As Joseph Stalin consolidated power in the Politburo in the late 1920s, he ordered the “Bolshevization” of foreign communist chapters, particularly targeting the language clubs for absorption into the larger party. However, from Canada to Latin America, Jewish sections of communist parties charted their own path. They refused to disband, and refashioned themselves as the International Workers Order, aligned with and led by Communist Party members, although they remained by and large independent organizations.

While this act of resistance to Stalinism would be remarkable on its own, what made the IWO a truly groundbreaking organization is that it expanded the model of Yiddishkayt Jewish organizing — socialist in content and Yiddishist in form — to other language and ethnic clubs in the communist orbit. While the Jewish section of the IWO (renamed the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order in the 1940s) remained the largest section with over 50,000 members at its peak, the IWO included Finnish, Hungarian, and Carpatho-Russian societies, as well as the pan-Spanish language Cervantes Society, the African American Lincoln-Douglass Society, the Polonia Society, a Czech society, the Italian Garabaldi Society, and many others.

At its peak, the group had two hundred thousand members before its demise during the Second Red Scare. While IWO chapters existed as semiautonomous clubs with their own summer camps, halls, and cultural events, the IWO would often hold interracial dances, theater performances, beach picnics, and softball games. The group also mobilized around campaigns in support of the Scottsboro Boys, black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women; the Spanish Republic; and opposition to the invasion of Ethiopia.

From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954, a collection of essays by fourteen historians and labor and ethnic studies scholars, places the ground-breaking nature of the IWO’s interracial organizing at the center of the book. As historian Paul Mishler frames it, while “previous left-wing ethnic societies were imagined as being temporary way stations for immigrant workers until they and their families learned English, the IWO saw . . . ethnic identification as a road to radicalism, rather than a hinderance to it.” The IWO took the lessons of Yidishe Kulture movement, connected them to nascent black and brown power movements, and threaded them together within a socialist, Marxist framework that emphasized cultural diversity and particularity, yet within a wider working-class whole. As editors Ellissa Sampson and Robert Zecker put it, the IWO practiced “intersectionality” as a working structure long before the word and come into common left use some eight decades later.

In 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a speech at the 1952 Jewish Life magazine’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration, an event cosponsored by the IWO. Du Bois’s speech recounted how he was mistaken for a Jew by a cab driver in 1930s Western Ukraine and taken to the Jewish quarter for lodging. This experience of mistaken identity leads him to reflect that racialization is not only a question of the “color line,” as he had written in The Souls of Black Folksome half-century before, but rather that race “cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status.”

Du Bois concluded his talk by remarking that the “problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind a separate and unique thing as I had long conceived it.” This experience “enlarged” Du Bois’s sense of race and also solidarity. The Civil Rights Congress (CRC), another organization very much tied to the fate of the Communist Party and IWO, modeled its “We Charge Genocide” petition on the United Nations Convention on Genocide, taking its insights to claim that African Americans faced violent erasure as a people in the United States. The core mission of the IWO was to use Marxism to draw these analogies between Nazism in Europe and racism in the United States and to create a multiethnic mosaic of organizations that could support such “intersectional” struggles.

While the JPFO founded the IWO, the core of the collection is four essays each about a singular figure on the African American left and their profound relationship to the shaping of both organizations: W. E. B Du Bois as mentioned above, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Louise Thompson Patterson. Of the four, probably the least well known is Thompson Patterson, who was the longest-serving cochair of the organization, along with Max Bedacht. The two did more than any other figures on the Left to make the IWO into an organization that advocated for black freedom. Raised into a middle-class family in Chicago and then Harlem, Thompson Patterson first encountered black radical politics on hearing Du Bois speak at the University of California, Berkeley. After leaving her teaching position at small historically black college in Virginia, she moved back to Harlem, where she met Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and other figures in the Harlem Renaissance.

Like many African American radicals in the 1930s, Thompson Patterson turned to the Communist Party as the party placed the struggle for African American self-determination at the center of its theory of American capitalism. Claiming African Americans are an “oppressed nation” not only appealed to former black nationalists; in more practical terms, it dignified the struggle against racism as equivalent to, or even more important than, the struggle against class exploitation.

Thompson Patterson organized support for the Scottsboro trial, was arrested in an early demonstration against segregation organized by the Communist Party in the 1930s, returned to New York to for fight for the Costigan–Wagner anti-lynching bill, and wrote about the “Bronx slave markets” in which mostly African American women were hired for domestic day labor. This prompted Thompson Patterson to be the first to theorize the “triple oppression” of black women, declaring that black women are oppressed by race, gender, and class in complex ways simultaneously. “Intersectionality before intersectionality” as the editors of the collection write — its difference lay in her observation that capitalism was the structure that bound all three. This observation opened the door for solidarities while not erasing difference or specificity and became, one could say, the logic behind the IWO’s structure and organizing philosophy.

Thompson Patterson also convinced her longtime friend Langston Hughes to get involved with the IWO, inviting him to direct the Harlem-based “Suitcase Theater,” housed and sponsored out of its 124th Street offices. As part of the popular theater company, Hughes staged a half-dozen plays, including many of his own, one of which, Em-Fuhrer Jones, became a major film starring Paul Robeson. Like Hughes, Robeson was involved with the cultural life of the IWO, singing before integrated audiences at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca (which may have been perhaps the only fully integrated summer camp in the United States at this time) and even singing in Yiddish at the JPFO’s Camp Nitgedaiget (Yiddish for “No Worries”). As Felicia Bevel puts it in her essay, to the multiethnic IWO, Robeson “was their hero,” and he would sing folk songs dedicated to the many nationalities represented by the order, bringing the message of multiethnic socialism with him wherever he performed. Indeed, one of the IWO’s final public acts of protest was to organize self-defense squads at Robeson’s concert in Peekskill, New York, which was assaulted by racist, right-wing vigilantes two nights in a row. “No Jim Crow in the IWO” was the slogan the group lived and, ultimately, died by.

Perhaps the most heroic and effective act of the IWO was to help organize money, support, and especially volunteers for the fight against fascism as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade/International Brigades (ALB/IB). Over one-third of the American volunteers in Spain were Jewish, many if nearly all of whom were recruited from the JPFO. For the Jewish members of the IB, such a journey was not only the political culmination of their affiliation with the communist movement. They expressed it in deeply cultural terms as well: that the “over-civilized barbarians of Spain — far ahead of Hitler . . . drove the Jews from country. . . .  They little thought . . . Jews would return . . . to help defend Spain from an outburst of the old terror.” More than a fight against antisemitism, the ALB represented the highest ideals of multiculturalism: it was quite literally the first integrated army fielded by Americans. Many of the African American volunteers were also IWO members and expressed not only their desire to fight fascism but also to pay back Italy for its invasion and colonization of the free African state, the kingdom of Ethiopia.

It was, as one ALB veteran put it, a “multi-racial army to defeat Hitler’s racial theories.” And as Langston Hughes said on an IWO-sponsored trip to Spain, the ALB was fighting America’s racial theories as well: fascists are “Jim Crow people,” as Hughes told an audience of ALB soldiers, and “here we can shoot ‘em down.”

The downfall of the IWO was swift and relentless. At the end of the 1940s, IWO and JPFO members “were confident their organization was part of the social democratic coalition working to make Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms a reality,” as historian Robert Zecker phrases it. While the Four Freedoms — free speech, religious freedom, freedom from want, and freedom from fear — were only a “foretaste” of a socialist America, to quote historian Michael Denning, even the most radical IWO members believed they were swimming with the current of an increasingly more democratic, less racist, more egalitarian United States.

Yet by the beginning of the 1950s, hundreds of IWO leaders had been deported under the McCarran–Walter (“anti-subversion”) Act, dozens had been jailed under the Smith Act, and many were facing eviction under new “anti-Red” ordinances that prevented members of radical organizations from renting apartments or even living within city limits. Paul Robeson was nearly lynched in Peekskill, Camp Wo-Chi-Ca was raided and set on fire before shutting down, and most dramatically, one IWO member attempted to stab himself to death in the streets in Erie in protest of the repression.

The IWO was finally brought down through bureaucratic means. Using a broad interpretation of insurance law, the IWO and the JPFO were legally disbanded and bankrupted by the state in 1954, their assets and offices seized. While the editors of the collection are keen to point out how many IWO members went on work in the civil rights movement, participated in the Freedom Rides, educated new generations of activists, and helped organize anti–Vietnam War protests, the collection offers little meditation on the meaning of the IWO’s loss.

Few other organizations of its size and cultural influence have been shut down by fiat of the state, with its members deported and leaders arrested and hauled before federal tribunal, the House Un-American Activities Committee. Not even the Communist Party was formally disbanded in such a way. While Paul Mishler is correct — the communist movement writ large and the IWO in particular were instrumental in constructing both theories and practices for a radical multiculturalism — one can only speculate what liberal multiculturalism, to say nothing of Jewish identity, might look like if the IWO and JPFO were still a robust presence.

Speaking to the long arm of neo-McCarthyism, it is also curious that the edited volume has little to say about Zionism or Palestine, especially considering the large role splits over Zionism played in the JPFO’s breakup with the Workers Circle. Beyond one mention of this split in an essay about the career of JPFO artist William Gropper, the only other mention of Palestine in the collection is a brief aside by ALB soldiers who remarked on the racism of troops from the Yishuv, the Jewish-only settlements in Palestine. While part of the explanation for the absence in the collection may be the complexities of the IWO’s and JPFO’s adherence to the zig-zags of the Soviet line on Palestine — rejecting its earlier anti-Zionism in 1947 only to embrace it again it in the early 1950s — the long presence of communist-aligned anti-Zionism not only left its mark but reemerged as a cultural resource in the 1960s. During those heady years, the student New Left began asking similar questions about Zionist colonialism and the fate of Palestinians.

While the edited collection remains one of the more important works on the rise and fall of the multiracial “Old Left” in recent years, this absence nonetheless reproduces the culture of silence around Palestine that has had catastrophic consequences both at home and abroad. Given the IWO’s purpose, the consideration of multiple and intersecting forms of oppression within a global socialist framework, addressing the dispossession of Palestine and complicated American Jewish left engagement with this question would seem to be more than necessary as an addition to this project.

Still, given the low expectations surrounding a World Cup doubling as a testament to Trump’s friendship with FIFA chief Gianni Infantino, many ended up pleasantly surprised. On the field, where crooked administrators usually manage to mess up least, it was generally a success. Spain played their usual suffocatingly beautiful football, and Lionel Messi reminded us how fortunate we are to witness his work. Germany found exciting new ways to prove they’re no longer a football power — and this time no one will try to blame wokeness for their failure.

Though at times cumbersome and guilty of forcing us to do more math, the expanded forty-eight-team format worked moderately well — even if it was largely a play to sell more tickets, and for FIFA to shore up support in Asia and Africa. Tournament debutants Uzbekistan, Jordan, and Curaçao brought fresh flair, while fellow newcomer Cape Verde put in remarkable performances.

Stadiums were packed, including for less-marketable group stage matches. Ticket demand exceeded expectations, as fans weren’t dissuaded even by eye-watering prices. The tournament at times resembled a six-week display of unstoppable consumerist purchasing power (and/or credit card debt) than a soccer tournament. It also showcased a deep-rooted cultural love for being blatantly ripped off. Where else would anyone cheerily admit to paying $4,000 for a group stage match, let alone argue it was worth it?

Another reason stadiums were full was simply the diversity of the US population. Massive, proud diasporas ensured no side went unsupported. This at least briefly shifted Trump’s tournament into what resembled a feel-good liberal dream. Few other countries are diverse enough to pull this off at such a scale, and the World Cup often provided an opportunity to celebrate immigrant life. This, too, allowed an alternative to Trumpism’s narrow expression of American identity.

The United States also seemed to impress the international fans that did make it across. There were the Scottish fans charmingly teaching Boston how to drink. Many individual European fans went viral when they gawked at the size of grocery aisles and fast-food portions. (Accounts like Freddy’s easily stirred enthusiasm among Americans of all political stripes, eager for positivity). But overall, many visitors found the United States and its people much more charming than expectations set by Trump-centric international reporting. The $5 billion air-conditioned football stadiums also looked unlike anything most fans have ever seen — but that’s also because most of the world elects to subsidize youth sports and not billionaire-owned sports arenas.

Thankfully, the legitimate pre-tournament fears of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) using games as an easy opportunity to round up immigrants didn’t materialize. Though American policing had little direct impact on the World Cup, it’s a sign of ICE’s brutality that it could murder multiple people even during the tournament and still be seen as on its best behavior. For much of the World Cup, it looked like FIFA and Trump had managed to pull off a public relations coup, overcoming expectations and encouraging positive vibes.

That goodwill could only last as long as Trump’s inauspicious silence around the tournament. However, Trump being Trump, he was bound to make things about himself at some point.

The president’s direct intervention to pressure FIFA into overturning US men’s team striker Folarin Balogun’s red card ban prior to the knockout match against Belgium was an egregious overreach. That Trump’s addled brain thought the best way to handle an obvious case of on-field corruption was to brag about it fits him to a T. Infantino’s FIFA bowing to political pressure is nothing new, but doing it to directly tip the scales on the field is also a new low, which was only served karmic justice by the United States flaming out stupendously against Belgium despite being handed the advantage.

Even former FIFA President Sepp Blatter joined in on the criticism of Infantino. He surely has an axe to grind — Infantino took the top job in 2016 after Blatter had been forced out over a corruption scandal. Given Blatter’s record, it’s hardly a good sign if he is criticizing your ethical judgement. Yet Infantino’s open kowtowing to despots did reach a new nadir. At least Blatter and his ilk knew to be somewhat subtle about their corruption — Infantino has been infected by the Trumpist proclivity to flaunt misdeeds as openly as possible.

Balogun was the most discussed but not likely the most egregious case of Trump’s antics actually affecting the football. In a ghastly affront to the fraternal spirit of international sport, a host nation raining bombs on fellow participant Iran throughout this World Cup wasn’t just unprecedented, it also had sporting ramifications.

Because of the war, the Iranian league, where most of its national team play, was suspended for months leading into the tournament. Shortly before things kicked off, Iran was forced to move its team base from the United States to Mexico — with the team only provided short-term visas around each match, forcing them to immediately return to Tijuana, and with some staff unable to actually enter the United States for matches at all.

Despite the tired Iranian players’ obvious sporting disadvantage — and the sheer moral depravity of the United States imposing such rules — the World Cup went on as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

And while the vibrant celebration of American immigrant life was often genuinely moving, the World Cup often relied on diasporas to fill stadiums because getting into the country was next to impossible for others. The United States’ border regime did the dirty work so that ICE raids never had to materialize during the tournament. Iran, Haiti, Ivory Coast, and Senegal all had at least partial travel bans to the United States despite playing.

Many of the worst elements of this World Cup — the open corruption, the cynical cash grabs, and the insistence on tinkering with the world’s most beloved sport — are only likely to be further entrenched.

If fans in other countries aren’t as comfortable as Americans in shelling out dizzying sums of cash for tickets, perhaps they’d better get used to it. Even if pricing drops in the future, it’s unlikely to resemble pre-2026 levels. The overwhelming US-style financialization of this World Cup, most clearly manifested in the “dynamic pricing” system that made buying tickets reminiscent of prediction markets and the poisonous spread of sports gambling, will likely accompany future FIFA competitions. The mandatory “hydration breaks” — a change to the format of the sport rammed through by FIFA to allow more advertising even when not called for by temperature — are also unlikely to disappear.

FIFA made such changes without US fans needing to pressure them to do so. The same is true of the nearly half-hour Super Bowl–style halftime show planned for the final (the break is usually only fifteen minutes). Literally no one is asking for Justin Bieber and BTS to interrupt the world’s most important sporting contest, but it’s happening anyway. Whether people like it or not, FIFA will stonily maintain that it was a roaring success.

Outside of international competitions, football has long been increasingly dominated by billionaires and speculative private equity. The World Cup shifts will only serve to further entrench capital’s grip on the global game, and these reforms being tested on the biggest stage will make them easier to bring to other competitions.

Corporate greed infecting football is not new — the game’s working-class roots have been brutally undermined over decades. But it now threatens to render football unrecognizable. And because FIFA, the sport’s most important institution, is an irredeemable racket, the cronyism intensified under a Trump-tinged World Cup will likely prevent anyone from stopping this.

Perhaps Infantino has gone too far, and (unlike the last two times) he looks likely to have actual opposition in next year’s FIFA presidential election. Yet he still seems largely untouchable. He’s responded to fiery criticism from Europe by floating a further expansion of the World Cup, this time from forty-eight to sixty-four nations, in an unsubtle attempt to secure votes from Asian, African, and Central American federations that would benefit from a lower entry threshold.

With the 2030 World Cup a sprawling monster taking place over three continents, and the 2034 edition slotted for Saudi Arabia, there is plenty of potential for further graft and sportswashing regardless of who is at FIFA’s helm.

And even with the World Cup moving across the world, the self-absorbed parochialism of the United States — a host country filled with pundits who boast of not understanding the sport’s culture — will be exported. An expanded number of participant countries is ostensibly widening the tent, yet FIFA’s obsession with revenue at all costs will instead shrink the worldwide footprint of fans who can really attend.

The multi-continent affair in 2030 will be even more logistically difficult, and possibly even more expensive for fans, than the current one. And like Qatar in 2022, Saudi Arabia 2034 will likely prove an unwelcoming and unappealing destination for female and queer fans. Football’s long-term degradation makes all of this feel like a logical follow-up to 2026.

But if 2026 teaches us anything, it should be that it doesn’t have to be this way. Despite it all, six weeks of football in North America brought joy to the world. It — if not always — demonstrated that even in the most hostile of conditions, football can bring people together and help reconstitute conceptions of community and belonging. It’s this power that shows us the sport must be protected, not used against us.

Victories in affordability and community-building, like those in Zohran Mamdani’s New York, prove football’s fetid institutions can indeed be challenged. We just have to do it before there’s nothing to win back.

The future of the republic depended not only on its right-wing enemies but also on the labor movement. In the case of the Socialist Party (PSOE), the “revolutionary” left faction, led by Francisco Largo Caballero, refused to repeat the experience of the Republican-Socialist government of 1931–33 and insisted that the Socialists (PSOE) should not participate in the new government, leaving it to the Republicans to “complete the bourgeois revolution.” This simplistic view of Marxism meant that Largo Caballero and his followers had no strategy for seizing power; instead, they were to wait passively for the Republicans to pave the way for a socialist government.

In contrast, the more social democratic faction led by Indalecio Prieto, supported by the Communist Party (PCE), argued for the need to return to a coalition government to complete the Republican reformist program. It was this latter position that would be adopted by the Socialist movement in the midst of the Civil War. The Left, having lost part of its base to Stalinism, particularly the Socialist Youth (FJS), which would merge with the Young Communists to form the JSU (Juventud Socialista Unificada), was overtaken by events and ultimately accepted the same position as its social democratic rivals.

On the eve of the civil war, the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) still wielded considerable influence within the most significant labor movement in the Spanish state, in Catalonia, and maintained a very strong presence in Andalusia, Aragon, and Valencia. Furthermore, in Asturias and Madrid, where the Socialists had historically been the dominant force among organized workers, the CNT enjoyed sizable minority support.

Inside the CNT, activists and union leaders were divided between anarcho-syndicalists and various radical anarchist factions, the most important of which was the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI). One thing all these factions had in common was their apoliticism. However, weakened by repression and ideologically divided, the CNT would adopt a less intransigent stance in its relations with the Left during the first months of 1936, a move that would prove to be a prelude to its direct participation in government during the civil war.

During the February 1936 elections, to secure the release of its thousands of imprisoned members, the CNT did not organize a campaign of abstention, as it had done in 1933, and this de facto call to vote would contribute to the Popular Front’s victory. In May 1936, the CNT held its fourth congress in Zaragoza. It would prove to be a milestone in the union’s history.

Faced with the bloody repression of the Asturian commune in October 1934, delegates called for a revolutionary alliance with the Socialist Unión General de los Trabajadores (UGT) as a first step toward social revolution. But the congress also revealed the limitations of the CNT’s turn away from its apolitical sectarianism. While there was a long and abstract debate on the nature of libertarian communism, there was no discussion of the political situation, especially the threat of a military coup.

The newly formed Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) also defended workers’ unity but through the reorganization of the Workers’ Alliances, which had played a key role in the revolutionary movement of 1934. The POUM contrasted the Workers’ Alliance, seen as essential for smashing capitalism, with the Popular Front, an electoral alliance subordinated to petty-bourgeois republicanism.

At the same time, it identified the absence of a mass revolutionary party as having been central to the defeat of the revolutionary movement in 1934. The POUM hoped to win over the most radical sectors of the Socialists, especially the youth. The FJS’s falling under Stalinist influence in the spring of 1936 would deal a fatal blow to those hopes.

The revolution that broke out in response to the military uprising in July 1936 marked the end of the European revolutionary cycle that had begun with the Bolshevik victory in 1917. In a matter of days, as the leader of the POUM, Andreu Nin, would insist in September 1936, the working class, arms in hand, had resolved the “fundamental problems” of the democratic revolution that the “liberal bourgeoisie” had failed to resolve in five years. Grossly unequal land ownership had been swept aside with collectivization or redistribution; the power of the church and the army had been destroyed, and Catalonia had ceased to be subordinated to a centralist state. But the working class, Nin clamed, was not fighting for a democratic republic but for socialism.

The cornerstone of this revolution was a unique experiment in workers’ self-management with the collectivization of industry and land. In many cases, the takeover of companies or land was a spontaneous process and was only subsequently supported by the workers’ organizations. Urban collectivization went furthest in Catalonia, where half of Spain’s industry at the time was concentrated. In the Valencia region, collectivization was also widespread, especially in agriculture.

The best-known agricultural collectives were those organized by anarchists in eastern Aragon. And although the presence of CNT militias in the area would influence their development, the initiative was often local, especially in towns where libertarian communism had been briefly established during the anarchist uprising of December 1933. Agrarian collectivization was also present in Andalusia and New Castile. Elsewhere with the notable exception of the Basque Country, the working class played a decisive role in the economy through different forms of workers’ control and the expropriation of workplaces and farms abandoned by supporters of the rebels.

The revolution also meant the widespread occupation of urban space, with buildings being seized and converted into schools, hospitals, popular restaurants, and the headquarters for antifascist organizations. As Mary Nash has argued, the revolution and the war represented for many women “a breakdown in the traditional confinement of women to the home and gave them public visibility.” They entered political life for the first time, joining antifascist women’s organizations en masse, working in factories, and, in a minority of cases, participating in the armed struggle.

At the heart of the resistance to the military rebels were the workers’ organizations, and not only in the areas where the social revolution was strongest. Throughout what would become the Republican zone, unions and workers’ parties quickly organized militias to fight the rebels. By the summer of 1936, there were already some 150,000 militiamen (and a minority of women) fighting on various fronts.

Faced with the military superiority of the rebels, who were heavily supplied by the fascist powers, the main parties of the Popular Front (Republicans, Socialists, and Communists) argued that it was necessary to present the war as a defense of bourgeois democracy in order to maintain the support of the middle classes and to secure military aid from the Western democracies. This was a position that meant suppressing, or at least concealing, the social revolution underway in much of the Republican zone.

Both in historiography and at the time, the left Republican parties have been seen as representing the “middle classes” or at least a sector of them. The fact that these parties played a central role in the republican governments of 1931 and 1936 has reinforced the idea of their political importance. However, their social and electoral base was limited. Outside of Catalonia, the only place where left republicanism enjoyed massive support (through Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya), it had a narrow social base, consisting mainly of the urban petty bourgeoisie and very specific sectors such as schoolteachers.

The electoral results of the Left Republicans clearly illustrate the limitations of their support. In 1931, excluding Catalonia, 111 Left Republican deputies were elected in coalition with the PSOE and the moderate republican Radical Party, and in 1936, 129 were elected as part of the Popular Front. In 1933, without being part of a national coalition, the Left Republicans won only fourteen seats (compared to twenty-one in Catalonia), nine of them thanks to local agreements with the Radicals and five due to local support from the PSOE.

At an international level, the republic’s seemingly natural allies, the liberal democracies, with the notable exception of Mexico, not only abandoned the legitimate government by refusing to send it the weapons necessary for its defense but also promoted the farce of the “nonintervention” policy, which would result in the almost total isolation of loyalist Spain (as the republic was known). The participation of Germany and Italy in the nonintervention committee would be the clearest example of the cynicism of this infamous agreement.

Neither France nor Great Britain had any interest in supporting an apparently weak government in a context of intense political and social radicalization. The French Popular Front government, under pressure from the ruling classes, the army, and British imperialism, quickly backed down from sending arms to the republic. The British government viewed the Left Republican leader, Manuel Azaña, the first Popular Front prime minister, as the “Kerensky of Spain.” When the Civil War began, it believed that “Bolshevism” was on the verge of seizing power. Statements abounded among its ministers about how Francisco Franco was the best option for protecting British imperialist and capitalist interests.

With the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and Joseph Stalin’s rise to power, the communist parties had become completely subordinate to Moscow’s political needs. The Comintern’s shift toward the Popular Front policy was driven, above all, by the need to contain the threat that Nazi Germany posed to the very survival of the USSR. This threat made it urgent to forge, at the international level, an alliance with the democracies, especially France, against the fascist powers. The Popular Front was thus the national expression of Soviet foreign policy, and the uniform adoption of this new orientation by the communist parties at that time was not based on any analysis of the specific sociopolitical situation in each country.

However, in contrast to the disastrous previous line that had identified the socialist parties as “social fascists” and the greatest danger to the working class, the Popular Front responded to the need to confront the threat from the far right and would result in a surge in communist influence in many countries, including Spain. During the Civil War, the PCE would become the most powerful political party in the Republican zone. By mid-1937, it had around 300,000 members, ten times more than before July 1936, while its Catalan equivalent, the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC), more than 50,000, and the JSU about 250,000.

There were several reasons for this growth in influence. The staunch defense of the Popular Front by the Communists attracted to the party newly politicized people opposed to the military uprising and fascism, including petty-bourgeois sectors frightened by the “excesses” of the revolution and the attacks on private property. By defending military centralization and iron discipline, the Communists also won the support of many professional military officers who had remained loyal to the republic. But above all, the USSR’s military support for the republic contributed to the rise in the PCE’s prestige.

A factor often overlooked in explaining the growth of the Communists’ influence in Spain was the persistence of their image as “the party of the Russian Revolution” and their self-identification as revolutionaries. The fact that the PCE, despite its commitment to defending republican democracy, spoke of the need for a “new kind of democracy,” a “people’s revolution,” and a “national revolutionary war” reflected the difficulties the party had in the context of the political and social realities in the Republican zone.

The extensive use of Soviet imagery and revolutionary methods to mobilize the population of Madrid in November 1936 was another example of the Communists’ seemingly ambiguous relationship with bourgeois democracy. From there, it was not difficult to conclude that the Popular Front was a necessary tactical interlude, a preliminary phase leading up to the establishment of socialism. Such ambiguities help explain the appeal of Stalinism to a significant sector of the FJS.

Ultimately, only the PCE (in Catalonia, the PSUC), with its discipline and “Leninist” structure, and not the liberal and reformist factions, was capable of both putting an end to the social revolution underway in the Republican zone and leading politically the Popular Front’s war effort.

After the defeat of the military uprising in nearly two-thirds of Spain, power was exercised by countless local antifascist committees, mostly made up of the Popular Front parties, the UGT, and the CNT. In Catalonia, the committees reflected the influence of the revolution and were often dominated by the anarchists and the POUM. Few of the committees were elected by the local population but tended to be made up of delegates nominated by the different antifascist organizations.

To overcome the lack of coordination and the fragmentation of power during the first weeks in the Republican zone, various types of bodies were organized at the regional and provincial levels, almost all of which were supported by the local Popular Front, along with the CNT. Their autonomy and radicalism varied from place to place. The most important of these was the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMA) in Catalonia, formed on July 21.

Despite having a Popular Front majority, the CCMA’s decisions reflected the strength of the revolution. In addition to military organization, the Catalan committee took the first steps to control the economy, organizing food distribution, freezing the bank accounts of those who had supported the uprising, and implementing measures to help workplaces already in workers’ hands to continue paying wages.

In much of the rest of the Republican zone, committees were formed that, like the CCMA, effectively held power during the first weeks of the war. The political orientation of most of these committees did not always reflect the politics of the Popular Front, despite the fact that its supporters usually made up most of the delegates. For example, in Aragon, Cartagena, Gijón, Málaga, and Valencia the committees, dominated by the unions, acted in an openly revolutionary fashion.

But with the fragmentation of power, the revolution could not fully triumph. Faced with this reality, the future of the revolution depended on the CNT, whose power appeared unassailable in the first weeks of the Civil War and soon would double its membership to reach some 1,500,000. But the anarchists rejected on principle the seizure of power.

The revolution existed for them in the sense that the working class controlled the streets, the factories, and the land. “Power” would be exercised below in local communes or the workplace. But the workers’ organizations, for example, did not control communications, foreign trade, or the banking system. Above all, with the formation of the People’s Army of the Republic in the fall of 1936, they lost control of the key element of the war and the revolution: the armed forces.

The dilemma the anarchists faced with the vacuum left by the near collapse of the republican state would soon become apparent. At a hastily called meeting of Catalan CNT delegates in Barcelona on July 21, Juan García Oliver, one of the most influential leaders of radical anarchism, argued that the CNT faced two alternatives: “going all out,” which would mean establishing “an anarchist dictatorship,” or collaborating with the other antifascist forces. Since “a dictatorship” was anathema to the anarchists, and given the significant presence of other forces (especially the Socialists), particularly outside of Catalonia, they opted for “collaboration.”

The anarchist leaders would quickly find themselves trapped in the contradiction between their defense of the revolution and their complicity with the bourgeois state, or what was left of it. The dichotomy was not between “dictatorship” and “collaboration” but between workers’ unity, extending beyond the ranks of the anarchists, with the aim of seizing power, or subordination to the Popular Front, which would sooner or later spell the end of the revolution.

Opposed to creating another state, the anarchists ended up collaborating with the existing state or, to be more precise, with the reconstruction of the republican state. In early November 1936, as the military situation grew increasingly critical, in an unprecedented move, four anarchists became ministers in the Republican government.

The counterrevolutionary process within the Republican zone would reach its peak with the street fighting in early May 1937. The formation a week later of a government headed by the moderate socialist Juan Negrín, without the participation of the anarchists, represented the definitive consolidation of the bourgeois state.

It also led to the suppression of the POUM, victim of a fierce campaign of slander by the Stalinists. The last bastion of the revolution, the anarchist-dominated Council of Aragon, was dissolved in August. In February 1938, the CNT, now fully committed to collaborating with the republican state, returned to the government.

Was there an alternative to the Popular Front’s approach of waging a war in defense of democracy at the expense of social revolution? The Republican government’s military strategy rejected the use of unorthodox or revolutionary tactics, due in part to its need to maintain control of the political situation within its territory, as well as to present itself to the world as a liberal government. However, given the enemy’s significant material advantage, adherence to an orthodox military strategy had little chance of success.

The idea that the Popular Front, and the suppression of the revolution, was purely due to the republic’s military needs is a fallacy. The Popular Front’s policies, especially its subordination to imperialist interests, had military consequences. For example, the Spanish fleet, which was under the control of the sailors, was withdrawn from the Strait of Gibraltar from the very beginning due to pressure from the British government, thus giving the rebels free rein to transport thousands of troops from North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula. Another case in point is the refusal, out of concern for not harming French interests, to declare Morocco’s independence and support a nationalist uprising behind the fascist lines.

An alternative strategy would have included the mass mobilization of the population (as was the case during the siege of Madrid in November 1936), a defensive, positional war, and the launching of more limited raids combined with guerrilla warfare, thereby avoiding massive clashes between two armies with markedly unequal capabilities. One can only speculate, of course, whether a strategy of revolutionary war could have succeeded, although the defense of Madrid is illustrative in this regard.

Another problem facing the revolution was an unfavorable international situation, in which both the communist and social democratic parties wielded great influence. It is impossible to know what impact the existence of a revolutionary power in Spain would have had on the labor movement beyond its borders. The precedent of 1917 raises the possibility that it might have served as a catalyst and, as a result, led other political currents to exert greater influence on the class struggle.

In the historiography of the Civil War, the division among the antifascist forces is often presented as a split between those who wanted to prioritize the war (Communists, Republicans, and Socialists) and the CNT and the POUM, who placed the interests of the revolution above those of the war: a choice between war or revolution. This was never the case. Both the CNT and the POUM defended the need to wage war and carry out the revolution simultaneously — to wage a revolutionary war.

The two were intrinsically linked. The POUM had a clear military policy that called for the creation of a revolutionary army, modeled on the Soviet Red Army during the Russian Civil War. But such an army could not be built without a revolutionary government based on democracy from below, on committees of workers, peasants, and militia members.

The POUM maintained that, to consolidate the revolution, at least in Catalonia, the working class had to seize power. But without the CNT, such a goal was impossible. Convincing the CNT, or at least part of it, of this point very quickly became the POUM’s primary political concern. However, as we have seen, it had to overcome the conviction held by the anarchists that any form of “power” or revolutionary state would inevitably lead to dictatorship.

Ultimately, what was sorely lacking in the Spanish Revolution was a revolutionary organization with the strength necessary to have led the seizure of power. There were several obstacles preventing the POUM, the “only party of the revolution,” according to Andreu Nin, from becoming such an organization. Its lack of a base outside Catalonia and its short history — it had been formed just a year earlier — were obstacles that were difficult to overcome. Without national political leadership, the revolution was doomed to defeat.

Meanwhile in Downtown Philadelphia, another World Cup host city, two hundred workers at the Sheraton and Warwick hotels won contracts in June that will raise wages to $30 an hour by 2028.

UNITE HERE Local 274 also won pension increases and a decrease in daily quotas for room attendants.

At the Sheraton, workers went on strike for nine days; at the Warwick, they got as far as voting to authorize a strike. Adding pressure on the hotels to settle were two more big tourist events: the country’s 250th anniversary celebration and the Major League Baseball All-Star game.

The Sheraton strike drew support from other unions and elected officials. IATSE members refused to cross the picket line to set up for events inside. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 33, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, and the Association of the Flight Attendants brought food to rallies.

Local 274 campaigned for new standard-raising contracts at eight downtown hotels this year; seven of these have now settled contracts, which are aligned to expire in 2028.

“Thirty dollars an hour will be a game changer for me,” said Shafeek Anderson, who has worked seven years at the Sheraton. “It would mean I could actually start saving for the future.”

In Seattle, hotel workers at the Hilton Embassy Suites have been on strike since June 18.

“Some people left their job in the middle of their shift at 6 in the morning and joined us,” said Hayden Eyerly, a front desk agent. “It was electric, and it’s been electric ever since.”

They’re demanding higher wages, improvements to their health plan, and the right to call out without discipline if immigration agents are in the building.

Allowing workers to stay home if ICE were on the premises would “just show a little bit of humanity, if Hilton was to do that,” Eyerly said. “We’re just trying to preemptively prepare for anything that could happen here in Seattle like we’ve seen in other parts of the country.”

During the strike, Seattle has hosted five World Cup games at Lumen Field stadium, which sits just across from the hotel. “We’ve had fans get on the picket line and start doing chants,” Eyerly said. “We’ve had some bring drums.”

Teamsters who pick up garbage at the hotel have refused to cross the picket line. Mayor Katie Wilson relocated an event that had been previously scheduled at the hotel.

The World Cup games at the Seattle stadium have now concluded, but members are holding the line. “Every day it’s frustrating, but it only makes us more resolved to see this through,” Jus Adsuara, a public areas attendant at the hotel, told KING 5 News.

“The people out here fighting alongside me continue to inspire me daily,” Eyerly said. “Even when I’m having a hard time chanting because my vocal chords are shredded, I’m finding the energy to continue because of them.”

A few miles away, workers also struck at the James Beard Award–nominated oyster restaurant The Walrus and the Carpenter.

Their independent union, United Creatures of the Sea, formed last year after the restaurant switched from tips to a service charge — a big pay cut. “I think I stayed up all night reading up about the format for authorization cards,” said former server Ford Nickel, now the union’s secretary treasurer.

After months of negotiations, workers voted unanimously to walk out on an unfair labor practice strike. “No one had participated in a strike before, and no one really had an idea of what this is supposed to look like,” Nickel said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if people are gonna do chants; maybe they’re gonna think it’s hokey.’ Nope! Everyone was on board.”

A spirit of solidarity buoyed the strikers. They visited the hotel picket lines; the hotel strikers visited theirs. Other restaurant workers brought food and water.

Nickel estimated that 80 percent of would-be customers chose not to patronize the restaurant after seeing the picket. “There were people that we’ve seen for the past four to six years,” he said. “They were like, ‘Oh, you did it! Ok, we’ll see you when you open again, when you have a contract.”

After eight days on strike, the United Creatures of the Sea returned to work with a reduced service fee of 6 percent and a return to the tipping model.

Emerging from the fogs of politics and war, each continuing the other by different means, a historic global reset is now underway. On the surface, the world today is caught up directly or indirectly in the US-Israeli war on Iran, the Russia-Ukraine-NATO war, and their effects. Below the surface, as the reset’s contours become visible, they can help us to better grasp our own history and thereby better shape where we go from here.

Karl Marx’s Hegelian lens enabled him to see that how Britain subordinated India, North America, and the rest of its empire also provoked their modern development in ways that eventually undermined that empire. For example, the wars of independence waged by one colony created first the United States and then the Monroe Doctrine. Both diminished the British Empire and its aspirations. Yet the expanding United States also provided Britain with the slave-produced cotton that enabled the textile industry to underpin the British Empire’s nineteenth-century growth and power, with the United States also supplying Britain with its own markets and profitable investments.

As both Europe and Japan scrambled to expand and exploit their respective empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it culminated in two world wars that destroyed them both. A partial exception was the United States, protected by two oceans and the limits of military technology at the time. The United States survived World War I (1914–18) with minimal damage compared to the other combatants. It did so again in World War II (1939–1945), using the required military buildup to recover from the Great Depression (1929–1939) while replacing earlier empires with its own. Many of the big contradictions driving world history since 1945 emerged from this rapid collapse of the old empires alongside the meteoric rise of the new American empire.

But America’s “informal” empire proved more productive and powerful than the “formal” empires of the past. It was united behind a single mission: to subordinate the rest of the world to serve its capitalists first and foremost. As Marx predicted, America’s rise produced a unified world economy by means of its technological innovations, especially in aviation and telecommunications. It thereby accumulated unprecedented levels of wealth.

It also defined for all the colonized people of the world a way forward. They would copy the colonizers’ technologies, diversify industrialized production, and participate profitably in world markets. Before 1945, the billions of people formally and informally colonized had been limited to the worst, most marginal positions in relation to global capitalism: suppliers of raw natural resources and cheap labor. Political independence, urgently pursued, disappointed those who imagined it would bring liberation from their colonial marginality.

Some of those billions tried to break out of their subordinate position by adapting the socialism of the Europeans. The working classes in Europe had looked forward to a world of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” as they supported the transition from feudalism to capitalism. But the result of that transition — actually existing capitalism — failed to deliver on those promises. Instead, socialism emerged as the answer. Marx proved crucial because his analysis of capitalism located the barrier to delivering on that promise inside capitalism itself, in its defining structure of the relations of production as employer and employee. Those workers who grasped what Marx taught tried to build an anti-colonialist movement that was also socialist: Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and so many others.

Their efforts, however deeply inspirational and influential on all that has happened since, proved nonetheless premature. Anti-imperialism was solidly grounded in a mass determination to end the marginality of the formerly colonized and now nominally “independent” regions. The support for socialism was less deeply rooted — present and growing but still relatively underdeveloped. What became the programmatic goal of the formerly colonized was to gain access, as quickly as possible, to the global capitalism led by the US empire after 1945.

After 1945, the US empire replaced European colonialism with an American brand of economic, political, and cultural domination. The United States grouped these now politically independent nations loosely into the United Nations, an institution that the United States controlled and funded. It subordinated them tightly in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and comparable alliances around the world. The first twenty-five years after 1945 were a period of recovery for the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe and Japan. By providing Europe with money through initiatives like the Marshall Plan, postwar Western Europe bought what it needed to recover from American firms, thereby giving America’s own capitalists a Keynesian-stimulated prosperity.

That prosperity spawned a level of uncritical celebration of all things American as components of an “exceptional” society. But that exceptionality was temporary, a historical oddity shaped by two world wars’ extremely uneven effects. Instead, the United States’ self-celebration obscured history’s forward movement as it changed the nation and the world. When the American empire finally peaked early in the twenty-first century, few seemed to realize it. Fewer still noticed the beginning of its decline.

By the 1970s, the recoveries of the major economies destroyed by global war were largely completed. And with that, the first phase of postwar US prosperity came to a halt. The United States was no longer the only major manufacturer of the West, nor was it the only nuclear power. It did remain the globally dominant capitalist power, except where its dominion was rejected — the nations led by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The US dollar had become the world’s number one currency, with the United States hosting the world’s number one consumer and capital markets. Along the way the United States had become a major world debtor. However, even as it introduced a new dollar vulnerability, it tied the rest of the world all the more closely to the dollar via the petrodollar system.

For US prosperity to continue, its employer class had to find a new way to profit in these changed global conditions. That class accomplished this by means of two major economic movements. The first was an exodus of manufacturing from the United States to China, India, Brazil, and elsewhere. China was best positioned, by the 1949 victory of its communist revolution, to welcome that exodus, which offered additional means to facilitate rapid industrialization. In effect, China offered employers outside the People’s Republic access to a massive new group of employees at far, far lower wages than anywhere else. After a few years, as the number of available employees swelled and their real wages rose, China sweetened the deal with their large and growing consumer market.

Under the control and supervision of a powerful central state and Communist Party apparatus, China constructed a two-sector economy. One half was private enterprises, owned and operated by both Chinese and foreign capitalists. The other half comprised public enterprises owned and operated by the Chinese government. In a very few decades, it very rapidly grew outputs of first consumer and then capital goods. By partnering with Walmart and other distributors, it quickly penetrated consumer markets nearly everywhere. Employers around the world could slow wage increases, since workers could now stretch their paychecks by accessing the cheap goods flowing from China.

The second major development enabling US prosperity after the 1970s was the so-called petrodollar system. Saudi Arabia, then the world’s major oil producer, and the United States both agreed to require all global oil sales to be priced in US dollars. This meant that every country who wanted to buy oil would need to maintain growing stocks of dollars to pay for it. Countries selling that oil would then accumulate huge dollar profits. Those stocks would be held and those profits would be invested in dollar-denominated assets, especially US Treasury securities, but also US private stocks and bonds, and US real estate. Dollars sent abroad to pay for all US imports (increasingly larger than exports) thus came back to the United States via the petrodollar system, in large part as loans to the US Treasury.

This is how the US Treasury was able to pay for its many wars, large and small, without having to raise taxes, and thus avoid provoking domestic opposition. As supplies grew, and oil became ever more important as an energy source, the pool of petrodollar funds expanded and thus fueled ever more US borrowing. It was a cycle that occasioned far less alarm than it should have.

What might happen, few asked, if oil supplies stopped for reasons natural or social? How would a closing of the Strait of Hormuz affect the petrodollar system that already faced other challenges? Would reduced global oil trade block or complicate budget borrowings by the US government trying to finance its trillion-dollar debts? Might US government borrowing under those circumstances force up interest rates just when a recession made that a particularly bad idea?

These are the contradictions of capitalism today, the effects of earlier configurations coming to a head. Capitalism once confined itself, in Europe for example, to small regions within a feudal context. It eventually grew, overthrew feudalism, and accomplished a transition to a new and different organization of production. At first these were individual and then clusters of enterprises, fields and workshops where employers and employees had replaced lords and serfs. Eventually individual capitalist workplaces grew and further organized themselves as national capitalisms. National capitalisms, intrinsically expansionary, provoked colonialisms and then, finally, a global capitalism. Its movements of goods, services, loans, and investments enhanced productivities, wealth, and power.

They also generated other sets of contradictions, including those that recently shut the Strait of Hormuz, caused the United Arab Emirates to leave the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), increasingly displaced fossil-fuel based energy with solar technology, and built pipelines to reduce reliance on tankers. Then too, there is the shrinkage of political support for Donald Trump’s presidency as high oil prices serve, like AI, to worsen economic inequalities.

An economic revolution transformed European feudalism from an early small-scale, decentralized social system into a late feudalism structured around absolute monarchies and a thirst for colonies around the world. A comparable transition inside European capitalism transformed it from an early, decentralized social system into a late capitalism structured around globalizing megacorporations. The feudal and the capitalist periods, as well as the transitions among them, were characterized by some of the worst violence, genocides, and wars in the history of our species.

Today a similar whirlwind is growing in the Strait of Hormuz. Common to both feudalism and capitalism, and the transitions between and within them, was one constant: workplaces were structured antagonistically. In feudalism, serfs and lords confronted one another in constant struggle. In capitalism, employees and employers did the same. The revolt of the serfs from feudalism – around such goals as liberty, equality, and fraternity – ended up with a capitalism that instead replaced one antagonistic struggle with another. Perhaps the solution now is an altogether different kind of transition, one that breaks, finally, with all those antagonisms such as those between master and slave, lord and serf, and employer and employee.

The transition we may soon need is founded on a rejection of such antagonistic splits. Consider the possibility of a transition of workplaces — factories, offices, stores, farms, etc. — to democratically structured human relations. Suppose each person engaged in each workplace had one vote, with majorities deciding what to produce, how to produce it, and where the work activity occurred. What if democratic decisions likewise decided how to dispose of the products or, if located within market systems, the revenues from selling such products? Democratic decisions would decide on the distribution of income from the workplace.

Profit maximization in such workplaces would be only one among several goals. The contexts of local community, region, nation, and society would be welcomed to provide additional goals and measures. Workplaces organized under capitalism worked out their interdependence with their contexts to reproduce their employer-employee organization. Democratized workplaces would structure that interdependence differently, namely to reproduce their different workplace organization. The latter interdependence means that democratic decision-making could be far more socially prevalent than anything capitalism ever achieved.

Even where and when capitalism allowed democracy in the political realm based on residence, it denied it in the economic realm. Employees within capitalist workplaces had no vote on key enterprise decisions. Employers reserved those decisions to themselves exclusively. Employers’ interests governed their decisions. Where and when the employer-employee division is overcome, everyone working within a democratized enterprise helps to make a recognized contribution to running it. Every worker likewise shares an equal responsibility.

What needs to be done here and now is this other kind of transition. Democratically organized worker cooperatives are the goal. Such a transition honors the concept of democracy by adding the economic enterprise as a necessary site of its installation. To be clear, this transition would be global and apply to privately owned as well as state-owned enterprises. Capitalism built a world economy. The socialist transition proposed here can build a better one — an economy genuinely committed to delivering the liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy that capitalism promised but never achieved.

Whenever the first wave of British punk (1976–84) is discussed, one question invariably takes center stage, recurring with equal persistence among activists, scholars, and musicians alike: Was punk a political phenomenon, or did it instead embrace a carefully cultivated apolitical outlook? As Worley convincingly argues, this question is itself ultimately ill-posed. We should ask instead whether the rejection of traditional political forms and languages was not itself a form of political engagement, however implicit or unselfconscious.

From this perspective, Worley’s book moves between two complementary lines of inquiry. On the one hand, it reconstructs the relationship between punk and organized politics (a relationship that was never linear). On the other hand, it traces the emergence of do-it-yourself (DIY) practice as a genuine response to the social, economic, and political model that shaped Britain in the 1970s and ’80s.

The punk experiences reconstructed by Worley are diverse and geographically distributed; politically, they are irreducible to any single shared ideology. Yet they are bound by several common threads. Foremost of these is the one that gives the book its title: “No Future.” More than a nihilistic slogan, the phrase reflects how a generation born in the postwar era felt a lack of prospects. Yet in their simplicity, these words also unsettle the grand ideological narratives of the twentieth century (anticipating a phenomenon pointed out by Mark Fisher in his Capitalist Realism). This points to a structural incompatibility with the narratives of progress upheld by the Left, whether institutional or extra-parliamentary.

Worley rejects both claims about punk’s “apolitical” standing or ones implying ideological coherence. He instead portrays a field of tensions that reflected the complexity of the historical moment itself. Significantly, the dates he identifies as marking its beginning and the end correspond to two of the most important and controversial political campaigns of the punk movement.

At one end stands Rock Against Racism (RAR), started in 1976 in response to the racist attitudes circulating among prominent rock musicians, for instance with David Bowie’s controversial comments on fascism, or Eric Clapton’s public endorsement of anti-immigration politician Enoch Powell. Worley carefully reconstructs the relationship of the RAR with the Socialist Workers Party while remaining attentive to punk suspicions toward that alliance: indeed, anarcho-punk bands such as Crass and Poison Girls criticized the campaign for what they saw as the Left’s attempt to co-opt punk for political purposes.

At the other end lies the widespread solidarity shown by many punk bands during the miners’ strike led by the National Union of Mineworkers in 1984 against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s decision to drastically advance the shutdown of Britain’s mining industry.

Worley is equally observant regarding the darker side of the story. He does not overlook attempts by the National Front and sections of the radical right to co-opt the Oi! scene, exploiting the discontent of working-class communities while fostering sexism and racial hostility.

As for the development of new political forms, what Worley describes as the “DIY ethos” is perhaps punk’s most lasting contribution to the political culture of the late twentieth century and the thread that binds the entire book together. DIY survived the fading of the first wave of punk in the mid-1980s, influenced all its various subgenres (from anarcho-punk and Oi! to post-punk) and provided the movement with its deepest continuity. Worley reconstructs and analyzes a practice that gave rise to alternative cultural infrastructures: independent record labels, networks for the production and circulation of fanzines and catalogues that operated outside a conventional market logic and were driven by a profoundly anti-capitalist sensibility. DIY was an attempt to create autonomous spaces of organization and communication beyond both commercial institutions and traditional political structures.

Punk, I have said, also forced a crucial reflection on the mainstream appropriation of underground culture. The DIY ethos itself emerged in part as a response to that process, seeking to preserve forms of cultural autonomy in the face of the growing incorporation of subcultural aesthetics into the circuits of the market.

Yet while self-production blurred the distinction between musician, producer, distributor, and audience, it also opened up an issue that Worley perceptively identifies but ultimately leaves unresolved. This is the issue of punk musicians’ role as workers, with all the tensions this entails between creative autonomy and economic survival. It is a question that powerfully resonates today, in the age of streaming platforms, where the language of DIY has been thoroughly appropriated and monetized by platform capitalism, which now profits from forms of self-production once imagined as alternatives to the market.

The book opens by clearly defining its methodological scope: punk is to be understood not as a style or musical genre, but as a cultural process of critical reflection that cuts across conventional political categories (thus placing this book in the tradition of ethnomusicologists such as Christopher Small). The decision to organize the chapters thematically rather than chronologically — with titles such as “Punk and Politics,” “Anatomy Is Not Destiny,” “Punk as Dystopia” — reflects the conviction that a complex and collective experience such as punk cannot be adequately captured in a single narrative movement.

A particularly original contribution of No Future is its focus on gender and sexuality as central political terrains. Punk irreversibly opened up new space for subjectivities that mainstream culture had long excluded, confronting the patriarchal structures of the music industry and pushing class-based and gender-based critiques into uneasy dialogue. Worley addresses these tensions without projecting a false coherence onto the past. He highlights how punks struggled to reconcile these critiques in their everyday practice, posing urgent questions about the body and identity that the contemporary left has yet to fully resolve.

In this sense, Worley investigates body politics alongside and intertwined with picket-line politics, highlighting how punk bridged the gap between personal liberation and social protest. This perspective has been further developed by Vivien Goldman in Revenge of the She-Punks (2019), a work that reinterprets punk — including its post-first-wave developments — through the lens of gender.

To reconstruct punk history, Worley privileges printed and audio sources over retrospective memoirs. He acknowledges the documentary value of oral history but also identifies its structural limits: the relativism and subjectivism of personal testimony, which often produce individualized narratives and the haze of nostalgia that often surrounds the years 1976–77. For the author, this process has generated increasingly ahistorical memories of punk, detached from the sociopolitical contexts that gave it its meaning.

While this choice ensures a rigorous focus on the mood and language of the times, it remains controversial. Oral testimonies, collected and handled with the same philological rigor applied to any other source — and with full awareness of both their strengths and their limits — could have added a dimension that fanzines alone cannot provide. It would have been possible to write an oral history of punk that moved beyond apologetic self-narratives and situated itself within the rich British tradition of history from below.

Furthermore, the reliance on self-produced materials raises an urgent question: Who preserves the sources of punk history? Fanzines, flyers, and other ephemeral materials often remain outside institutional archival circuits (and some would argue that this is for the better). The struggle over their preservation is itself a political act, highlighting the unresolved tension between the autonomy of the subculture and the institutionalization of its memory.

Ultimately, Worley succeeds in using the history of punk to offer insightful perspective on this period of historical change. In a present that often feels like it has run out of prospects, investigating punk history challenges us to ask how politics can be reinvented, and what alternative infrastructures, networks, and relations we might still build today.

For Moroccan officials, the presence of The Odyssey crew was a propaganda coup. They have made it clear they see it as just the beginning of Dakhla’s development as a base for international film productions. This is despite the fact that the wider Western Sahara remains the site of an ongoing armed conflict between the country’s military and the Sahrawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. Last month, three Polisario fighters were killed in a Moroccan drone attack close to the 2,700 kilometer sand berm that separates Moroccan-controlled territory from the desert areas held by Polisario.

If the construction of the vast defensive berm in the 1980s was Morocco’s attempt to entrench its military control over Western Sahara, the transformation of Dakhla into a tourist destination and green energy hub in recent years aims to consolidate the occupation as an irreversible economic reality. From the Moroccan leadership’s perspective, Sahrawi independence will look increasingly unrealistic if it can develop the territory in conjunction with international investors. It is also incentivizing Moroccan settlers to move to the territory with generous subsidies and jobs.

The clearest expression of this strategy is Morocco’s Atlantic Initiative, which looks to provide landlocked countries in the Sahel region with maritime access to the Atlantic via a new €1.3 billion port facility currently under construction in Dakhla (and set to be operational by 2028). Positioning the occupied city as a key logistics hub for northwestern Africa, the project aims to further integrate Western Sahara into regional trade networks.

Tourism is also key to normalizing Moroccan control, with Dakhla in particular recast as an international destination for kitesurfing and ecotourism. On a 2022 visit, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were photographed at one of the growing number of high-end hotels on Dakhla peninsula, as well as on the sweeping Atlantic coastline that would later attract the film crew shooting The Odyssey. The couple’s holiday photo shoot offered a vision of luxury resorts and leisure in which the military occupation and indigenous Sahrawi population were erased from view.

Airline Ryanair’s announcement in 2024 that it was opening new direct routes connecting Spain with Dakhla and the Sahrawi capital El Aaiún marked a further expansion of this model of occupation tourism — even as the European Commission informed airlines that routes involving Western Sahara would not be covered by the terms of the EU-Moroccan aviation agreement. At the same time, international journalists, trade unionists, and human rights defenders have looked to break the Moroccan media blockade by boarding these low-cost flights over the last eighteen months, only to be detained at the airport or arrested when they made contact with local Sahrawi activists. Footage from last year even showed a left-wing delegation from the European Parliament being physically blocked from disembarking a Ryanair flight by Moroccan security forces.

The Odyssey’s subsidized production forms part of this same effort to establish Dakhla as an international — but firmly Moroccan — destination while limiting scrutiny of the occupation itself. Yet as news of the Dakhla shoot emerged last summer, Sahrawi filmmakers, journalists, and activists took to social media to contrast the free rein afforded to Nolan’s Hollywood production with the systematic repression they faced in trying to document the Moroccan state’s human rights violations, or simply in exercising creative freedom.

“I grew up in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and today, as a Sahrawi filmmaker from the occupied city of Dakhla, I cannot freely enter my homeland to tell my own stories”, director Brahim Chagaf posted as part of the online campaign organized by The Western Sahara International Film Festival. “That is the great contradiction behind this landscape: while a few privileged people like Nolan can turn it into a movie, others are still waiting for the day when we can simply return to it”.

Campaigner Ghalia Djimi’s message was even starker: “Mr Nolan: I am a human rights defender. Morocco disappeared me for 3 years and 7 months in a secret prison in occupied El Aaiún.”

Her experience is far from exceptional. In its latest 2024 report, human rights NGO CODESA catalogued dozens of abuses carried out by Moroccan security forces that year. These included the repeated violent suppression of peaceful protests, the harassment and arbitrary detention of activists, and the suspicious deaths in custody of three Sahrawi civilians. In November 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that the detentions of two dozen Sahrawi activists and journalists, held ever since the Gdeim Izik protest camp in 2010, were illegal. It also found that in the case of eighteen student activists detained in 2016, torture was used to extract confessions.

As The Odyssey opens at the global box office, one of the Gdeim Izik prisoners, Enaâma Asfari, is currently in the fourth week of an indefinite hunger strike. In calling for his immediate release last month, Frontline Defenders said it was “concerned about reports describing medical neglect, reprisals and other forms of ill-treatment against Sahrawi human rights defenders in prison.”

“When Christopher Nolan steps on the red carpet on his way to the premiere’s screening, he will also be stepping on International Law”, insisted María Carrión, executive director of The Western Sahara International Film Festival, last month. “We ask the public to treat this film as they would a movie made in occupied Ukraine with [Vladimir] Putin’s permits, or in the illegal settlements in Palestine with [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s blessing.”

A series of rulings from the European Union’s highest court back this claim. Over the past decade, the Court of Justice of the European Union has repeatedly found that Western Sahara is a territory with a “separate and distinct” status to Morocco and that legally its resources cannot be exploited without the consent of the Sahrawi people. Those judgments concern specific EU-Moroccan trade agreements, which the EU has tried to revive despite successive rulings from its own courts that they contravened international law. But the rulings raise broader questions about the responsibilities of international companies operating in the occupied territory, including film studios.

Given his back catalogue, Nolan’s brilliance as a writer and director is unquestionable. Yet with The Odyssey, he and Universal Pictures have set a dangerous precedent as they pioneered a new form of filmmaking for our Trumpian age: occupation cinema. A country subject to a brutal colonization and a system of effective apartheid is not a legitimate backdrop for either international tourism or a Hollywood blockbuster.

It took until 2019 for the workers who cut and harvest trees and the truckers who transport the wood to have the right to collectively bargain in Maine. Until then, the state’s loggers and wood haulers were barred from doing so by federal antitrust law, because, as mostly independent contractors, it would supposedly constitute price-fixing. It was a technicality that employees across many agricultural sectors had run headfirst into over the years, leading the Maine state legislature to carve out exemptions from antitrust law for an ever-expanding list of workers.

Having become president of Maine’s state senate the previous year, Jackson swiftly turned to make sure woods workers were made part of that list. At the close of March that year, flanked by a group of loggers risking a blacklist from the state’s large landowners, the logging companies, he introduced a bill to create that exception. Less than three months later, it became law — a victory that was the culmination of decades of struggle by Maine’s forestry workers to get a fair slice of the profits increasingly hoarded by the state’s corporate mills and landowners.

Over 1998–99, Jackson had been one of a trio of loggers in Maine’s overwhelmingly rural, long-declining Aroostook County who had led a series of work stoppages trying to win more jobs and better pay. At first aimed squarely at the Maine logging industry’s use of foreign labor, the stoppages kicked off years of agitation by loggers that would ultimately turn its sights on corporate exploitation of workers and their lack of rights to resist it.

What drove the loggers to begin with was the hiring of Canadian loggers from just across the border who could work via a “bonded labor” program that let them enter and work in the United States for a specific employer until they had completed the job they had been hired for. The program had been a sore spot for Maine loggers ever since it had been created in the 1940s because of how it undercut American loggers. “I am not anti-Canadian — most are decent, hard-working people — but the fact remains that they have our jobs and are keeping prices down,” Jackson wrote in a December 1998 op-ed.

That was two months after he and ten other loggers from the Allagash and Fort Kent areas had clogged a border crossing into Quebec with their pickup trucks, demanding an injunction on any more bonded workers and jobs for American workers, and stranding dozens of Canadian loggers and Maine truckers hauling lumber to Canadian mills in the process. When the Canadians looked to get in through an alternate path, Jackson and the other loggers expanded the blockade to two more border crossings.

“I am a father of two small children whom I love dearly, but soon I will have to return to the border with the knowledge that in doing so I will be arrested,” Jackson wrote. “I am willing to commit to this in order to get people to realize just how serious I believe this problem to be.”

Jackson had seen firsthand how work for Americans in the logging industry, virtually a way of life in remote northern Maine, had deteriorated over the decades, and the role the bonded labor program had played. First meant to let the industry dip into the Canadian workforce when there weren’t enough American workers to fill jobs, the program slowly morphed into a way for employers to undercut American workers. Since Canadian loggers didn’t need health insurance, thanks to Canada’s universal health care system, and were willing to work for lower wages because of the weaker Canadian dollar, they had a built-in advantage over US workers.

Years later, Jackson would describe to Beacon, an independent outlet in Maine, how, as a twelve-year-old boy, he had watched firsthand a landowner use the threat of bonded workers to intimidate more than a hundred loggers who were threatening to strike after he cut the prices he would pay for their wood.

“He didn’t get out and ask, ‘How do we resolve this?’ Or, ‘I know it’s a big cut.’ He just said, ‘If you don’t go back to work in the morning, I’ll replace you all with Canadians.’ That was the whole negotiation,” he recounted.

A few weeks after their first blockade, Jackson’s father told the Bangor Daily News how his truck had been sitting in his driveway for nine months because he had no work, and how he and Jackson had had to sell a $300,000 piece of machinery they couldn’t use but were still spending thousands of dollars on in monthly payments. “Come with me, and I will show you machinery owned by Canadians, and it’s in the woods working,” Jackson told the paper. The following year, he described helping several friends pack up and move because of a lack of jobs.

What Jackson and other loggers saw around them and felt in their own lives made them leery of assurances by officials and employers that bonded workers weren’t affecting Americans’ jobs, and that landowners were not breaking the law by using them, as the US and Maine departments of labor (DoLs) determined after an investigation prompted by the original blockade.

They were equally unimpressed with the meetings they won with Maine officials and, eventually, with the state’s contractors and landowners too, all together in one room for the first time over two days in February 1999. Despite a lengthy list of items the state and federal DoLs agreed to investigate, the thirteen hours of meetings ended with Jackson storming out after an official representing Maine’s largest landowner spoke for the first and only time during closing statements, when he couldn’t be questioned.

So Jackson continued to evangelize about the plight of Maine loggers, serving as a panelist on the subject at the University of Maine and giving state labor department officials a tour of the woods. A year to the day after the original weeklong blockade, frustrated with how little had been done, he helped lead a second blockade of the Quebec border, which this time saw state police sent to escort them out. “We took the only option they gave us,” Jackson said.

Deciding further action at the border was a bust, Jackson and the other loggers took their protests to the doorsteps of government officials, telling the press that “our problems are with landowners and the Department of Labor, not with the police at the border.”

“We’re here because, legally and morally, the state and federal governments should be doing something to protect us,” Jackson told people who had gathered at the state DoL in November 1999, warning that “they’re killing our town, they’re killing northern Maine.”

The official indifference to their plight seemed borne out by a series of releases by the state DoL, including a study that dropped that same month. It concluded that Canadian workers were not having a downward effect on American loggers’ wages, except for “in isolated labor markets in far northern Maine, primarily in and around the St. John Valley” — in other words, in the exact geographic area that Jackson and the other loggers lived and worked.

“Are we not considered Americans here in the St. John Valley?” one of his fellow protest leaders bitterly remarked. “Maybe the solution is to declare the St. John Valley a third country.”

But for all the focus on the bonded worker program, the loggers’ struggles went much deeper than the use of foreign workers. One factor was the industry’s shift decades earlier from treating workers as wage-earning employees to independent contractors, leaving them suddenly bereft of benefits and having to cover expenses like machine upkeep and workers’ compensation.

As a result, Maine loggers complained at a January 2000 summit, business costs had doubled while their wages had flatlined — all as the wood-buying companies still exerted minute control over virtually every part of the “independent” contractors’ work. Under those conditions, working at McDonald’s was a better deal, one contractor charged.

“There is only a shortage of American workers willing to work at the landowners’ and contractors’ offered prices,” environmentalist Mitch Lansky said later that year at a tense seven-hour meeting held by the Maine DoL about its November 1999 study, disputing employers’ claims that they had to hire Canadians because Americans simply refused to work. “If wages were high enough to make a decent living, Americans would return to the woods.”

The fact that employers were able to get away with this was a product of another shift: namely, as that same study had determined, that there was a “concentration of landownership in northernmost Maine among relatively few large landowning companies.” As a result, the study had concluded, loggers’ bargaining power was weaker, and there was a “double squeeze” on both logging contractors’ profits and loggers’ wages.

That shift had gotten markedly worse over just the year before the report came out, after the New Brunswick–based conglomerate, J. D. Irving Ltd, became the state’s largest landowner by buying up nearly a million acres of northern Maine forest land. A year later, the Professional Logging Contractors Association of Maine reported that since the purchase, the rates contractors were getting had been cut 25–30 percent.

“They’re kind of creating a situation that the Americans can’t work here because we can’t afford to,” one contractor told the Bangor Daily News, predicting that they would then turn to Canadian bonded workers, “because they’ll say that nobody around here wants to do the job anymore.” He spoke to the paper anonymously, as all the contractors did, fearing retaliation since Irving was “going to be the only game in town,” as one put it.

Another contractor later charged he had had his contract withdrawn after complaining publicly about Irving’s prices. In the years ahead, the contingent of American loggers — some of whom came from generations of lumberjacks, including one of Jackson’s fellow protest leaders — permanently leaving the industry grew and grew.

Jackson, who had regularly stressed that his protests were not “anti-Canadian,” subtly shifted the target of his ire, even as he remained critical of the bonded labor program. He increasingly took aim at what he called “the sale of most of northern Maine to corporate Canada” in his public rhetoric, and condemned Irving’s “financial slavery,” charging that “the state is in the landowners’ pockets.”

In a February 2000 op-ed for the Bangor Daily News, he praised an earlier report by the paper examining the Irving family’s domination of the Canadian province of New Brunswick just over the border, and how local officials there had “pandered” to the firm by skipping an environmental assessment to approve one of its projects.

“It would seem to be a natural presumption that Irving would have the same practices in other industries, in other countries,” Jackson wrote.

The protests and blockades had seemingly hit a wall in terms of what they could achieve, partly thanks to Maine politicians who, in Jackson’s estimation, said the right things but offered no substantive help at all. So he decided on a new course of action: to join them.

“I thought maybe if I come down here and change people’s minds, we’d have a better chance,” Jackson later said.

Running for office later that year as a Republican, he criticized Irving and pointed to the DoL study’s findings that landowners’ profits had risen 169 percent over the previous quarter-century, while total wages had dropped 20 percent.

It took Jackson’s second tilt in 2002 to win the seat for Maine’s 151st District, one of the state’s largest and most remote. He had quit his job with a land developer to plunge full-time into campaigning, reportedly visiting 98 percent of the homes in the district, and declaring that he would “remind people in Augusta that we do exist up here, that we have been unfairly treated” by politicians if he won.

Jackson had already played a direct but small role in the push for legislative solutions to the crisis facing loggers. The blockades and protests had spurred the state legislature to create a roundtable committee to draw up recommendations for lawmakers, whose roughly dozen members Jackson had been a part of. Once elected, he could continue the fight from within the halls of the state capitol.

Jackson, now an independent, submitted five bills identical to the roundtable’s recommendations on wages and conditions in the forestry industry to be considered by the next legislature. Members of the state legislature’s labor committee told the press they knew of no other bills that had been submitted on the matter. That December, Jackson arranged a meeting with dozens of loggers to discuss with them his legislative push.

They would all, in the end, coalesce around one demand in particular, and the bill that would make it law: LD 1318, which aimed to extend collective bargaining rights to loggers and wood haulers, and create an arbitration board to settle disputes. “Although this stems from legislation proposed by us, this was actually born after the blockade of roads we did on the border,” Jackson told the press.

What followed for the next year was what we would now call an inside-outside strategy. In Augusta, dozens of loggers and truckers made the pilgrimage to testify about how dismal their working conditions had become and to lobby lawmakers to advance the bill, hoping to counteract the fierce and well-funded lobbying campaign against it from Irving and other landowners. Meanwhile, back in the woods, with Jackson’s encouragement, loggers and wood haulers formed an organization, the International Loggers Association (ILA), and planned a strike in response to Irving’s lowball rate offer for their new contract.

“Organizing may be the way to go anyway. Whatever needs to be done has to come from you guys. I will do whatever you guys need me to do,” Jackson told the loggers, warning them that the company would try to pit workers against each other.

In January 2004, the loggers voted 47–3 to launch a work stoppage that raised alarms by exacerbating a work shortage in the industry — a fact that Jackson and others claimed bitter vindication over, having said for years that loggers were being driven out of the industry and region by poor wages. Nearly three weeks later, they voted to end it, partly on the condition that the governor John Baldacci, who opposed the bill, not veto LD 1318, which he refused to agree to.

Meanwhile, Irving strong-armed the loggers, giving them an ultimatum to either take their contract offer or lose their jobs, peeling off some of the strikers and luring them back to work. “These woods workers need the legislation that is pending in Augusta,” Jackson commented, pointing to “heavy-handed tactics” by the firm.

That opportunity came a few months later. Jackson — who continued to work as a delimber, getting up sometimes at the crack of dawn to work a twelve-hour day in the woods, and driving four-and-a-half hours to spend the work week in Augusta — served as one of its leading champions in the state legislature. He helped tweak the bill to make it easier to pass, limiting it to apply only to landowners who owned more than one hundred thousand acres, and later to four hundred thousand, effectively applying to only three companies; he switched to become a Democrat, owing to the party’s overall support for the bill; and he spoke with Baldacci, convincing the governor, in his telling, to sign the bill when he confessed his fears that if it failed, he would end up costing people their jobs.

“I remember one lobbyist telling me that ‘everyone in the building was working against you,’” Jackson later recalled.

The loggers, meanwhile, took advantage of the seasonal lull in April to lobby for the bill in Augusta, more than two dozen of them holding meetings in lawmakers’ offices and stopping legislators in the hallways, and even holding a sit-down with the governor to make their case. In the end, the bill passed the state senate, where it had previously died, by one vote, and was signed into law by Baldacci. Jackson was convinced the loggers’ presence is what tipped it over the line.

At his request, the governor waited for Jackson, en route to the capitol, to do the signing, so that he could do it with a special pen he was bringing: one gifted to Jackson by his father-in-law, made from bird’s-eye maple harvested from the North Woods by an Allagash logger. Two years later, Jackson endorsed Baldacci for reelection, saying that whatever their differences, he had sided with “everyday working people” over big money when it most counted.

One of the ironies if Jackson takes the Democratic nomination is that he will be challenging and even serving alongside lawmakers who he and other loggers regularly criticized for not lifting a finger to help them. The blockade had come about in the first place, Jackson had charged in January 1999, because the offices of Susan Collins — his potential general election opponent — and other top elected officials refused to meet with the loggers on three separate occasions.

When the blockade finally won them meetings with Collins and, later, a representative from her office, Jackson and the loggers were left underwhelmed by her opposition to their work stoppage and promise to simply look into the matter. “Shame on our hard-working politicians for hiding like cowards in the shadows or saying there is nothing they can do,” he wrote in February 2000.

“You couldn’t get anyone on the federal and state level to do anything about it,” Jackson recalled after winning his first election in 2002. “If you ask our congressional delegation, they say it’s a state issue, referring you to the Maine DoL to file a complaint. This is the treadmill Maine loggers have been on for at least thirty years,” he complained in June 2005, as he pushed legislation to even the playing field between American and Canadian loggers.

Jackson was equally scathing about then-Governor Angus King, now the independent senator for Maine, who Jackson will serve alongside if he wins the Senate seat. King “seems to be blind to what is going on in northern Maine, or maybe he just doesn’t want to get his hands dirty,” he complained. He “says we need to be patient, but I don’t think he has been out of work for a year and worries about providing for his children,” Jackson wrote.

In contrast to Baldacci, who remained relatively active in response to the loggers’ complaints despite his pro-business bent, Collins largely excused herself from the whole matter after giving the loggers a couple of meetings. Other than backing emergency relief for loggers for natural disasters and during the pandemic, there’s nothing in the public record that suggests Collins remained engaged in efforts to improve their working conditions — though in 2022, she did introduce a resolution recognizing October 12, 2022, as “National Loggers Day.”

As Jackson told the Bangor Daily News in December 2002, it was the futility he felt meeting with such officials in the 1990s that had, ironically, shaped how he operated as a politician. “I want to listen to what the guys have to say tonight,” Jackson said about the meeting he had arranged with the loggers. “A lot of times when these guys talk to people who say they are going to help them, well, they just don’t believe it.”

As the fact that it would take another fifteen years for Maine loggers to get full collective bargaining rights suggests, the passage of LD 1318 in 2004 would ultimately be a dream deferred. One of the conditions of Baldacci’s signature was to narrow the legislation further, so in the end it effectively only applied to a single company: Irving. Soon after, Irving exploited a loophole in the law to avoid arbitration over its rates, forcing the loggers and lawmakers back to the drawing board.

The 2019 law would be the culmination of many more years of organizing by Maine’s loggers and persistence from Jackson, who continued to advocate for the industry’s workers in Augusta, and to push for more aggressive government action to help them. Sometimes those efforts were successful, like a 2005 law that made employers show proof that foreign workers owned equipment before they hired them. Sometimes they weren’t, like when Maine’s previous self-styled right-wing “populist” governor vetoed Jackson’s bill in 2017 that would have incentivized the state’s employers to offer jobs to Maine and US workers first, before foreign ones.

In any case, Jackson’s history is a case study of something today’s American left has often talked about but less often seen: a genuine working-class politician who emerged from the struggle of workplace organizing; who sought to use his position in power to advance the goals of his fellow workers; and who had a vision of how workers’ movements and their allies in elected office can work in concert to do it.

The Graham Platner saga is a sad situation on many levels. But if it opens the door to a version of that at the federal level, it would be a considerable silver lining.

The most straightforward extension of the emerging consensus on Gaza would be to scale back American militarism. If eliminating military aid to Israel is the clearly articulated demand, a natural extension is to flip the cozy relationship with other abusive and belligerent actors like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Similarly, it is a no-brainer to avoid military interventions like the war in Iran, whose historic unpopularity points to widespread public fatigue with American war-making. Slashing a bloated defense budget set to top $1 trillion is also a clear part of this agenda.

But while scaling back militarism is a necessary component of a progressive foreign policy, it cannot be the only component. For example, Darializa Avila Chevalier has called “to have our tax dollars come back home to invest in our babies here and not in bombs abroad” — useful rhetoric, to be sure, but this framing also presents a binary between doing good at home and causing harm abroad. The possibility of progressive international engagement is absent.

The problem with the United States’ Israel policy is its backing of egregiously violent and undemocratic action — not that the United States is engaging internationally. Indeed, the depth of the horror that many Americans have felt watching children suffering in Gaza demonstrates that their solidarity is by no means limited to American citizens. In any case, in a deeply interconnected world, even fulfilling promises to Americans will depend on effective management of the US relationship with the world.

But in contrast to a foreign policy that prioritizes bellicosity toward a set of adversaries, a different form of international engagement would emphasize international cooperation to address shared challenges. Notably, domestic policy can only address the United States’ outsize but minority share of global emissions. Comprehensively defending a safe climate will demand international action to ramp up climate finance and cooperation on decarbonization. Cross-border health threats like COVID-19 or the recent Ebola outbreak present similar dynamics. A progressive approach would not only bolster international disease surveillance systems but also strengthen basic health infrastructure in poor countries and take on intellectual property monopolies that limit the diffusion of vital health technology. Other notable global challenges include managing supply shocks and enabling a humane and orderly migration system.

It is fair to question whether a domestically troubled country that has just bankrolled a genocide can be a constructive actor in addressing these global challenges. But noninvolvement is not an option: the global economy runs on the dollar; the United States is the world’s largest consumer market; and it is a central hub of technological innovation. Further, as indicated by the funding crisis facing international organizations after Donald Trump slashed US support, international cooperation demands funding that is hard to come by without the world’s richest country pulling its weight. But as much as US involvement is needed to solve global challenges, so is China’s — and defusing tensions with China to a level that allows a working relationship is a core component of a less militaristic foreign policy.

Gaza also points to another lesson for foreign policy: the need for an international approach to counter oligarchy. The wave of antiestablishment Democrats has emphasized economic populism alongside Gaza, and there is a coherence between the two. Public funds were put toward unpopular support to Israel rather than meeting the needs of working-class Americans, elites from university leadership to legacy media closed ranks, and AIPAC poured huge sums of money into targeting critics of Israel.

However, policies to reorient the economy toward the interests of the many will struggle as long as the wealthy have an international escape valve on offer. The rich can shift money to tax havens to avoid increased taxes, corporations can dodge labor and environmental standards by moving operations to lax jurisdictions, and AI regulation may come to face similar arbitrage. Scaremongering can exaggerate these impacts of progressive policies — the US market has enough advantages that few will flee it entirely — but the global race to the bottom is a real challenge. The antidote is global cooperation to raise the floor, such as minimum corporate taxes or even a global minimum wealth tax.

Perhaps most profoundly, Gaza has exposed the ways the foreign policy blob can treat people in the Global South as subhuman and disposable, shredding the legitimacy of American claims to uphold human rights, international law, and democracy. Meaningfully living up to those commitments requires a much broader reorientation of US foreign policy — and crucially, one that extends beyond the realm of peace and security. Domestically, politicians increasingly understand that most Americans’ core concerns are economic: access to health care, affordable housing, good jobs. This holds true internationally too. Especially for the half of humanity living on under $4,000 per year, development is a chief concern.

In this light, excising the harms embedded in mainstream foreign policy is not only about cutting the flow of US-made bombs that fall on Gazan children. It is also about ensuring that money goes to nourishing the one-third of Ethiopian children whose growth is stunted and is not paying off high-interest debts to foreign financial institutions. Correcting an international economy stacked against development will require a new approach to US engagement at institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, ensuring that countries can affordably finance investment and have sufficient policy space and access to technology to move up global value chains. Well-designed international aid, too, has a role to play — and given the role of the world’s richest man in eviscerating aid to the world’s poorest people, reviving the United States Agency for International Development also aligns with the broader agenda of unwinding the influence of the superrich.

One advantage the establishment holds is that it is, well, established. There are relatively low barriers to entry to critiquing a palpably egregious status quo that lends a hand to a genocide. Developing a new, holistic foreign policy vision is a much harder task. Creating it will require a much more developed institutional infrastructure and set of personnel — a counter-blob, so to speak — that can seriously respond to the types of questions demanded of a sitting government.

What should security cooperation with countries like Finland and Djibouti look like? How should the United States balance broader left priorities in trade with keeping the price of imported goods low for consumers? What international reforms should be pursued through the more democratic UN versus potentially more agile multilateral groupings?

Right now, the main people offering up answers to questions like these are the foreign policy establishment that backed a catastrophically wrong policy in Gaza. The moment is ripe for the people who were right on Gaza to come up with their own set of answers, but they won’t get there unless they start asking the right questions.