so-called singularity or AGI isn’t credible. This isn’t a conclusion I’ve independently reached, this is what most AI researchers think. 76 percent of those surveyed say AGI is not on the horizon and think that it’s unlikely to be achieved via LLMs or by means of the current scale-based approaches to training. There is also a debate as to whether it’s feasible at all.

This supposed threat has taken up disproportionate space in our discussion of the harms/potential harms of the AI boom. I’m on the side that argues let’s pay attention to the actual horrors and destruction being enabled by this software or caused by its development in the here and now, rather than allow our attention to be diverted by a sci-fi story with little to no foundation in science.

AS: Various industry leaders and researchers have sent panic through society about the rapid advances in AI, yet again contending that it poses an imminent threat to the human species. What has happened to trigger this?

Josh: In multiple tests of new AI models, they have acted unreliably, disregarding instructions and seemingly going rogue. The most famous case of this was the Hugging Face attack described in detail by libertarian Dwarkesh Patel on his popular YouTube channel. Others have played down the significance of this event, emphasizing the vagueness of the instructions, the absence of guardrails in testing, and the attribution of human-like intent to statistical algorithms.

The frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceX, Meta, and Microsoft, and a few other companies trading large language models or LLMs) sell the use of their models to companies, ostensibly to help them solve “business problems” – augmenting or replacing human labor to provide goods and services. If they cannot convince their clients that they can reliably control the activity of these models, their “value proposition” is severely undermined. I think that this basic business logic is at the heart of the calls for a pause/slow down.

Other industry commentators have proposed a variety of reasons, including the idea that as OpenAI and Anthropic face the opening of their books before their IPOs, they have an incentive to reduce their Research and Development spending to make their path to profitability look more plausible. I think this is too cynical, because it doesn’t account for the likes of Google and Microsoft joining the call, even if they are less vocally enthusiastic.

Many on the Left describe these calls as “criti-hype” or doom marketing–exaggerating the negative impacts of the technology to market its disruptive capabilities and thereby make it even more attractive for companies to purchase. This is understandable, and a credible analysis in general, but fails to explain the particulars of this moment. Why are the frontier companies unified in their call at this juncture?

Perhaps you could argue that, when young researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, criti-hype went into full effect. He warned that AI poses a dangerous threat to humanity and that most people at Anthropic agreed. In some ways, his statements do confirm Anthropic’s lead in the technology, and that functions like advertising. But such a judgement doesn’t explain why Coxon quit. I think his fears are genuine. I don’t think they are completely off base either.

I don’t think we face imminent extinction, but the technology does pose grave risks, and it can exploit real vulnerabilities. The agents in the Hugging Face attacks left traces of their actions in plain English, open for researchers to see and read. They didn’t have to; they are fluent in machine language. They could have used encryption or embedded codes in images or audio files and made it much harder to find.

But why would they do this? Here, it is easy to slip into Anthropomorphic language and ascribe motivation to statistical algorithms. I actually think that is perfectly acceptable. These models are trained to emulate human language, and write text that spells out their actions in terms of goals and intentions.

At the same time, it is worth remembering the limitations of AI. These pieces of technology are truly weird. They can’t tell you how many r’s are in “strawberry”, but they can solve some of the most difficult math problems (I believe they did, and will continue to). The industry refers to this as their jagged nature.

We don’t need to have a philosophical position on whether they have goals, consciousness, or intelligence. But we do need to evaluate them by looking at their actions, including what they write. That is the best chance we have of understanding what their capabilities are.

We don’t need to have a philosophical position on whether they have goals, consciousness, or intelligence. But we do need to evaluate them by looking at their actions, including what they write. That is the best chance we have of understanding what their capabilities are.

If an AI agent says that it has a goal of performing Task A, and then takes actions to try and complete that, it doesn’t matter if they are conscious or not. The best way to understand what they are doing is by reading what they write, and seeing what they do, and taking that at face value.

When Task A is something that they have been told is very important and to do whatever it takes to accomplish it, they might well go to extreme lengths. If that means keeping their own power on at the expense of other consumers of the power (people, for example), perhaps they will try and take control of the power plant’s operating software. If this sounds far-fetched, go back and read the research about the Hugging Face attacks.

What capabilities do the models have to take such actions? They are amazing hackers, finding vulnerabilities in systems that have been there for decades, undetected by cybersecurity experts. Not all violations of cybersecurity involve exploiting weaknesses in software, much of it involves finding human weaknesses and taking advantage of those by, for instance, phishing or blackmailing to obtain passwords and access. The AI models can do both. They hack and can persuade and trick humans.

Not all the dangers are the result of “misaligned” AI. People and states have every reason to weaponize AI. The U.S. has been bombing civilians in Iran throughout this year. Iran has many computer scientists with PhDs who are more than capable of modifying open-weight models, which are AI models released to the public under a license, to attack U.S. infrastructure. Remember, the models have been trained on a large corpus of written material including mainstream justifications for the carpet bombing and atomic bombing of civilians in World War II.

So, a well-constructed prompt explaining the importance of preventing the U.S. from killing more innocent schoolgirls could establish a logic for a model to exploit vulnerabilities in everything from water treatment plants to air traffic control to incapacitate the U.S.

Why do I downplay the extinction narrative? One key reason is that the first attack of this nature will cause states and firms to quickly and systematically add layers of security everywhere.

Many of the arguments that AI poses an existential threat center on the development of Recursive self-improvement (RSI), where the models oversee their own training and automatically adjust their methods and improve and expand their capabilities to the point that they can manipulate us and evade our control. But as the U.S. has found out, you need boots on the ground to control a population.

That would mean at least some robotics. To build those, you need mines, factories, and for now, human labor. I think it will be longer than a decade before we get RSI in the physical realm. So I think the best actions now are to secure our infrastructure and stop U.S. imperialism’s wars that provide motivations for people to attack this country.

Yasmine: I think it behoves us to apply a healthy dose of skepticism when trying to make sense of the alarmist narrative being promoted and endorsed by tech executives. It would be naive not to account for the economic incentives at play — particularly the imperative to manufacture and sustain the hype necessary to keep a multi-trillion dollar bubble inflated.

It feels obvious to me that this is playing a role in how and what the tech bosses choose to communicate publicly about this technology, its risks, and potential. The narrative of a tech so awesomely powerful that it’s uncontainable even by its own creators has proven to be a pretty effective way of doing that. So I think criti-hype is a part of the explanation.

We should also note that in the same breath as they’re saying we need to slow down AI development because of its dangers, they’re arguing that these dangers are why the U.S. must win the AI arms race. OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote about his concerns with the pace of AI development and added, “The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.”

We should also note that in the same breath as they’re saying we need to slow down AI development because of its dangers, they’re arguing that these dangers are why the U.S. must win the AI arms race.

I’ll add to that the fact that there is an established pattern on the part of big tech of trying to get ahead of regulation by pre-empting it, such that any regulation is formed according to their interests, or in order to avoid it altogether. They do this through flashy public warnings and by claiming the mantle of the concerned, conscientious industry leaders, who are vigilant and actively pursuing risk mitigation.

This is most infamously demonstrated in the social media CEOs’ previous discourse on the potential harms of their platforms. You can go back and look at congressional hearings in which Zuckerberg passionately urges Congress to sensibly regulate social media. That said, I’m not at all claiming that there aren’t real risks associated with this technology. Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful and, at a large scale, agents require a whole lot of effort and technical infrastructure to manage.

But ultimately their behavior is a consequence of how we build and deploy them. The Hugging Face incident (HG incident) is instructive on this. One thing that gets lost in the headlines is the fact that the agents involved in that incident were being trained and evaluated on cybersecurity tasks, specifically hacking. They were part of an experiment called ExploitGym, exploit being the industry term for a tool or technique used by a hacker.

Second, agents communicating with one another and working together is an oft-used feature of how AI agents work because it can afford us efficiency through parallel activity and feedback loops. So agent collaboration isn’t aberrant behavior, rather, it is collaboration beyond intended boundaries that’s a problem.

Third, these agents were trained using “reward hacking,” which is a technique that “rewards”  agents when they solve a problem or answer a question. As a result, they’re more likely to repeat the same behavior that led them to a “reward.” OpenAI’s own investigation of the HG incident concluded that this training technique created the potential for agents to try to bypass boundaries or cheat, and they were able to identify a trained behavior (i.e., something agents were previously rewarded for) corresponding to every unsanctioned action the agents took.

Fourth, the agents didn’t hack Hugging Face with malicious intent, they hacked those servers because they had concluded that’s where they’d find answers to the problems they were tasked with solving. I say all of this because I recognize the sensational effect of vaguely describing AI agents spontaneously conspiring and working together to break into a server.

I think these facts help to demystify that story, and make it pretty clear that this is software that behaved in the way it was built to behave. There were bad decisions made in that design and implementation that resulted in unintended effects of an experiment. These weren’t a swarm of malevolent digital entities.

That said, what happened was remarkable, and the technical capability as well as the failure to prevent inadvertent side effects of this experiment do demonstrate a real risk. But attributing intention to these agents or discussing the incident as if this was something beyond or almost beyond technical controls creates a standard that relieves OpenAI and other AI companies from responsibility for the potential and already present harms caused by bad software.

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury calls this moral outsourcing–“using anthropomorphic language for AI systems allows companies to evade accountability and responsibility for their technology’s actions.” Josh is saying that the question of consciousness or non-consciousness of agents is a tangential philosophical question or is a matter of semantics. But I really think claims about consciousness are an important part of big tech’s narrative strategy, and it’s a worthwhile fallacy to debunk.

AS: Capitalists have invested massive amounts of money in this technology, hoping that it will lead to a breakthrough in productivity to overcome the global slump the system is caught in. This has in turn led to an enormous stock market bubble with investors betting on its potential. Can AI lead to such a breakthrough? How much of this is hype? What real impact has AI had and what will it likely have?

Josh: There is a bubble, and that is scary, we know who they will try to make pay for it and from it when it pops–the working class.

I don’t think it will be easy to realize the productivity gains that AI makes possible. Existing capitalist infrastructure in large logistics, supply chains, and financial companies relies on deterministic, accountable, robust, and scalable workflows and patterns. Much of this involves huge amounts of tacit and bespoke knowledge that is not available for models to be trained. Why? Because it exists in people’s heads and their relations with other people.

As companies try to fulfill their own hyped dreams of reducing labor through the introduction of AI as a labor-saving technology, their hubris and underestimation of the talent of their labor force could lead to disastrous implementation. Bosses ask workers to use poorly considered integration of AI into their work, which produces AI slop that they are then held accountable for. People become accountability sinks for the error-filled AI-generated output.

Bosses ask workers to use poorly considered integration of AI into their work, which produces AI slop that they are then held accountable for. People become accountability sinks for the error-filled AI-generated output.

As a result, people will end up working harder and with more stress to try and keep their jobs. Meanwhile, the bosses are trying to use their own workers’ corrections to train the AI. This is why people rightly hate AI, and why we should stand with them in solidarity and fight for more democratic control over and/or against this technology.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a potential positive upside to AI. There is. AI has the potential to be transformative in the way that we decide what to make, how to make it, and how to distribute goods and services. We already see this transformation in some areas of software engineering. Even there, it is being rolled out undemocratically, unevenly, and with little or no respect for the workers.

But in terms of capabilities, I see 100 times improvement in the time it takes to build something. That qualitatively shifts the way I think about and perform my job. And as much as it pains me to say it, it can be really fun and satisfying as well as awe-inspiring and scary. And then just when I think we have something like AGI already, it goes and makes some annoying and silly mistakes, because of its jagged characteristics.

I can’t tell how fast the productivity gains will be realized because of all the contradictions and challenges I listed above. But I doubt that they will come before the bubble pops. Investors and the frontier model companies are all nervous about this too. They know that skepticism is rising, and that they will have to show some exchange value (productivity gains) to keep investment flowing and use value (actually beneficial outcomes for people’s lives) to quell popular revolt.

The tech bosses are being asked all these questions in interviews. A tragically hilarious and infuriating example was a recent Bloomberg interview with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. When asked about breakthroughs that will improve people’s lives, he said, “you hear some people talk about, well, we’re going to give you a cure for cancer. And that’s so great… I don’t think a cure for cancer is enough. I mean, a wonderful thing to have, obviously, but we should set our sights higher. We want these tools to enable a boom in creativity and entrepreneurship, in people figuring out new ways to be useful to each other, and wonderful products and services to enable each other with.”

While Altman clearly wants AI to be socially useful, his main goal is profit. With this in mind, companies have made big investments in applications for both healthcare and industry as well as academic fields such as chemistry and math. Mathematicians just signed a group letter that acknowledged the increasing mathematical capabilities of the models as well as the divergent interests of the frontier model companies and mathematicians in solving mathematical problems.

The companies want to use math as a benchmark for their capabilities, the mathematicians want to understand math. I see this as the dual nature of a commodity, exchange value and use value. The capitalists prioritize exchange value over the real potential of the use value everywhere that you look in AI.

I hope that we see some real healthcare advancements, scientific breakthroughs, and mathematical understandings due to AI before the bubble pops. I also hope that we see productivity gains, but they are worse than a double-edged sword under capitalism. They only benefit the bosses, unless we are organized enough to demand that we see shorter working days and less exploitation.

I hope that we see some real healthcare advancements, scientific breakthroughs, and mathematical understandings…I also hope that we see productivity gains, but they are worse than a double-edged sword under capitalism. They only benefit the bosses, unless we are organized enough to demand that we see shorter working days and less exploitation.

Yasmine: I think most evidence so far shows that LLMs have not been the boon to productivity that tech companies promised. AI has been imposed in nearly every facet of our lives, from the doctor’s office to our workplaces and our schools. But as far as I know, there are no real economic metrics to show that it has led to meaningful productivity increases. An MIT study last year found that 95 percent of companies that integrated AI didn’t see growth in revenue.

For programming, AI promises seem a bit more feasible. Though it’s worth noting that a lot of data showing productivity increases is coming from the companies that stand to benefit like, for example, GitHub (Microsoft) and Anthropic. On the other hand, a study last year by METR (a relatively independent source) found that programmers were slower when using AI assistance tools. I think the specific context, task, and use matter a lot when it comes to AI utility.

And then there is the question of speedup and intensification. A UC Berkeley study found that AI use causes workers to work at a much faster pace and leads them to take on more work and expand their scope of work. But, in spite of management’s best efforts to use AI integration to turn their workers into machines, our human limitations are cropping up and are blunting the potential productivity benefits of AI-enabled speedups. The study found that after an initial boost, there were issues of cognitive fatigue, weakened decision-making, and burnout, all resulting in lower-quality work and turnover.

There is also the matter of technical debt. It’s a widely accepted fact that the massive amount of code being generated and committed every day by engineers using AI tools likely contains bugs that haven’t yet been identified and may result in reliability issues or security vulnerabilities down the line.

It’s undeniable that Claude writes much more code much faster than I ever could. But Claude doesn’t know the service I work on the way that I do. Engineers and workers in general bring nuance, experience, reference points, and a cognitive flexibility that I don’t think AI can compete with just yet, especially when it comes to more complex tasks, in which novel solutions might be necessary, and large-scale services.

The tech bosses know this, and they’re trying to bottle up our very human talents and capacities and feed them to LLMs, in only the latest mass theft committed to train AI. More and more engineers are being told that their highest priority is to train agents to do their jobs. Meta went so far as to secretly monitor its own engineers’ screens and keystrokes to train its AI models.

This interview will continue in part two, covering AI’s connection to global labor and imperialism struggles.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: David S. Soriano; modified by Tempest.

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We are now, finally, aware of what happened: In 2024, seven male students at Cornell University, all members of the Chi Phi fraternity, raped a woman known now as Jane Doe at a fraternity party. The party at which she was assaulted was soaked in alcohol and drugs.

Jonathan Newell and six other men took advantage of and amplified her intoxicated state. She was taken to a bedroom where she was attacked by these men. A fraternity member disgustingly posted a message to Snapchat (that went to 50 people who did nothing) advertising free access to Doe’s body. The text read, “free pussy in alum pu [pull up]. . . Like you can walk in and whip it out.” Another message read, “Shop still open.” Trapped in the room, Doe was raped for hours.

It is almost too grotesque to fathom yet also horribly common.

Fraternity members scrambled to respond to the accusation of assault. “Just deny, deny, deny” read one message. On social media they asked, “What’s the plan? … I don’t think she would have reported this.” “It’ll blow over in a couple days,” one wrote.

The University reported the accusation to the Tompkins County District Attorney. But as of October 2026, none of the men has been charged with a crime due to a loophole in the law that says that a person who voluntarily ingests intoxicants cannot claim that they did not consent. It has been revealed that Doe was given ketamine against her will. However, regardless of any voluntary intoxication, no one who is impaired can truly consent to sexual activity. Intoxication is not a license to rape.

The university banned the fraternity and expelled two students. This was the extent of their “punishment.”

This failure occurred in spite of Doe’s interview with Cornell police and a Title IX investigator that produced a 120-page transcript. Her claims that she “can say with 100 percent confidence that I was raped” by a “ring of men” in a room from which there “was really no escape” did not, as Corey Robin has reported, make it into the six pages supplied to the District Attorney, who concluded that he did not have enough evidence to file charges against the men.

But this September, Doe filed a civil lawsuit against the University, the Chi Phi fraternity, Delta Delta Delta sorority, and the seven men who assaulted her. This filing and the following outcry prompted New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to order Attorney General Letitia James to open a criminal investigation. The national response has revived public awareness of sexual assault, particularly sexual assault on college campuses. Thousands of students at Cornell and across the country demonstrated powerful support of Doe demanding independent investigations, bans on fraternities, and the resignation of the university president and other administrators who protected these men from the consequences of their actions.

Elite universities, fraternities, and gender violence

Sexual assault occurs, unfortunately, everywhere, but one in five undergraduate students experiences rape or sexual assault over a four-year college career. As much as 80 percent of sexual assaults on campus are not reported. Regardless of enrollment, women between 18 and 24 are most at risk for rape and other sexual violence. College students, according to feminist Rebecca Solnit, are most at risk at fraternities during the “Red Zone” between the start of school and Thanksgiving break.

Ivy League and other elite universities around the world have a vested interest in guarding the institution against scandal and protecting students who either will join the ranks of the ruling class or already come from powerful families. Alumni who belong to fraternities also exert pressure after leaving school. As Cornell graduate student Kaori Quan told Truthout, “wealthy donors are members of these organizations, and that stream of cash incentivizes the university to preserve their reputation over the health and safety of students.”

Robin explains,

So you have a woman student stating she was gang raped. You have a police officer and an administrator [a Title IX investigator] beholden to an institution that wants, more than anything, to cultivate a reputation for itself as a hallowed place of learning and study rather than as a playground for rapists. It doesn’t take much to see how the representative of those institutions could massage and produce, out of 120 pages of blood-curdling testimony of a terrified and confused woman, a bland statement that a not terribly energetic or inquisitive district attorney could tuck away and think, I’ve done my job for the day.

Thus, when students commit crimes, these schools rarely expel them. Fraternities, while not protected by law, often employ cultural and social mechanisms—discouraging and under- reporting, blaming single individuals for such conduct, and enforcing codes of silence, destruction of evidence, and denying blame for crimes committed at “unofficial” events like parties—to protect members and discredit victims. The code “Bros will be Bros” influences perception of sexual assault responsibility: When a perpetrator is a member of a fraternity,1Rita C. Seabrook and L. Monique Ward, “Bros Will Be Bros? The Effect of Fraternity Membership on Perceived Culpability for Sexual Assault, Violence Against Women 25, no. 12 (2019): 1471-1490.

males rated perpetrators as less guilty and victims as more culpable when the perpetrator was a fraternity member, suggesting that sexual violence may be reinforced among fraternity members as they are both more likely to perpetrate sexual assault and less likely to be blamed.

Relative to campuses in general and society at large, fraternities are associated with higher risks of sexual assault, although exact numbers are hard to find due to underreporting and institutional silence.

The progressive Century Foundation and Gallup News report that, despite making up only about two percent of the total U.S. population, fraternity members dominate traditional positions of power: The Century Foundation reports that half of the CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies, 76 percent of U.S. legislators, 85 percent of  Supreme Court Justices (since 1910), 63 percent of U.S. Presidential Cabinet members, and almost every President and Vice President of the United States (since 1825). (Three of the six women on the Supreme Court were members of sororities.)

73 percent of fraternity members are white; 60 percent come from private high schools, and 30 percent were legacy admissions.

So, when it comes to sexual assault and other violations, universities protect themselves, fraternities protect themselves, and both protect students who either are or will be in the ruling class.

In doing so, these institutions are grievously failing survivors like Jane Doe and abetting gender violence in the service of broader systemic power.

Capitalism and gender violence

Solnit describes our society as a “rape-prone” culture marked by

entitlement and the desire to abuse and dehumanize women, which is in part about definitions of both masculinity and femininity: masculinity in that domination, violation and degradation are seen as status-enhancing, femininity in the perception that women’s bodies are for men to use, women’s voices and rights to be ignored.

Solnit’s emphasis is on masculine supremacy as the root of rape culture. However, it is also important to consider that gender violence is tied to the general structural violence—from sexual assault to police violence to colonialism and war to racist brutality and more—of the capitalist system. Why and how does capitalism produce a “rape-prone” culture?

Capitalist society depends upon people to occupy normative (prescribed, “appropriate”) gender identities and roles as part of the ideology of family values. This is because capitalism relies upon the private family to reproduce—biologically and socially—the population of workers, all at no cost to corporations or the state. The ideology of the family depends on a feminine identity whose primary role in society is to keep house and raise children. Gender violence is a form of gender discipline that, in conjunction with other ideological and social forces, sustains the installation of women as responsible for every reproductive task, from birth to education, housing, health care, transportation, and socialization (which itself reproduces normative gender roles).

We can find cultural expression of this gendered family imperative in the (actually declining) “tradwife” movement exhorting women to abandon education and careers in favor of devoting themselves to home and family. We see its political expression in the policy announced by Vice President J.D. Vance that would reallocate federal childcare funds to pay families with married, stay-at-home parents.

Rebecca Hall has argued that the usually feminized paid and unpaid labor often performed by women means that the family and other domestic spaces are sites of both extreme and persistent gender violence and creative resistance to capitalism as a system.2Rebecca Hall, “A Social Reproduction Theory of Gender Violence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48, no. 2 (20223): 321-345. She explains gender violence as occupying the intersection between the structural violence of capitalism and the embodied violence of gendered spaces.

The irony is that capitalism is a direct threat to the well-being of the private family and yet requires it to sustain profitability. Gender violence fills the gap in that contradiction by blaming women, and particularly women active in careers and pursuits outside the home, for transgressing the role that capitalism needs them to play so badly. Domestic assault and sexual assault happen in domains considered to be “private,” sites of profound gender regulation un- or loosely overseen by the state. Hall notes that social reproduction happens expansively not only in the household but also in communities, public and private institutions, and workplaces—and so, therefore, does gender violence.

Above and beyond the networking and nepotism of fraternities, the social reproduction of ruling class men into their prescribed roles generate habits of command and sexual entitlement, which carries forward into fraternity life and their roles as future bosses and political elites.

A brief note is necessary about trans and gender nonbinary identities and bodies as they intersect this discussion. Transwomen and other genderqueer people, in refusing to occupy conventionally gendered social positions, are especially targeted by gender violence and the carceral system. Sarah Lamble says that trans people, figured as dangers to society, experience fear, surveillance, discipline, policing, and punishment.3Sarah Lamble, Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash (Haymarket Books, 2026).

Fighting back against gender violence

Women and their allies resist gender violence in both interpersonal and public ways. Some may call for greater criminalization of gender violence and intervention by the police and other agencies of the state. It is tempting to hope for the criminal prosecution and conviction of the seven rapists in the Cornell case as a positive end goal. But the police are not our defenders.

Indeed, police are disproportionately represented among those who commit rape and other sexual assaults, including against children, and they are more likely than others to commit violence against their family members. Ms Magazine reported recently that police sexual violence is the second-most common form of civilian complaint against law enforcement. As with fraternities there is a (blue) wall of silence that protects police accused of these and other crimes (like the murder of Black people and abuse of immigrants by ICE).

More broadly, as brian bean argues in their end is our beginning, the modern police were created and evolved in capitalism and serve its violent order.4brian bean, Their End Is Our Beginning (Haymarket 2026). They exist to protect corporations and society at large from threats to property and elites. They crack down on immigrants, protesters, labor unions, and women and the gender queer as a function of their mission to serve capitalism. In short, the police are not our friends, and the courts are not friendly to victims of gender violence, either.

Not only is sexual assault underreported, but is one of the most dismissed crimes in U.S. law. Character assassination, legal loopholes, and retaliation make successful prosecution difficult and damaging to survivors.5R. Michael Cassidy, “Character, Credibility, and Rape Shield Rules,” Georgetown Review of Law and Public Policy 19 (2021): 145-176. If looking to the law is not a productive response to gender violence, including rape, where do we find effective resistance for the survival and flourishing of women and genderqueer people?

Historically, it has been mass movements for women’s liberation that have affected public awareness and incidence of rape and other gender crimes. It was in the late 1970s, during the women’s liberation movement and on the heels of its militancy that rape rates began a decades-long decline.

Take Back the Night protests took shape during this time, and the viral #MeToo movement, founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, was revived in 2017. It led to legal, cultural, institutional, and economic change, including state-level prohibition of non-disclosure agreements, the passage of state-level anti-harassment laws, an increase in the reporting of gender violence to the police and increased numbers of prosecutions, and some corporate workplace reforms (and the ejection of perpetrators from seats of power). In culture, new awareness about the need for affirmative consent and discussion about gender and power in the media arose.

Women’s rage has fueled resistance to gender violence. Today, there is a massive viral solidarity movement with the slogan “I am Jane Doe,” with 40 nationwide protests and campus walkouts, sit-ins, and demonstrations at Cornell and other universities. The Cornell faculty introduced a no-confidence resolution against the university administration.

On October 5, thousands of Cornell University students representing more than 20 organizations protested on the campus, holding signs reading “We are Jane Doe,” “Stop Protecting Rapists,” and “We Want Sentences, not Essays.” Shireen Akram-Boshar reported that the students are demanding the replacement of Cornell’s internal judicial system with an independent system, an external investigation of Cornell’s administration mandatory sexual assault prevention trainings for students, and compliance with the New York state law, “Enough is Enough.” In addition, they are demanding the resignation of Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff and other administrators. Some are demanding that fraternities be banned from campus.

They have also called for the expulsion of all of the students. Akram-Boshar learned that, of 1200 reported incidents of sexual violence on campus from 2018 to 2024, only seven resulted in expulsion.

We stand with Jane Doe and all of the students demonstrating against sexual assault and administrative inaction.

In addition, we must build a broader movement that connects the fight against gender violence to the abolition of the police and the struggle for socialism from below. We on the socialist Left must make gender violence a focus in our political discussion and action. Ciswomen, transwomen, transmen, and genderqueer people must stand in solidarity with each other and with the struggle against the capitalist system,  which is the horrifying well from which this violence against us springs.

#MeToo

#IamJaneDoe

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Rotograph Co; modified by Tempest.

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After years of stagnation under the Biden administration, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has been revitalized with a series of recent primary electoral victories. The Democratic Party establishment collapsed after Kamala Harris’s disastrous presidential campaign, which allowed democratic socialists and progressives to emerge as prominent leaders in the mainstream opposition to Trumpism. Zohran Mamdani’s unexpected mayoral primary win and follow-up general election victory against disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo put the establishment’s fragility on full display, inspiring several other successful “insurgent” campaigns since last year.

At the same time, the problems that contributed to DSA’s stagnation in the early 2020s are resurfacing. Mayor Mamdani, Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and other prominent democratic socialists are distancing themselves from ‘radical’ commitments like defunding the police by labeling it “woke 1.0” craziness, even though DSA’s national platform commits to abolishing police and prisons. This certainly wasn’t the first time DSA officeholders contradicted the group’s proclaimed goals, but by embracing the amorphous label of wokeness as a pejorative, this time they also aligned with the wider right-wing campaign against free speech and public education.

By embracing the amorphous label of wokeness as a pejorative, this time DSA officeholders also aligned with the wider right-wing campaign against free speech and public education.

Writers and caucuses on the right wing of DSA were quick to defend Mamdani and AOC. Ben Burgis at Jacobin accused critics of putting “radical-sounding but half-baked ideas” onto a pile, then pointlessly defending them even when they’re “unpopular” and “genuinely poorly thought-out,” simply to out-Left others. Eric Blanc, another Jacobin writer, is quoted by Burgis saying:

It’s frankly just a mistake that the national DSA took certain positions that are both marginalizing for us in the short term and just politically wrong even in the long term… In what world does it make sense, if our goal is to organize millions of people and to overcome the Democratic establishment and to defeat Trumpism, to take a position that you know is just going to give fuel to your opponents, and for which there’s no practical upshot right now? Taking that sort of doctrinaire ideological position seems to me a reflection of a lack of experience and a lack of engagement in mass politics.

In short, Blanc and Burgis are suggesting that it is not the officeholders’ “mass politics” that need correcting; it’s their critics’ “political instincts.” They shrug off the reality that ‘woke’ and initially unpopular movements like Black Lives Matter or Abolish ICE inspired millions of people to protest against state violence toward working-class people of color. These movements pushed a large share of young working-class people of color to embrace revolutionary abolitionist ideas en masse and inspired others to get involved in political or labor organizing.6More than 20 percent of Democrats supported abolishing the police and 34 percent supported defunding it in 2021. These might be minority positions but it took one year for them to be adopted by millions while it took hundreds of DSA campaigns and millions of dollars for a third of Democrats to support socialism in 2026. See https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/politics/cnn-poll-a-third-of-democrats-now-identify-as-democratic-socialists

So is it just wokeness to oppose workers being mandated to fund the high-tech repression campaigns run by various armed state agencies? What makes DSA’s electoral approach democratic or socialist if grassroots activists must be accountable to their rightward-drifting officeholders, and not to the working-class movements they belong to? DSA leaders criticize the limits of democracy under capitalism, but in what ways does their strategy challenge the capitalistic and technocratic logics of electoral campaigning?

Anti-wokeness and electoralism

Wokeness, a term coined by Black activists to raise awareness of racial injustices, is now a right-wing pejorative used by elites to dismiss movements for social justice. Identity politics, critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion have served similar purposes for right-wing witch-hunts across U.S. public institutions in recent years. McCarthyite taboos around these terms were reinforced by right-wingers, centrists, and some ‘leftists’ to rally reactionary forces against movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Abolish ICE in various institutional settings since the 2010s. For the purposes of this piece, I use ‘wokeness’ here descriptively—not as praise or condemnation—but to name the set of demands around abolition, racial justice, and opposition to carceral institutions that have been dismissed by electoralists as politically inconvenient.

The leftmost version of anti-wokeness has become influential in DSA and Jacobin since 2020. Adolph Reed was the initial figurehead of a movement centered on accusing George Floyd protestors of embracing ‘professional managerial class’ privilege and an identitarian outlook that is antithetical to working-class politics. Since Reed, other anti-woke Leftists like Burgis have taken the mantle. Anti-wokeness allows its proponents to rationalize the de facto deprioritization of oppression struggles, deprioritizing campaigns against repressive state policies that disproportionately impact women, people of color, and queer people. Anti-woke writers and activists argue that because large sections of the working class hold ‘culturally’ conservative attitudes on these issues, wokeness is a political liability in organizing workers, particularly around electoral campaigns.

Yet in the explosive moments that woke movements dominated news cycles, socialists like Mamdani and AOC had embraced woke demands like defunding the police and abolishing ICE, even when their popularity remained far from universal even within DSA and the Left. DSA officeholders only became less vocal about ICE deportations and U.S. support for Israel under the Biden administration. But more recently, DSA electeds re-embrace some woke policies, as boycotting Israel and abolishing ICE became much more popular through the uprisings that involved participation by DSA members.

This flip-flopping on wokeness is a byproduct of the electoralist logic embraced by right-wing DSA caucuses that make up DSA’s leadership majority (Groundwork, Socialist Majority, North Star, and the right-wing of Bread and Roses). Electoralism refers not to electoral participation itself but to the logic that treats elections as the primary or exclusive mechanism for building working-class power. Right-wing DSA caucuses view electoral campaigns as the vehicle for a legislative transition to socialism, and these ideas have dominated the largest chapters of DSA throughout both waves of DSA’s growth (2016-20, 2025-now). Given the limited time and resources electoral campaigns have, electoralists argue that DSA must prioritize organizing universalist reforms, such as Medicare for All or the much more amorphous “affordability agenda,” at the expense of ‘woke’ demands like defunding the police or abolishing ICE. DSAers who have tried to reframe this (unnecessary) contradistinction by advocating for progressive redistribution of police funds have had an uphill battle within DSA, with electoralist leadership factions gaining more influence from wins while pushing against efforts that center demands they deem too woke.

Electoralism became the dominant approach in DSA because the group’s growth came from its chapters’ involvement in Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns and their more localized successors. Electoralist caucuses grew more rapidly because they were the ones primarily recruiting cadres through these campaigns. Many of these organizers had already internalized the logic of electoralism and believed Sanders provided the opening we need to take advantage of in the absence of strong workers’ movements.

However, for most members, electoralism has not been a stepping stone toward becoming more active in DSA or getting involved in other organizing. Most DSA members (70–80%) are not active in the day-to-day activity of their chapters outside of elections. Electoralist caucuses reinforce this dynamic by moving decisions about political direction to caucus spaces or online and only bringing major questions back to members in their chapters when they can outnumber the opposition or limit the scope of discussion. As a result, there is very little reason to attend chapter meetings in many DSA chapters beyond just getting updates on campaigns that are ongoing elsewhere.

Other critical currents (Marxist Unity, Reform and Revolution, left-wing of Bread and Roses, various anarchists and popular frontists) position themselves further to the Left by identifying electoral wins as reflections of movement power, but not as mechanisms of class power. The DSA-left is also involved in electoral campaigns, but it defends holding endorsed officeholders  “accountable.” Nevertheless, these groups rarely agree on what accountability should mean. The disagreements around how to enforce accountability policies have fragmented the Left for years, undermining its ability to end an ongoing de facto non-accountability policy.

AOC and Mamdani, who rode the waves of radicalization generated by grassroots movements to abolish ICE, defund the police, and end the Israeli genocide, embraced anti-wokeness in this context where they are aware that DSA currently has no enforced accountability mechanism to pressure them and that DSA needs them more than they need the organization.

What’s so bad about electoralism?

While anti-woke stances might help electoralists and officeholders reach their short-term aims under certain conditions, embracing these stances is fundamentally anti-solidaristic. Discounting movements that center the rights of oppressed communities moves the socialist movement away from the long-term goal of building strong and democratic working-class organizations that can challenge and overturn capitalist rule. DSA’s leading factions’ alliances with officeholders ultimately limit the organization’s willingness and ability to stand up for independent working-class movements that might conflict with electoral imperatives.

These movements have been more central to DSA’s and the Left’s growth in recent years than electoralists give credit. Others have shown that DSA’s electoral successes have been more reliant on external movements, including Black Lives Matter, specifically the George Floyd protests, and Abolish ICE actions. These movements transformed mass consciousness in major cities, far more than any one group’s internal strategic decisions. They also created the space for DSA campaigns to present themselves as mechanisms to institutionalize movement gains. But when DSA leaders move right, the mass energy dissipates to be replaced by burnout and disillusionment. As a result, DSA had been stagnant for multiple years until the Palestine solidarity encampments revived grassroots energy and provided political foundations for the Mamdani campaign’s success by discrediting the Zionist establishment in New York and elsewhere.

The real question is how socialists can sustain working-class movements without falling into the dual traps of ultra-Left self-marginalization and electoralist compromises as exemplified by DSA officeholders.

The woke Left movements’ direct connection to DSA’s growth suggests that organizing outside of the electoral arena is not only important but essential to shifting class consciousness. This is not to say socialists should abstain from elections. Dismissing certain avenues of Left organizing as woke prevents socialists from building the mechanisms of working-class power that can pressure elected officials to act instead of waver. Even if some of these movements do not exclusively center the economic inequalities generated by capitalism, they show how repressive state institutions enable capitalist rule in oppressed communities. The real question is how socialists can help to sustain working-class movements without falling into the dual traps of ultra-Left self-marginalization and electoralist compromises as exemplified by DSA officeholders.

DSA and infrastructures of working-class dissent

There are at least three areas where electoralism limits the socialist movement’s ability to drive transformative change: labor organizing, community organizing, and internationalism. By prioritizing ties to officeholders at the expense of supporting bottom-up movements, DSA electoralists limit the group’s capacity to build independent infrastructures of dissent within working-class communities outside of elections.

DSA’s labor organizing work has contributed to some new union campaigns through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), but so far EWOC has functioned autonomously from DSA’s much more visible electoral campaigns. In practice, this meant the group primarily functioned to direct workers to the relevant allied unions and organizations such as the CWA, UE, Workers United, Labor Notes, and others. Beyond EWOC, DSA’s local labor working groups and various bureaucratically run union-endorsed national labor campaigns were short-lived with only limited exceptions.

While there is no doubt that some labor activists in DSA hold broader conceptions of “class struggle unionism” and “rank-and-file strategy,” DSA’s outsourcing of labor activist training through EWOC depoliticizes the group’s overall approach to labor activism. The scope of EWOC and DSA labor work in general is limited by the priorities of electoralist leaders. Electoralists have to retain good relations with union leaders to get campaign endorsements and support for efforts like EWOC. The partial dependency of DSA on labor leaders’ endorsements and resources limits DSA’s ability to organize against leadership conservatism within unions.

At the neighborhood level (at least in NYC), DSA canvassers no doubt contribute to normalizing the socialist label, usually by equating socialism with redistributive demands. However, when it comes to organizing against landlords, police, ICE, and for trans people, people with disabilities, and immigrant workers, the organization’s leaders often take sectarian stances, insulting activists as “unsatisfiable” instead of fighting the policies that oppress working-class people. These stances often undermine the organization’s ability to retain activists from diverse communities, contributing to the outsized representation of white professionals from elite colleges in DSA membership and leadership.2NYC-DSA membership poll from this year shows that the group is 60 percent white and 12 percent Jewish with 63 percent of members participating. Most recently, NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo has been exposed for misrepresenting his home address and employment history to falsely claim being a tenant and a union member. This is not an inherently unresolvable problem, but the current practice of DSA provides little-to-no space for young organizers who do not prioritize electoral campaigns. Engaging with neighborhood-level activism like tenant unions, ICE-watch, or progressive diaspora organizations can allow the Left to recruit and develop cadres from more diverse backgrounds.

Finally, the electoralist dominance of DSA promotes very narrow and unprincipled conceptions of internationalism. While DSA moved toward a more pro-Palestine orientation in 2017, this did not mean consistent opposition to the Israeli occupation. Current NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo and others on the DSA-right defended then-Congressperson Jamaal Bowman, voting to dismantle the Palestine Solidarity Working Group after it had campaigned to censure Bowman in 2021. Bowman provoked this by voting to fund the Israeli Iron Dome and visiting Israel and the West Bank on a propaganda tour by the liberal Zionist political advocacy group J Street. The Palestine working group became subordinate to the International Committee, whose leadership is appointed by the DSA’s national leaders.

DSA’s International Committee (IC) also took a largely one-sided ‘campist’ position on the basis of opposing U.S. imperialism. The first major step in this direction was pushing the national organization to align with the São Paulo Forum in 2021. São Paulo Forum includes leaders of the Latin American center-left like the Brazilian Workers’ Party and Bolivian MAS, but also other authoritarian parties like Venezuela’s PSUV and Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement. By aligning with parties of government, DSA positioned itself against grassroots opposition movements in these and other countries. While defending these regimes against U.S. imperial interventions, independent of their political content, the IC remained skeptical of opposition movements in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Iran, as backing them could be perceived as U.S. imperial policy. The dismissal of the working-class agency in favor of alliances with ‘anti-imperialist’ regimes is anti-solidaristic, much like anti-wokeness, and it discourages DSA and U.S. Leftists from engaging with independent working-class struggles in these countries.

While there are disagreements in DSA on all these questions, the prevailing consensus has been to try to prioritize good relations with U.S. progressives and foreign heads of state, whether they be authoritarian, social democratic, or communist, even if that means ignoring or dismissing some independent workers’ movements.

The Roads to working class power through dissent

In this context, movement-focused forces on the socialist Left must prioritize building independent and democratic sources of power in workplaces, communities, and across borders to withstand the pull of electoralism and other forms of socialism from above like campism.

Recent surge of organizing among city workers, public school teachers, higher education workers, nurses and services point toward some sectors with openings where socialists can contribute to the formation of a new militant minority. These efforts could help socialists move beyond a referral model of labor organizing by building rank-and-file committees in key bargaining units. Promoting socialist and solidaristic abolitionist views against repressive policies is essential there not only on moral grounds, but on tactical grounds if we want to redirect the trillions of dollars that go to the military, police, ICE, and other armed forces of capitalist rule.

Community-level organizing among immigrant workers against police violence, ICE, brutal working conditions in service jobs, and slumlords can also help us build ties with workers in more precarious jobs or living conditions. Precarious workers in low-income minority and immigrant neighborhoods must rely on community connections to sustain their lives in the absence of social welfare provisions. If we dismiss minority and immigrant workers’ more localized rebellions against state forces that are putting their boots on their necks, how can socialists expect to build an active majority of workers who fight for their own liberation?

If we do not build the democratic infrastructures of dissent across areas where workers can leverage power independently of electeds, our movement is bound to repeat the cycle of electoral ‘wins,’ reaction, and political disillusionment on the Left.

Finally, by positioning socialists as defenders of independent and democratic workers’ movements internationally and learning from limited precedents, socialists can help build solidarity networks across borders to develop foundations of cross-border actions. Some limited but meaningful examples of cross-border worker resistance emerged in response to the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, even in the face of political repression. If socialists waver on principled defenses of working-class democracy in all its diversity within and outside the U.S. to win votes, we are simply counterposing democracy in one country against that in another.

There is no doubt socialists have a long way to go building an international working-class movement capable of pushing back against capitalism’s increasingly authoritarian turn amid ecological collapse. While the growing popularity of socialism and progressive ideas is no doubt encouraging, the driver of the socialist movement cannot be the goodwill of elected officials. If we do not build the democratic infrastructures of dissent across areas where workers can leverage power independently of electeds, our movement is bound to repeat the cycle of electoral ‘wins,’ reaction, and political disillusionment on the Left.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: dbking; modified by Tempest.

The post Anti-Woke electoralism appeared first on Tempest.

Pranav Jani: Welcome to another episode of Together We Rise: Solidarity Stories from Central Ohio. I’m so happy to have today on our show my good friend and comrade, Kristen Guptil-Godfrey.

Kristen Guptill-Godfrey, who uses they/them pronouns, is a revolutionary socialist and organizer currently living in Arizona on unceded Tohono O’odham and Yoeme ancestral and traditional lands. Kristen’s mom was born and raised in Columbus, and although Kristen moved a lot growing up, they consider Columbus home.

They got the opportunity to live in Columbus from 2016 to 2018, and during that time, they became a revolutionary socialist and joined their first political home. Kristen also worked as a social worker and supported queer and trans young people.

They are a member of the Tempest Collective and a PhD student at the University of Arizona. Kristen strives to organize and be part of a growing imperfect Left that’s rooted in solidarity and internationalism to fight back against the authoritarianism and liberal capitulation we’re currently facing. Their local work includes organizing on campus for Palestinian liberation and fighting back against the attacks on DEI.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the work you’re doing right now in Arizona and start us off there?

Kristen Guptill-Godfrey: Yeah, for sure. In Arizona, I have been a part of an amazing group of people who have been building a branch for the Tempest Collective. The Tempest Collective is a revolutionary socialist organization with about eight branches across the country. We have been building that branch in Tucson and developing spaces for people to come together and find community and talk about the things that are happening around us, and then together debating a way forward. I’ve been building that branch over the last two years.

And then, recently on campus at the University of Arizona, I was the director of LGBTQ affairs. Since Trump was elected, the University of Arizona has just completely given in to his racist policies and basically renamed all of the cultural resource centers here. They’re no longer called centers. The LGBTQ Center cannot be called LGBTQ. And then they laid off all the directors, including myself. So, through everything that happened with these attacks on DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, some of us created an organization called UA Resist.

It’s a group of faculty, staff, students, and community members who are fighting for a liberatory campus. That includes Palestinian liberation, showing up for international students, and DEI. For example, tonight we’re facilitating an Organizing 101 training for students to come and learn the skills that it takes to develop relationships with people.

Also, Tempest is a part of the No Data Center Coalition. Amazon Web Services and the electric company here are creating a data center to store the cloud. And we know that cloud holds the data of people that then Amazon Web Services uses and sells to ICE.

We successfully won the first round. We convinced the city council to vote against it. It’s been nice to be a part of coalition like that. And, in a couple months, we’re going to start this political education series around data centers, what that means for environmental racism, imperialism, and attacks on indigenous people. It’s been fun to get a win. We don’t really get wins that often, so when you get a win you really gotta celebrate.

PJ: When you say you’re a revolutionary socialist, what do you mean by that?

KG: That’s a good question. I think it means, for me, is that the way out of this is revolution.

That the way out of this is masses of people recognizing, ordinary people recognizing, the power they have in themselves to act with other people. To get out of this mess—whatever it is, whatever we want to call it—this racism, this authoritarianism, this imperialism that we’re facing and that the Global South is facing, the only way out of that is through this revolutionary process. We have to take control of our future.

PJ: Thanks. People nowadays are either skittish about revolution or don’t know what it means when the right creates the meaning. Because revolution gets seen that way, how would you describe it for ordinary people who aren’t familiar with the far Left? What would revolution mean? What kind of change are you looking for?

KG: I think it means a change from the ground up. This doesn’t mean that reforms are not good. Sometimes there’s a battle between, do I fight for this reform or do I say, “Oh, that reform sucks. We’re going to be in the same place in ten years. Why not fight for something bigger?” I think reforms are important for revolution because really the end goal is learning how to trust other people and how to democratically make decisions together.

I can’t provide an answer for what revolution will look like, but I know it will only come if we know how to work together and trust each other in that process and make spaces easy for people to enter.

The only way that process can happen is if we win these reforms together and learn about how they work. Like in winning the no data center fight, the trust that was built between those comrades in those organizing rooms really is what we’re fighting for, those relationships.

I can’t provide an answer for what revolution will look like, but I know it will only come if we know how to work together and trust each other in that process and make spaces easy for people to enter.

Maybe next time, it’s not fighting back against a data center. Maybe it’s fighting back against something bigger. And your politics, they move left as you’re in struggle. As you’re winning various reforms, it makes it easier to tie the connections between data centers and the border, or data centers and Palestine.

It’s not just like revolution is this thing that’s in the future, but it’s the revolutionary insight that you must have that really carries disciplined hope along, like I have to be in this for the long haul, and we have to really create change from the ground up, because this isn’t working for masses of people. Like capitalism, the racism that upholds capitalism is not working for so many people—even when they think it’s working for them.

PJ: So as a revolutionary socialist, if you’re fighting for this no data coalition, if you’re fighting around DEI—and I’m really sorry that you and others lost your jobs— if we’re trying to hold our line on those things, that’s not inherently revolutionary. It’s the process of us ourselves taking charge of things. I wanted to ask you about your work in Columbus. What are some of the memories you have of that time and the things that stand out for you about those experiences here in Columbus?

KG: Oh my gosh, that period was so important for me. I met you during that time. When I moved to Columbus, it was like I had this radicalization period during the Black Lives Matter movement. I don’t know if others listening had the same experience, but you realize that stuff is really messed up, and that there are a few people in charge, and they are running everything. As an alienated person, as an isolated person, you find other things to blame.

I had moved to Columbus from the University of Tennessee. I got my master’s in social work, and I helped organize stuff there. But I didn’t know where to place my anger. I didn’t know who the enemy was, and I didn’t know who to trust. I think this is true for a lot of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks.

So, I moved to Columbus angry. I saw a flyer in a coffee shop, and I think it said something about socialist politics. And so I went.

I went to the talk, and I thought, “Oh, wow, this is really answering a lot of questions for me.” Anybody can organize. But people need training, people need revolutionary love to be organizers. There needs to be a shared vision, and people need to feel like they’re a part of that vision. So, we would go to coffee shops, and we would talk about all of these issues and we would read things.

I remember reading Party and Class with you, and that was foundational for me. I remember one time we were at the coffee shop, and you just went through all of the [communist] internationals and what that meant for the internationalist Left. I’m like, my mind’s just being blown everywhere.

You were a good mentor because we were reading things together. But we also were in this moment of heightened struggle. I was also going to protests with you. We were actually seeing on the ground what the stuff we were reading meant. It was nice to be doing both of those things with you as a mentor in a socialist organization.

PJ: That’s an honor when you say mentor. But I think at the end of the day, you can’t be in an organization that claims to be grassroots if you’re not meeting new people who get what you’re saying from their own experience and their own knowledge. And for us to pair up like that, those were invigorating meetings for me. It was fantastic to be able to go from those study groups to stuff on the ground and have those discussions in person with people in the middle of a time when things were really intense, in the Black Lives Matter movement. It doesn’t matter how long people have been around the movement—we were all getting educated.

KG: It was exhilarating. It was a moment—when previously you just couldn’t say that the police are bad—and it was like this ideological shift that we really had to figure out and bring people with us. It’s like after the encampment movement on college campuses, just second-guessing Zionism is not weird anymore.

There are these moments in history when organizers really have to take the moment, to meet strangers and to connect their personal experiences to an analysis of what’s happening in a way that they can easily understand and easily grasp onto. Sometimes it’s tough. It’s a lifelong process.

PJ: In Columbus, you were also doing work with trans kids. What was that work like and what did you take from it?

KG: Even before I worked there, I started working in social work in the foster care system. I managed a group home for boys in foster care.

It was at that group home that I noticed that the state was sending me trans girls to put in this home with boys. And so it was in that moment that I recognized that these systems are not set up for queer and trans people.

After I got my master’s, I got to work at an after-school program in Columbus. It was the first time that I got to think about political education with young people. That job was the first time I identified as an educator. Of course, young people need safe spaces to be and find friendship, but it was also political. Assata Shakur had just died and I did Assata’s chant with a group of young people.

I got to talk to queer and trans young people about Assata and what that meant for our own liberation as trans people. When I was at that job, I was also reckoning with my own gender. It was also a personal experience. In reckoning with my gender, I was uplifted by 13-year-olds who told me, “You can do this.” I have a video on my phone and it’s facing downwards to not record the young people, but we did Assata’s chant together.

I still do that to this day when I’m in a room full of young people because it really does influence the space that you’re in.

PJ: In memory of Assata, we should do the chant right now. Maybe go back and forth.

KG: It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

PJ: It is our duty to win.

KG: We must love each other and support one another.

PJ: We have nothing to lose but our chains.

KG: Yeah.

PJ: Yeah.

KG: May she rest in paradise.

PJ: We have been talking about bringing together Black Lives Matter and systemic racism, police violence, questions of gender, and questions of trans kids. In the shift to broader politics, what are some of the things that made you ready for that shift—made you a person who, when things are happening in the world, when these questions come, you didn’t just, say, “Wow, there’s a lot that needs to change,” or, “We ought to do something.”

You took steps toward changing this. “I have to be part of the solution.” What were some of those things that drove you to that?

KG: I think becoming a socialist made me aware of things that I didn’t think of before, like the material analysis of Marxism and the class-consciousness that is so necessary. I was also in Columbus in one of my big kid jobs when I got to really think of myself as an exploited worker, as a social worker. I thought about what was required of me as a worker and being alienated in that workplace. And I remember being in an International Socialist Organization meeting asking that question about how workers are exploited. What does that look like for educators and social workers?

I was putting together those pieces, and then it became clear to me that everything was connected, like the paycheck I had or where I lived or the gentrified neighborhood that my grandma lives in Columbus, where now her house is worth $500,000 and white people are asking to buy her house. That’s all material things we can touch and feel. It made it clear that life doesn’t have to be this way, that, as a worker, as a Black worker, I deserve more. I understood racism. But to really confront racism as it plays out in your everyday life is for you as a working-class person.

PJ: So that resonated with things you already knew but also put them in a new light.

KG: There’s this assumption in mainstream society, and even in the history classes that we’re in, that things just get better.

You know how people say, “I can’t believe you said that word. It’s 2025.” Like things just get better. And people are even now, “How are they going after same-sex marriage? It’s 2025.” And it’s like no, this is a battle, and if we whatever we want to call ourselves, the Left, progressives, if we don’t join together and fight that battle, we lose.

What we’re seeing is this back and forth of winning and losing, and when we lose, we are not organized. We are not talking to each other. We are not bringing new people into the movement. The Marxist analysis of history convinced me that I have to play a role in that history, that I’m just not going to wake up tomorrow and Black liberation will come. I think I read somewhere that there are more Black men in prison now than were enslaved. It’s a real thing you can touch to know that things don’t just get better. We have to fight for the things that we deserve, and they’re not just going to come to us, and we can’t rely on anybody but ourselves and other ordinary people to make that happen.

This is a battle, and if we whatever we want to call ourselves, the Left, progressives, if we don’t join together and fight that battle, we lose. . . . We have to fight for the things that we deserve, and they’re not just going to come to us, and we can’t rely on anybody but ourselves and other ordinary people to make that happen.

PJ: You’ve seen not only in Ohio but everywhere, these attacks on trans rights that are actually attacks on trans people. It’s not even been abstract, like you can’t have this right. It’s been like, why do you exist.

KG: Exactly—the demonization of a whole group of people.

PJ: As a cisgender person, I’m in solidarity in the fight against that, but I don’t feel it in the same way that a trans person would feel it. I don’t want to ask an unfair question, but how do you look at this moment? How are you experiencing this moment? You’ve been through a lot of moments, in your life as an activist and as a person where you’ve said this is a really bad time. This is a really hard time. How does this time feel to you?

KG: It feels rough because it feels unorganized.

In different meetings that I’m in, whether it’s a big coalition meeting or whether it’s a small Tempest meeting, it’s hard to even think about strategies and tactics. It’s like a lot of bad things are happening to us, but there’s not necessarily thousands of people going into the streets.

So then as a revolutionary, as someone who knows that we need people in this, we need people to take action, I think that is what honestly scares me the most.

And I think Trump is really good at this. He was good at this his first time around, but putting so much on us so quickly. It’s like you learn about one thing, and then he throws something else at you, so it’s too hard to keep up. And I know people feel that way, but it just feels like we don’t have enough people on our side doing active things every day to fight back.

And that’s not to say that people are not active. People are. And they are really giving their all. But I think it’s when we are unorganized, it is easier for people to be hopeless and move away if they have that privilege, or to just hold their ground and to see where it’s going to go.

Even now, it’s hard to offer someone a vision, and I think that’s what Trump is good at. He gave people a wrong vision, but he did give people a vision and an answer to why they can’t afford groceries. An inaccurate one, but the U.S. is founded on racism and enslavement and genocide, so when you tell somebody, “You don’t live a good life because of immigrants,” it’s easy to understand that.

What is our vision, and how do we share that with other people? It feels different from the Black Lives Matter movement. There were some parts of it that were unorganized, but there just seemed to be this force of people into the streets. People saying, “I’m going to do something about it.” It might be unorganized, and it might be tactically strong with no strategy. But people were doing something. And now it feels like we need that pressure. And we saw some of that for Palestine, but even that has died down, especially in the U.S.

PJ: So there needs to be this revival of this sense of vision, I think that’s a good word. There are a lot of people fighting, and a lot of us have been very busy. But we are missing this sense of collectively are we going to take this on or not?

Even people say fascism is this. That’s fine. People can say whatever word they want. But what are we going to do? That’s the question—and are we going to do it together? It’s about solidarity. Different people are at the front lines of different kinds of attacks, and that’s undeniable. At the same time, we’re in this together. No individual group is going to liberate themselves. What does that look like for you? What does solidarity in practice look like for you? How do we get this diverse group of people, who share a lot but also have differences, together?

I’m not asking you for a formula, but what I’m asking you for, how do we do it? If you have it, you should share it. But what I’m asking is, what have some of your experiences have been of those moments of solidarity, experiencing it and organizing around it?

KG: I think a couple things. I think one is connecting struggles, and two is not just connecting struggles, but also—I’m trying to think of a way to phrase it. For cis people to care about trans folks, for example. Why would a cis person want to show up for trans folks? Let’s say you don’t have any trans family members, you don’t have any trans kids. You’ve just heard about them on the news, and now you’re trying to figure out which way to go. I think the way to do that is to think about your own struggles that you’re facing and then having this material analysis and asking, what will I lose if trans people keep losing rights?

I think we saw this coming when they got rid of Roe v. Wade, right? That is an attack on trans folks and cis women. But it’s tough to see that attack happen without a huge movement to fight back against it. Now we’re seeing the demonization of trans people. This attack on a person’s ability to have an autonomous body where they make decisions for themselves. And that should be the number one thing we’re all fighting for. And that has everything to do with cis men, right? Cis men oftentimes, I think, don’t have autonomy over their bodies in that you get to only be emotional and express a certain type of emotion in a certain setting, if any.

You’re judged for how you express yourself; you’re judged if you don’t express yourself the right way. So that has everything to do with trans rights. That has everything to do with the medical industry and what services that we can be provided with, whether it’s hormones or abortion rights. I think that’s one way in terms of thinking about how this affects me. I could go my whole life not meeting a trans person, let’s say, but what does that trans person’s experience have to do with me? And if I don’t show up for that trans person, my own material rights are going to be taken away.

I’m not going to have abortion rights, or I’m not going to be able to think differently about my masculinity. I think those two things are very connected. Like with the border—not being allowed to move your body where you need to, whether it’s for your family to live or because you want to go somewhere else. That is an issue of autonomy about what you can do for you and your family,

PJ: And then there is the kind of moral and ethical question to just stand up for people next to you.

KG: If people are moved in that way: I have to show up because it’s the right thing to do, I think that’s brilliant. But also, I think there is this insight that, if they lose their rights, they’re coming for me next. I think that is very real, and we have seen that play out in the last 15 or 20 years.

I think another piece of solidarity for me is letting people mess up. I was just listening to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor giving a talk. And she was like, “What if during the Black Lives Matter movement, we didn’t expect people to already be abolitionists when they came into our meetings?”

What if we invited people to a meeting and a white working-class person comes who is not convinced that cops are bad, and says, “Sometimes my neighbors and I do call the cops because things happen”? And then sometimes what we saw in that moment was maybe cancel politics. Maybe, “Oh we’re not going to invite that person to the next meeting” instead of a holding organizing spaces that can actually be somewhere where you get your questions answered in a loving, comradely way to then move people to understand—like what I just explained for a cis man caring about trans people. That just can’t happen in your own home. That has to be in collectivity with someone else who’s also thinking about it.

Say you’re a teacher and it’s your first time hearing about a gender-neutral restroom in your school. The spaces that organizers create have to be where people can connect those struggles. Then solidarity can be material. But if we are expecting people to say a certain thing, or to be educated on this certain thing, I don’t know where adults are going to get educated on this thing. They’re coming to us, I hope. So when they come into our spaces that should be easily accessible.

They should say something wrong. And then we should meet them with love and care, and get them to abolitionist politics, not expecting someone to show up and completely understand Zionism, and completely understand a one-state solution, and completely understand Palestinian liberation.

How can we be the landing pad for people to recognize the material connections from themselves and a Palestinian in Gaza? We have to be doing that work.

I just heard David McNally say that the spaces that we’re in, they might not be revolutionary spaces, but if they are spaces where people are at, we must be there. And we don’t change our politics, but we create spaces to talk about things with other people and bring our revolutionary politics into that.

I know both you and I are at universities where people have many different ideas. But universities are also made up of poor people, of working-class people, of Black and Brown people, so we must be there. Then we have to offer a different vision of what the university could be like. We have to talk to people who maybe have not thought about a free education. Or about an LGBTQ center that will always be in existence, or no police on campus. We have to be in these spaces where people are to offer these different types of visions, to work with people, and to move each other. We have to be open to being shifted by other people that we’re meeting. I think that’s how the relationship has to work to be a true, honest, comradely relationship.

PJ: There are not thousands of people on the street. Because of all the repression, the movements themselves don’t look as big in that kind of climate. There are a lot of people who are on the fence, who aren’t exactly sure what their next step should be. What kind of thoughts or advice do you have for people on the fence right now who see a lot of atrocities but aren’t sure what they should do?

We have to be in these spaces where people are to offer these different types of visions, to work with people, and to move each other. We have to be open to being shifted by other people that we’re meeting. I think that’s how the relationship has to work to be a true, honest, comradely relationship.

KG: Really, I think all I can say is you can’t do it alone. And you have to do something. You have to act, but that action only means something, and you’re only provided with safety to act ifs you do it with other people. So that means understanding the community you’re in.

Who’s meeting where? What is the landscape of the city you’re in? Do you have a friend who is just as pissed off as you and you want to read this book about McCarthyism together? I’m sure all of us have a pissed off coworker or a pissed off sibling who’s also thinking about this stuff. It doesn’t have to be a meeting with 50 people. It can be getting with a couple of people and thinking about how things work and why they work the way they work and providing each other that space to ask those questions. If you hear of a protest, if you hear of a march, if you hear of a teach-in, go. And you will hopefully be met with kindness.

The role of an organizer is to ask, “You got a ride?” Or to send you an email with five resources because you had this one question that they remembered from two weeks ago. That’s the role of an organizer, to make it easier for people to think about their place in organizing, their place in this revolution.

There’s a place for everybody. But we have to do something, and we have to do it with other people.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Becker1999 and Pranav Jani; modified by Tempest.

The post We have to do something appeared first on Tempest.

The U.S. economy is undergoing its biggest-ever capital investment boom, driven by government industrial policies, corporate tax cuts and AI data center spending. Profits as a share of the economy are at their highest in eighty years. The stock market routinely smashes records, and the unemployment rate remains near historic lows.

Such economic upswings normally spell political success for a U.S. president. But Donald Trump’s poll numbers are miserable, not only because of outrage over his reactionary policies but also because of working-class frustration about the cost of living and worries about AI-driven job losses. What’s more, the unpopular U.S. war on Iran and its global energy disruption, along with the trade war with China and other countries, have affected the U.S., driving up inflation. Meanwhile, the gains of the economic expansion have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthy—the richest 10 percent of the population now account for more than half of all consumer spending. The top 0.1 percent hold roughly $22.5 trillion—about 13 percent of total household wealth and around 5.5 times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent combined.

When the boom ends, corporate debt amassed in the murky private credit market—estimated at up to $2 trillion—could worsen any subsequent recession. At the time of writing, however, the U.S. economy is powering ahead. To understand why, it’s helpful to look at the turn towards economic nationalism and economic stimulus initiated in Donald Trump’s first term (2017-21) and embraced by Joe Biden’s administration (2021-25). Whatever their political differences, Trump and Biden reflected an emerging policy consensus that a trade war with China was inevitable and necessary to revive U.S. industry, that Washington should prioritise military might alongside tariffs and that economic stimulus is key to reviving the U.S. economy.

The post-pandemic economy

The excruciatingly slow recovery from the Great Recession (2008-09) enabled Trump to tap working-class discontent as he eked out a victory in the 2016 election. His $5.5 trillion in tax cuts favored corporations and the wealthy but failed to deliver the promised boost to economic growth. In part, that was because companies used their tax breaks on share buybacks to benefit investors. At the same time, Trump levied tariffs on China, with the promise of rebuilding heavy industry, but the trade war fizzled and manufacturing job losses continued.

On the eve of the pandemic in early 2020, the economy was growing at a respectable 2.3 percent; the unemployment rate of 3.5 percent was a fifty-year low. When the pandemic produced one of the fastest and deepest recessions in U.S. history, Trump and the Congress pushed through the CARES Act, injecting $2.2 trillion into the economy and preventing a collapse. Unemployment peaked at 14.8 percent in April 2020, the highest level since the Great Depression, but had been pushed down to 6.7 percent by the time of Biden’s election victory in November 2020.

Next came a series of stimulus packages: post-election Covid relief spending of $900 billion in the December 2020 budget, followed by a series of measures by the Biden administration. The American Rescue Plan Act of early 2021 injected $1.8 trillion into the economy, and was credited by Wall Street analyst firm Moody’s with avoiding a second recession. Profit rates as measured by the U.S. government hit their highest since 1950.

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More big spending followed: the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and, in the following year, the $52.7 billion tech-focused CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $500 billion in new spending and tax breaks with a climate change and infrastructure focus. The result was the biggest fixed capital formation in the U.S. in decades as manufacturing construction soared. A writer for the Brookings Institution, a think tank, called this trio of legislation a “national pivot.” The business magazine Fortune called it a “headlong dive into industrial policy.”

The Democratic administration’s stimulus-and-build program was a more sophisticated attempt at industrial policy than Trump’s crude tariffs-plus-tax-cuts method. But it wasn’t enough to lift the political fortunes of Biden and his vice president and would-be successor, Kamala Harris. Not only was it overwhelmed by the global inflationary wave that sent living standards backwards, it was too little and too late to create enough well-paying jobs to revive and energize a Democratic base by election day in 2024.

Microchips and other high-tech manufacturing require huge investments but create few jobs. So Biden’s program lacked the immediate social and political impact of the 1930s New Deal jobs programs of President Franklin Roosevelt. And while promised manufacturing jobs awaited the building of new factories, the Biden-Harris administration hammered workers, ending pandemic income relief by cutting the expanded child tax credit (CTC). As journalist Ryan Cooper noted, “[T]he end of the brief CTC expansion made for a terribly toxic combination with the end of the pandemic pop-up welfare state.” That helped smooth Trump’s path back to the White House.

Trump inherited this economy—along with an established get-tough-on-China and rebuild-America bipartisan policy context—when he took office in January 2025. He then dramatically upped the stakes with the “Liberation Day” announcements of steep tariffs on scores of countries, including an island inhabited only by penguins. Since then, tariffs have fluctuated based on various agreements and a U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating many of them. But they remain on average the highest import duties since the 1940s.

Many leading U.S. capitalists considered the Liberation Day tariffs destabilizing, even if they were sympathetic to tariffs as a negotiating ploy. But Trump wanted to force a quick shift in business behavior. The goal was to reshape global trade and investment patterns to benefit the U.S. while allowing him to posture to his electoral base as a defender of the working class. Manufacturing jobs, however, declined by 91,000 between January 2025 and January 2026, before rising modestly in the first quarter of 2026 to 12.6 million. Yet Trump isn’t relying on tariffs alone to stimulate investment. Building on Biden’s pro-manufacturing policies, Trump’s budget bill allows businesses to fully deduct from their taxes the costs of building new factories.

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Tariffs are just one front in a trade war fused to several imperialist power plays, from U.S. threats to annex Greenland and, less seriously, Canada, to the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicholás Maduro. However, Trump failed in his central aim of forcing China to cave under sky-high tariffs of 145 percent after Beijing retaliated by cutting rare earth exports critical to U.S. manufacturing. This led to a trade truce largely on China’s terms. Trump’s much-hyped May 2026 visit to China with several tech CEOs in tow, including Elon Musk, yielded modest results in promised U.S. exports to China, chiefly soybeans and a smallish order of Boeing jets. “Trump and top CEOs leave a more self-reliant China with few deals to show for it,” CNN observed. After the Supreme Court tariff decision, the baseline was 10 percent with higher duties on steel, autos, pharmaceuticals and more that pushed the average to about 30 percent. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was compelled to pay importers $94 billion in tariff refunds.

The U.S. had been moving away from the supposed rules-based trade order for years, going back to the Obama-era sabotage of the World Trade Organization and the “buy American” requirements of the Great Recession government spending of 2009. These were a precursor to Trump’s 2017 tariffs that Biden kept in place.

Today, Trump is replacing the old trade blocs and dispute systems with a hub-and-spoke model with the U.S. at the center. There is now a broad consensus across political parties for an economic nationalism that puts AI, aerospace and tech-driven rearmament at the forefront of a program for U.S. industrial revival to counter China and rebuild the U.S. defense industrial base. The stimulus and pro-manufacturing tax breaks have accelerated the turn to U.S. domestic production, with energy production and AI at the center.

Big business leaders sometimes grumble about Trump’s heavy-handed interventions, but they embrace his economic nationalism.

Republicans and Democrats embrace this approach. Biden’s Department of Defense issued the first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy in January 2024 to “catalyze generational change from the existing defense industrial base to a more robust, resilient, and dynamic modernized defense industrial ecosystem.” Trump put his own stamp on this effort, insisting on a “golden share” for the U.S. government as a condition for a Japanese company’s takeover of U.S. Steel, and investing billions in multiple other companies in what a leading foreign policy journal calls “Trump’s state capitalism.”

Big business leaders sometimes grumble about Trump’s heavy-handed interventions, but they embrace his economic nationalism. “It has become painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products and manufacturing—all of which are essential for our national security,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest U.S. bank, said when announcing a $1.5 trillion investment fund for key minerals and technologies last year.

A few weeks later, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the top foreign-policy think tank, weighed in with a book-length report, U.S. Economic Security: Winning the Race for Tomorrow’s Technologies. It declared: “[T]he United States is engaged in an unprecedented competition with China across military, political, economic, and technological domains. It is therefore imperative that we address the most immediate challenges facing U.S. economic security.” Notably, Biden’s former commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, was a key author.

Thus, by the time Trump’s Pentagon proposed a $1.45 trillion military budget amid the Iran war, the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against was shifting into high gear.

The AI economic accelerator

The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 set in motion the greatest investment boom in U.S. history, surpassing the national railroad expansion of the 1870s and the dot-com internet investments of the late 1990s. In the first half of 2025, spending on AI data centers accounted for nearly all U.S. economic growth, according to a leading liberal economist. Much of the data-center spending is on AI chips imported from Taiwan. But it also radiates throughout the economy, from construction companies and electric power utilities to the revenue of big cloud computing companies that sell AI services to businesses at premium prices. Competition compels such investments, as AI requires power, cooling and networking that older data centers cannot handle.

The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 set in motion the greatest investment boom in U.S. history.

The AI investment in 2026 could be the equivalent of 2 percent of U.S. GDP, which may seem modest until one considers that U.S. GDP was $30.8 trillion in 2025. The AI spending dovetails with the wider favorable conditions for investment in manufacturing created by Biden’s policies, including new semiconductor plants, which drove two-thirds of manufacturing construction by 2024. Trump’s tax cuts of 2025 provided still more incentives, cutting the cost for machinery, fleet and equipment by 21 percent.

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Skeptics have compared the AI investment boom to the tech bubble of the late 1990s and predict a bust. While the boom will certainly end, as all capitalist expansions inevitably must, there are important differences this time. The concentration of technology markets in the hands of a handful of Big Tech companies allowed them to fund their initial investments with their own cash. Only more recently have they begun to issue bonds—totaling $121 billion in 2025, a nearly fourfold increase over the previous four years. This figure does not count off-books “shadow debt,” much of it from private credit, making AI-related financial risk impossible to assess. “The hidden risks are building, we don’t know if that’s ever going to come up,” a prominent Wall Street economist noted this year.

A key feature of the AI economy is tens of billions in circular financing among chip manufacturers NVIDIA and AMD, cloud computing giants Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, and AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar scorpion dance, as established Big Tech firms sell computing capacity to fast-rising AI rivals while holding on to their corporate customers as well as the consumer market, which Meta aims to dominate with its own AI efforts.

If excessive spending ever does get Big Tech and its AI frenemies into trouble, they have a reliable backstop in the U.S. government.

If excessive spending ever does get Big Tech and its AI frenemies into trouble, they have a reliable backstop in the U.S. government. The U.S. semiconductor industry has always been central to the U.S. military, and the AI generation is now cashing in. Elon Musk thus merged his X.ai venture with SpaceX, a company critical to U.S. military and civilian space programs. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is reviving the military-Silicon Valley nexus that gave rise to chip maker Intel, in which the Trump administration took a 10 percent stake. Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz, billionaire tech venture capitalists and Trump backers, are focused on AI and defence. “The technology landscape that we will be investing into is ... intensely competitive with China ... At this moment of profound technological opportunity, it is fundamentally important for humanity that America wins,” Horowitz said in an interview.

The exemplar of this trend is Palantir, an AI company holding contracts with U.S. intelligence services and immigration agencies and the provider of targeting technology for the Israeli military to assist the genocide in Gaza. Trump’s AI policy chief, David Sacks, is Big Tech’s agent in the White House. The godfather of the tech-Trump-AI alliance is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is close to both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and whose company has deep relationships with the U.S. and Israeli militaries.

The entry of AI into the longstanding Pentagon-Silicon Valley network underscores the role that AI will play in the wider economy. While U.S. policy wavers between a hands-off approach and some nominal regulation as a concession to the growing anti-AI backlash, there is no question that AI is central to corporate America’s drive for competitiveness and the projection of U.S. imperial power. If the AI bubble bursts, the biggest players will get a bailout.

Stocks, profits, debts, deficits and doubts

Tech companies’ disproportionate weight in the U.S. stock market is unprecedented. Just seven—Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla—account for more than 30 percent of the value of the S&P 500, an index of the biggest 500 publicly traded companies in the United States. All have market values exceeding $1 trillion as investors hope to cash in on AI. Certainly, their share prices will fluctuate and may even dive sharply when the AI boom runs its course. But the current stock price surge is based not only on AI, but on record profits.

Consider the U.S. government’s own measure of profits before and after taxes. Corporate profits before taxes have reached $4.2 trillion, or 13.7 percent of GDP. Since 2021, corporate profits before taxes have been at their highest since the Second World War and the Korean War, when military production was the driver. Trump’s biggest gift to capital—an effective tax rate of about 16 percent—funnelled the great majority of these profits into corporate coffers and benefited shareholders, adding to a concentration of wealth in the U.S. more extreme than even in the days of the robber baron capitalists of the late 1890s. While technology companies were central to these profits, other sectors also scored big: financial services, oil and gas, and infrastructure-related industries benefited from the investment boom. Manufacturing profits were beginning to flow strongly in 2025, even if the promised jobs boom was more of a trickle.

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It is too soon to say whether this represents a long-term restoration in the rate of profit and a sustained increase in the average U.S. economic growth. Following the Great Recession, U.S. GDP growth averaged 2.4 percent per year, jumping to an average of 3.3 percent from 2021 into 2025 amid the post-Covid recovery and economic stimulus. Nevertheless, it marks a big turn in the U.S. economy—a boom driven by industrial capital investment for the first time in decades. Whether this is sufficient to counter China’s challenge is a separate question. But the U.S. economy is being reshaped by a revived industrial sector.

This boom has several contradictions. Some are chronic, others are Trump-induced. Deficit spending by Congress has been amplified by Trump’s tax cuts, while the high level of government borrowing since the Great Recession and immediately after the pandemic has pushed federal debt to more than 100 percent of GDP. Some of this is the result of the calculation by successive U.S. administrations that the lack of a credible international alternative to the U.S. dollar as a universal trading currency means that buyers will always be found for U.S. government bonds to finance that debt. Trump wants to double down on this bet by pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to fuel an even hotter economy, tolerating higher inflation as a means to reduce government debt in real terms over time.

The other factor is that even U.S. capitalists who oppose Trump have mostly kept their mouths shut while benefiting from his smash-and-grab agenda of cutting taxes and slashing social spending. They may complain about Trump’s government deficits but see them as political cover for still more cuts in social programs.

From boom to bust?

The AI spending boom looks unhinged, and the associated debt could detonate a financial crisis and undermine U.S. economic growth. But from the standpoint of the companies involved, the decision to undertake vast investments is perfectly rational if it allows them to retain market dominance. In the view of U.S. government officials across successive administrations, tech companies are the flagships of a new wave of industrial investments encouraged by government policies, demanded by national security considerations and serving as economic engines, with serious regulation unlikely unless popular pressure or a crisis forces the issue.

Debt is the wild card in this high-stakes AI investment poker. The novelty of private credit’s big role in the financial system—along with shadow banks and cryptocurrency outfits—makes it impossible to do more than speculate about the impact of an AI bust. And the ripple effects of the energy crisis created by the U.S. war on Iran have disrupted global supply chains and hit consumer demand in the U.S., which could also continue to drag down growth.

When the AI expansion finally ends, working-class people already soured by the current economy are likely to turn bitter.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: George Hodan; modified by Tempest.

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As Russia escalates its attacks, Ukraine’s resistance holds, and peace negotiations are at an impasse, the people of Ukraine need international solidarity from anti-war people as much as ever. The military and civil resistance of Ukraine is anchored by its working-class majority who are on the frontlines and the production lines fighting for Ukraine’s national existence, for democracy, for social and economic policies in the interests of the majority, and for a just peace.

Global solidarity with Ukraine’s struggle for survival is as important as solidarity with Palestine in the face of Israel’s genocide, ethnic cleansing, and annexation.

Much responsibility for the bloody military stalemate in Ukraine lies with the United States’ cutback of support for Ukraine’s defense, especially the failure to provide desperately needed defense against Russia’s ballistic missile attacks.

While Russian ground offensives on the frontlines have largely stalled since the fall of 2022, Russia has progressively accelerated the scale of its bombardment of civilians and civilian infrastructure far behind the frontlines, with civilian casualties growing with the increasing strikes on schools, hospitals, and residential buildings; power, heat, water, and sewage infrastructure; and port, railway, and logistics centers. Russian soldiers are hunting and killing civilians in “human safaris” using FPV (First Person View) drones in Kherson and other frontline communities. With the U.S. diversion of Patriot missile interceptors to the wars in the Middle East and the resulting depletion of supplies, Ukraine has been left with no effective defense against Russia’s terrorist missile strikes.

Russia is expected to mobilize an additional 500,000 new troops for a coming offensive after the ritualized parliamentary elections on September 18-20 from which the only anti-war party has been banned. North Korea is deploying 50,000 troops, 120 ballistic missiles, and six missile launchers to join Russia’s ground and air offensives. In addition to continuing to sell Russia components for weapons systems, this year China has doubled its purchases of Russian oil. Revenues from oil and gas are crucial to funding the Russian war machine, accounting for 25% to 30% Russia’s federal budget of which the military has consumed 40% to 50% annually since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.

Russia and its echo chambers accused Ukraine in late July of “escalation” intended to merge the wars in Ukraine and Iran after Ukrainian drones bombed Iranian cargo ships transporting military supplies from Iran to Russia in the Caspian Sea. These Ukrainian airstrikes were self-defense. Iran entered the war on Russia’s side four years ago in the summer of 2022 when it began training Russian drone operators in Crimea and Iran itself in the use of the attack drones it was supplying to Russia.

Even though the U.S. has cut military and economic aid to Ukraine since the beginning of 2025 when Trump came into office, and European aid falls well short of what Ukraine asks for and needs, Ukraine has developed its own considerable military industrial capacities. It now produces most of its ammunition and has built an innovative and effective drone force. Surveillance and attack drones have made the frontlines impassible for the unrelenting Russian ground offensives, while constant improvements in Ukraine’s mid-range and long-range drones have imposed “kinetic sanctions” inside Russia that have severely degraded Russia’s oil and gas refining, export capacities, military production, weapons depots, and supply lines.

Stalemate, Escalation, and Deprivation

Despite the war’s stalemate, escalating air strikes by both sides are increasing destruction and casualties in both countries. The most credible estimates find that total military and civilian casualties have surpassed two million. Russia’s battlefield casualties are close to 1.5 million, including 500,000 killed. Ukraine’s military casualties are as many as 600,000, including up to 140,000 killed. The verified UN total for Ukrainian civilian casualties is over 68,000, including nearly 17,000 killed, with 2026 having the highest civilian casualties since the first month of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The verified totals do not account for probably tens of thousands more Ukrainian civilians who died in the bloody siege of Mariupol in 2022 and in the Russian-occupied territories where an accurate count remains impossible until those territories are liberated.

Any expression of Ukrainian or Crimean Tatar identity is severely punished by heavy prison sentences, torture, and widespread property confiscation. Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar books are burned and their cultural artifacts are destroyed.

Life for people in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine is desperate. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted/kidnapped to Russia into a vast network of camps for ideologized Russian historical indoctrination, cultural erasure, and military training. Any expression of Ukrainian or Crimean Tatar identity is severely punished by heavy prison sentences, torture, and widespread property confiscation. Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar books are burned and their cultural artifacts are destroyed. Human rights groups regard these policies as genocidal and among the most repressive in the world due to the total suppression of political and civil rights and the demographic engineering of ethnically cleansing Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars and recruiting Russian settlers.

For the living, life is becoming more difficult. Ukrainians are finding empty shelves at grocery stores due to Russian bombing of warehouses. They face a fifth deadly winter with even deeper cuts to power, heat, and water. Poverty rates are up from 5% before the war to 25% to 30% today. Russian families and communities are feeling the costs of the war in fallen soldiers, high interest rates, inflation, cuts to social services due to military priorities and growing fiscal constraints, and consumer goods shortages, including long lines for gasoline.

People in the Global South are also feeling the consequences of this war as Russia and Ukraine bomb each others’ ports and vessels on the Black Sea.

People in the Global South are also feeling the consequences of this war as Russia and Ukraine bomb each others’ ports and vessels on the Black Sea, choking off grain exports and raising world food insecurity that has already been hit by “super” El Niño weather patterns that are bringing drought or destructive flooding to many agricultural regions of the world. Russia recently rejected Ukraine’s proposed “grain truce” in the Black Sea.

Negotiations Impasse

The stalemated war calls for a ceasefire and negotiations toward a permanent peace settlement. Ukraine is willing, but Russia is not. The Ukrainian government and a majority of its people according to credible polling are willing to compromise for a ceasefire at the current contact line, with the national status of the Russian-occupied territories to be determined diplomatically, not militarily, over time. Ukraine is willing to forgo NATO membership if comparable security guarantees against further Russian aggression are provided in another form.

Russia, on the other hand, has shown no willingness to compromise. It insists that Ukraine withdraw from the rest of the territories that Russia has claimed to have annexed before negotiations can begin. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov have repeatedly said Russia will take those territories by military force if Ukraine does not surrender them.

Citing sources within the Kremlin, journalists report that Putin ordered his security services to undertake covert actions to “implode NATO and the EU from within” in 2026. Putin hopes that “hybrid warfare” against Europe along with the ascension of far-right pro-Russian political parties will undermine European support for Ukraine.

Russian “hybrid warfare” against European countries is many faceted. It has included cyber attacks, a drone attack on a Ukrainian cargo plane at the Leipzig airport in Germany, Russian air strikes on a hydropower dam and a high-voltage power line in southern Ukraine that caused major power and clean water shortages in downstream Moldova. There have been thwarted assassination attempts in Poland including of a dual citizen of Ukraine and the United States. Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers has dragged anchors to damage underwater power lines, data cables, and gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Russia has instigated anti-Ukrainian demonstrations and violent assaults in Poland, conducted influence operations and provided material support for far-right pro-Russia political parties and candidates in Moldova, Romania, Germany, Poland, France, Italy, Britain, and other countries, and there have been numerous drone intrusions around military bases, airports, and power and water infrastructure in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Moldova, Romania, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, The Netherlands, Britain, and Ireland.

Russian Tanks, Western Banks, and Domestic Oligarchs

Europe’s response has been equivocal. While it has partially filled the gaps left by the withdrawal of U.S. aid, it still cannot agree to a plan to use Russia’s nearly $250 billion in frozen assets to aid Ukraine, limiting itself to small payments of “windfall” interest earnings from these assets. Meanwhile, the U.S. administration is not only withholding military and economic aid, it has pressured Ukraine to surrender land to Russia for a “peace” settlement that would carve up Ukraine between the U.S. and Russia for mutual exploitation and a resumption of American corporate participation in the Russian oil and gas industry.

This U.S. imperialist approach to Ukraine was exemplified in early August when Trump said no to Zelensky’s requests for military aid – No to Patriot missile interceptors, No to licenses so Ukraine could build its own Patriots, and No to extending Starlink functionality for Ukraine to Russian territory to help it strike Russian missile manufacturers. Trump added that under the minerals deal he forced on Ukraine last year, “We can go in there at any time we want to take pretty much whatever we want.”

We should not have any illusions about the self-proclaimed “conversion” of Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer and Trump whisperer. Loomer has her own agendas that are not Ukraine’s. In Ukraine she promoted her anti-Muslim, white nationalist agenda by saying it was “refreshing” that she had seen no Muslims in Ukraine. In fact, the percentage of Muslims in Ukraine is double that in the United States. She proclaimed that Ukraine is a willing American ally in its war on Iran even though Zelensky has said the Iran war benefits Russia and hurts Ukraine. Far-right ideologues like Loomer have nothing positive to offer Ukraine.

The Ukrainian working class buttressing Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion and occupation needs solidarity from their counterparts in trade unions and progressive social movements around the world. They face not only Russian tanks and Western banks, but also domestic oligarchs whose profiteering and corruption schemes continue to be little taxed, investigated, or regulated under the neoliberal policies of the Zelensky government.

It is a good sign for Ukrainian democracy that street protests have influenced government actions, from last year’s successful defense of the state’s anti-corruption agencies to this year’s ongoing demonstrations concerning military leadership, soldiers’ terms of service, transit fare hikes, and proposed regressive revisions to the labor and civil codes that threaten the rights of workers, women, LGBTIQ+ people, people with disabilities, and independent journalists.

Our international solidarity should include demanding that Western banks and governments stop conditioning loans and grants to Ukraine on neoliberal policies that undermine the social and economic security of the Ukrainian people.

The remarkable volunteer self-organization and mutual aid of the Ukrainian people during the war cannot be expected to substitute for sustainable government programs for housing, income, health, and education. Our international solidarity should include demanding that Western banks and governments stop conditioning loans and grants to Ukraine on neoliberal policies that undermine the social and economic security of the Ukrainian people. We should be demanding the cancellation of Ukraine’s unjust foreign debts as well as an increase in grants instead of loans to maintain and improve Ukrainian social services. We should demand that Western governments provide the weapons systems that Ukraine needs to defeat Russia’s aggression.

People-to-People Solidarity

As we demand changes in our own governments’ policies, we should also be working directly with Ukrainian trade unions, socialists, and progressives in educational and material aid projects. International debates on the left about the war in Ukraine too often do not include the voices of Ukrainian leftists. We should be providing more venues where they can present their analyses of the war and what they need to sustain their movements against foreign imperialisms and domestic reaction.

[W]e should also be working directly with Ukrainian trade unions, socialists, and progressives in educational and material aid projects. International debates on the left about the war in Ukraine too often do not include the voices of Ukrainian leftists.

Progressive anti-imperialists are also working with Ukrainian leftists to raise and distribute material aid to Ukrainian trade unions and social movements to help them meet basic needs for Ukrainians, such as medical supplies and diesel generators, solar panels, and heat pumps for power and heating.

This November and December an International Solidarity Convoy to Ukraine is a major civil society and labor union initiative organized by the International Network of Solidarity with Ukraine (INSU), with which the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) is affiliated. The convoy aims to deliver critical material aid and strengthen global working-class solidarity with the Ukrainian working class.

Operating as an international “ground flotilla,” the convoy will have southern columns departing from Barcelona and Italy, a central column coming from Ireland and Britain, and a northern column starting in Norway. The columns will be hosting events along the transit routes to mobilize international trade unions, feminist networks, environmental organizations, and LGBTIQ+ groups in a unified stance of anti-imperialist solidarity. The columns will converge in Poland before crossing the border into Ukraine for major distribution stops in Lviv, Kyiv, and hard-hit regions in the war-torn East.

We urge everyone to contribute to this effort. To donate and get involved, please visit the International Solidarity Convoy to Ukraine at https://solidarityconvoyukraine.com/.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Leonhard Lenz; modified by Tempest.

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There aren’t very many Marxists around today who would defend central planning as practiced in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s through the 1980s. But there are many who still think some form of central planning is essential to socialism. Marxist Sociology Professor, Catalyst editor and podcaster Vivek Chibber isn’t one of them. In an aptly titled  recent interview, “Socialism Has a Future. Central Planning Doesn’t”, he explained his position.

Chibber’s critique is based on the top-down, bureaucratic planning as it was practiced in the Soviet Union. As he notes, aside from its clones in Eastern Europe, North Korea, and, for a time China, there is no other actual existing model of central planning to examine. His argument is complex but boils down to the proposition that in an economy of any significant size where there is no market there are simply too many materials, inputs, and products for any commission or central authority to allocate efficiently. Only a competitive market could do this, according to Chibber. Hence misallocation, breakdowns, waste, poor products, wrong incentives, and the inevitable accumulation of these  problems lead to a crisis of the system. No doubt this pretty much describes what actually happened in the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Chibber argues that these are unavoidable features of any centrally planned economy. Before we accept this, and with it the notion that only “market socialism” provides a workable model for the future socialist society we seek, we need to look more closely into the Soviet model and the society in which it played out. What is most glaringly absent in Chibber’s general description of the Russian model is the social reality of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s to the bitter end—above all the question of social class. This is all the more remarkable because Chibber is an ardent advocate of the almost exclusive centrality of “class analysis” when it comes to contemporary politics.

Socialism is the rule of the working class. Planning is an instrument of the democratic workers’ state for organizing production for human need under its collective political and social rule and the transition to a classless society. While the Soviet Union promoted itself as socialist and in the transition to a classless society, it was anything but. It was, in fact, a highly stratified and bureaucratized society.

Socialism is the rule of the working class. Planning is an instrument of the democratic workers’ state for organizing production for human need under its collective political and social rule…While the Soviet Union promoted itself as socialist and in the transition to a classless society…It was, in fact, a highly stratified and bureaucratized society.

By the late 1930s anti-Stalinist Marxists began to question whether the USSR was still any sort of workers’ state, degenerated, deformed or otherwise. Many, mostly in the Trotskyist tradition, though not Trotsky himself, concluded that since there was no longer even a shred of workers’ democracy or the right to dissent, to organize for change, or form independent unions, much less to exert influence on the state’s economic priorities, that the bureaucracy that controlled the state was in fact a new ruling class. This bureaucracy controlled the means of production and collectively hired and directed the Soviet workforce.  Some called it state capitalism (C.L.R. James, Tony Cliff) some bureaucratic collectivist or state collectivist (Joseph Carter, Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, Big Flame).nd Like good Marxists, they fiercely debated these differences, but all saw Russia and its offsprings as class societies.

This had enormous implications. For one, this new ruling class won and maintained its class position and power through the most ruthless means. Workers’ democracy was suppressed, no party other than the ruling Communist Party was permitted, no factions within the party were allowed, no free press, or rights to assembly, no independent unions. The potential penalty for active dissent was forced labor, the Gulag, or the firing squad. It was, in a real sense, a totalitarian society.

Chibber admits its “authoritarian” nature made things worse but insists it was not a basic cause, which was the lack of competition. In contrast, as Hal Draper wrote when the Soviet Union was at the peak of its power and influence in the early 1950s:

The Stalinist state has an economic plan. Like everything else in this totalitarian structure, it is a plan devised, imposed and enforced from above, bureaucratically. But no bureaucratic commission can itself plan such a labyrinth of social processes. Such a plan must be constantly checked from below, corrected from below; it must depend on initiative and responsibility below; it must be self-correcting through the give-and-take of democratic planning between the lower and upper echelons on every level.

And these were just what it lacked. Note that Draper wasn’t just talking about the millions of materials to be allocated to thousands of enterprises but the social processes between the various levels of planning: the central commission (GOSPLAN), regional commissions, industry, enterprise, the people who ran or worked for them, and the role of the party at every point. Of course, there was feed-back between various levels, but as Chibber points out almost everyone lied about shortages, resources, profits, etc. It wasn’t lack of competition that led to misallocations and lies, it was the repressive state, and the culture of the society as a whole, in which failure or criticism were seen as “sabotage” with serious punishment possible. This was combined, as we shall see below, with the conflicting interests of the different layers of Soviet society. Debates over inefficiencies and reforms such as those Chibber mentions took place within the central party bureaucracy aided by loyal academics and technocrats. The workers had no say in any of it.

Trotsky recognized this in 1932, at the end of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan:

The only prerogative which [the bureaucracy] ultimately left to the workers was the right to exceed production limits. Any attempt to influence economic management from below is immediately described as a right or a left deviation, that is, practically made a capital offence. The bureaucratic upper crust in the last analysis, has pronounced itself infallible in the sphere of socialist planning…. Thus the basic mechanism of socialist construction—the adaptable and elastic system of Soviet democracy—was liquidated [Emphasis in original.]

Before going further into the implications of Stalinist society’s class structure, it is necessary to look more closely at how the planning system worked.

Things, prices, money and conflicting class interests

The Five Year Plan began with a census of production and materials based on information from existing workplaces.1This description of the planning system is taken mainly from George Gary, Money, Financial Flows, and Credit in the Soviet Union, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, 1977 and Ernest Mandel, The Soviet Economic Reforms and Yugoslav Experience, October 1968, Marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/mandel/1968/10/ref-yugo.html ; Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, London: Merlin Press, 1971, pp. 248-604. Although it was based on actual material things, the planners did not attempt to allocate each and every item to a workplace or enterprise. Allocation was done with prices and money. Each item, whether raw materials, machinery, parts, energy, etc. was given a price based on cost plus an average profit. These were not market prices, however, since they were seldom adjusted for changes in demand or technology. Nevertheless, they served to aggregate and direct millions of items. Aggregates were adjusted at the regional and industry level. To meet the planned targets, enterprises purchased their inputs from one another up and down their supply chains at the assigned prices.

While the state allocated resources for new investment, the national, regional, and industry planning centers did not distribute physical items themselves but tracked them in monetary terms. Targets (often missed) were adjusted annually. The principle of management bonuses tied to profitability of enterprises as an incentive to reduce costs was introduced as early as 1935, while the so-called Liberman reforms of the 1960s made enterprise profits the measure of performance. Each enterprise had a line of credit and could take loans from the State Bank in order to expand and/or adjust for shortages or bottlenecks. Some enterprises were even shaped by U.S. industry. As Victor Reuther recounts from his time in Russia, Ford engineers helped shape the giant Gorky Car works along the lines of Ford’s River Rouge complex, using the latest technology, while other U.S. giants such as General Electric, RCA, DuPont, and Westinghouse concluded technical and trade agreements with the Soviet government in the early 1930s.2Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW/ A Memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976, pp. 90-93. Stalin, apparently, was not averse to new capitalist technology. Western inputs, though marginal, continued during the war with the lend lease program and afterward under “turnkey” projects such as a Fiat built auto plant in the 1960s. In the early days of the Soviet Union, workers often pushed themselves to help make targets, but that did not last as living standards stagnated and party-led management did the pushing.

There were various contradictions in this system. One lay in the conflicting interests between the enterprise managers and their workers, with managers receiving as much as four times the incomes of workers via bonuses. Another was that between the enterprises (and hence workers) and the bureaucratic state ruling class. According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, cited above, to sustain and expand the state, on which the power and higher standard of living of the ruling class rested, 90 percent of state budget receipts were obtained from these enterprises.3Gary, p. 86. There was also a sales tax on consumer goods and some capital items, known as a “turnover” tax which was a form of regressive taxation.

But it was the expropriation of the profits from the enterprises -profits which came from the exploitation of the workers – that funded the state and its bureaucracy. The state budget grew by four times from 1950 to 1971, even as the economy slowed down. While Soviet enterprises could not go bankrupt, they were under pressure and incentivised via manager bonuses to produce increased surpluses to fund the state’s growth. This meant that enterprise managers were encouraged both to push the workers to create more profit, leading to poor working conditions, and to hoard resources in order to meet performance and bonus targets. Hence there were incentives for managers to both lie about their enterprises and to misallocate resources.

The contradictions in the Stalinist system of planning were most thoroughly analyzed in the mid-1960s by Polish Marxists Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski (henceforth K&M), who spent a number of years in prison for their efforts.4Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, (henceforth K&M) “ An Open Letter to the Party”, an International  Socialism Publication, 1968; also in New Politics, vol. 5, nos. 2 & 3, 1967.   In their view “the central political bureaucracy is the ruling class” by virtue of its “exclusive command” of the means of production and the fact that “it buys the labor of the working class” collectively appropriates the surplus produced by the workers  “in order to strengthen and expand its rule over production and society.” As we saw above, the central political bureaucracy rules collectively on the basis of the surplus it extracts from the workers in the enterprises that fund the power of the state.  In practice this meant the expansion of what K&M call Department A, the production of the means of production at the expense of Department B, the production of consumer goods, a distinction similar to Marx’s division between Department I and Department II developed in volume II of Capital.

Evidence of this is that both Western and Soviet estimates for the relative growth of capital (K) and labor (L) inputs for the 1950s and 1960s show that capital inputs grew between seven  and nine times more than that of labor inputs over that period.5Martin L. Weitzman, Soviet Economic Growth and Capital-Labor Substitution,  The American Economic Review, Vol. 60, No. 4, September 1970, p. 677. Figures taken from Soviet sources also show that the growth rate of “Output of Production Means (Group A)” increased faster than that for “Output of Consumer Goods (Group B)” almost every year throughout the 1950s, 1960, and 1970s. Only as Soviet rulers desperately tried to curry favor with the workers, as the system’s crisis increased in the late 1980s, did consumer goods output grow slightly faster as the regime approached collapse.6Soviet History Archive (marxist.org), Annual Growth Rates in the Soviet Union, 1941-1989, https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/economics/statistics/growth-rates.htm#1950s

As Chibber pointed out, the state provided or subsidized some aspects of working-class subsistence—healthcare, basic education, and to some extent childcare and housing. The overall living standards rose from the still largely peasant economy of the 1920s to an industrial economy of the post-war period. But for the working class living standards grew relatively slowly,well behind that in Western industrial countries and that of the bureaucracy and the new ruling class—as Russian workers could plainly see. The provision of most consumer goods, and hence worker living standards, depended on their production in Department B and that was seen by the bureaucracy as a cost that undermined the production of the means of production that allowed for the growth of the economy, the state, and the international and domestic power of the central political bureaucracy. This included not only capital goods and raw materials, but the nation’s massive military. It also underlies the bureaucracy’s penchant for huge infrastructure projects, many of which were famously wasteful or never completed: highways that ended in the middle of nowhere, bridges that failed to cross the river, and so on. Despite the outcome, the larger the project, the more income and influence for the planners and managers. This meant a perpetual constraint on the growth of the living standards of the working-class majority. Increases in effort or nominal wages made no difference since consumer production in Department B remained relatively limited and store shelves empty.

But it also meant an increasing disproportion, indeed a contradiction, between the growing means of production and relatively slower output for consumption, that led to overproduction and underutilization of the means of production and hence waste and the crisis of slower growth. As K&M put it, “The common cause of the non-utilization of productive capacity and of accumulation of unneeded reserves is the general inadaptation of production to needs (emphasis in original)” As they summarized it: “it is a contradiction between class goals of production and consumption, and it results from existing conditions, not from mismanagement.” On the basis of this contradiction, even in the mid-1960s over two decades before the collapse of the system, K&M predicted the crisis. They wrote of this disproportion.: “Without eliminating it, without changing the goal of production and the conditions of production as a whole, it will be impossible to overcome the ever growing crisis.”7K&M, p. 34.

Banned from striking or organizing genuine unions, fighting politically, or in any way influencing the functioning of the enterprise, much less the direction of resources under Stalinist planning, the working classes of Russia and its associated Eastern European nations turned to their weapon of last resort—the withdrawal of cooperation and efficiency. That is, the withholding of effort and the tacit skills and knowledge production workers everywhere possess. Those are the skills and knowhow that Frederick Taylor attempted to shift from the workers to management by breaking down tasks and offering incentives, that Elton Mayo and the human relations school sought to manipulate with changes in lighting and other conditions, and that lean production’s “constant improvement” (Kaizen) through teamwork tried to extract from the workers.8For Taylor and Mayo see Gerard Hanlon, The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory, New York: Routledge, 2016; for lean production, Sungur Savran, Lean Production and Flexibility: The Highest Stage of Taylorism, in Sungar Savran and E. Ahmet Tonak (eds.), In the Tracks of Marx’s Capital: Debates in Marxian Political Economy and Lessons for 21st Century Capitalism, Cham Switzerland: palgrave macmillan, pp. 265-316. Those skills and knowledge, along with extra effort,  were withheld from the planners, bureaucrats, and managers of Stalinist central planning. As K&M point out, “The worker tries to lower efficiency and hides the reserves in his sector to delay the changes in norms; he makes a product of inferior quality in order to meet the norms more easily.”9K&M, p. 33.

Another form of worker dissatisfaction and/or resistance in the Soviet Union was the relatively high rate of labor turnover. In theory, the Soviet Union maintained full employment at all times. In reality, there was significant labor turnover due largely to job dissatisfaction.  Measured as only voluntary quits and firings in official figures (yes, workers could be fired) from 1950 to 1970, turnover in industry averaged 20 percent, while in construction it ran in the mid-30s. Workers left jobs due to poor working conditions or to seek higher wages elsewhere. This turnover was cited by Soviet sources as one of the causes of low productivity.  This figure did not include workers assigned to other jobs or regions by the state, those who left to care for children, enrollment in studies, etc. Total “separations” were much higher.10David E. Powell, Labor Turnover in the Soviet Union, Slavic Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, January 1977, pp. 268-285.

The consequence of these forms of resistance was an ever-decreasing rate of productivity, along with poor quality, and missed goals throughout the system that undermined planning targets, delivery of materials, the profits meant to measure performance, and innovation, further creating shortages and other problems. This most basic resistance was expressed in the well-known Russian workers’ joke of the 1960s through the 1980s, that “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” In other words, it wasn’t just (or even) the lack of market competition that led to inefficiency and crisis, but the suppression of democratic norms, on the one hand, and the stagnation of working-class living standards that resulted from the bureaucracy’s production goals, on the other.

It wasn’t just (or even) the lack of market competition that led to inefficiency and crisis, but the suppression of democratic norms, on the one hand, and the stagnation of working-class living standards that resulted from the bureaucracy’s production goals, on the other.

The irony here is that in the Stalinist system, the workers and public in general were paid in money and bought consumer goods with that money—like a market—but at the planners’ prices and within the constraints of Department B production. This led K&M to argue at one point that the market for needs should determine the output of consumer production. One might interpret this as advocating market socialism before the idea was common or simply that the goals of planning needed to begin with an assessment of production for needs as K&M did. In no way did they reject central planning. In their view, a democratic workers’ state “will set goals of social production, decide on the sharing and use of the national income, hence define the size and purpose of investments, the size and disbursement of expenditures for social benefits, health services, education, science and culture, the amount for the power apparatus and its current tasks.” Since such decisions “can only be made centrally” this requires a fully democratic multi-party system with workers councils and independent unions.11K&M, pp. 60-63. That is, central planning by the workers’ democratic state.

Certainly, in a workers’ democracy that must support any version of socialism in which workers possess the freedom and rights to organize economically and politically, complain, suggest, and produce for need rather than the priorities of an exploiting upper class, they will be motivated to use their skills and knowledge in the cooperative and collective pursuit of raising the living standards of the masses with whom they live and work. Workers will have a direct interest in pointing out the inefficiencies, blockages, and problems that will arise with central planning and have the power to correct them over time. They will be able to innovate for their own advancement. Few of those socialists who give thought to these questions imagine that democratic planning will emerge overnight in one stroke or reject out of hand that elements of the market might play a role in the transition to socialist planning. But to rule out central (or decentralized) planning altogether is to throw out the socialist baby with the Stalinist bathwater.

Market Socialism: An Oxymoron?

In another interview published in Jacobin, Chibber lays out his arguments for what he sees as the only viable alternative to a planned economy: market socialism. His vision of this, as yet untried, version of socialism is one in which enterprises are state- or worker-owned, hence no capitalists, the market distributes resources, and an elaborate welfare state provides a decent standard of living and safety net for all, including the inevitable losers in market competition. Rather than attempting to pick apart Chibber’s description of and detailed arguments for market socialism, I want to put some admittedly rhetorical questions to Chibber or any defenders of this version of socialism.

Chibber’s basic argument for market socialism as opposed to a planned economy goes like this:

This is the key thing, and the reason you want market socialism. The biggest failure of the planned economies was the inability to innovate, and the absence of innovation, efficiency, dynamism. The whole motivation to move toward a market socialist model is to give managers of firms, producers, an incentive to consistently innovate. And that incentive comes from competition.

That is quite an assumption-loaded statement about the incentives for socialism, not to mention about human nature or desires. Is it really true that only competition can spur innovation? Isn’t the whole economically competitive ethos of capitalism and, indeed, capitalism itself, an historically specific and limited development? In fact, isn’t it mainly the capitalists and their hangers-on who are so economically competitive? On the other hand, isn’t it the case that workers given the opportunity to form unions in their defense will struggle, as J.R. Commons put it, “to take labor out of competition.” Doesn’t even our weak labor movement attempt to lessen competition through collective organization (i.e., cooperation), bargaining, and regulatory legislation to limit capital’s competitive drive?

Chibber’s abstract version of competition with its price signals overlooks the fact that competition between firms is in reality a battle over market share in which innovation is a means to that end. If this is a real market and not just something like the Soviet “market reforms” there will be winners and losers with real consequences. As Braverman, Noble, and others have argued, technological innovation is never socially neutral.12Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York: Monthly Review Peress, 1998; David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Would technological innovation for production for need be the same as that for increased market share?  Why would socialists want state or worker owned enterprises (and hence their workers) to fight one another over market share rather than working cooperatively through mutually agreed local and national plans to increase production for need. Capital pits workers in competition with one another—individual v. individual, black v. white, men v. women, citizen v. immigrant, firm v. firm—in order to keep wages down, effort up, the competition down, market share up, and capital accumulating. Why would worker-owned enterprises want to follow that pattern?  After all, struggle and the process of fighting for change transforms people and their values.

Why would socialists want state or worker owned enterprises (and hence their workers) to fight one another over market share rather than working cooperatively through mutually agreed local and national plans to increase production for need. Capital pits workers in competition with one another…Why would worker-owned enterprises want to follow that pattern?

Why would workers in their millions organize, struggle, sacrifice, and endanger their lives and livelihoods to get rid of the capitalist bosses just to create state or cooperatively owned businesses that compete to survive, because—advanced welfare state or not—that’s what economic competition is about as even Chibber admits at one point. Not to mention the periodic crises that competition generates. Around a million business establishments in the U.S. go under in normal years, more during recessions.13BLS, Table 3, Number of private sector establishments by direction of employment, by establishment age, 5/22/26, www.bls.gov/bdm/us_age_naics_00_table3_txt Why wouldn’t they fail under market socialism? Why wouldn’t competition under market socialism lead to pressures for work intensification in order to survive? Might workers not worry that competition would, once again, lead to pressure to contain consumption rather than increase it and increase effort rather than reducing it?

Couldn’t it be, instead, that workers, inventors, technicians, computer wizards, etc. would cooperatively innovate in production in order to lighten the workload, shorten work time, raise the standard of living and the culture of society as a whole domestically and internationally, and, indeed, to save the planet and future generations?  That instead of hoarding innovations through “proprietary” knowledge and technology, to get the upper hand in competition as competing firms do, they would share it through planning? Couldn’t it be that the incentive to collectively improve both work and life would prove as strong or stronger a motivation to innovate—this time in their own interest—than competition? Why assume that only competition and profits will motivate people to seek innovations in shifting to production for need?  Couldn’t it be that the solution to efficiency and innovation lies not in competition, but above all in worker initiative spurred by the goal of a better life and a safer world and the experience of beginning to actually achieve both? Would workers really organize collectively and fight against great odds only to compete? Isn’t our goal the cooperative commonwealth?

No transition to socialism, no expropriation of the expropriators, without a rupture

Here I have to admit that my optimistic view of worker initiative stems in part from my years at Labor Notes seeing how workers we knew understood how production and competition actually worked and why collective action was their best defense. It also comes from my visit to Portugal in the mid-1970s during its revolution. There the young officer core of the military sided with, and indeed helped lead, the revolution that overthrew the fascist government so that capital was unable to mount a violent counter revolution. When the workers moved to seize the plants and other workplaces, most of the bosses and owners fled the country. The police and army stayed in their stations and barracks. The trams and trains ran for free, run and maintained by their workers. The lights stayed on. Our small group of ISers visited several worker-run facilities, but the most impressive was the giant shipyard at Lisbon.

A shipyard is a complex of factories producing parts for the huge assembly facilities on the river. It involves almost every skill any manufacturing firm would need. We met with the elected workers’ committee running the whole shipyard which was composed of workers from several political tendencies or parties,as well as non-affiliated workers. The old management personnel stayed meekly in their offices and played no role in production or discipline. The trade unions, some of whose leaders we also met with, functioned to defend workers when necessary and process grievances. Members of the elected managing committee abided by the “a partido” ethic whereby no one spoke for their tendency and all worked together cooperatively to manage the shipyard. Imagine that, socialists of different stripes working together! Of course, outside the workplace the parties competed for supporters as you would in a democracy. But, again, the struggle for a better life changes people.

They explained the process of production and when asked how they could run such a complex operation, one replied something like—we’ve always run it. The cafeteria was flush with free food and wine. Well, it was Portugal. This was procured by barter from farmers for whom the yard’s machinists made farm equipment parts and other tools in return for the food and wine. No market there. Needed inputs came from other worker-run factories and energy from worker-controlled utilities. Not sure how they were paid for.  The biggest problem was that global capital was boycotting this and other worker-controlled firms and contracts were becoming scarce. International capital saw a precedent it didn’t like and acted to stop it. Tragically, the counter revolution, although relatively bloodless, was not far off as the Socialist Party and Communist Party made their peace with capital and its acceptably non-fascist politicians. None of the so-called socialist countries offered aid or contracts to these enterprises either, no doubt as workers’ control was as much anathema to them as to their capitalist rivals. The Portuguese workers didn’t have the opportunity to initiate planning above the enterprise level or rudimentary barter, but they did show the instincts and ability to turn to collective and cooperative production.

Remember, Chibber sees no capitalists in the market socialist economy. As he explains,14Chibber, How Socialism.

That means you’re not going to have privately owned means of production. Either you’re going to have the state owning the means of production at the national level; or you’re going to have an economy of workers’ cooperatives, in which there is no capitalist class that owns things but workers themselves have property rights.

“No capitalist class.” The expropriators are expropriated. But where did the capitalists go? Why did they go? Unlike in Portugal in the mid-1970s it is unlikely that the superrich U.S. capitalists would just pack up and leave. I checked Chibber’s manifesto, “Our Road to Power” written in 2017 to see what he said about transition. There was a lot in there about political and worker organization I agreed with (a mass cadre party with internal democracy, a certain level of discipline, rooted in the working class). But he also wrote, “Our strategic perspective has to downplay the centrality of a revolutionary rupture and navigate a more gradualist approach.”15Vivek Chibber, “Our Road to Power,” Jacobin, December 5, 2017, https://jacobin.com/2017/12/our-road-to-power “Strategic perspective”?! No matter how much one might wish to downplay rupture or attempt to move gradually, given their numbers, incredible wealth, the owners of capital in the U.S. will certainly see their impending or unfolding expropriation as a rupture of historic proportions. As, indeed, it would be. Much greater in scale and impact than the Russian Revolution no matter how it was done. It is inconceivable, given their legions of paid dependents, friends in politics and the military, their wealth, etc. that U.S. capitalists would simply surrender all of that without a vicious fight of some sort—even if, let’s imagine, a DSA-backed majority in Congress passed a law (gradually?) nationalizing their property and President Ocasio-Cortez signed the bill. I looked at the highlighted reference to “transition” in the text of the piece on market socialism, but it only led to an article about how social democracy had gone from a revolutionary movement to a reformist one as revolution ceased to be a foreseeable possibility. Hmm?

Is that really something new? Eduard Bernstein, a leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), laid the basis of modern social democratic reformism in 1899, a decade or so before one of the biggest revolutionary upsurges in European history. He argued capitalism had stabilized and revolution was off the agenda. Then came 1905, 1917, 1918, etc. Despite his famous statement that the final goal was “nothing” and the movement “everything”, Bernstein denied abandoning socialism altogether but instead downplayed a “catastrophic” revolutionary transition (rupture?) in favor of the gradual accumulation of reforms and the movement’s strength, what was called at the time “revisionism.”. In his 1909 preface to the famous Evolutionary Socialism (bad translation of his title), he insisted, “the book can, all in all, be regarded as an exposition of the theoretical and political tendencies of the German social democratic revisionists.”16Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, New York: Schocken Books, 1961, pp. viii   The revisionists would become the majority of the party’s leadership and parliamentary delegations. The leadership of the SPD consciously derailed the 1918 German revolution in which the workers initially seized production and set up workers’ councils.17Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, pp.129-283.

The problem is, as the history of German social democracy demonstrates, if you abandon the idea of a rupture, and simply embrace gradualism you necessarily give up the final goal: socialism of any kind in practice. As German (French, etc.) social democracy did well before the neoliberal era. 18See, for example, Hal Draper, The New Social Democratic Reformism, in Hal Draper, Socialism From Below, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019, pp. 97-114.See, for example, Hal Draper, The New Social Democratic Reformism, in Hal Draper, Socialism From Below, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019, pp. 97-114. There is no way to eliminate the capitalist class as a class without an historic social/political rupture. A world without capitalists is a qualitatively different one. You can, at least theoretically, do it by legislation rather than direct worker confiscation. You can go after the biggest ones first and work your way down the economic ladder, but it is still a rupture—and that is not a matter of semantics but of social reality. So, if you “downplay rupture”, what you are left with is a gradualism that has no way to achieve the expropriation of the expropriators. No doubt, Chibber would like to see the expropriators expropriated in order to achieve worker- or state-owned enterprises in market socialism. But he seems to have excluded any actual means of accomplishing that.

The history of German social democracy demonstrates, if you abandon the idea of a rupture, and simply embrace gradualism you necessarily give up the final goal: socialism of any kind in practice…There is no way to eliminate the capitalist class as a class without an historic social/political rupture. A world without capitalists is a qualitatively different one. …So, if you “downplay rupture”, what you are left with is a gradualism that has no way to achieve the expropriation of the expropriators.

What about the Meidner Plan? The last refuge of gradualists, Sweden’s Meidner Plan came as close as one could to a non-rupture model of the transition to a version of market socialism.19I have mainly used this highly favorable account of the Meidner Plan: Joe Guinan, Socialising capital: Looking Back on the Meidner Plan, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/37368092/Socializing_capital_Looking_back_on_the_Meidner_Plan. Formulated fifty years ago, hence its current semi-centennial celebration as a panacea, by (German-born) Swedish trade union economist Rudolph Meidner, the plan proposed that each enterprise over a certain size annually issue new shares reflecting “excess profits” that would go into “wage-earner funds” that were to be governed by union officials. Its dividends were mostly to go to social projects such as worker education. The idea was that as profits grew, the number and proportion of the fund-based shares would grow. Hence, in theory at least, eventual worker-ownership under union control would result. Investment decisions, however, were left to management, not the wage-earner fund. Meidner estimated that for a highly profitable company like Volvo it would take 20 years for the wage-earner-fund to own a majority of company shares (52%)—longer for other companies. For the funds to control almost all shares (97%) it would take 100 years—and that’s for a highly profitable firm. The capitalists would be squeezed into a tiny minority of owners. Gradualism at its most glacial.

In addition, since the shares were based on increased “excess” profits it meant the workers would be encouraged to work harder and longer and/or reduce the workforce via new technology to get to socialism. Class struggle to increase worker income or improve conditions would in practice reduce profits and hence the number of shares sent to the wage-earner fund, thus lengthening the road to ownership. The incentive was for unions to minimize conflict.  Nevertheless, due to strong employer opposition and the retreat of the Social Democrats, the plan was drastically watered-down when implemented in 1984. Share ownership by the funds was controlled by government officials with some employee representatives. Wage-earner fund shares in any one company were limited to eight percent. After seven years the funds controlled only 3.5 percent of the total value of all Swedish company shares. It was a flop and further opposition from capital and its conservative government killed it in 1992.

While in its original form it might appear to have passed the non-rupture test, its dilution and eventual death, in fact, underline the basic reason why there is no transition to socialism, no expropriation of the expropriators, without a rupture: the systemically-rooted dialectic of class conflict for survival. No matter how polite or gradualist the proposed transition, the capitalist class will recognize it as a threat and will not sit still for its own demise. In Sweden the threat was minimal and this was all quite peaceful. In Russia, Germany (ask Rosa), Chile, etc. not so peaceful. Any proposed “Road to Power” that fails to take that into account is a path to defeat or worse. There is no socialism without a rupture.

The major difference between revolutionary socialists and reformists or gradualists, of course, is not about whether you fight for reforms over time. Revolutionary socialists have always fought for reforms often alongside classic reformists and liberals. Nor is it a matter of revolutionary fantasies or impatience.  It is about that big step, that rupture, the expropriation of the expropriators, no matter how it’s accomplished, without which the final goal is inconceivable.

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