The first and best way to lower emissions, cut energy bills, and build resilience is to make it so our buildings don’t need so much energy to stay warm or cool. Harold Orr, acclaimed energy engineer and inventor of the blower door test, believes the most high-impact work begins with simply fixing the air leaks in our homes — that is, preventing heated or cooled air from slipping through the gaps — and reducing the amount of heating and cooling our buildings need in the first place.

Prudence Ferreira, a building science expert, echoed this sentiment, telling Jacobin, “We can get almost everything we need from insulation and ERVs.” ERVs are short for “energy recovery ventilators,” a device that brings fresh air into buildings without losing temperatures inside — unlike opening a window. A Canadian engineer named Anthony Douglas calculated that in colder climates, installing ERVs delivers ten times the return on investment of an equivalent solar installation.

New window-unit ERVs are relatively low cost and take just minutes to install, making them accessible and affordable for homes and apartment units everywhere. Fixing air leaks, insulating roofs and basements, and installing ERVs are a way to significantly lower home emissions and energy bills without any electricity or critical minerals — by simply eliminating energy needs at the source.

When it comes to the energy we do need, we can get that at the source as well. President Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House back in 1978. But these panels didn’t generate electricity — they made heat. The panels heated water behind glass and distributed it to kitchens and buildings around the White House complex, a technology known as solar thermal. With 70 percent of our home energy use for heating and hot water, solar thermal is a critical technology, and it’s already in use worldwide.

Solar water heaters used to be commonplace in America, only falling out of favor around 2010 as solar electric panels started getting significantly cheaper. But more recently, as utilities have begun facing higher costs due to increased electrification, and as states like California have ended net metering incentives, we’ve seen a renewed demand for solar heat that doesn’t depend on grid power or battery storage. Since 2009, every new home in Hawaii has been built with a solar water heater, eliminating pollution and reducing grid strain while ensuring the availability of hot water during outages.

Living Energy Farm, a sustainable technology research center in central Virginia, has heated multiple off-grid buildings with solar thermal — without electricity or gas — for over ten years. “There’s a lot of solar collection going on here, but the bulk of it is not actually creating electricity,” explained Debbie Piesen, cofounder of Living Energy Farm, in a presentation. “It’s storing solar energy as heat.”

Arctica Solar, a California-based company, makes solar thermal products that enable you to harvest heat from your exterior walls. Originally designed to heat camps in Antarctica, Arctica’s “solar air heaters” simply draw cold air into a glass panel, use the sun’s heat to warm it, and send the heated air back into living spaces. Five of these panels, costing a total of $6,000, can provide 30,000 BTUs of heat per hour — almost the average amount of heat used by an American home. These solar thermal systems don’t depend on electricity, fuel, or hardly any moving parts. That means they take heat off your energy bill permanently, and ensure it’s always there.

In 2021, a winter storm swept across Texas, leaving 4.5 million homes and buildings without power and causing up to seven hundred deaths in the freezing temperatures. Solar thermal energy can prevent those disasters. One homeowner who installed Arctica’s panels in Billings, Montana, reported that when outside temperatures were 3 degrees Fahrenheit with eight inches of snow, Arctica’s panels kept indoor temperatures at 61 degrees Fahrenheit — higher than the average indoor temperature for Montana in that time of year.

Big picture, solar thermal has a number of benefits over electric-based heating. Solutions like Arctica’s solar air heaters are easy for general contractors to install. Perhaps more importantly, solar thermal is simple to produce. Unlike electric panels, which rely on complex circuitry and manufacturing, solar thermal primarily relies on glass and heat. Many people even make solar thermal panels themselves at home with off-the-shelf parts.

In terms of global decarbonization and transitions away from fossil fuels, solar thermal can be manufactured by any country, regardless of technological capacity. Many countries are already using it for heating and hot water needs. EU energy policy officer Jamie Kern reported seeing solar water heaters throughout Morocco — even connected to temporary structures such as tents.

Scott Sklar, director of the George Washington Solar Institute at The George Washington University, believes America should scale up solar thermal again as well. “This solar thermal panel added $5.40 to my renovation mortgage per month and saved me back then $20 per month,” Sklar said, on a tour of his net-zero home in the suburbs of Washington, DC “It’s absolutely cost-effective.”

As for our remaining electrical needs, we can meet them at lower cost and with materials right from home, too. Unlike typical rooftop solar installations, plug-in solar panels — rapidly rising in popularity — don’t feed power into the grid (which requires batteries to store that electricity) or into home batteries. Instead, they send power directly into your home’s circuits. Your appliances draw power from plug-in panels when the sun is shining and fall back to the grid when sunlight at your home isn’t enough. This simple solution is the cheapest, fastest, and most resilient way to get electricity to our homes — especially with more outages ahead due to extreme weather, rising power demand, and the advent of data centers.

The most difficult question for decarbonizing our buildings is: How do we stay cool? Air conditioning isn’t sufficient. In 2024, widespread power outages hit the Mediterranean during a summer heatwave, due to all of the homes running AC units in the extreme heat. The outage left residents even more vulnerable in hotter temperatures. This is a preview of what’s to come across all our regions as temperatures rise — and it illustrates why low-power cooling, independent of the electric grid, is so important.

Insulation and ERVs cool buildings at the source. Other low-power technologies — from white curtains and window overhangs, to whole-house fans and solar attic vent fans that flush out hot air, to green spaces and trees that provide shade and evaporative cooling as they “sweat” — all help cool buildings as well, with minimal electricity required.

Beyond this baseline, how we cool buildings in a resilient, emissions-free way remains an open question. The American Geophysical Union headquarters in Washington, DC, a global leader in zero-energy design, offers one solution: overhead radiant cooling panels that use chilled water above the panels to draw heat from the air below.

Andrew Lowenstein, who has worked on radiant cooling panels with advanced teams at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, views “liquid desiccation” as another approach. This technology dehumidifies the air, which reduces the energy air conditioners need to expend for cooling.

Another solution, from Peng Wang at Sun Yat-sen University in China, is called NESCOD, or No Electricity and Sustainable Cooling on Demand. NESCOD utilizes a chemical solution dissolved in water to pull heat from the surrounding air. The cycle is recharged by adding solar thermal heat to the solution, rather than electricity, making it well-suited for hot temperatures, with no electricity or batteries required.

Still, more work is needed to make these cooling approaches accessible for everyday homes and buildings so we can begin to decarbonize this sector with the materials on hand today.

The last sector constrained by critical-mineral challenges is transportation — specifically, our cars. Car-dependent transportation makes up 26 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. But the cheapest, fastest, and most sustainable and resilient way to decarbonize cars isn’t just making all of them electric. It’s ensuring that we need far fewer cars in the first place.

Washington State representatives voted 94-2 earlier this year to allow all homes to offer shops, services, and businesses. After a state senator chose not to schedule the widely popular bill for a Senate vote, Washington municipalities began advancing neighborhood retail laws directly. This will make Washington neighborhoods more walkable, with everything from groceries to childcare to cafés and repair clinics potentially available within residential areas.

In addition to lowering emissions, these laws will support affordability. One of the highest costs for local businesses is fixed commercial rental leases. The new laws emerging in Washington — following the example of Nashville, Buffalo, and communities around the world — will allow people to operate shops and services from their homes without paying additional rent and to pass those savings on to customers.

From insulation to new heating and cooling technology to shops and services in our neighborhoods, these are the fastest, most sustainable, and most cost-effective ways to decarbonize our homes and buildings. The sectors these approaches target — buildings and transportation — account for more than half of global emissions, and they don’t require us to wait for new technologies or production to ramp up.

All of these interventions are based on technologies we have available today, and we can scale them up without the critical minerals, deep-sea mining, or delays that we and future generations cannot afford.

The federal monitorship was born out of necessity. Years of embezzlement, bribery, and the misuse of members’ dues culminated in the convictions of two former UAW presidents and numerous other officials. The 2021 consent decree that resolved the government’s civil case installed an independent monitor charged with investigating corruption and enforcing the terms of the settlement. The consent decree also entailed a referendum on the question of direct elections for the union’s highest leaders. When the votes were tallied, 63 percent were in favor of the change; the union’s prior delegate system had been a key mechanism through which the old-guard Administrative Caucus had consolidated power.

In the union’s first direct election, held in 2023, Fain and the UAWD caucus narrowly defeated the old guard on promises to break with concessionary bargaining, organize the nonunion auto industry, and rebuild the UAW into a fighting union. The administration’s victories in the Stand Up Strike and the organizing win at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee assembly plant made it the most closely watched reform project in organized labor.

Barofsky arrived at the UAW with a well-developed philosophy of oversight and no experience with unions. As the first special inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program after the 2008 financial crisis, he made his reputation through repeated clashes with Treasury officials over the administration of the bank bailout. Throughout his memoir, Bailout, he presents conflict with the institutions he oversaw as the inevitable consequence of taking oversight seriously.

The origin of Barofsky’s escalating conflict with Fain had little to do with the financial corruption the monitor was tasked with investigating. On December 1, 2023, the UAW called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Twelve days later, on the eve of a Capitol Hill press conference where Fain was scheduled to speak about the resolution, Barofsky called him, saying he was speaking “strictly in a personal capacity,” to urge him to reconsider the union’s position. In the conversation, the monitor said his children had been “harassed” by UAW members who opposed Israel’s genocide. As Lichtenstein recounted, the insinuation that the union’s position was antisemitic didn’t sit well with Fain: as he said at a later executive board meeting, “For anybody to ever f–king say I’m antisemitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.”

For many in the reform administration, that episode marked the point at which the monitorship ceased to feel confined to policing corruption and began to look like an institution intervening in the union’s political life.

The monitor’s office soon opened investigations involving Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock, staffing decisions, internal appointments, executive board disputes, and eventually Rich Boyer’s removal from oversight of the Stellantis Department. Some of those disputes had little resemblance to the corruption that prompted the consent decree: Mock’s conflicts with Fain increasingly centered on her insistence that expenditures and organizing budgets receive detailed scrutiny before approval, while Fain and his allies argued that the administration needed greater flexibility to hire staff and move resources quickly into bargaining and organizing campaigns. Other investigations concerned appointments, departmental assignments, and executive board decisions that ordinarily fall within the discretion of elected leaders.

The monitor’s own reports increasingly shift from questions of elections, ethics, and compliance toward detailed examinations of disputes among the union’s elected leadership. Taken together, they reflect a monitor increasingly involved not simply in rooting out corruption but in disputes over how the reform administration governed the union.

Federal oversight of unions is rare but not unprecedented. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) has operated under a federal consent decree since 1989 after a racketeering case brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). That decree created independent institutions to investigate corruption, supervise elections, and adjudicate internal charges while leaving the elected leadership to govern the union. The arrangement became the backdrop for one of the most significant union reform movements of the late twentieth century, led by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU).

Ken Paff, the longtime national TDU organizer, spent decades working under the IBT’s federal consent decree. When asked to compare the two monitorships, he told me, “The UAW situation seems different, and troubling. The monitor seems to have rather unlimited power.”

Paff points to the structure of the Teamsters’ consent decree itself. “The current Teamster monitors are the Independent Investigations Officer and the Independent Review Officer,” he said. “Both are former federal judges. They don’t issue broadsides against Teamster leaders, but investigate corruption, and the IIO can bring a charge, and the IRO is the final judge of it. They have no authority to tell the IBT leadership who to appoint to what position and don’t try to inject themselves into a Teamster election.”

That distinction is built into the consent decree itself. The Justice Department envisioned a system in which the monitor investigates and, where appropriate, brings charges before an independent adjudicator. As union democracy lawyer Cathy Highet told Labor Notes, “Court-appointed monitors only have the authority given to them by the court, and it’s important they limit themselves to that role rather than trying to run the union. . . .  The Monitor has the authority to bring ‘charges’ against officers. Then the officers have a right to a trial by someone else, with a just-cause standard. In other words, the Monitor is a prosecutor, not a judge.”

In May 2024, Fain removed Boyer from oversight of the union’s Stellantis Department, accusing the vice president of concealing bargaining concessions, mishandling negotiations over the Kokomo battery plants and the reopening of Belvidere Assembly, delaying profit-sharing payments for supplemental workers, and otherwise failing in his responsibilities. Under the UAW constitution, a finding of dereliction of duty permits the president to remove an officer from a department. Boyer denied the allegations and filed a complaint with the federal monitor.

Two years later, Barofsky concluded that the documentary record did not support the case Fain presented to fellow members of the international executive board. Drawing on emails, bargaining records, text messages, and witness interviews, the report argues that the administration was aware of key bargaining developments it later claimed Boyer had concealed, found no evidence that Boyer secretly accepted the concessions cited by Fain, and concluded that the stated rationale for his removal did not match what investigators uncovered.

Instead, the report argues that Boyer’s removal followed disagreements over staffing inside the Stellantis Department and disputes surrounding a health and safety settlement at Warren Stamping. It ultimately concludes that the removal formed part of what it describes as “a recurring pattern of retaliation” against officials who challenged the president. The report also finds that Fain improperly sought bonuses that would have benefited his fiancée and misused the authority of his office in matters involving her sister.

Those findings may have merit. But they also come after two years in which Barofsky’s office had become deeply involved in disputes over staffing, appointments, political resolutions, and the day-to-day governance of the union. For Fain and his allies, the issue is therefore no longer only the substance of the report. It is whether the monitor can still be understood as an independent investigator rather than another participant in the conflict.

Fain has rejected the latest report’s conclusions in their entirety. Yet the significance of the report lies not only in the findings themselves. Released just as ballots are about to be mailed in the union’s presidential election, it ensures that the monitor’s conclusions will become part of the campaign between Fain and Boyer.

When I asked Paff about the report’s timing, two years after Boyer’s allegations and days after Boyer emerged as Fain’s likely most substantial challenger for the union’s highest office, the TDU leader did not mince words. “Clearly he wants to tip the scales against Fain, who he politically dislikes,” said Paff.

Whatever members ultimately make of Barofsky’s findings or Fain’s response, the dispute has increasingly consumed a reform administration elected to tackle a different set of problems. The need to accomplish those aims has only become more urgent. As Chris Townsend recently observed, “One thing the federal monitor . . . will not investigate is the fact that the UAW has lost 80 percent of its membership in the last fifty years.” The UAW still has hundreds of thousands of nonunion auto workers to organize, employers determined to reduce labor costs, and an industry undergoing sweeping reorganization.

The reform movement in the UAW was elected to reverse decades of decline. However this fall’s election turns out, the union will still face the same unfinished work: organizing the vast nonunion auto industry, bargaining contracts that restore workers’ power on the shop floor, and building the kind of fighting organization that made the union a force in American life. Those priorities have increasingly been displaced by a monitor who has expanded his role far beyond policing corruption and into the day-to-day political life of the union. The longer that continues, the harder it becomes for the reform movement to focus on the work it was elected to do.

“Nobody here subscribes to the great man theory of history,” said Becky Givan, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers who helped to organize the conference. “We believe in organizing,” not in “elevating individuals or heroes.”

Mazzocchi would have agreed. He saw worker-whistleblowers not as studies in courage or conscience but as tools for tilting the balance of power toward the working class, both on the shop floor and outside of it.

Mazzocchi’s efforts relied on scientific education, a network of journalists, and the belief that workers’ disclosures served the public interest, all of which required constant tending through law and social movements. In the 1960s and ’70s, many unions had grown bloated with bureaucracy and seemed more motivated to fight the Cold War than to organize the working class. Mazzocchi fostered rank-and-file activism, largely by politicizing workers around their own health. He was an architect of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Its provisions bear the imprint of this distinctly democratic philosophy.

Disillusioned with the neoliberal turn of the Democratic Party, Mazzocchi founded the Labor Party in 1996. “The bosses have two parties,” Mazzocchi said. “We need one of our own.” For Mazzocchi, the crisis generated by global capitalism offered the labor movement a chance to “seize the terms of the debate” by forcefully advocating for the right to a job, public health care, and free higher education, campaigns stifled by a corporate-dominated Democratic Party. Mazzocchi’s accomplishments are ably detailed in Les Leopold’s biography, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor.

The conference opened with recorded remarks from Ralph Nader. Now ninety-two, the consumer crusader was Mazzocchi’s friend and frequent collaborator, whose own third-party run in 2000 was presaged by the Labor Party. Nader’s 1971 Conference on Professional Responsibility popularized the term “whistleblower” — though in a distinctly white-collar register. Nader called upon “employed professionals” like engineers, scientists, and analysts to publicize employer policies “which contravene the public interest, destroy the environment, and defraud the taxpayer.”

In Mazzocchi’s vision, the blue-collar whistleblower possessed even more transformative power. He sought not to vindicate a set of “professional ethics” or to balance the public purse but to intervene directly into the heart of capitalism: employer control over the conditions of production.

The rates of disabling injuries and occupational illness rose throughout the postwar decades, particularly in the places where OCAW members worked: plants that made asbestos insulation, oil refineries that also produced benzene, paint factories that used lead, and petrochemical plants that made all manner of consumer and industrial plastics, including known and suspected carcinogens. In other words, cheap postwar consumer abundance was subsidized by the bodies of chemical workers.

“The mad rush of science has propelled us into a strange and uncharted environment,” Mazzocchi said in support of the passage of what would become the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. “We grope in the dark and can light only a few candles.”

The conditions of American work in the 1960s generated Mazzocchi’s core insight: the fight for worker health could be a powerful, coalition-building, continuously mobilizing force. The fight required collecting and disseminating information. It required workers themselves to intervene directly in production at times of extreme danger. It established a basis for alliances between workers and surrounding communities, united in a desire to protect themselves from the toxins that didn’t stop at the factory fence.

Information and education stood at the core of this political vision. But prior to the 1970s, workers suffered an extreme information asymmetry. Many were not even sure what they handled. It was not uncommon, for example, for an employer to obscure the labels affixed to the sides of fifty-five-gallon drums. Even before Nader issued his call to professionals of conscience, Mazzocchi politicized scientists in the quest for a worker-centered public interest.

Glenn Paulson was one of these scientists. Paulson has had a fifty-year career in occupational and environmental health and hazards. But in 1968, he was an environmental sciences graduate student at Rockefeller University in New York. Over lunch in the faculty club, Mazzocchi relayed what had happened at the National Lead Company in Sayreville, New Jersey.

The plant had instituted a new process for producing a paint thickener intended as a safer substitute for lead. Two workers in the carbon monoxide area collapsed on the job. One later died, and the other suffered serious cognitive impairment. Mazzocchi wanted to tell his members what was poisoning them.

Mazzocchi invited Paulson to tour the plant. When they were turned away at the gate, Mazzocchi threatened to shut the plant down. The threat worked. Paulson described carbon monoxide monitors set to go off only at levels that would produce unconsciousness, or death.

Paulson also fielded questions from workers, who described what they smelled, sensed, and saw on the job. Workers at Sayreville won the right to a labor-management health committee, enabling workers to inspect safety monitors and initiate the shutdown of an active hazard.

The form of chemical consciousness-raising at Sayreville set a template for bringing workers and experts together in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Across the United States and Canada, workers and scientists learned from each other.

As support for an occupational health and safety law grew in Washington, OCAW released some of this testimony as Peril on the Job — a 1970 book that left a New York Times reviewer “uneasy, disillusioned, and a little angry.” The union arranged for some of those chemical workers who had testified at these conferences to speak in Congress in support of the new law.

When the Occupational Safety and Health Act finally went into effect in 1971, it bore the distinct imprint of a rank-and-file philosophy of whistleblowing: that workers armed with technical information could safeguard a shop floor and serve as tools for democratic accountability.

The law established that workers had a right to a safe and healthy work environment and imposed upon employers the duty to provide it. It also authorized the federal government to make these rights and responsibilities real. To do so, the government promulgated exposure standards, established a regime of inspectors who could issue citations, and deputized workers to enforce the law. Workers could request an inspection in cases of imminent danger and accompany the inspector on the plant walkaround. The law was also the first federal statute to explicitly protect such whistleblowers against retaliation for their disclosures.

The law’s success can be measured in the body count. When the law was passed, thirty-eight American workers died on the job every day. Today that figure stands at fourteen, despite the doubling of the US workforce. The AFL-CIO estimates that 712,000 lives have been saved since 1971.

But the act has failed as a tool for democratic revitalization. It has been chronically underfunded, silent on public sector workers, hobbled by weak anti-retaliation language, devoid of meaningful criminal penalties for corporate offenders, and has endured four decades of judicial attacks. As a result, it has never lived up to its potential to directly empower workers, as Mazzocchi had hoped.

The billionaire-backed Trump administration has taken a further hatchet to OSHA’s meager enforcement agenda, reducing the number of inspections and issuing fewer fines to violators. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the agency’s research arm, was an early victim of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). A thousand occupational health researchers, physicians and engineers spent months fighting their mass terminations before they were reinstated in January 2026.

As the conference drew to a close, the former deputy administrator of OSHA commented from the audience. Mazzocchi, he said, “never let a disaster go to waste.” From Karen Silkwood to tech industry workers fired for raising concerns about artificial-intelligence systems or warning about child sexual abuse material, whistleblowers change the public conversation away from the terms set by capital. As Mazzocchi understood, informed wage earners not only secure health of the workplace — they also secure the health of democracy.

In a recent article in Sidecar, Dylan Riley reiterated his argument that we are witnessing the rise of what he and Robert Brenner have called “political capitalism.” In this regime, they claim, the extraction of rent through control over the state is overtaking productive investment as the primary means by which the ruling class accumulates wealth.

Capitalists, Riley wrote, “would prefer to make profits through rent-seeking and political extraction without risking their wealth on uncertain investments.” Moreover, this has gone so far that “the most obvious threat to capitalism today comes not from the working class, but paradoxically from capitalists who with increasing success have figured out how to profit by plunder rather than productive investment.” These remarks echo the sweeping claims Brenner and Riley have made elsewhere: that “under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return.”

Riley began his Sidecar article by rightly insisting that analysis must focus on the system’s “laws of motion.” But as we argued in a critique in Jacobin, his own analysis seems unmoored from any such grounding. The rent capitalists are supposedly extracting has to come from somewhere. Like profit and interest, rent is a claim on a finite pool of surplus value. It is derived from control over some condition of production or circulation that gives certain capitalists the power to appropriate wealth produced elsewhere — an advantage that cannot be competed away. If access to that condition was generally available to all capitalists, the rent would disappear, since it would no longer confer an exclusive advantage.

Because it is a claim on finite surplus value, rent cannot expand without limit. To the extent that it is deducted from profit, it cannot grow to the point of removing the incentive for productive investment — which would undermine the source of rent itself as well as the reproduction of the entire system. “Extraction” may enrich particular capitalists, but it simply cannot displace productive investment as the general basis of accumulation. As a result, we argued, “Riley’s analysis effectively suggests that capitalism is being replaced by some form of ‘neo-feudalism’ as the accumulation of wealth through ‘plunder’ undermines competition and leads to the suspension of capitalism’s ‘laws of motion.’”

In a somewhat puzzling discussion of rent in response to our criticisms, Riley tries to get around this limit on extraction by separating the capture of rent from the dynamics of accumulation — arguing that “there are many forms of rent that have nothing to do with markets and therefore do not depend on monopolies.” But it is hard to see how this could be the case. The example he offers, government contracts awarded to Trump’s political allies, hardly clarifies matters. If preferential access to state power affords certain capitalists advantages not available to others that enable them to extract wealth from the productive economy, as Riley claims, this would seem to fit the definition of monopoly quite closely.

Moreover, state contracts have been crucial for the competitiveness and profitability of US multinational corporations since World War II. Is all of this to be understood simply as “rent”? Indeed, state spending has long figured centrally in monopoly capital theory. As we argued, if we abandon Karl Marx’s link between rent and monopoly, as Riley attempts to do, the concept of rent becomes so broad that “profit as a distinct category tends to disappear into rent altogether.” As if to prove our point, Riley ends up with a definition that could encompass almost any state fiscal or monetary policy.

Riley’s argument obscures the fact that the state does not constitute an autonomous source of value but redistributes wealth produced elsewhere. He thus cannot evade the limits on the expansion of rent we identified. If rent, plunder, and politically inflated asset values are not claims on surplus value, then what are they claims on? If these are seen as sources of wealth independent of production, then the argument has left Marx’s theory of value behind and moved onto a terrain closer to that of neoclassical marginalism. If, however, they are claims on surplus value, then the questions remain exactly those we posed: how surplus is produced, how it is distributed, and why these forms of appropriation could be understood as a new regime of accumulation.

In his response, Riley jumps from vivid examples of political corruption and self-enrichment by the Trump family to a much larger claim about “political capitalism” in which the entire economy is dominated by an elusive and unnamed “extractive sector.” As in the original Sidecar article, he neither identifies what this “unproductive predatory and extractive sector” consists of, nor provides any evidence of its overall economic significance. Pointing to cases of flagrant corruption is of course very different from demonstrating that state extraction constitutes an entirely new regime or logic of accumulation. At most, then, Riley has identified a particular set of firms profiting through corrupt political connections of the kind reported daily in news stories like those he cites.

Riley’s framework tends to depict the state as the direct instrument of a narrow ruling oligarchy. Yet organizing the power of a ruling class whose members compete with one another and are concerned primarily with their own bottom lines rather than broad systemic stability, requires that the state stand at some distance from particular capitalists — what Marxist state theorists call “relative autonomy.” It does capitalist things not because capitalists tell it to but as a result of structural imperatives. We need a more sophisticated theory that treats the state not merely as corrupt or captured by private interests but as a capitalist state with systemic roles in supporting accumulation, securing legitimacy, and exercising coercion.

Such a theory clarifies both the possibilities and limits of reform. It also helps us understand how the state came to express a right-wing backlash that fused anger at the costs for workers of (very profitable) globalization with anxieties about immigration and the erosion of patriarchy. If capital had its way, Kamala Harris, and not Trump, would be president. The political crisis that gave rise to Trump, and which his chaotic actions in office have only exacerbated, arises partly from the fact that capital does not directly control the state.

There are other fundamental problems with the notion of political capitalism. The framework is built on the claim that stagnation has foreclosed opportunities for productive investment. For Brenner and Riley, the crisis of the 1970s was never resolved, forcing them to explain away the 1990s boom and the post-2008 recovery, as well as current record profits, high R&D spending, and large-scale investment. Yet Riley concedes that Big Tech — typically the central target of “technofeudal” and rentier-capitalist accounts — is competitive, investing heavily, technologically dynamic, and not earning monopoly rents. If this is the case, then it would seem that not much remains of the claim that “zero-sum conditions” mean accumulation can occur only through extraction.

Riley retorts that we must consider growth rates outside of the tech sector. But what does it say if the theory can survive only by leaving aside the most dynamic sector of the economy? Are we also to ignore large investments in military, energy, and logistics? Even if there is some overinvestment, leading to devaluation and market concentration — even potential crisis — this reflects the normal dynamics of technological development in capitalism. It certainly does not indicate a system that is exhausted and stagnant.

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, writing in the new issue of Monthly Review, responded to critiques we leveled at monopoly capital theory by pushing in the opposite direction. Where Riley attempts to sever rent from monopoly and ends up with an impossibly broad definition of rent, Foster and Clark push an expansive definition of monopoly that effectively cannot be falsified. In doing so, they demonstrate our central point: faced with a reality that does not fit the theory, monopoly capital theorists have stretched the definition of monopoly to fit the facts. We demonstrate that Shaikh’s notion of real competition captures the dynamics of contemporary corporate capitalism far better than “monopoly capital.”

As we show, monopoly capital theory is closely related to mainstream theories of “imperfect competition,” in which actual markets are measured against the ideal of “perfect competition” imagined within neoclassical economics textbooks. At the core of these theories lies the “quantity theory of competition,” according to which the intensity of competition is seen as a direct outcome of the number of firms in a market. Competition exists on a spectrum, with perfect competition, characterized by innumerable small firms, at one pole, and perfect monopoly, characterized by a single seller, at the other. As markets come to be dominated by a smaller number of larger firms through concentration and centralization, the story goes, capitalism leaves its “competitive stage” and enters a “monopoly stage.” Absent competitive discipline, the result is low investment, stagnation, high prices, and superprofits.

In our Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE) paper, we looked at the case of Amazon, which is often cited as a key example of a monopoly firm. Theorists of “technofeudalism,” for instance, hold that Amazon and other tech firms are extracting substantial monopoly rents by virtue of their control over intellectual property, platforms, and personal data. As in the case of “political capitalism,” the ability of tech companies to extract rent would depend on their possession of monopoly power: control over something that confers a market advantage that cannot be competed away. Otherwise, above-average profits would attract investment by other capitalists, intensifying competition and pushing profits back toward the social average.

This process whereby the profit rate is competitively equalized is central to the theory of real competition. In this view, competition is not a function of the number of firms in a sector or their size but the mobility of capital. Large corporations, supplied as needed with the requisite firepower by Big Finance, are better equipped to tear aside barriers protecting any markets generating above-average returns. From this perspective, competition is not necessarily weakened as firms get larger — on the contrary, concentration and centralization amplify the force of competition as the “war among firms” takes place on a larger scale.

As we demonstrate, Amazon must compete to attract sellers by reducing turnover time and offering expanded access to markets, as well as to attract customers by offering low prices and lightning-fast delivery. As a result, it is compelled to maximize efficiency, intensify work, exploit labor, and accelerate the circulation of commodities. Crucially, we also show that Amazon has not persistently earned above-average profits. In our recent Socialist Register essay, we demonstrate that the same is true of the other leading tech firms. There is, in short, no evidence that barriers to capital mobility have suspended the competitive equalization of profit rates, as theories of technofeudalism or monopoly capital require.

Foster and Clark do not address this evidence, our broader account of Amazon’s development, or the specific claims made by the monopoly theorists we criticize. Instead, they repeatedly move from the existence of giant corporations to the conclusion that they possess monopoly power. Foster and Clark shift from profit rates to general statements about corporate size, concentration, platform centrality, and strategic planning, citing data on corporate concentration Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna compiled in 2011. But this assumes precisely what must be demonstrated. The existence of large firms is of course not in doubt; what we are challenging is the assertion that concentration inherently equates to monopoly.

To support this argument, Foster and Clark turn from the evidence to interpreting what Marx really thought, claiming that he endorsed the quantity theory of competition. Yet the single passage from Volume I of Capital they cite is taken out of context. Marx’s theory of competition is developed across all three volumes of Capital, and it is not until Volume III that he fully examines its operation across the system as a whole. Even the passage Foster and Clark quote concerns a specific situation in the process of capitalist development, in which small capitals unable to meet the rising minimum scale of investment are excluded from sectors transformed by modern industry and crowd into spheres it has penetrated only partially. “Here,” Marx writes, “competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the rival capitals.”

The word here matters. As Howard Botwinick notes, Marx is describing the desperate rivalry among numerous small capitals confined to an increasingly limited economic sphere, not stating a general law. With the establishment of modern industry, however, competition increasingly operates through scale, technological development, productivity growth, and the capacity to enter new markets, all facilitated by access to credit. Only a few sentences later, Marx identifies the broader tendency: “Commensurately with the development of capitalist production and accumulation there also takes place a development of the two most powerful levers of centralization — competition and credit.” In other words, competition and credit develop alongside accumulation, even as they propel concentration and centralization.

Foster and Clark criticize us for failing to recognize that rivalry persists within monopoly capitalism — a feature of what they call “real monopoly.” But this is precisely the issue our RRPE paper addresses. As we point out, these theories acknowledge oligopolistic rivalry within a system of collusion, price fixing, stagnation, and surplus profits. Yet this does not correspond with the reality of modern capitalism. It is in response to this reality that a new generation of monopoly theorists, from Lina Khan to proponents of technofeudalism, have expanded the concept of monopoly to encompass competition itself. Thus Khan famously presents Amazon as a “paradox”: on the one hand, it is a giant firm operating in a concentrated market, but on the other hand it engages in apparently competitive behavior. Her solution is to make the quantity theory true by definition: large firms count as monopolies whether they raise or lower prices, expand or stagnate, invest or not. If we abandon the quantity theory, however, the paradox also disappears: the simpler explanation is that these firms are competing, exactly as the theory of real competition would expect.

Foster and Clarke’s reply largely confirms this tendency, even crediting Khan as a theorist of “real monopoly.” They acknowledge that monopoly firms compete to reduce costs and expand sales and may even invest on an enormous scale. But it is hard to see how such “monopoly” behavior can be distinguished from competition. As they argue, high profits count as evidence of monopoly rents, while low profits are attributed to long-term monopoly strategy; underinvestment confirms monopoly stagnation; high investment confirms monopoly consolidation. Every outcome supports the theory. The decisive distinction Foster and Clark draw between real competition and “real monopoly” is that monopoly firms avoid price cutting. But they do not address the evidence we present that price competition is in fact occurring. Nor do they confront the implications of their own claim: if firms are charging monopoly prices, they should earn above-average profits — but as we show, they do not.

The sole indicator Foster and Clark offer in support of monopoly capitalism is inflation. But inflation is neither a measure of monopoly nor a direct index of market structure. Prices may rise because of demand and credit creation, wages and class struggle, supply disruptions and exchange-rate shocks, fiscal and monetary policy, and numerous other factors. Market power might allow firms to sustain higher markups and therefore a higher price level, but it cannot explain continuing inflation unless these markups themselves keep rising. The persistence of inflation therefore does not demonstrate the disappearance of price competition. Foster and Clark’s argument fails at the most basic level: inflation alone cannot tell us whether firms possess monopoly power, coordinate prices, or remain subject to competition.

Foster and Clark close with a lengthy quotation from a 1981 essay by Paul Sweezy that they claim “spells out a theory of real monopoly.” But that passage sets out much more definite expectations than Foster and Clark’s elastic concept suggests. Monopoly capital theory, Sweezy writes, confronts the “realities” of mature capitalism: “overaccumulation and stagnation, idle productive capacity and underinvestment, surplus profits and underconsumption”. It is hard to see how this could be squared with Foster and Clark’s recognition that the tech firms exhibit massive investment, rapid technological development, expanding capacity, labor-process restructuring, and no consistent monopoly superprofits.

The evidence therefore contradicts the tendencies Sweezy identifies far more directly than Foster and Clark acknowledge. Rather than a mature monopoly capitalism escaping competitive discipline, as Sweezy and Paul Baran would have expected, Amazon displays the intensified competition predicted by Marx and Shaikh.

The great political value of the theory of real competition lies in the clarity it provides about the struggle for a more sustainable and democratic alternative to capitalism. Reading Foster and Clark’s reply, one wonders why it is so important to twist ourselves in knots to base our analysis in “monopoly capital.” We have argued that treating the malfunctioning of capitalism, rather than its routine operation, as the central problem can “gesture toward” a narrow politics of revitalizing capitalism rather than building the capacities necessary to transcend it. This does not mean that every theorist or actor who has invoked monopoly — from Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin to Sweezy and Foster — is a reformist. The problem is that by obscuring the central role of competition in driving capital accumulation, the exploitation of labor, and environmental destruction, the monopoly capital framework can also obscure the central importance for socialist strategy of breaking with competition.

Foster and Clark’s own reply reflects this ambiguity. On the one hand, they insist that monopoly is inseparable from capitalism itself, and that anti-capitalist and anti-monopoly politics are integrally linked. On the other hand, they present antitrust measures that would intensify competition as potentially beneficial to workers. But Amazon is already fiercely competitive. Its low prices and rapid delivery are achieved through relentless pressure to cut costs, accelerate circulation, discipline suppliers, and intensify work. Amazon is bad for workers not because it is a monopoly but because it is a ruthlessly competitive capitalist firm. Automation, surveillance, and work discipline are better understood as weapons in the warlike struggle among capitalists for profits than as consequences of monopoly power. And as Foster’s sometime coauthor Paul Burkett powerfully demonstrated, these same competitive imperatives drive environmental destruction.

This underscores the need for a systemic transformation. The question in this respect is not whether to pursue reforms but what kind of reforms should be prioritized and why. For socialists, the answer to these questions hinges on their ability to form a link in a broader struggle to shift power toward workers, build democratic capacities, and open a path beyond capitalist market discipline. As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin wrote, we must “liberate ourselves from the notion that it is only through competitiveness that we can confront the development of our productive capacities.” Indeed, “to accept competition as the goal . . . is to give up on the socialist project before you begin.” This means revitalizing and transforming the labor movement as the linchpin of a broader class politics and, no less important, imagining and constructing institutions capable of expanding democratic control over investment. As the climate crisis accelerates, the failure of investors and capitalist states to undertake a green transition makes clearer than ever the need to allocate resources according to social and ecological needs rather than competitive market imperatives.

The exact number of heat wave deaths is far higher than official statistics throughout South Asia capture, due to inadequate public health monitoring systems and inadequate tracking of heat-related mortality. Instead of naming heat as the primary cause of death, several nations in the region such as Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan frequently report deaths under categories including cardiac arrest, dehydration, kidney failure, or respiratory issues.

There are massive gaps in heat wave surveillance due to a lack of national registries, unreliable hospital reporting, poor infrastructure for rural health care, and lack of cooperation between the health and meteorological departments. Many deaths are never officially reported as heat deaths, and death cases go unreported in several regions where poor people don’t have access to health care.

According to a report of the World Meteorological Organization, 2000 to 2019 saw 489,000 heat-related deaths annually, with 36 percent in Europe and 45 percent in Asia. The official diagnosis and reporting of heat-related cases and fatalities is underreported globally.

India witnessed a massive number of heat wave fatalities, with 24,223 reported heat wave deaths between 1992 and 2015, according to official government estimates published by the Energy and Resources Institute. From 2015 to 2025, India alone reported 3,815 heat wave deaths related to the rising human cost of excessive temperatures brought on by climate change.

Pakistan witnessed devastating heat waves in recent years that killed 2,990 people in multiple reported incidents, mostly in the southern provinces of Sindh and Karachi. In 2015, Pakistan reported 1,200 heat wave deaths in Karachi alone when temperatures exceeded 49 degrees Celsius. Extreme heat is becoming more fatal in Pakistan due to climate change, extended power outages, rising urbanization, and a lack of heat protection for outdoor workers, according to scientists and public health professionals.

Both India and Pakistan have made investments in Heat Action Plans (HAPs), aimed to prevent mortality caused by heat waves. But few suggestions in these action plans have been implemented.

“South Asia requires epidemiological techniques to estimate excess mortality, improved cause of death certification, and [incorporation of] heat attribution into regular surveillance,” Prakash told me.

In recent years, Bangladesh reported one of its longest and hottest heat waves ever, with temperatures in numerous regions crossing to 43 degrees Celsius. At least fifteen people died from heatstroke in 2024, according to health officials, which is the nation’s first officially recorded heat wave death toll since systematic monitoring started.

The Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) in Bangladesh recognized that the number was probably underestimated due to the late commencement of heatstroke surveillance and the incomplete inclusion of data from private institutions.

South Asian nations have poor tracking monitoring to identify heatstroke death cases. Anjal Prakash added that South Asia recorded 209,537 deaths due to severe temperatures in 2021, but India’s official death toll for the 2022 heat wave was only about ninety across India and Pakistan.

Over one hundred died during a heat wave in 2024, but there were also 40,000 suspected cases of heatstroke. Outdoor workers, casual laborers, and the impoverished who lack access to health care and cooling infrastructure are among the groups most severely undercounted and affected.

As per data from the International Labour Organization, nearly 86.6 percent of workers in South Asia are employed without formal contracts, social insurance, or legal protection. Millions of daily wage workers who work in construction sites and agriculture fields and as street vendors make up the region’s enormous informal economy.

Anamika Barua, a South Asia–based professor and an expert on climate change and water security, told me that outdoor laborers are among the worst affected, because their livelihoods depend on continuous physical work under direct exposure to extreme heat, often without adequate shade, hydration, cooling facilities, or social protection.

Over the last few years, India’s formal sector has also been bearing the brunt due to intense heat waves. Last year, in Uttar Pradesh, thirty-three polling staff members died in a single day during elections. The chief electoral officer of India’s northern state, Navdeep Rinwa, announced monetary compensation of 1.5 million rupees for the families of the deceased. On April 26, two teachers died in India’s Odisha state while carrying out surveys.

While Indian authorities compensate people associated with the formal sector, no compensation is being given to the laborers when they die.

“They are being compelled to continue work despite serious health concerns and in the absence of legislative assurances for paid rest intervals, heat-safe working conditions, or income compensation during extreme weather events,” says Barua.

She stressed that the poorest communities are most at risk even though they contribute the least to global emissions. As a result, policies for adaptation must go beyond infrastructure to incorporate social protection, labor fairness, and climate-sensitive workplace safety. Policies must include income support programs with enforceable heat adaptation laws rather than relying only on short-term advisories.

In South Asia, heat weaves already claim more than 200,000 lives annually. According to a recent study, as temperature rises, the death toll might exceed 400,000 by 2045. India is at high risk.

The study further reveals that over 200,000 deaths are currently attributed to severe temperatures, and this figure may nearly quadruple over the next twenty years.

With deaths increasing and governments lacking strategies to protect laborers from dying, vulnerable workers across South Asia are demanding their governments provide heat wave protections.

Ashok Kumar, forty-two, a migrant worker from India’s Bihar state, has been running a barber shop on a footpath with no roof in India’s national capital, New Delhi, where temperatures exceed to 46 degrees Celsius (114.8 degrees Fahrenheit). With no shaded resting area, Kumar spends nine hours a day in a scorching heat to support his family.

“Where shall I go? I have to feed my family. The government cannot install air conditioning at the roadside for us. We are dying under the blazing sun. We have no options. If we stop work, our families will die hungry,” Kumar told me.

While governments issue emergency alerts aimed to prevent heat wave deaths, the economic instability faced by laborers like Ashok Kumar means they must leave their homes.

“We are bearing intense heat. When people stay inside their homes, it kills our livelihood,” Kumar said.

In India, 49 percent of street vendors lost more than 40 percent of their daily income during extreme heat events, according to a Greenpeace India survey, and a sizable percentage did not have access to any cooling facilities close to their workplaces.

Daily wage laborers are raising similar concerns in Pakistan. Shabaz Khan, forty, an auto driver from Karachi, has stopped driving as the heat has impacted his health.

“How long shall I sit idle at home? I have no option but to bear the intensity of the heat and earn for my family. Who can work under 46 degrees Celsius?” he said.

Hospitals across South Asia are witnessing a massive influx as patients complain of heat-related ailments, dizziness, and high blood pressure. Experts warn that the number of cases will increase in the region now that they are entering summer.

“We are checking hundreds of heatstroke patients everyday. The flow of patients is unexpected,” says Dr Waqas Khan at Jinnah Hospital Karachi Pakistan.

As global temperatures continue to rise as a result of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, climate change is the primary cause of the hottest and most intense heat waves in South Asia.

In countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, what were earlier thought to be uncommon occurrences are quickly turning into seasonal reality. The World Meteorological Organization reports that South Asia had some of the highest temperatures ever in 2025 and 2026, with climate change boosting the frequency and intensity of fatal heat waves.

According to a recent NASA Earth Observatory assessment, rapid warming and excessive humidity are making South Asia one of the world’s most heat-vulnerable regions, posing a threat to millions of people’s lives.

While knowing risk factors, many migrant laborers are unable to do much more than cover their heads with wet towels.

“We saw how the laborer Paswan collapsed and died in India’s Nuh grain market. I can’t forget. I am working in the same market and at the same temperature. Covering my head with a wet towel gives relief. But no guarantee of life,” says Narayan Kumar, forty, a migrant worker. “All I want is for laborers to be compensated. Don’t leave them to God’s mercy.”

To track where fossil fuel profits actually end up, the researchers followed the ownership chain from oil companies all the way down to individual shareholders — including people who own oil stocks indirectly through hedge funds, investment funds, or other companies. The finding is stark.

The top 1% of the wealth distribution captured more than half of all fossil fuel profits during the 2021–22 supply shocks. The bottom half of Americans received just 1%. This fundamentally changes how we understand supply shock–driven inflation. If you only look at rising consumer prices, this inflation hits everyone roughly equally — about 6.5% in 2022 across income groups. But once you factor in the profits flowing back to shareholders, a very different picture emerges.

For the top 1%, effective inflation in 2022 was around 3% — because their dividend and stock income offset much of the price increases. For the bottom 50%, there was no such offset. They were forced to absorb the full hit.

Individual companies have already reported the results. Shell and BP have announced huge profit surges. US crack spreads — the standard measure of refinery profit margins — show that much of the increase in fuel costs reflects higher profit margins, not higher input costs. And because the major oil companies are vertically integrated, they profit at both ends: from the increased prices they sell their excess crude at, and from the rise in their own refinery margins.

Markets, it seems, were ahead of the public. Fossil fuel stocks began rising in January and February of this year, when tensions with Iran first escalated and the US invasion of Venezuela raised fears (or, for shareholders, perhaps hopes) of further supply disruption.

Supply shocks do not spontaneously generate inequality, but instead amplify the inequality already existing. The war in Iran did not choose its economic winners and losers; the ownership structure of the global fossil fuel industry did that. When we describe what follows simply as “inflation” or “market dynamics,” we are using neutral language to describe something that is, at its core, a transfer of resources from people who are suffering to people who are not.