With the Space-X IPO, there’s been a wave of inevitable stories about Elon Musk being the “world’s first trillionaire”. The grindset crowd has been excitedly telling us that this is the fruit of ambition and hard work, something for everyone to aspire to. Liberals are bemoaning the new reality of trillionaires ruining democratic politics worse than billionaires. Socialists and progressives have been reminding us of how Musk is, effectively, a welfare baby. Others have been rightly highlighting how this is, to varying degrees, all a grand fiction. This last group includes people across the economic spectrum. Youtuber Patrick Boyle, hardly an economic leftist, has been doing a great job calling attention to the massive red flags in this IPO and in Musk’s portfolio in general. What this last group gets right is that Musk is only a trillionaire on paper, and his wealth is as much if not more a grand fantasy than an economic reality. This fantasy reveals important facets of modern American capitalism, and how it has degenerated into a new era of radical subjectivity.

To begin with, it’s important to dig deeper in the nature of Musk’s wealth. Musk is a trillionaire through the market valuation of his assets. He owns a trillion dollars of stock in various companies … he does not have a trillion dollars in some bank account somewhere. Yet the high value of this stock is purely a product of (a) aggressive salesmanship and (b) constrained supply. A certain number of people want Space-X or Tesla stocks, Musk has most of those stocks, and there’s only so many on the market. This means that the market value of his assets is determined by the supply and demand mechanics of his shares, and by the way he’s sold his vision of a robotic, spacefaring anti-woke capitalism (fully automated luxury heteronormative space capitalism, if you will). If he actually wanted to buy a trillion-dollar palace, he’d have to liquidate his assets by selling his stocks, but if he sold all his stocks in one go the market would be flooded, their price would plummet, and he’d very quickly no longer be a trillionaire.

What Musk has done is salesmanship. He’s created this vision where Tesla is the future of the automobile (or, robotaxis and robo butlers) and Space-X is the future of space travel. If there’s one thing that a lot of venture capitalists and day traders share, it’s FOMO, fear of missing out. They were too young or too poor or too risk-averse to get in on the ground floor with Bitcoin, Facebook, Amazon, Standard Oil, or any other number of great historical investments. Had they done so, they would be fabulously wealthy today, and they don’t want to make the same mistake twice. So if Tesla and Space-X are the future, then the time to buy those shares is now. Thus, even if Tesla is not that profitable compared to, say, Toyota, its share price can be pumped up with the aspiration that some day be the world’s biggest robotics and car company. By selling himself as a generational genius, Musk can convince people that it will inevitably be more profitable than Toyota and GM combined, at least some day. This drives up demand for those shares way above what it would otherwise be. As the main holder of Tesla stock, this makes Musk far richer on paper since his wealth is determined by the value of his assets, not the profit of his businesses.

Of course, Tesla’s future is looking much rockier today. Chinese car makers are making cars that are cheaper but just as (if not more) technologically advanced than Tesla, and Chinese robotics companies are making massive strides while Tesla is paying dancers to dress up as robots. The Chinese state is heavily invested in these car companies, if not the outright owner of them (like FAW and SAIC), meaning they will continue to benefit from subsidies and economies of scale that Tesla can only dream of. If not for the massive tariffs on car imports from China, we’d be driving $20,000 BYDs.

This is probably why Musk has been so interested in getting Space-X out there. He needs investment in this company for it to survive, because it’s not profitable yet and needs billions of dollars to grow. In this way, Space-X is not unlike so many other tech firms, from Uber to Facebook, which were not profitable yet highly valued on the stock market. The old VC strategy was to throw a hundred million dollars at a dozen different companies, and if half failed it would be ok because at least one of them might be massively successful. After these companies had grown enough, they could go to the stock market for more investment since, even if they weren’r yet profitable, they at least had a viable business model. The difference between Uber and Space-X, though, is that Uber wasn’t needing hundreds of billions in investment. Its capital needs were relatively mild by comparison. The other difference is that Space-X is dependent on technology that is unproven and demand that doesn’t yet exist. Perhaps this is why they fudged the rules to get more retail investor money into Space-X.

At least Tesla is profitable, yet Space-X isn’t. It’s a huge agglomeration of Twitter (or, as Musk confusingly renamed it, “X”), Grok, Starlink, and a massive rocket department. Starlink, for all its faults, is profitable, but not trillion-dollar profitable. The real issue is the expensive R&D on rockets, where massively expensive vehicles routinely blow up on the launch pad or fall apart on re-entry. There is a reason why from the 1950s to the 1990s, government spending was the main driver of space exploration … its incredibly expensive, very risky, and not remotely profitable and won’t turn a real profit until we’re mining asteroids (even then, you need to compete with mining on our humble Terra, which of course is much, much, much cheaper and probably will be for the foreseeable future). It’s only worth nearly two trillion dollars because Musk has convinced enough investors that it is. What’s worse, it may soon be facing the same fate as Tesla, as China is racing ahead with its own state-subsidized model of space exploration with all the economies of scale and cheap, automated manufacturing systems that exist there. Even without China, satellite companies can go hire a budget Russian Soyuz to get their stuff into orbit once the war in Ukraine is over and the sanctions get lifted.

This gets at a flaw in modern Yankee capitalism, or at least the way people think about it and reflect on economic questions. Specifically, this is the mistaken view that value is a subjective category. The idea that capitalism is a system of subjective values contained in the mind of ambitious dreamers grinding away is what I call Fantasy Capitalism, an economic system driven mainly by dreams and aspirations about the future more than hard, concrete realities. In this view, the economic system is simply a matter of desires and the faith that technological change ensures those desires will be met. There is no real material constraint to how valuable a commodity is since its real value is found in our beliefs and aspirations.

This idea that value is subjective is a central plank of the modern culture of capitalism, and it has an intuitive truth to it. Consider the old question of diamonds and water. As Adam Smith pointed out, diamonds generally fetch a much higher price than water but are much less useful.

Nothing is more useful than water; but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.

If I am in a desert and I am thirsty, I will find water to be far more valuable than diamonds for obvious reasons. Yet in most other situations I will find diamonds to be far more valuable. Thus, I can probably make more money driving water trucks to remote Tuareg villages deep in the Sahara than I could selling diamonds to these same communities. Truths like these seem to justify the intuition that value is a subjective property. Water is subjectively valuable to the person in the desert even if its price is low elsewhere while most people around the world subjectively value diamonds much more, ergo value in general must be a subjective question.

In his famous opening chapter on the commodity fetish in Capital, Karl Marx points out that the exchange value of a thing cannot be found in any material properties of the thing.

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-bye lay special claim to critical acumen, find however that the use value of objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects.

Water is simply the chemical combination of hydrogen and oxygen, hopefully without too many pollutants adulterating it, while a diamond is simply a crystallized lattice of carbon. Nothing in that hydrogen, oxygen, or carbon can tell us how many diamonds we can trade for a liter of water or how many liters of water we can trade for a diamond. Thus, Marx does agree that there is no property in the chemical makeup or any other physical structure in the object that determines its value.

Both Smith and Marx share the idea that there are two types of value. There is the value of the thing as useful to us, and there is the value of the thing as something that can be exchanged for something else. Thus, the terms use value and exchange value. The use value of water is drinking, irrigating crops, cleaning cars, and cooling data centers, while the use value of diamonds are in jewelry and certain types of drill bits. In our society, exchange value is more abstract and is usually taken to be some price. However, for Marx the exchange value isn’t really the price but rather the center of gravity which price moves towards. Exchange value is, thus, a theoretical abstraction, albeit one with massive economic importance in a capitalist system. Smith’s idea of supply and demand captures the difference between price and exchange value, as the price of goods increases when the price is too low or decreases when the price is too high. The real exchange value is, at least in theory, where the supply curve and demand curve meet, but nobody ever actually knows precisely where they do. Thus, we never know exactly what the “real” exchange value of a thing is, but in a well-functioning market full of well-informed consumers the price ought to be close to it.

For Marx, the commodity is defined by the fact that it has both exchange value and use value. A merely useful thing isn’t necessarily a commodity; it only becomes a commodity once it’s useful properties motivate people to sell it on a market. The commodity fetish is the idea that, like some pagan idol, it is not only an object but something that has this mysterious property of exchange value too. In other words, the commodity has two overlapping essential properties, one we can observe in the thing (the use value) and the other which emerges only through social interaction in the marketplace (the exchange value). These two essences are inexorably linked but also distinct.

Demand for a good is driven by its use-value, so there obviously is a relationship between exchange value and use value. Most rational people won’t pay tons of money for something they don’t need. Yet this use alone doesn’t determine the exchange value of a thing. Air is unarguably the most immediately useful of all things, even more so than water (at least, suffocation kills you faster than thirst, as the proto-Hindu writers of the Upanishads noticed 3,000 years ago), but is free. It wouldn’t be free if it were scarce, but it requires no work to simply take a breath. Thus, it has no price or exchange value. Supply, therefore, also plays a role in determining exchange value, and supply is determined by scarcity. Scarcity, in turn, is determined by how hard it is to obtain … in other words, how much labor it requires to find, prepare for consumption, and bring to market. Since air requires no labor to bring to market, its exchange value is zero, while water is easy to bring to market but still requires some minimal amount of labor, so the exchange value is low. Diamonds requires some significant amount of labor to dig out of the earth and polish, and it requires some amount of training to be a jeweler, so its exchange value is incredibly high.

Of course, the labor required to bring it to market isn’t the only thing which makes it more scarce, as one can use monopolistic practices to constrain supply (looking at you DeBeers … diamonds aren’t that rare), but this is a market inefficiency. This artificial scarcity is what we would call rent-seeking, even if it isn’t obviously so, since one is effectively charging a rent for their ownership over resources that can be found in only so many places. Water in the desert might actually not be that valuable if there is a big oasis nearby, but if some clever tribesman owns the oasis he can charge rent to access it. Even if it takes little labor to access his water, its price will be determined by how rich or poor his customers are and much work it takes for hypothetical competitors to import water in trucks across the desert.

This, in a nutshell, captures the broad strokes of the labor theory of value shared by Smith and Marx. This view holds that the exchange value of a good is determined by the labor required to bring it to market. Sometimes this is misunderstood as arguing that a commodity is valued by how much work that specific thing took to create. So if one inefficient worker takes five hours to deliver a liter of water. Yet Marx’s argument is that its the average labor required to bring it to market, meaning the goods of one inefficient person isn’t intrinsically more valuable or one very efficient person isn’t intrinsically less valuable.

This labor theory of value has fallen into disuse thanks, in part, to mistaken readings like the one just mentioned. In its place, we have a more radically subjective theory of value. Value, in this view, is determined by the price which people pay, and the price people will pay for something is simply a subjective question. If Bob buys a can soda for $100, the value of that soda is $100 even if he could have bought it for $1. We’re all rational consumers, and our reason is subjective, so the value of the things we consume is determined subjectively. Thus, if Elon Musk sells 10% of his shares of Space-X for $170 billion, then his company is worth $1.7 trillion.

The subjective theory of value is shown in things like the rise of Bitcoin. It not clear what actual use bitcoin has beyond buying Mexican methamphetamine, illegal pornography, and other illicit goods. The best case I’ve heard is as an investment, but the idea that it is a good investment simply presupposes that other people in the future will give it even more subjective value than buyers are today. Thus, as long as there were people who subjectively valued Bitcoin, its price continued to go up. Yet as soon as these people ran out of money to throw at it, the price stopped going up.

The problem with this theory is that value is not subjective, or at least it’s not purely subjective. There are hard, material, objective constraints as well as subjective ones. While use does have some subjectivity to it (one guy might like a painting while another guy might not), its usually the objective properties of things which determines how useful they are. Returning to the example of water in the desert, this water is only expensive because of the objective fact that people die when they get too thirsty (and they suffer a lot before then). Thus, even though there are subjective elements in use value there are also hard material constraints. The idea that use value is purely subjective is a luxury of the rich who have effectively limitless resources, since they can pay whatever they want for whatever they feel like. For those of us with limited resources, we need to balance our subjective desires against each other as well as our hard material realities. So Elon Musk might have the luxury to believe that value is subjective, since he can go buy a statue for $1 million or $10 million depending on how much he likes it, but most of us must balance our material needs with one another and consider our resources in how we obtain it.

The labor theory of value brings in the other element of objectivity to value. How much work it takes to meet our desires and our needs determines how much of it exists on the market. This is an objective property, bringing together all the material realities of our globe and our limitations and capacities as human beings to work on material nature to meet our needs. This is the real origin of material scarcity.

Thus, the real value of Space-X depends not on how much someone on the stock market in June 2026 wants that share or how much he will pay for it, but how much use we get out of their rockets, how much human labor it takes to build, fuel, and pilot those rockets, and how many useful resources or ideas these rockets might bring to us in the longer term. Whatever Elon Musk and the buyers of the shares think its valued subjectively, that rocket will eventually be captured by the inexorable gravity of this real, objective constraint.

This gets us to Marx’s chapter in Volume 3 of Capital on fictitious capital. This chapter deals with the way investments are often valued very highly based on projections of future profits, yet those projections have no material justification. The great example are the many railroads built across the UK in the 1800s. These railroads were taken to be valuable because some had been highly profitable, but they required massive investments to buy the land, buy and lay the track, and buy and operate the locomotives. After the first tracks between big trade hubs were laid, new railroad companies were left laying tracks to nowhere in the hope they might turn a profit someday. Yet there simply was never enough demand for those routes to justify the massive investments. Consequently, even though these railroads were worth huge sums one day, once the debts were due their value collapsed. Their capital was fictitious, therefore, because it was never going to give a return on the massive investments required. This, in turn, caused some pretty severe depressions and recessions in Victorian England as investors lost tons of money hoping to see the returns that earlier railroad investors saw. Oops.

The 19th century was not Fantasy Capitalism because the railroads were valued for good reason. The investors did suffer FOMO, yes, but also saw how much money had been made by the first railroads. Thus, they were not investing merely on subjective dreams and hopes, but on concrete empirical evidence that these investments were sound. Their evidence was, unfortunately for them, incomplete as they often didn’t look at other relevant factors (like the fact that there was no demand for these specific rail routes), but there was evidence nonetheless. What distinguishes the current context is that the “evidence” isn’t the success of past railroads but mere dreams and hopes that Elon Musk has sold to the public. Where the railroads were, at least, proven pieces of infrastructure, now we’re investing in vaporware and the science fiction dream that we’ll be mining asteroids in a decade. We may well be mining asteroids at some point in the future, yes, but we have no clue yet how to do it economically and at scale or whether Space-X will still exist by the time we’ve figured that out.

Venture Capital has always operated with these fantasies, and it did work to bring about the first two Silicon Valley tech booms, and the first railroads before them. What we haven’t had is an economy so entirely centered on unproven and untested ideas, with so much tied up in things which may take decades to realize and where the engines of growth are experiments. Bezos, Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and so on became billionaires by creating something that worked and, if it wasn’t already profitable, could become profitable in time. They didn’t just claim to be a trillionaire one day on the hypothetical value of untested tech.

It’s not only Space-X though. OpenAI and Anthropic have their own IPOs coming up, with similarly massive valuations, and established businesses like Google (or, better, the parent company Alphabet) have seen their value skyrocket on hopes that “AI” will grow them even more. NVidia has seen similar growth … when the gold rush is going on, its good to be the pickaxe and shovel salesman. The big AI companies are operating at a loss or with low profits, and NVidia’s massive profitability entirely depends on them. This is surely more justified than Musk’s aspirational valuation, but this is also an obvious bubble. Ed Zitron has done some interesting work critiquing the

Why has this fantasy capitalism come into existence? Surely, there are some cultural conditions. Silicon Valley did normalize the idea of becoming massively wealthy on novel ideas. Defenders and apologists of our economic system turned to innovation as the real engine of capitalism, and the real creators of value. Their success seemed to prove the business model. This habituated people to believe in the visions of some wealthy man with a strange personality, bad social habits, and big ideas. The way Venture Capitalists were convinced Sam Bankman Fried was a visionary and not some goofy slacker because he was playing computer games during business calls is a great example. There’s also the content of science fiction itself, as the inventors and innovators of today grew up watching Star Trek, Alien, Star Wars, and so on. The idea of personal computing, artificial intelligence, asteroid mining, communications satellites, and even tablets were foreshadowed, in a sense, by our fiction.

Another problem is that the old engines of growth have tapped out, as it were. Politicians want a story to tell, investors want good investments, and workers want hope that their conditions will improve. Yet what big engines of growth do we have today? Presidents Obama, Biden, and Trump tried to keep at least some manufacturing in the US, with no big success. Most of the things we used to do well like cars, rockets, and computers can be made in China or other developing countries. We can’t boost home values without making it even harder for people to afford homes, and we can’t build lots of homes without tanking the investment egg of a ton of people. This emerges from an old puzzle that confounded economists, which was the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. To put it simply, as capitalist economies become more developed, profit rates have a tendency to go down. Revenues might go up, but competition and high costs for all the material capital eat this up. What’s worse, there are too few well-paying jobs to ensure a good consumer market. The economy becomes more and more devoted to simply sustaining it vast machinery of production and infrastructure.

The wild card is the potential of new technology that both expands the needs of consumers and also makes work more efficient, which boosts employment while still profiting the companies. The internet, personal computers, cellphones, automobiles, and so on all did this to some level. Today, even many working-class people in the developing world use phones to connect to the internet. Thus, the economy becomes more dependent on new technologies as quick fixes and simple solutions to our growing systemic crises. It becomes ever-more dependent on big bets, without yet understanding the wider consequences of these bets being successful (or unsuccessful) and without solid evidence that they will pay out.

This was sustainable when Twitter, Uber, and Facebook needed a few billion to get off the ground. Musk and the others are asking for hundreds of billions and are claiming to be worth over a trillion. It’s like the trope of Wiley Coyote running over thin air and not falling until he looks down. He doesn’t fall, in other words, until he becomes subjectively aware he’s got no ground underneath his feet. If he were only running a few meters, he might make it, but when running across a massive canyon there’s more time for the truth to be exposed. The stock market could run over a modest distance like Uber or Facebook, but could it make it across the figurative Grand Canyon of making asteroid mining profitable?

Elon Musk is not a real inventor, but he is a hell of a salesman. He’s convinced enough people that he’s got ground under his feet to keep going so far. Will Space-X’s rockets be like the solar roof tiles he said were ready for production (they have never entered the market)? Will it, or OpenAI, or Anthropic, or NVidia survive the next “market correction” (read, economic depression)? I don’t have a crystal ball, of course. Yet to work, it requires a massive and willful effort to ignore the hard, objective constraints like unprofitability, the momentous labor required to design and build affordable and reusable rocket systems, and so on. Tesla and Space-X will have to pay their debts eventually.

Gabriel Rockhill’s recent book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism has produced quite the stir among leftists and Marxist academics. The book targets the Frankfurt School thinkers primarily (with some shots taken also at the French post-structuralists here and there), accusing them of being unduly influenced by the US and West German state. This undue influence, Rockhill argues, lead to their works becoming part of the ideological war against the Soviet model and its emancipatory potential. This argument has produced considerable glee among old-school Marxist-Leninists who somewhat understandably resent the Frankfurt School version of Marxism being treated as de facto the only acceptable form of Marxism in Western Academia. Yet it has also produced equally understandable pushback from those academics who value the achievements of the Frankfurt School and who don’t treat one’s views of the USSR or PRC as a kind of litmus test on whether one is really a “Marxist”.

I will begin with the strengths of the book. Rockhill clearly did a considerable amount of research, combing over various government documents, personal letters, interviews, and other primary sources to make his point. The argument that the Frankfurt School was too hostile to the Eastern Bloc and friendly to the United States and West Germany (and even too “bourgeois” or “idealist”) is an old one, but at least Rockhill brought receipts to lay out his case. In this respect, it does provide a useful body of research for anyone interested in the connections between the US and West German governments and the Frankfurt School. It also does show that, whatever the Frankfurt School intended to be doing, they were effectively seen as a weapon against the Eastern Bloc by individuals within the Western establishment. This was already common knowledge, but at least Rockhill provides thorough research for anyone intending to build upon that point.

Certainly, Adorno’s disparagement of the Vietnamese independence struggle was misplaced. However ruthless they were, Adorno didn’t adequately consider the position thrust upon them by US and French imperialism. Adorno should have known better, and understood why Marxist-Leninism became the obvious alignment for Vietnamese nationalists. Adorno was an excellent critic of the forms of domination within the capitalist US and West Germany, but didn’t understand the mechanisms of this domination in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Marcuse was better on this point (as Rockhill acknowledges). The same can be said for Adorno and Horkheimer’s one-sided understanding of Arab nationalism as mere antisemitic authoritarianism, and not as a rational choice for Arabs asserting their own needs in the face of European and Israeli domination. They very clearly viewed the Arab-Israeli conflict through the lens of orientalist Jewish holocaust survivors, with the combination of myopia and trauma which such a standpoint entails. So Rockhill’s work does provide some interesting insights into how many in the Frankfurt School misread imperialism.

Yet as a work it’s beset by deep problems, not least of which is an entirely uncritical attitude towards “Actually Existing Socialism” (which is to say, all the Marxist-Leninist states). This allows him to sidestep all the reasons why the Frankfurt School thinkers might have been critical of the USSR and its allies in the first place. This creates the implication that their standpoint was motivated entirely by their connections to Western intelligence and an interest in demonizing the Soviet bloc. Never does Rockhill explore the content of their critiques. After all, it is just who paid the piper, but not what it was piping. Yet the absence of any consideration of the substance of these critiques does create the (almost certainly intentional) impression that their critiques were motivated by these funding streams and not any actual concerns on their part.

The first, and most basic problem of the book is its use of the term “Western Marxism”. By this, Rockhill really only means the Frankfurt School. Yet classically, the term is much broader and begins with Karl Korsch and Gyorgy Lukács. Yes, it includes the Frankfurt School but this is only one specific branch of the broader tradition. Rockhill doesn’t mention Korsch once, and his sparse references to Lukács don’t acknowledge him as an important part of the tradition either (one of the few is his old allegation that the Frankfurt School was “Grand Hotel Abyss”). Perhaps Rockhill is using the term more narrowly for some reason (he may get this from Losurdo, who I have yet to read), but he doesn’t explain that or why he thinks his conception is better or more useful. At least some acknowledgement of why he uses the term in this more narrow way would be expected in this kind of scholarship.

Like Lukács and Korsch, there is a surprising absence of the Francophone tradition. The French existentialists are only mentioned in passing. Althusser is absent, too, perhaps because he conflicts so much with the narrative Rockhill is building that Western Marxism is too cut off from actual working-class parties. Althusser was famously a leading intellectual of the French Communist Party. Though he had some disagreements with their leadership, he often did keep party discipline. Of course, these do have elements of the Western tradition Rockhill criticizes, in particular a greater interest in subjective themes like ideology, culture, language, and psychology. The Existentialists were incorporating Heidegger’s phenomenology, Nietzsche’s will to power, and Kierkegaard’s subjectivity, for instance, and all the French were into Freud. Yet they go largely ignored. Where he does talk about the French, it’s to criticize Foucault and Derrida which is odd because neither are a part of the Western Marxist tradition!

Where he does define the tradition, he does so in clearly partisan terms that sets it up as something to be opposed:

It is an ideological construct aimed at transforming the greatest theoretical weapon of class struggle from below into an ineffectual philosophical position that is accommodationist towards capitalism, and even imperialism (62)

If we define it this way, then yes it is surely a bad thing, but what if not every “Western Marxist” is accurately described in this way? What if even the Frankfurt School figures he focuses his ire on at least deserve a bit more nuance than he gives them? Wouldn’t it be fruitful to consider how they might have responded to this characterization on his part?

The biggest problem in the book is its strict Manicheanism. One is either a communist or an anticommunist, there is no between. A communist is one who supports “Actually Existing Socialism” or AES, which is to say the Soviet bloc and official communist parties, while anticommunists assert “Anything But Socialism” or ABS. What counts as support or condemnation isn’t exactly clear. It is surely true that Frankfurt School thinkers broadly didn’t like what they saw in the Soviet bloc, and Rockhill has plenty of quotes to show that. Yet we already knew that was the case. None of the Frankfurt School thinkers were seriously engaged with any effort to infiltrate and undermine the Soviet bloc, and as intellectuals they lacked any practical avenue to do that anyhow.

This Manicheanism is surely an oversimplification. Everyone ought to condemn the Khmer Rouge as a debased and degenerate party guilty of autogenocide, and it was surely correct for the Vietnamese Communists to invade and overthrow their government (one of the few cases of regime change we can all get behind). Yet is that me rejecting “AES” in favor of the corrupt capitalist oligarchs running Cambodia today? Are the Vietnamese communists now anticommunists for replacing the Khmer Rouge with a government that would evolve into the current Cambodian system? The Chinese evidently thought so, hence their punitive and abortive 1979 invasion of Vietnam. Are the Chinese anticommunists now for attacking Communist Vietnam? Are the Vietnamese Communists the anticommunists for attacking the Khmer Rouge, are the Chinese Communists the anticommunists for attacking Vietnam, or are they both anticommunists? We can play the same game with the Sino-Soviet clashes along the Amur and the Kazakh-Xinjiang border.

Surely, then, there must be more to being anticommunist than criticizing or opposing some country ruled by a Communist party. Rockhill doesn’t clarify or acknowledge the significance of the whole Sino-Soviet split, which is remarkable because this event deeply impacted Marxism across the world. To be fair, most of the Frankfurt School didn’t concern itself much with the split. Adorno didn’t look too favorably on either side of that divide, and though Marcuse had more sympathy for those third world communists, those fell on both sides of the split. Yet it is illustrative of a problem underpinning Rockhill’s book, which is that he doesn’t really concern himself with the content of the critique at all so much as there was a critique and the CIA happened to like it. This means his argument becomes, in effect, a kind of guilt by association where we do not need to pay much attention to its reasons because we can associate it with the big bad imperialists. Hence, Frankfurt School thinkers could make criticisms that at least rhymed with those levelled by the Soviets and Chinese against one another, but in the case of the Frankfurt School they demonstrate “anticommunism”.

Consider the question of “social imperialism”. Perhaps it is anticommunist to have called the Soviet Union “imperialist”1. This does show a break with Lenin’s definition of imperialism. Even if we take the Trotskyist position that the USSR was state capitalist, they weren’t exploiting Eastern Europe in the way the United States exploited (and still exploits) most of Latin America. Thus, surely it is a false equivalence, even a partisan misuse of language, for a Marxist to call the USSR imperialist. This must be good evidence that the Frankfurt School is “anticommunist”. Yet it was Mao who adopted the line that the USSR had become social imperialist! He objected to a lack of Soviet support for his state, and later the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia (as well as their attempts to govern the world socialist movement from Moscow). This split would metastasize to the point of Mao meeting with Nixon in the 1970s to align with the US against the USSR (perhaps more evidence that Mao is the real anticommunist here?)

In fact, this isn’t the only case where the Frankfurt School’s own criticisms of the Soviet model rhymed with those made by the People’s Republic of China. These criticisms were surely endogenous and largely came out of the PRC’s frustration with the USSR treating it as a junior partner, and not because Mao was reading Adorno and Marcuse. Yet nonetheless it’s significant that Mao and other Chinese communists saw some of the same issues with the Soviet model that the Frankfurt School thinkers saw.

Perhaps the most extreme example is the critique that the USSR, and by extension all the countries based on its model, had become too bureaucratic. The Frankfurt School thinkers saw the Soviet Union as a government where the workers were dominated by the bureaucracy the way that the bourgeoisie dominated workers in the US and Western Europe. This bureaucratic logic determined their social utility in instrumental terms, as a unit of labor with a need to be managed. This led to workers being directed by the state to meet production quotas under conditions directed by others and for alien goals they had no part in planning. Thus, the revolution had been taken over by an increasingly conservative bureaucracy with its own privileges and agendas. In the late 1960s, Mao saw similar problems gripping the Chinese government which is a big part of why he implemented the Cultural Revolution. Bureaucrats and party elites were purged, subject to struggle sessions, and “rusticated” (sent to the countryside to work with the peasants). Many were pushed to suicide even, as angry working-class Red Guards mobilized against the Chinese technocracy at the encouragement of Mao. As a young man, the current Chinese leader Xi Jinping was sent to the countryside to work with the peasants (and, based on those public statements I’ve seen translated into English, uses that time as evidence he’s a man of the people and not just some suit).

Thus, the Frankfurt School critiques of the USSR were not always so different from some found in the “Eastern Marxism” he praises so vociferously. Nor have the events since the death of the Frankfurt School thinkers done much to refute these critiques. The entire Soviet bloc collapsed, in part because the parties and bureaucracies that governed them lost credibility. They did not lose credibility due to the words of Frankfurt School theorists, nor even CIA meddling (though surely the CIA didn’t help matters). Rather, it was a decade and a half of economic stagnation, blatant failures like Chernobyl and the war in Afghanistan, systemic corruption like that of the Central Asian cotton industry, ecological failures like the drying of the Aral Sea, and most importantly the political alienation of the working class. It was also the fact that the tightly controlled Soviet model of politics offered few avenues for citizens to organize freely against those problems. By the end of it all, even many of the bureaucrats and party elites didn’t believe in the system anymore and became the first generation of oligarchs after the counterrevolution. In his only mention of this time period, Rockhill blames Yeltsin for a “coup”, but that’s leaving out a whole lot of backstory (and really only applies to Russia and to a lesser extent the rest of the USSR, not the rest of the Warsaw Pact). None of that is to say the fall of the USSR was good or was replaced by something better, just to say that enough Soviet citizens (both workers and political apparatchiks) lost faith in their system for it to collapse from within.

In fact, Rockhill seems entirely unconcerned with whether or not there were kernels of truth in criticisms of the Soviet model. He entirely ignores the Soviet crackdown on the East German uprising in 1952, the intervention in Hungary in 1956, and the intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. All three of these events were incredibly divisive among even those Communists who supported the USSR. All three events pitted the USSR not against Yankee imperialist Marines but large swaths of the working class of these countries (not to mention members of other classes). The second two ended in purges against significant portions of the Communist Party which the Soviets had deemed to be politically problematic. Despite being a committed Communist, Imre Nagy was hung, and the great “Western Marxist” philosopher Gyorgy Lukács was purged for being a part of Nagy’s government. Dubcek’s fate, at least, was more humane, simply being subject to a political purge alongside his supporters. While I could play the game I played earlier about who is the real anticommunist (is the USSR now anticommunist for invading and overthrowing a communist government?), I merely want to note that many Marxists who had previously supported the USSR saw these events and thought “this isn’t what I signed up for”. Many abandoned Marxism altogether, but many simply became heterodox Marxists like Trotskyists and later Maoists.

I certainly understand the strategic dilemma that motivated the Soviet intervention. They were concerned about a NATO first strike, and were worried that either Hungary or Czechoslovakia could serve as a highway for US tank divisions into the heart of their country or as an air route for Western bombers. They interpreted these events through that trauma of the Great Patriotic War which Khrushchev and Brezhnev had front row seats to as officers in the Red Army. They didn’t want a NATO Barbarossa but with nukes, and they owed it to their own people to make sure that could never happen again. They also interpreted NATO’s defensive moves as offensive (to say nothing of NATO’s offensive moves), much like NATO interpreted the Warsaw Pact’s defensive moves as offensive. Yet none of that nuance and context changes the fact that Soviet t-34s and t-55s shelled German, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak civilians (nay, even the workers!) because of conflicts between the Communist Parties themselves.

He also attacks Adorno and Horkheimer for turning a blind eye to the CIA meddling in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, while also railing against the oppression and stifling intellectual climate of the Soviet bloc.2 While this is certainly blameworthy, Rockhill overlooks that the CIA activity in Iran and Guatemala were clandestine and not proven until much later. However much we might say that the signs were all there of foreign meddling, and they were, its not like these actions were public knowledge at the time.

Rockhill’s attacks are fairly uncharitable, at least in his interpretation of their works. For instance, he mocks Adorno for suggesting that the German invasion of the USSR could be retroactively justified through the menace which “the East” posed to the West.3 Yet this is a pretty wild interpretation of what Adorno was saying in the text. Adorno wasn’t endorsing any such justification, rather noting the ideological function played by Bolshevism in Western reactionary authoritarianism. Moreover, Adorno is highlighting the irony that it was Germany’s own anti-Bolshevism which led to the Red Army bringing the same system into Central Europe. While Rockhill might still find some things to disagree with in his description of events, the broad strokes are simply objectively true (to this day, some in the far-right still use the Bolshevik model as a kind of retroactive justification of fascism, and the Warsaw Pact could only have come into being in a world where the USSR pushed the Third Reich out of Central Europe).

At times, it almost seems Rockhill thinks that the Frankfurt School should have gone to the USSR instead of USA when they fled the Nazis. Or, at least, that it might have been ok to go to the US while they were allied with the USSR, but they should have gone to the Soviet bloc after that. After all, then they wouldn’t have had to frame their ideas in anticommunist terms to secure funding like they did in the USA and West Germany. He even mocks them a bit for arguing that the Soviet bloc had a terrible track record on academic freedom when the US was so bad at this during the 1950s.4

Yet this is awfully naive. Let’s turn to another Western Marxist who Rockhill ignores, and who did move to the Soviet bloc. Ernst Bloch was a friend of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Gyorgy Lukács, and his idiosyncratic version of Marxism is as interesting as it is unique. Like the Frankfurt School thinkers, he had fled to the US to escape the holocaust. Unlike the Frankfurt School thinkers, Bloch moved to East Germany in the late 1940s to live in a Socialist country as a party member and to take up a job as a philosophy professor in Leipzig. Yet his heterodox Marxism led him to get purged from the party and the academy in the wake of events like the Hungary intervention, and he eventually moved to West Germany where he died. Surely, East Germany wasn’t the totalitarian hellscape US propaganda presented it as, but narrow party discipline and tight control over the intelligentsia made it difficult for even Marxist philosophers like Bloch to stray from the official line. We already saw how Lukács, too, was purged by the Hungarian party for similar reasons.

Or consider the domination of Lysenkoism across the Soviet world. Lysenko was a Soviet evolutionary biologist famous (or infamous, rather) for pushing questionable, quasi-Lamarkian theories against classical Darwinism (and the New Synthesis emerging at the time, which combined Darwinism with mutation and genetics). The problem with Lysenko was not that he had an alternative theory, but rather the way he leveraged his high status within the Soviet academy to sideline and silence people with “alternative” views. Mainstream Darwinism was sidelined because it was “reactionary,” where Lysenkoism presented plants and animals in quasi-collectivist terms with little evidence. Lysenko’s theories justified bad agrarian policies that stunted farm output at a time when the USSR desperately needed to boost its agricultural productivity. This was precisely the kind of politicized theorizing that the Frankfurt School balked at, where truth and falsehood was judged from a narrow standpoint by the party leadership.

Similar problems of politicization can be seen elsewhere. Many loyal communists were sent to gulags because of false allegations and political reasons during the 1930s. These individuals frequently retained their politics even while jailed by the state they served, and when released they achieved great things for the Soviet Union. For instance, the Soviet space program was the brainchild of Sergei Korolev, a rocket engineer who spent a few years in the gulag before his time inventing great things like the Soyuz rockets still in use today.

Rockhill likewise criticizes the US for fascistic policies like the Japanese internment, and rightly mocks the Frankfurt School thinkers for giving this a pass. As they say, scratch a liberal and find a fascist. Yet the Soviet Union had similar follies, as in the post-war context the country decided to move vast numbers of people around to alter demographics for political reasons. Germans had to leave what is today Western Poland, Tatars, Kalmyks, and Chechens were loaded onto trains and moved to Central Asia, and so on. All of these population transfers were cases of ethnic cleansing, and all came at a significant price for the groups in question. Internationalism is not a slogan but a critical principle for any socialist of the Marxist persuasion, and its one which extends to Tatars and Chechens just as much as Russians, Chinese, and Cubans.

Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and others looked at this intellectual and political atmosphere with disapproval. Yes, the US under McCarthyism was hardly free either. Communists were blacklisted and surveilled by the FBI, and even Marcuse was an object of suspicion (as Rockhill’s own sources show, even if those documents concluded there was nothing to worry about). Yet the point was that in the Soviet bloc even Communists and workers were treated with suspicion. Thus, it is not without reason that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse criticized the USSR and the Warsaw Pact states for stifling free expression.

Rockhill doesn’t address any of these issues, beyond gesturing at the difficult choices that AES states had to make to survive under the pressure of imperialism, underdevelopment, and wartime devastation. Rockhill abstracts from all these concrete problems, instead just vaguely gesturing to the challenges socialist societies faced due to imperialism and underdevelopment. Yes, the USSR faced serious challenges, but this fact doesn’t mean we ought to look on it with uncritical loyalty.

We should also reflect on why they became so pessimistic. The 1919 German working-class revolution was a failure, leaving its greatest thinker Rosa Luxemburg dead in a ditch alongside Karl Liebknecht and many of her comrades. After this, the Italian workers were defeated by Mussolini’s fascist blackshirts in the early 20s and the 1929 Great Depression also failed to produce a revolution. In fact, the Great Depression only seemed to fuel the spread of fascism from Italy to elsewhere, including their home in Germany. By the 1950s and 1960s, German and American workers were largely passive and accepting of the capitalist system, and many supported its worst elements like its various wars. Martin Luther King Jr, controversial when he was just fighting for Black Americans, became increasingly isolated when he began advocating for the poorest workers. The fact is that wages were rising and living conditions improving for most American and German workers at the time. A decent factory job in the Fordist system could support a family with a modest bungalow, convenient appliances, and a family automobile. Yes, the poorest workers still suffered terribly, especially those in agriculture, but the industrial proletariat was content. This was so for structural reasons, as capital could afford to pay rising wages which then was spent consuming their own goods in a (temporary) virtuous cycle. This is why Adorno was so pessimistic about the possibility of revolution. It seemed, at least for a time, that US bureaucrats and monopolists had figured out the social questions and problems of crisis that made socialism once seem inevitable (so much so that Baran and Sweezy were trying to rethink the whole critique of capital). Thus, Adorno came to see the working-class subject as too profoundly dominated intellectually by capital to ever become revolutionary again.

Of course, all this wasn’t to last, and by the late 1970s this system began to slowly unravel. We remember neoliberalism beginning with Reagan and Thatcher, but it really began with the oil shock of the mid 1970s and, later the Volcker shock under Jimmy Carter. The declining rate of profit had finally caught up with these masters of the corporate capitalist world, and it was time to squeeze the working class once more. Five decades later, we see re-emergent interest in socialism, both the reformist variety in Bernie Sanders, Jean Luc Melenchon, AMLO, Jeremy Corbyn, etc. and the more revolutionary variety. Yet the generation of Frankfurt School thinkers Rockhill focused on were long-dead by then.

It is undoubtedly true that even in the 1950s and 1960s there were problems causing harm to the poorest echelon of the working class (especially black workers) as well as people in other countries like Vietnam. This is why Marcuse came to emphasize these groups as potentially revolutionary subjects as opposed to the working class. Again, he wasn’t alone here, as the more radical sectors of the Maoists viewed the entirety of the Western working class as labor aristocracy benefitting from the labor of third world peons.

We might say the lack of radicalism on the part of the American working class was a product of Western Marxists abandoning them in favor of the students. Yet this is clearly wrongheaded, even idealist as a critique. On the contrary, there was still the good old CPUSA, the Black Panthers, a huge array of Trotskyist and Maoist sects, and many other organizations with more doctrinaire and “orthodox” Marxist positions. Outside of students and ethnic minorities, these smaller sects had no more success organizing the industrial proletariat of America and Germany than Marcuse and Adorno (and, as already established, Marcuse and Adorno weren’t even trying). Instead, these groups ended up spending most of their time criticizing one another in terms not dissimilar to the ones used by Rockhill against the Western Marxists. Sure, Western workers might not have been reading Eros and Civilization, but they were probably more likely to read that (or at least Marcuse’s interview with Playboy) than they were the collected works of Enver Hoxha. So many of these doctrinaire and orthodox Marxists ended up subsumed within the Democratic Party, like former Oakland Mayor Jean Quan (and a handful, like Eldrige Cleaver, in the Republican Party). It’s really no different from the Trotskyist-to-neoconservative pipeline which many Marxist-Leninists like to emphasize. To some extent, this impulse is understandable. Being a part of a tiny Marxist sect in the United States, whatever its ideological persuasion, is to commit oneself to political isolation and irrelevance. In this way, they ended up in an even more accommodationist place than Marcuse and Adorno, who at least never fully abandoned their Marxism however many caveats we might stick on it.

What’s ironic is that despite overlooking the actual conditions facing the Western proletariat between 1940 and 1980, Rockhill insists in the validity of Dialectical Historical Materialism over the more “subjective” approaches preferred by the Frankfurt School. Surely, it would be valuable to consider the conditions of the American and German workers and their level of militancy and class consciousness when assessing the pessimism of Adorno or Marcuse’s pivot to minorities and students. Instead, the only material condition Rockhill is interested in is the various funding links between the bourgeoisie, the intelligence agencies, and the Frankfurt School. It’s not that these links are unimportant, but that clearly a holistic picture must go beyond that and look at the actual political circumstances in the US, Germany, etc.

Finally, there are a few cases where the polemic edge of the text comes into conflict with its scholarship. For instance, at one point Rockhill accuses Zizek of supporting fascism after supporting ultra-leftism, but provides no quote or citation for this. What was this passage by Zizek? Was he complementing Bordiga before praising Mussolini’s train management? Rockhill doesn’t elaborate. Also, his concept of “intellectual commodity fetish” is put forward as a concept. He defines it as providing a theoretical concept free from the social and material conditions of the thinker. Yet there’s much more to the commodity fetish than concealing where it came from, and its not clear what this concept adds to the description or how it relates to Marx’s original concept. Thus, the concept comes off as polemics dressed up in more sophisticated theoretical language.

Ultimately, Rockhill’s book is perhaps the strongest version of an old critique of Marxist and Marxian theory west of the Iron Curtain, which is that it was corrupted by its past relationship to the OSS, pushed by governments interested in discrediting Marxist-Leninism, and too beholden to powers in the NATO bloc and overly critical of the eastern bloc. Rockhill’s project of revaluing the importance of the Soviet Bloc and its intellectual traditions is not without merit, and I am not the kind of sectarian who writes off a thinker just because they love Mao. Yet his book ultimately comes off as a sectarian polemic despite its ample scholarship. Rockhill is surely right that the Frankfurt School mistrust of the Soviet bloc should be treated critically, but there’s no need to marry this critique to an uncritical approach to the Soviet model.

As an aside, I feel the need to briefly apologize for the lack of accents on some of the letters, for example in Dubcek’s name. There’s a lot of different accents in the names mentioned here, and don’t know how to do accented letters on substack beyond copy-pasting.

Elon Musk has long been the purveyor of raw fantasy, selling future commodities that don’t exist yet as investment opportunities. Whether we’re talking about “bulletproof” Cybertruck glass, solar roof tiles, or getting people to Mars by the mid 2020s, he has always over-sold knowing full well that enough people want to believe in his promises and experience FOMO to mean he will enjoy tons of investment. Inasmuch as these investors do see profit since the values of their investment go up, this becomes a kind of grand Ponzi scheme built on the promises of revolutionary technologies with revolutionary profits at some future date. Of course, legally speaking it’s not a Ponzi scheme, but in practice that’s what it becomes when the meteoric growth of his business is built purely on investor confidence and not actual profits.

This process has reached its absurd conclusion with the Space-X IPO. Space-X has the revenues of a modest-size business. Its net revenue in 2025 was $18.7 billion, amounting to a negative profit of -$4.9 billion, and its assets total at $92.1 billion. It does sell real commodities, like transiting satellites to orbit and providing Starlink internet. Yet these are at best not enough to put it in the black. Yet it is putting forward a valuation of $1.8 trillion. For context, this is roughly twice the market capitalization of Walmart, a business with a revenue of $713 billion, a net income of nearly $20 billion, and total assets of $260 billion.

Of course, Space-X is free to think its worth whatever it is, there is no obligation for the market to reflect this self-valuation. It could simply ignore the stock as massively overvalued, driving down demand and then driving down the price. This is the normal response to absurdly overvalued enterprises, and one of the features that makes modern corporate capitalism work whatever faults it has.

The trick that Musk figured out is that if he could get his company listed in the S&P 500 with the self-valuation of Space-X, this means index funds are compelled to buy in. Index funds are a type of investment fund which invest across the board in a basket of companies. They reliably outperform most investment funds by simply taking the market average, and are a safer way to invest because they don’t leave anyone as a victim of bad investment decisions or a lack of individual knowledge. If one company turns out to be a bad investment, it evens out because you’re also invested in everyone else including those that perform better than expectations. This contrasts with, say, the investor that puts all their eggs in that Enron basket because hey, the company is very profitable. Since they’re a safe way to make reliable profit, index funds are a usual place for pension funds to park billions of dollars in people’s retirements.

Until recently, index funds had rules in place to make sure only proven businesses actually receive investment. Businesses couldn’t simply waltz into the S&P 500 with a manipulated or overly optimistic valuation because they had to establish that they had revenues (and preferably profits) that justify such valuation. To join, they needed to meet several requirements that differ between index providers. For instance, to get listed on the S&P 500 you need to be publicly traded for at least a year and be profitable for four consecutive quarters.

However, the various index fund providers like the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and others have been changing the rules to “streamline” the process whereby companies can be listed. The problem is that the index funds have to buy in when their index providers change the rules. They have to take the market average, and if your index fund tracks the S&P 500 then you only get the market average when you’re invested in all the companies on the S&P 500. So the index funds can’t decide that one of the companies looks too fishy to invest in. This would undermine the way index funds are mechanically locked into the market average instead of being subject to the judgement of fund managers. So Americans who think its a bad idea to invest in a company built on smoke and mirrors will see their retirement accounts getting plowed into Space-X anyways.

So why is Space-X valued so high if its assets and revenues are negligible and it isn’t even profitable? Elon Musk would tell you that this business is going to figuratively go to the moon because it is literally going to go to the moon. It is going to colonize the moon and set up mining bases before going to Mars and mine there. It will have orbital data centers. It will be mining asteroids for platinum and gold. All that sounds exciting and fun, and we might imagine a hypothetical corporation in 2060 making bank doing these things. The problem is that all this is purely hypothetical, based on a technology at best in the early testing stage (a testing stage that involves expensive rockets blowing up). It will take many, many billions and many, many years for any of these projects to pan out, and they will all face countless unknowns. What if Space-X’s space data centers hit one of Space-X’s defunct Starlink satellites? Space junk is a problem that will only get worse. What if a meteor strike knocks out the moon mining base’s launch pad? Since we don’t have any experience building moon bases, we’d need to learn as we go. This is all assuming Space-X actually lasts long enough to achieve these (real and metaphorical) moonshots.

Yet if Musk wants any chance of seeing these fantastical promises through, he will need billions of dollars of investment from rubes willing to throw money at a corporation that might not be profitable for a generation. There are, of course, a lot of rubes out there, but they don’t have enough money left over after plowing money into AI, data centers, crypto currency, and WeWork. Who needs rubes, though, if index funds are required to buy your absurdly overpriced shares?

Thus, Musk is able to turn his fantasies into real-world investment through a kind of bizarre and elaborate fraud on a trillion-dollar scale. Since he isn’t necessarily breaking any laws either, it’s not like he would reliably see justice if it all fails terribly. We are now entering the (hopefully short) age of fantasy capitalism, where businesses can sell science fiction as an investment opportunity and the world has to follow suit.

This normalization of fraud reveals the decadence of the modern capitalist system. Fictitious capital is something new and was an issue which Marx addressed in the third volume of Capital in his discussions on credit. The famous example in his own time were the railroads, as railroad companies were building new lines across the country on the promise that this new technology would be massively profitable. Yet many of the lines would never be as profitable as they needed to be to justify all this investment. This caused some of the first real stock market crises in history, as railroads tanked and took massive investors down with them. Yet these mistakes were learned from, albeit slowly, as the system put in place rules to make a repeat of these experiences less likely. The point of capital was to invest in real profitable ventures, and while risky investments have always been a thing they are there mainly for those willing to lose a bunch of money on a longshot. Venture capital rises and falls on this process, as they know most of their investments won’t pan out but the few that do will cover their losses.

The problem is that the financial elite have gamed the system to ensure that those who intentionally invest into “safe” funds are now subject to the risky investments that venture capitalists and other high-risk investors engage in. They have to do this in the case of Space X as there simply isn’t enough venture capital to keep it up, and even if there was they will look askance at a corporation that could take a generation of two to become actually profitable. The chance it actually makes it that long is vanishingly small.

Musk has successfully gamed the system to transmute fraud into a legal and above-the-board way to secure investment. He’s been doing this for years, but watering down the rules for index funds is taking this to a new level that exposes a bunch of people investing intentionally to avoid these kinds of problems. The rules that make capitalism work are being rewritten for his sake, and if Space-X ends up failing it will make retirees a bit poorer. If other businesses follow his lead, it could make them much poorer and make index funds a joke, a situation which would just privilege the biggest financial firms who stand to benefit from the resulting arbitrage.

A system might be somewhat irrational, self-contradictory, and prone to manipulation by elites. Yet that system, so long as it is not decadent, will put rules in place to limit these abuses. These rules ensure that even if the system doesn’t work for everyone, at least most people stand to gain some benefit if they play their cards right. Yes, we have a two tier justice system, for instance, but there are rules to make sure that the richest can’t abuse it too openly. You cannot openly bribe the president for a pardon, at least. Or, that used to be the case. Now we have a system where sex offenders can get their crimes pardoned simply by showing up to a protest on the President’s behalf, and where financial fraudsters get off scot free by giving a few millions to a Trump slush fund.

Thus, capitalism as a system might be deeply flawed, even in need of replacement with a better system, but so long as it can keep those rules in place it can ensure that its worst flaws don’t blow up in the faces of the middle or working class too often. The problem is that these same rules become inconvenient fetters for the most fabulously wealthy members of the bourgeoisie. It reduces their profit margins and possibility for investment, and if they’re rich and influential enough, they are incentivized to lobby to water down or eliminate these rules. The system becomes increasingly decadent and irrational as these avaricious individuals manipulate the system in various ways to improve their own standing.

The decadence of the system has only been growing as our rules have been eroded with remarkable ease by our unaccountable elites. We have gone from the Pelosis making millions on insider trading to the Trump family making billions on it. Insider trading may have happened before, but never at this scale as the basic ethics of the financial world had at least some legitimacy for the financial bourgeoisie. We have Trump, as just mentioned, openly selling pardons. We have “prediction markets” creating online casinos that avoid regulation by just not calling themselves casinos. None of these ethical rules protect the working class from exploitation or the environment from devastation, but they do at least constrain the worst tendencies of the financiers.

Under the right conditions, this decadence can produce reforms that return it to a more sustainable state of affairs. The decadence of the roaring 20s led to the great depression and the emergence of a Fordist New Deal where one no longer needed to be an elite to benefit from US capitalism. The danger is that it can also destroy the system altogether if the elite itself remains too decadent. I’m not very invested in the future of capitalism as an economic model, but the more decadent it becomes the more everyday people will see their savings and income put at risk by the arbitrary decisions of billionaires. The more we will see everyday people suffer because the richest men need new revenue streams and forms of investment to finance their fantasies. If we cannot put in place reasonable safeguards against the increasing decadence of our system, then we will only see most of us harmed. Even if we were to fix it, these problems would just re-emerge a generation or two later once our rules, once again, become too much of a fetter on the most powerful and least accountable of our financial elite. We might laugh at things like financial ethics, but these are the only safeguards we have against abuse.

I broadly think that the culture wars do become something of a distraction. Yet I think this doesn’t get to the root of the matter. Why are people so interested in these issues in the first place? The answer that they are simply deluded by elites pitting them against one another is naive at best. We ought to consider the possibility that there is more to it than that. I would propose that culture wars are a battle over social reproduction, and that people take sides in this battle because social reproduction is one of the few spheres where they really feel like they have some capacity to effectuate change. By diminishing labor unions and by treating economic problems first and foremost as technical issues as opposed to political ones, our system has done a great job at displacing the economy and political system as a field of struggle. In addition, the cultural dimension of social reproduction does have importance to people simply in virtue of the fact that the little leisure time they have is taken up by consuming movies, television shows, video games, and the like. Thus, it is rather natural that many today focus their attention to these cultural questions like whether or not is acceptable for a black woman to play Helen in a movie. Despite this, the terms of the culture war do remain an expression of our general social alienation, both from one another and from culture itself.

Culture today is dominated by the intellectual property of a handful of corporations. This has been true for a few generations now, but centralization has made this far more acute. Disney purchased most of Lucasfilm’s and Marvel’s IP, for instance, while Star Trek has become the domain of Paramount. Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and various other literary universes have likewise become the property of major studios. While Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad and the collected works of Shakespeare remain public domain, these same studios are effective gatekeepers over the versions of these stories we see.

This centralization has come alongside increasing diversity in the West, first through the migrations of various peoples “within” the Western world and then from without. It has also come alongside a civil rights movement which ensured de jure equality between these groups, at least for the most part. This has created an increasingly pluralistic market for consumer goods, with more expectations for representation. Likewise, writers, directors, actors, and other cultural workers have become more diverse, meaning there needs to be more roles open to minorities. On the other side, there is a downwardly mobile population with a slowly shrinking majority that is concerned that they no longer have a monopoly on cultural representation. They have been habituated over generations to, say, watch movies starring people who look like them playing characters who do too, acting out narratives that conform to their values and traditions. Charleton Heston starred in Ben Hur playing a Jewish character in a quintessentially Christian story, and this was peak 1950s Hollywood. About a decade later, we would have Kirk kissing Uhura on Star Trek, which was radical at the time as a biracial romance. A few decades later, we would have the first Disney animation set in the Arab world. A few decades after that, we would see people critiquing this same movie for its orientalist stereotypes.

We also saw increasing critique of the “problematic” tropes in media, from traditional gender roles to heteronormativity to orientalism to stupid racial stereotypes. The increasingly diverse writers of today went to college when these academic ideas were becoming more widespread, and so these norms have filtered down into popular culture. These writers are not unconcerned with economic issues, as the recent writers’ strike shows, but they also want to make movies that correspond to their values. We still have Ben Hur on streaming websites for those who want something more old fashioned, so why not make something new that reflects the changing times.

This brings us to the question of social reproduction. Movies are, first and foremost, commodities sold by big cultural capital, and the same can be said for books, television shows, computer games, and so on. All of these are produced as commodities for the purpose of profit. Yet all culture serves the function of (a) creating pleasure for the consumer and (b) habituating people into the values of our society. This second function is rarely intentional today, although this wasn’t always the case. Every organized religion crafted its art, ritual, liturgy, and performance at least in part to propagate its values. Today, it is rather an accident, at least from the point of view of film studios, as every movie (as intellectual capital) has the entelechy (which is to say, essential and defining purpose) of returning shareholder profit. Where they are interested in cultural values, it is only inasmuch as they do not want to alienate their customers. Rather, this value reproduction goes on largely under their noses as studios let writers express their own values within the constraints of their commercial agenda. The studio may be very interested in making a Christian movie to appeal to Christian consumers, but as long as the writers don’t violate that directive, they do have at least some sway to bring their moral and aesthetic values into the content of the production.

Liberalism broadly treats the reproduction of values as a secondary issue. John Rawls, the American liberal philosopher, argued that the liberal theory of justice makes no claims about the final ends people ought to pursue. Rather, liberalism was primarily just concerned with whether people were able to pursue their own ends fairly. Thus, it is not a matter of justice if movies express Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, or Hindu themes. The thing that Justice is concerned with is that people with these different belief systems are free to pursue what they think is good without oppressing each other. Rawls did not invent this concept himself, so much as make this already-existing position explicit (though we see similar ideas, for instance in Mills’s “marketplace of ideas”). Thus, liberalism pulls back from the question of what we ought to be producing in terms of reproducing people’s values. This might be for the better in another economic system (and Rawls was no “classic liberal” capitalist) but in capitalism it has the strange effect of commodifying our social reproduction. This, in turn, makes the issue of social reproduction one of consumption and market share. Social reproduction of values occurs only where and when there is a commercial profit, and the control which people have over which values get embedded in our cultural production is in what we buy. The outcome of this, unsurprisingly then, is a population which is prone to either “cancel” stuff that is too “problematic” or to loudly proclaim “go woke go broke” and boycott anything with the “wrong kind” of diversity. Consumer activism reigns ascendant.

Anxiety over mass-produced consumer culture doesn’t always lie on left-right axes, and often simply expresses the general alienation of the fans. Consider the culture of mainstream fandoms, be it Star Wars, Star Trek, or Lord of the Rings. Fans are constantly disappointed in the products which come out of mainstream IP owners as culture corporations try to make content that fits their theory of what the market wants. It’s almost like the attempt to focus-group culture leads to deeply unsatisfying products like the Star Wars sequels that leave many fans unenthused. The problem is that the corporations which they have no control over have a monopoly on defining the “canon”. If JJ Abrams decides that planet Vulcan is destroyed, then Vulcan is destroyed in the canon, even if that’s not what the fans want (though granted, a true Trekkie might say it was only destroyed in an alternate timeline). If he decides that Star Trek movies are now action movies, then Star Trek canonically becomes a militarized universe. These “facts of the matter” can be retconned, too, but this often makes things worse. If Disney decides that an entire universe worth of Star Wars novels are no longer canon, then they are no longer canon. It doesn’t matter much if many fans enjoyed this “canon”, all that matters is that the corporations now find this old material inconvenient for their current project.

The problem, simply put, is that fans have little else to build their identity around than their favorite intellectual property. Then, when this IP goes in a direction they don’t like because of whatever the owners of the IP think the market desires, their identity is challenged and undermined. They have no control or say over the very thing, therefore, which they build their personality around. This corporate domination of culture raises the stakes, and any “mistake” in writing, design, acting, directing, and so on becomes an almost existential problem for the fan. Luckily for me, I dodged this bullet by becoming disillusioned about my own favorite IP when Phantom Menace disappointed when I was in Middle School (in hindsight, many of the political themes aged well even if the Gungans and late 90s special effects remain corny). History and philosophy became more reliable (albeit less aesthetically exciting) things for me to delve into.

In the ancient world, this wasn’t the case. People often compare modern superheroes to the ancient heroes in mythology, but this is a terrible analogy. Modern superheroes are corporate IP, and as mentioned, their fates are determined by the decisions of corporate hierarchies with their own interests. Ancient heroes of mythology were rather nobodies’ property, where people were free to make up whatever myths they wanted. This is why we see different versions of the same myths, from Hesiod to Homer to the Greek Tragedians to Ovid. The Hindu Puranas contain numerous entirely contradictory myths. In one myth, Shiva cuts off the head of his son Ganesh after Ganesh (who Shiva did not know) tried to guard the entrance of his home. After this, the god had to replace his head with that of an elephant. In another, Ganesh loses his head when the unlucky Hindu god Shani views the baby (though in this myth it is also Shiva who gives him the head of an elephant). People were free to pick and choose the myths that reflect their own desires and tastes. The Abrahamic religions take the opposite approach, providing a single concrete unchanging canon. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam tell different stories, but each of these traditions are (for the most part) internally consistent. More importantly, they’re not subject to change based on perceived market demand. Abrahamic mythology rather tells people what to value, but this will be cultivated over generations (though interpretations may change). Despite the differences between polytheistic mythology and Abrahamic narratives, they share the feature that myth is not a fantasy sold to consumers by corporations which chase the market. Ancient mythology isn’t alienated from the believer because it is ever-present in an immediate sense. Abrahamic religion is alienated from the believer, but in a way which habituates the community of believers to accept its aesthetics, morals, and values over generations. Modern culture is alienated, but as an empty and vacuous commodity that never really satisfies.

Culture wars are not only fought in the space of corporate culture, but also in the space of educational curriculum. Whether sexual education is abstinence-only or teaches teenagers how to use condoms is of profound importance for people who want to reproduce certain values in the next generation. Whether we teach that Washington was a hero who liberated America from the British Empire or a cruel slave owner who used his slave’s teeth for dentures matters a great deal for those who wish to teach either patriotism or historical iconoclasm in the next generation. This battlefield goes back, of course, as we see how the Scopes Monkey Trial and the desegregation of education in the South became critical battles of their time.

The unfortunate effect of the culture wars over education is in pushing teachers and schools to avoid anything which will cause too much offense. Nobody wants angry parents showing up to school board meetings, whether it is parents angry that books with gay characters are in their school’s library or parents angry that their school glorified some figure from US history which committed some atrocity against a minority. Whether or not this outrage is sometimes justified, it often isn’t, and its cumulative effect is to discourage the teaching of anything good. Instead of challenging students with problematic yet historically important and aesthetically compelling novels like To Kill a Mockingbird or the plays of Shakespeare, many schools simply avoid controversy altogether. This is compounded by various state laws which enable parents to get books pulled if they complain, meaning you only need one or two irate parents to impose their values on the whole community.

Thus, we can understand why culture wars dominate political discourse in the US. Culture is the only thing which many people feel like they have any control over, especially in a world where people are once again less autonomous in their workplaces and where the political sphere is so heavily dominated by narrow interest groups. Yet nobody is ever fully satisfied by the cultural product, and it always appears as something inadequate. Their sense of control is largely illusory, as the old cultural majority sees its false sense of monopoly slipping away and as other old or emerging minorities alike are pandered to in ways they will at best only briefly find adequate. Writers and other cultural workers, too, find themselves increasingly competing with AI and subject to rapid turnover times and arbitrary demands by their bosses. Even the bosses find a market increasingly hard to satisfy. The education sector also suffers as teachers, too, are subject to constant curriculum changes and limitations on what they can teach thanks to the conflicting sensitivity of parents. Even academics are seeing increasing limitations on academic freedom, as culture war battles increasingly intrude on the academy.

Yes, culture wars are a distraction from the deeper systemic problems, at least in political terms. Yet they are also a symptom of these same systemic problems. Perhaps it will be easier to confront the culture war and overcome its divisive political ramifications if we better understand its social and economic origins, and the rational kernels that motivate its various factions. This will work better than simply berating people for caring about these issues, and we can focus instead on the harmful effects of climate change, economic exploitation, and the increasing decadence and corruption of our political system. Fixing these issues won’t eliminate all the issues of social reproduction raised during culture wars, but they may lower the stakes.

Rarely have innovators, industrialists, and magnates like us had countless acres of undeveloped public land available for them right at the heart of greatest metropolises.

Instead, Carnegie had to go to Pittsburg and Ford had to go to Detroit to find homes to realize their dreams.

Yet right here, right now, our data center buildout has a chance to bring the opportunity of a lifetime to the people of New York and San Francisco.

This industrial development will bring the jobs of the future to our youth, slaving away as baristas and Uber drivers. Why pour coffee when you can walk the halls of the next industrial revolution, overseeing countless CPUs humming along?

Instead of taking their jobs, AI will instead give them their jobs as they maintain vast racks of our CPUs. In fact, they will have the opportunity to become investors and entrepreneurs themselves by buying into the many crypto currencies supported by our data centers.

Yet as we speak, NIMBY residents are pushing their city councilors to reject these critically important developments.

These city councilors are too scared to stand up to these privileged residents trying to pull up the ladder behind them, all to protect hundreds of acres of unused land.

They think that having a place to walk their dog, smoke pot, and enjoy a picnic with their family outweighs the nearly 90 jobs that maintaining, patrolling these data centers will bring!

Opponents are concerned with proposals that call for bulldozing important cultural institutions like the DeYoung Museum, the Legion of Honor, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Yet they really ought to check.

their.

privilege.

The art contained in that museum is only available to San Franciscans and New Yorkers, and those with the free time and money to come to the cities.

Yet the data center we will build will help people across the globe generate their own art using innovative new systems like Sora and Claude.

With the technology powered by our data centers, you won’t need to be lucky enough to be in a big metropolis to see the classics. You will be able to make the classics yourself.

The fact is that these tracts of land provide little to the local GDP whereas our data centers will add billions. Currently, the only “profitable” businesses are the museums we just mentioned and a few ice cream stands and boat rentals.

Our proposal will replace these unprofitable and obsolete businesses with compute, the industrial commodity of tomorrow.

The current communist mayor of New York even had the gall to complain about the lost opportunities in free air and green space. Sorry, what do squirrels and a few trees offer our economy?

Some say that these data centers will be obsolete themselves in a few years as better CPUs will be available by then.

This is all true, which is why we have already mapped out new data centers to get built out in 2030 in other undeveloped places like Crater Lake, which has a huge source of available freshwater and geothermal energy. The industry of today pays for the development of tomorrow, this is the basics of capitalism. Why hold back progress?

Yet more are concerned with the water supply in their cities. We have already accounted for this in our plans and estimate that using the water from the Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis reservoir and that which is currently consumed by duck ponds, we can account for a significant portion of water use.

Moreover, our proposals to construct desalination plants in the derelict Sutro Bathhouse in San Francisco and Riverside Park in New York City should provide yet more water. With the addition of these sources, we estimate that water bills for residents will only increase at most 25%!

Others complain about potential noise pollution, citing the complaints of people who live near data centers elsewhere.

This is absolute nonsense spread by scaremongers utilizing woke social media outlets to spread propaganda. Consultations with ChatGPT has confirmed to us that these loud noise reports are exaggerated, and we ought not believe random videos we see on Tik Tok when it was founded by the Communist Party of China!

Have any of the readers actually driven out to one of these data centers to check themselves, or do they just believe everything they see on the internet?

In any case, there is considerable scientific research showing that white noise helps people to sleep better. The fact is, these kinds of bad-faith arguments rely on obvious distortions to spread panic among people who simply don’t know any better.

Some online have attempted to draw the most absurd and slanderous false equivalence between the luddite NIMBYs blocking data center development in New York and San Francisco to our own activism against attempts to build apartments for low income residents near our homes in Woodside, Marin, Malibu, the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Palm Jumeira in Dubai, Carmel, Napa Valley, Kengsington Gardens, Clearwater, Little St. James, Jackson Hole, and Palm Beach.

These are entirely different situations.

Where the NIMBY luddite crowd wants to protect some trees, empty fields, footpaths, duck ponds, and wildlife, we were working to protect the intangible heritage and character of these timeless communities.

They shout things at us like “You’re just a greedy ghoul who doesn’t want housing for the poor,” “Why do you care more about property values than housing?” and “You look like an egg”. Totally unfair characterizations.

Imagine for a moment, you’ve just gotten off your jet after an exhausting series of business meetings, and all you can think about when the driver picks you up is relaxing on your patio to enjoy the sunset. Then you get home, and before you even get out of the car and get to your door there’s some junkie bothering you for money, or some high teenager grinding on the curb, or some cheap car blasting strange music.

Great minds just can’t innovate in those kinds of conditions.

Moreover, vast sums of wealth are concentrated in these neighborhoods, and devaluing the real estate there would erase billions from the economy.

Those hoping to build apartments in such communities are economic arsonists hoping to destroy the fruits of our labor. Meanwhile, those like us hoping to build data centers in our big cities are economic genies who bring the gift of employment to university graduates drowning in debt.

The time is ripe to bring abundance to America. We have constrained the freedom of money for far, far too long.

We hope the city councils do what is right and vote the future.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the co-authors, and do not express the editorial commitments of Sam Badger

There’s a classic narrative about Greek philosophy shared by those who emphasize the importance of Western thought as a distinctive and separate tradition and those who reject eurocentrism as a “problematic” political project that must be overturned. This narrative holds that the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, were intellectually insular and rejected ideas from non-Greeks. The non-Greeks were seen as barbarians with barbarian governments, and categorically beneath Greek society. This is reflected in Aristotle’s Politics when he calls non-Hellenes slavish due to their culture and climate. Aristotle, of course, is (alongside his teacher Plato and with a boost from the pre-socratics) the originator of the Western intellectual tradition (hence why the Medievals called him “the Philosopher”). One variant of this narrative is that Greek thought was basically better, and the inspiration for Western notions of Republican governance. Another variant is that there was influence from outside Greece, but this was downplayed or hidden by the Greeks or by later European intellectuals. Yet if we read Aristotle’s Politics, we see him explicitly praise Carthage as a uniquely virtuous and well-ordered Republic. As much as he generally preferred Greek customs and found them to be closest to virtue, he also thought that the Phoenician city-state had a better constitution than Athens and even Sparta.

In fact, if we look at Greek mythology and philosophy we see a lot of exchange between the Greeks and Phoenicians going back well before Aristotle. The Phoenicians were a Semitic, Canaanite people who lived in what is today Lebanon, Syria (particularly Latakia), and parts of Palestine/Israel. They lived in city-states not unlike the Greeks, many of which became the most famous cities of Lebanon today like Tyre and Beirut. Their economy was mercantile, and their merchants, shipbuilders, and sailors were famous across the Mediterranean. The Persian navy was dominated by the Phoenicians, who had earlier probably invented the heavy bireme war galley (these would later be expanded into the more famous triremes and other larger ships). They also gave us our alphabet!

There had long been connections between the Greeks and Phoenicians, as both were mercantile, trading people clustered along the coast. Naturally, much of their trade was with one another. Though the Semitic paganism of the Phoenicians was very different from the Greek, they did influence each other (including their aforementioned alphabet).

The Greek hero Cadmus was, in fact, a Phoenician. In his famous myth, he sailed away from Phoenicia when Zeus kidnapped his sister Europa. On his way to find her, he met Harmonia (who he would later marry), before working his way to Greece to consult the Oracle of Delphi on how to find his sister. The Oracle told him that he should found a new city instead of continuing on his quest. He would know where to build it by following a sacred cow and setting the foundations where it rested. Once it stopped, he decided to sacrifice the cow and sent some companions to a nearby spring. As was typical at the time, a dragon sprung from the spring, attacking and slaying his companions. Cadmus then slew the dragon, and the Goddess Athena told him to plant the teeth from the dragon’s mouth. He planted them in a field, and before long, the teeth sprouted into a small army of mighty warriors. Unable to defeat this army by himself, Cadmus hid nearby and threw a rock into the crowd. When the rock hit one of the warriors in the head, the unlucky warrior thought he was under attack by his fellows. A general melee broke out, until all but five of the warriors had slain one another. Once the bloodshed was over, Cadmus emerged from hiding and gave the remaining warriors the opportunity to become the first citizens of the new city. They agreed and became the founding nobility of the great city-state of Thebes with Cadmus as their king and Harmonia as their queen.

We can see then that the Greeks were familiar enough with the Phoenicians to credit them with the founding of one of their greatest cities. There may have been truth to the story, even. Maybe not the dragon part, or the warriors sprouting from the earth part, but the bit about a Phoenician immigrant building the great city. If true, it would speak to the antiquity of the exchanges between these people. Whether true or false, the myth shows how far back the Greco-Phoenician connection went.

Like the Greek city-states, some Phoenician city-states eventually became Republics. Also like the Greeks, they were largely oligarchic in character, meaning the wealthiest families largely dominated the political system. Thus, the Phonecians adopted the Polis as their political model just Athens and Sparta, instead of becoming powerful, imperial monarchies spanning many cities like Persia, Egypt, and Macedonia.

The Phoenicians did not stay put in the Levant, and many sailed West to North Africa where they founded cities like Carthage (Qart Hadsh in their language), Utica, and Tunis (the city today extends to the ruins of Carthage and the current town of the same name). Some of their cities were founded as far away as Spain and Morocco. Carthage was founded in the 9th century by the semi-mythic queen Dido, famous in Roman mythology as the lover of the Trojan Aeneas (who later went to Italy and played a part in founding Rome). After some civil unrest in the 6th century, Carthage became a Republic at roughly the same time that Athens did, and decades before Rome did. Their Republic was governed by two elected Shofets (not unlike the Roman Consuls, which is perhaps where the Romans got the idea), had an upper house of 30 elite officials (not unlike the Roman senate), and had a tribunal of 104 judges. Though these offices were drawn from the wealthy land-owning aristocracy and the merchant class, they also had popular assemblies of all citizens which made many if not most civic decisions. Moreover, unlike the Roman Consuls, their Republic wisely denied the Shofets military power which prevented situations like the coup of Julius Caesar.

Perhaps the most well-known Shofet was Hannibal Barca, famous for spending nearly two decades ravaging Roman Italy. After their defeat in the Second Punic War, Hannibal was tasked with rebuilding the city. He restored it to its wealth and opulence, rebuilt its military, and expanded democratic institutions. In fact, he was so successful and popular that the Romans demanded his removal out of fear that he would restore their old rival to the point where the Carthaginians could menace them again!

The city was also well-known for its philosophical achievements, although most of these are lost thanks to the Roman devastation of their city in the third Punic War. A Carthaginian even became the head of Plato’s Academy at one point, and their texts on agronomics became the foundation of Roman agriculture. They also explored the Western coast of Africa and sailed up to Ireland and Britain.

Decades before the Second Punic War and the exploits of Hannibal, Aristotle praised their model of government in his Politics. Despite the Hellenic chauvinism ascribed to Aristotle (not entirely without justification), he ranked Carthage as a better-ordered constitution than even any of the Greek ones. Aristotle thought that Democracy as mob rule, Oligarchy, and Tyranny were the most dangerous forms of government. Democracy as mob rule meant that rulership devolved to the lowest common denominator and would therefore tend to be vicious and prone to dangerous demagogues. Oligarchy, on the other hand, meant rule by the rich which meant the state would be dominated both by their avarice and by their feuds. Tyranny, of course, is dangerous for self-evident reasons (Aristotle would have been keenly aware of how his teacher Plato suffered all kinds of indignities when he went to the Greek city-state of Syracuse to teach virtue to its tyrants and failed to do so).

Opposed to these models of bad government were aristocracies, or the rule of the virtuous elite, monarchies, by which he specifically meant rule by a virtuous king, and republics with democratic input but strong checks and balances by the wealthier, more educated classes. What was most important for Aristotle is that the virtuous elite should be empowered to limit the avarice of the wealthiest citizens and the passions of the Hoi Polloi, By today’s standard, Aristotle’s politics is remarkably conservative and fearful of popular rule, but this is somewhat unfair. Aristotle did think democratic input was important, he just feared a mob rule which empowered the most ignorant sectors of the public. This was a time where few citizens had the time, wealth, and freedom to study much about foreign affairs, architecture, or civil engineering. There were no newspapers and few books, and anyway most people were illiterate. Even the elite rarely read and relied on literate scribes and slaves to read for them. Thus, it was naive to expect the masses to really master the knowledge requisite to govern well. It was still important for the masses to have their needs met and their grievances addressed, meaning some democratic institutions were important. Also, despite his belief in slavery, aristocracy, and at least some inequality, Aristotle did also advocate wealth redistribution and the abolition of poverty. Thus, some democracy would make a city more virtuous, but too much would lead it down the road of chaos and civil strife.

Aristotle didn’t think any existing government lived up to these ideals, but he also saw it as difficult to create a constitution that did. He did, however, think the Carthaginians had come closest of any ancient civilization he was aware of. He particularly admired their robust checks and balances. As Thornton Lockwood states, “Aristotle characterizes Carthage as a polis in which both the people and the wealthy consent to a dual or hybrid criterion of rule, namely a mix of excellence and wealth” (Lockwood, 196). The people did have input through their assemblies, but this input was constrained by the most knowledgeable members of society. The wealthy elite, on the other hand, could guide the decision-making but were constrained since they lacked a monopoly on power. Thus, he praises their government for its excellent institutions:

The Carthaginians are also considered to have an excellent form of government, which differs from that of any other state in several respects, though it is in some very like the Lacedaemonian. Indeed, all three states- the Lacedaemonian, the Cretan, and the Carthaginian- nearly resemble one another, and are very different from any others. Many of the Carthaginian institutions are excellent The superiority of their constitution is proved by the fact that the common people remain loyal to the constitution the Carthaginians have never had any rebellion worth speaking of, and have never been under the rule of a tyrant.

This doesn’t mean their political system was perfect, of course. Aristotle criticized it for granting too much power to the wealthy, in particularly the merchant elite. The city was famous for its fabulously wealthy merchant families, and he thought the citizens of the city were too quick to confuse wealth for virtue. He also criticized their willingness to give the same person multiple offices, saying “one business is better done by one man”. Yet he also praises their care for their poor through redistributing the wealth of the merchant class, including the poor in democratic distribution of wealth, and through creating new colonies across the Mediterranean for the poor to find new opportunities in.

Thus, we see that Aristotle, despite being a Greek chauvinist, in fact looked to a Semitic city in Africa to provide a model for politics. Nor was Aristotle the only one, as his Athenian contemporary Isocrates also praised Carthage as having the best constitution alongside Sparta. This city was engaged in a constant process of intellectual, cultural, and political exchange with both the Greek and Latin worlds, although the Romans might have been keen to downplay this after their three wars with Carthage culminating in the genocide against the city (hence why the Roman Republic was founded later and resembles theirs, though we do not discuss any influence from it on the Roman constitution). In fact, Aristotle entirely ignores the Romans as irrelevant, not mentioning them at all in his treatise.

Alongside the myth of Cadmus, this reveals a healthy intellectual exchange between Greek and Levantine society and shows that the Greeks did not have any shame in this link. On the contrary, though the Greeks certainly saw Celts, Germans, Thracians, and other European peoples as savage barbarians, they admired the Egyptians, Persians, and Phoenicians. They did see the Egyptians and Persians as civilized barbarians dominated by a tyrannical king, and so were unfree in a way which the Greeks themselves were not. Thus, they might have admired these people’s intellectual achievements (and, in the case of Egypt, their antiquity … the pyramids of Giza were older in the time of Aristotle than Aristotle’s writings are today!) but still saw them as flawed. Yet the Phoenician people were free like them and should be admired as such. The Greeks could learn from them, too, even in the field of politics.

This shows how the narrative popular today that democracy and republican governance was a strictly Greek invention was not only false, but not even something the Greeks themselves thought. Rather, they developed alongside their Levantine trading partners, and popular governance has as much antiquity in Lebanon, Tunisia, and Algeria as it does Greece and Italy.

We’ve already had to remind ourselves that Aristotle was transmitted to Western Europe via Ibn Rushd (or, as the Catholics latinized his name, Averroes), the Spanish Muslim philosopher without whom St Thomas Aquinas could not have come up with his grand synthesis of Aristotelianism and Catholicism. The Sephardic Jewish philosopher Maimonides had, likewise, synthesized Judaism with Aristotelianism. Before Ibn Rushd’s commentary on Aristotle was translated into Latin, the great Greek thinker had been largely lost to the Latin-speaking world. The theological school of Thomism emerged out of Aquinas’s critical engagements with these Islamo-Aristotelian traditions, and this set the stage for the great scientific, artistic, and political revolutions of the Renaissance. Thus, the whole notion of a Western tradition split off from the East is a later invention. What Aristotle’s writing on Carthage reminds us of is that Aristotle himself was engaging with the ideas of “the orient”. In fact, he saw “the orient” as quite familiar and would have found it strange that he and his teacher Plato were credited with founding a distinctly “European” intellectual tradition. On the contrary, he was far more positive towards those Semitic city-states than the trouser-wearing, illiterate, and heavily tattooed Celts, the Wotan-worshipping and forest-dwelling German tribesmen, or even the militaristic Romans.

As well as challenging the naïve Eurocentric vision that aims to construct a distinctly “Western” tradition, though, this also challenges the ultimately ahistorical view that all Greek thinkers rejected everything foreign. This view traces Eurocentric bigotry back to the Greeks, and blames Western racism, slavery, patriarchy, and all sorts of other ills on the Greeks. The Greeks had their prejudices about non-Greeks, though Greek philosophers like Aristotle generally attributed their flawed nature to the climate. The Celts and Germans came from a cold country and the Egyptians a hot country, which changed their nature in unfortunate ways, but the Levant and Tunisia were similar to Greece. They also thought civilizations ought to center on local governments through city-states, the polis, instead of in large Empires or small tribes, though the Phoenicians lived this way too. This mutual respect goes back centuries before Aristotle, as the myth of Cadmus shows us.

Europe surely has distinct traditions from Africa and the Middle East. There have always been linguistic, religious, and cultural barriers between them to say nothing of the geographic barriers. Yet there have always been conversations between these spheres, and the idea that there was ever a discrete Western tradition that operated independently of its neighbors has never been true. It’s high time to stop reading contemporary culture wars and chauvinistic politics into the ancients like Aristotle who had their own agendas, prejudices, and admirations.

Source:

Lockwood, Thornton, “Carthage: Aristotle’s Best (Non-Greek) Constitution?” in Foreign Influences: The Circulation of Knowledge in Antiquity (2024)

Aristotle, Politics translation available on The Internet Classics Archive | Politics by Aristotle (this is an open source version, there are contemporary translations I would recommend before using this, but it is easier to copy)

Before contact with the Spaniards, indigenous people across the coasts of the US built gigantic shellmounds with the refuse generated by their shellfish-based diets. Over the many generations, these shellmounds grew into steep-sloped monuments along the coast and began to serve as ritual and political centers of their communities. Rising up from the coastal wetlands like the pyramids built by their distant Mesoamerican cousins, they marked the history of these peoples in the very geography of the land. After the famine, war, and displacement brought by the Spanish and later the US, many of their builders ceased to exist and those which didn’t were banished from their former homes. Their mounds remained, and though they were increasingly overgrown with plants it didn’t take much digging for archaeologists to expose their real history. The remnants of these communities knew what they were and valued them as monumental reminders of their ancestors, and the deep history of their presence in the land. Historians, archaeologists, and other academics valued them as objects of study. Sometimes, the descendants of the colonists valued them too. Yet municipal governments, developers, and the owners of the land saw no value in them. Thus, city governments like that of Emeryville, California made the choice to bulldoze or pave over them to build commercial and residential units. The gigantic shellmound in Emeryville was already partially destroyed due to historical industrial exploitation and development, but this damage was compounded by yet more development in the past few decades. The remains of tribespeople buried within them were unceremoniously unearthed and shipped off to universities for study. The vanishingly small number of people who even knew about let alone really cared about these monuments were irrelevant when weighed against the political demands of capital and the possibility of attracting new tenants. The only visible memory of the gigantic shellmound at Emeryville is the name of the street bringing customers to the mall built on its ruins.

During the Civil War, General Lee’s Confederate Army of Virginia marched through Maryland into Pennsylvania, before being cut off by General Meade’s Army of the Potomac. They met in a humble town in Southern Pennsylvania, with the Army of the Potomac fortifying along the partially forested bluffs. Lee’s army would smash its head against Meade’s over three days, before he ordered General Pickett to charge uphill against entrenched Union positions. Pickett’s bloody defeat finally decided this engagement where tens of thousands of men from both sides were killed or wounded. The battle was not the only important Union victory that year, yet it has been since remembered as the decisive engagement of the whole conflict. Since then, the battlefield in Gettysburg has become preserved as a National Park and is today treated as hallowed ground. Through this park, the historical memory of the events and the courage and sacrifice of those who fought there can be reproduced in new generations. From those who celebrate the memory of the Union to those obsessed with the Lost Cause myth, Gettysburg remains one of the most historically significant places for the Republic. The thought of paving it over and building condominiums, hotels, and malls would be sacrilegious, although currently only roughly half of the battleground is effectively preserved.

It is understandable that US citizens would want the battlefield to be preserved. It plays a clear function in the reproduction of the Yankee and the Dixie alike, and its status as a focal point in American history is undeniable. The name “Gettysburg” resonates through the culture, and it has spawned countless books, documentaries, reenactments, movies, television shows, etcetera. Yet it’s worth asking why the shellmounds are not shown the same regard. Though it’s been impossible to preserve the entirety of the battlefield thus far, much of it remains protected whereas most of the shellmounds have been largely destroyed and built over. The events of Gettysburg took place over only a few days, although a few months later Abraham Lincoln would make his famous address at the cemetery built for the Union casualties there. The shellmounds, on the other hand, were inhabited for centuries if not millennia. Thousands of people also lived and died in and around these monuments too, and over a much longer timespan.

The preservation of indigenous cultural sites has always been a struggle in the United States. Some of the giant earthen pyramids in Cahokia were preserved, but only after many others were simply bulldozed. Mesa Verde, Bandelier, and many other proto-Puebloan sites were preserved too, but these are remote ruins hidden deep in rugged canyons. Some shellmounds in Florida and California were lucky enough to be preserved, but the vast majority were stripped of material to use for construction or fertilizer before whatever was left got paved over and buried under development. Where the Union soldiers who died in Gettysburg were honored in the cemetery there, the bones of the Ohlone and other monument builders in the United States ended up in the cabinets of various anthropology departments.

Similarly, the Trump administration’s construction crews blasted through multiple sites of cultural importance to Native Americans so they could build their border wall. Most recently, they demolished a chunk of a 1,000-year-old and nearly 300-foot-long etching in the desert in the land of the O’odham people, a nation cut in half by the US-Mexico border. Though the federal government is supposed to avoid destroying such culturally important native sites by law, they have simply been waiving these regulations without regard to the tribal nations that hold them sacred. The historical monuments of these people have been replaced by a monument to American arrogance and fear. To be fair, Trump may just be expressing the philistinism of so many developers, as he also bulldozed a wing of the White House to build a tacky and garish ballroom, but it is notable that the ballroom construction has generated far more controversy than his demolition of indigenous heritage.

Obviously there will be many Native Americans who do not care for these artifacts of their ancestors, just like there are certainly many Americans who do not care if we put a gigantic data center in the middle of the Gettysburg battlefield. There are many others, though, who clearly do care and want these sites to be preserved for posterity. Just like the United States utilizes Gettysburg to reproduce its own national narrative, there are those who likewise want to reproduce their culture and honor their ancestors through these indigenous sites.

This is not only a problem within the United States. The IDF in Lebanon was recently caught destroying an image of a crucified Christ in a Christian village and apologized after the inevitable backlash. Yet countless Sunni and Shia mosques have been obliterated in Gaza and Lebanon in the past two years. The most hardline Jewish and Christian Zionists alike drool at the prospect of demolishing the Muslim architecture on the Temple Mount to rebuild the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, and though they have not done so yet they do nonetheless harass the Palestinians and other Muslims who hope to access the location. The Taliban obliterated the Bamiyan Buddha images in their own country knowing their Salafist base would not lose any sleep over Buddhist monuments. Clearly, the question of whose history we protect and preserve is political, and in no way a consistent application of “just” or “fair” principles all over the world.

We are compelled to ask, then, whose culture do we preserve and why? Is it more important to preserve the national memory of the United States as a whole than the ancient tribal nations scattered across its land (and even those who disappeared)? How do we weigh the instrumental goods which come from redeveloping these locations with the intangible cultural goods baked into them?

No just or moral principle comes out of the application of raw power, yet to a large degree this is an issue of might-makes-right. Native Americans cannot do much to stop the Trump administration from paving over archaeological sites only known about by locals and a few academics. Israel has absolutely no accountability to the Shi’a Muslims of Southern Lebanon, whose lives have been so terribly disrupted by the IDF and their proxies since the late 1970s. Conversely, Americans of very different political stripes would object to development of the most sacred Civil War sites and have the political and economic power to make their voices heard. Likewise, Israel depends on the goodwill of American Christians to sustain its war machine meaning any damage to Christian imagery and artifacts will have real consequences for them.

A somewhat more charitable interpretation would be that this is a mere matter of demographics. There are lots of Americans who care about Gettysburg, while only a handful of obscure and remote tribal nations are concerned about the destruction of indigenous history. Thus, the destruction of these sites creates less “harm” in the utilitarian sense. Fewer people feeling the pain of lost heritage means less harm. Yet this reasoning shares the flaw inherent in all utilitarianism … it’s ultimately a shallow and one-dimensional way of determining what we ought to do. It turns a question of cultural value and preservation into a mere math problem and consigns the rights and values of smaller communities to the dustbin of history. Moreover, it reduces the real individuals facing moral problems into mere containers for happiness and grief, erasing the qualitative aspect of individuality in the face of quantitative analysis.

The obvious retort from the right is that some cultures are simply better and more valuable than others. We preserve US history because its a great nation with a grand legacy, but the shellmounds are monuments to stone age societies that achieved little. Likewise, if preserving the cultural legacy of the United States requires building a wall right through some lines in a desert drawn by stone age peoples, then it is a small price to pay. Though such a claim is unlikely to be made explicitly by the leaders of the modern right, it is the implication of their policy and it is not hard to find corners of the internet where such views are expressed. Of course, this is nothing more than cultural narcissism and chauvinism. The ancient Germanic and Celtic peoples were “primitives” before the Romans introduced them to “civilization” and organized religion, yet we preserve Stonehenge and other neolithic sites across Europe nonetheless. The remaining descendants of those who built the shellmounds and desert ruins are no less modern than the rest of us, with tribal governments embedded into modern political and economic systems too. All these sites are equally a part of our legacy as modern people, and if we make distinctions on chauvinistic lines then we’re no different than the Taliban dynamiting ancient Buddhas.

Perhaps the best version of the argument against preserving these sites is a more enlightened form of instrumental thinking, perhaps akin to Mill’s more sophisticated utilitarianism. Recently, a political dispute was resolved in Berkeley, California over whether a parking lot built over the ruins of an ancient shellmound should be turned into housing or a cultural space honoring the Ohlone peoples who once lived there. The Ohlone non-profit pushing the cultural center won out, and the land will be turned into a cultural site. It is no secret that the California Bay Area is desperately in need of new housing, and struggles to find any available land upon which to build it. NIMBY politics frequently leverages legitimate cultural causes to create barriers to new housing, which only benefits established residents by curtailing housing supply and driving up land values. Ohlone heritage has value, but so does housing for people who need it. Therefore, it might be argued, building in that location is simply a valuable sacrifice. Perhaps instead we could stick a big land acknowledgement on the apartment building - “THIS WAS BUILT ON OHLONE LAND”.

Ohlone activists and their supporters hope to re-bury the remains of ancestors kept by UC anthropology departments, and create a cultural museum inside a sort of replica shellmound with an indigenous ceremonial site on top. The foundation, of course, would be the lower levels of the shellmound which were not removed. It would serve as a connection between modern California and its indigenous legacy, and has many supporters in the liberal and social-democratic bay with its many supporters of land-back measures. Such a move is an eminently reasonable application of land back politics, as opposed to the naïve extremism proposing some type of radical decolonization of the US. No, we don’t need to send hundreds of millions “back to Europe” or Asia or Africa or wherever else their ancestors came from, but it is more than reasonable to protect and preserve locations of historical value and make it a part of our shared regional culture.

The weakness of the “enlightened instrumentalism” against this demand is that there is so much other land wastefully used for commerce and luxury housing that has no real cultural value. Whats left of the Emeryville Shellmound, as already discussed, is a shopping mall. The Bay is full of luxury homes taking up vast plots of land. Moreover, it once again commits itself to the kind of cultural chauvinism of the right. Nobody is suggesting we bulldoze the Presidio in San Francisco to build housing units, nor should they. It’s a location of significant cultural and historical value, to say nothing of its profound natural beauty. Sacrificing a parking lot to build a park and cultural museum honoring an ancient indigenous village is a small price to pay, and we can instead sacrifice infrastructure with no meaningful historical value if we want to create that desperately needed housing.

Perhaps a bigger problem for the preservation of indigenous culture is political. The Ohlone group behind the Berkeley plan is Sogorea Te’, a non-profit that does not represent all Ohlone and is distinct from the two (federally unrecognized) Ohlone tribes in the East Bay. It has its own funding mechanism in the form of a kind of guilt tax paid by well-meaning non-Ohlone liberals in the Bay Area. Aside from the existing issues around “reparations” for historical injustice, it makes even less sense to pay such reparations to a non-profit which does not represent the community as a whole. This means that the park and monument will not speak for all Ohlone, but instead a narrow subset behind the non-profit. Yet the Ohlone tribal leaders in California do not represent all Ohlone either. The only institution which could is the state government of California, which has its own interests and is dominated by a Democratic political machine which would rather gesture performatively at support for indigenous heritage.

Ultimately, historical preservation is a form of cultural reproduction. We are maintaining the achievements and memories of our ancestors to reproduce in ourselves and in future generations a different type of subjectivity. If we only focus on the achievements of a few cultures and civilizations while disregarding others we will simply be reproducing the worst of ourselves. We will be committing ourselves and our descendants to the chauvinism and petty nationalisms of our ancestors, instead of a cosmopolitan future where the legacy of humanity is honored, we will remain small-minded and provincial. Thus, we ought to treat the violation of indigenous cultural legacies as no different in substance than deciding to bulldoze the Vatican itself.

Yet we also need to build better institutions for protecting cultural legacy. Clearly, private developers will not do this beyond the emptiest performative moves. Ideally, governments could do this yet they have their own narrow priorities, as demonstrated with Trump’s border walls. Non-profits, likewise, speak for themselves and not for society in general even when they do good work. The next step is figuring out what kind of broad-based institutions could actually govern and maintain our shared heritage for the good of all.

This debate has now entered the mainstream, with many mainstream Democrats attacking Hasan Piker for his sympathy with the targets of Western imperialism. Piker, a streamer popular among leftist and liberal youth, has made a name for himself interviewing Houthi supporters in Yemen, criticizing Israeli action in Gaza, and visiting China. I do not agree with all of his politics, but many of the attacks against him by politicians in the Democratic party are absurd.

While I think there is some value to the broader debate, and both sides sometimes make good points, the importance of this whole discussion is largely overblown. Neither side really has any means to influence the actual outcome of events either way, which diminishes the moral significance of their stance. The reality is that anti-imperialists of all flavors are generally in the minority, even when people disagree with the war, meaning they only have any influence on the political outcome as a group. What’s worse, they don’t really control any important institutions, whether they be mainstream political parties, churches, businesses, and so on which could meaningfully determine any policy.

To begin with, it’s worth pointing out that the governments targeted by Western powers are not all cut of the same cloth. Some are one-party socialist states, some are multi-party democracies governed by socialists, some are theocracies, some are nationalist dictatorships, and so on. To put it mildly, I’m less sympathetic to some of these governments than others, and I am not alone in this. Yet this debate is nonetheless treated in Manichean terms by some anti-imperialists. If one opposes imperialism, then all the movements targeted by it ought to be supported. This has limits, of course, as groups like ISIS are too distasteful for even the most hardcore anti-imperialists (which is made easier by the fact that, in the case of ISIS at least, the US and European governments teamed up with their erstwhile ideological rivals in Iran, Kurdistan, Syria, and Iraq to stop the terror statelet).

This debate has recently come to the fore with the wars in Gaza, Syria, and Iran. The question of whether one ought to support the people of these states is without question. Gazans, Syrians, and Iranians have been brutally massacred by the US and Israel (and, in the case of Syria, Turkey too). Yet the question of whether one should support Hamas, the Assad dynasty, or the Islamic Republic is a totally different matter. These governments are not the same as their people, they are guilty of various human rights abuses (not to mention different forms of economic mismanagement), and they also have their own interests separate from those of their citizens. These interests are not entirely separate from their people, of course. They are, after all, constituted by individuals who are members of their society and whose loved ones are too. Yet they are also ideologically distinctive factions which aim to preserve their own political power.

If it were true that support for the people of Gaza means support for Hamas, or support for the people of Iran means support for the IRGC, then it wouldn’t be much of a debate. However, this simply isn’t the case. Many Gazans and Iranians oppose their government for good reasons (quite possibly a majority, though polls are of course unreliable in these areas). Both governments enforce harsh theocratic laws against their people. For example, the Bahai faithful of Iran are opposed because they are seen as apostates, and because their religion is deemed to be heretical (this contrasts with how the Iranian government treats Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians who are deemed dhimmi, or non-Muslims whose religion is worthy of protection).

What is true is that imperial aggression against these countries is largely justified by the authoritarian features of their governments and their violations of basic human rights. It’s also true that these violations are grossly exaggerated by Western media and governments, and pretty much any bad story about these governments are believed. This is notable with North Korea, where pretty much any allegation of human rights abuse by the state is taken to be true at face value, without any skepticism whatsoever. The logic often has a circular feature, where the governments are taken to be bad because of the outlandish stories about their brutality, and the outlandish stories of their brutality are taken to be true because their governments are bad. No doubt, many of these stories are true, but so many others are questionable at best, if not outright misrepresentations and falsehoods. North Korea doesn’t help things by being such a closed society, since none of these stories can be easily falsified. Yet that doesn’t mean we should believe every provocative outrage reported in the media.

A demonstrative example of the way that human rights abuses get misrepresented is the way that Soviet executions of Nazi collaborators is treated as evidence of the brutality of Stalin’s government. The fact that the “victims” of these executions were Nazi collaborators is conveniently left out. It’s obviously not to say that Stalin’s government was innocent in regard to human rights abuses in other cases as I will get to, but it is rather silly to include the execution of war criminals in that list. In that respect, it is important for anti-imperialists to raise skeptical doubts about such allegations.

Uncritical support is another matter however and is unhelpful at best and dishonest at worst. Crimean Tatars and Chechens, for example, got deported to Central Asia by the Soviet state because some individuals from these communities collaborated with the Nazis. Collective punishment and ethnic cleansing are always abominable, and it makes no sense for communists to defend the deportation of loyal Communist Tatars and Chechens (or apolitical individuals just trying to survive the war for that matter) just because others from their ethnicity collaborated with Nazis. Thus, the tendency of some anti-imperialists to defend everything about the USSR because it was opposed to American and European imperialism is hypocritical and in conflict with the same principles they use to criticize the US, France, the UK, Israel, and so on.

The tendency to accuse anyone of not extending uncritical support of being “imperialist” is doubly silly considering these states often are in conflict with one another. The Sino-Soviet split fractured the whole Socialist bloc, and led to Mao and the Soviet leadership leveling harsh criticism against one another (and even fighting a war). It is strange to say anyone who accuses the USSR of “imperialism” in Eastern Europe is a supporter of US imperialism when Mao himself made the same criticism. It is also strange to accuse anyone who objects to the foreign policy of China of being a supporter of US imperialism when China supported Pol Pot in Cambodia, and when it was Socialist Vietnam which invaded Cambodia and overthrew him.

It is worth emphasizing that criticism of a regime doesn’t mean supporting its removal. I can argue that the Chinese government ought to show more respect to its ethnic minorities and their rights, reduce if not abolish its use of the death penalty, restore its social safety net, and reform its justice system but that doesn’t mean I want it to be replaced. For one thing, there’s no reason to believe that whatever replaced it would have a better human rights record, and for another thing, their government remains the most competently run world power despite its faults. Thinking that a government can and should do better is not the same as calling for its overthrow. Despite this, hardcore anti-imperialists often treat any such criticism as apologia for Western imperialism.

All that being said, the significance of this whole debate is blown way out of proportion by socialists and liberals hoping to score political points in their sectarian squabbles. An anti-imperialist uncritically defending Iran’s government on social media does no functional harm either way to the actual victims of oppression in Iran. Their views might be silly or involve dubious double standards, but if you were to actually convince them to change their position you would not have done anything to free political prisoners or victims of religious oppression in Iran. Even the neoconservative warmongers in the US who are guilty of exaggerating these abuses to justify their imperialism do nothing to limit them. So, what real significance is there in a handful of leftists becoming apologists for the government?

Conversely, leftwing critics of governments in Iran and China do nothing functionally to endanger these regimes. China’s government is a world superpower, and the Communist Party has approximately 100 million members. Despite its slowing economic growth, it remains the industrial powerhouse of the globe and the government has a deep base of support among its people. If the government was seriously endangered by a few leftwing Americans criticizing it instead of extending it uncritical solidarity, it would only be because it is facing even worse domestic problems. Yet that isn’t the case, and there is no serious threat of their government falling any time soon.

It is worth remembering that the chance of most of these governments actually falling depends entirely on their domestic support. At this point, it is impossible for the US government to militarily defeat that of the People’s Republic of China even if it got all of its allies on board. If the Chinese government were to fall, it would only be because they lost the faith of enough Chinese citizens that domestic revolution forced it from power. Even much smaller nations like Iran’s are relatively secure, as we have seen from the failure of the US to force regime change militarily. The only way that the US could actually defeat the Iranian government would be a ground invasion, and this would be so costly that most Americans would oppose it. Even the current bombing campaign, which led to only 13 US deaths (announced so far, at least), is overwhelmingly unpopular even among a population that dislikes the Iranian government. The Iranians could, potentially, overthrow their government, but whether or not this occurs will be determined by a discourse in Farsi, Kurdish, Azeri, and Balochi among Iranian citizens, not discourse among Westerners on social media. Similarly, North Vietnam was able to survive a bruising war against the US and South Vietnam that lasted about a decade and then conquer its southern rival.

The exception might be states like those of Cuba (and, until recently, and possibly again in the future, Venezuela’s) where the threat of US intervention and the harm of sanctions (and now a US blockade) is a very real hazard to the regime. In this case, it is very important for politicians, institutions, and US citizens more broadly to unequivocally oppose US intervention. It is certainly even more important in this case to argue against outright lies about their government. Even then, however, I can criticize policies of the Cuban state without endorsing the clear US aggression against the Cuban people and their government.

What is important is not gaslighting people who left these countries or accusing them of being pro-war reactionaries. Not everyone who left China, Vietnam, or Cuba owned a plantation, but if anti-imperialist Twitter were to be believed the only people who fled were wealthy capitalists who got rich exploiting the labor of others. Likewise, not everyone who left Iran was a monarchist supporter of the Shah or MEK terrorist. Many were, of course, and these incredibly insufferable people have undue influence in places like Miami and Lost Angeles. Yet adopting a Manichean worldview and applying it to everyone who claims asylum is stupidity. Countless working-class Venezuelans fled after the economy tanked in the 2010s and did so because of the lack of opportunities (and, in many cases, the increasing level of political violence from both the state and its opponents).

What’s also important is not gaslighting regime supporters from these countries who may have good reasons to support their government. There are many citizens in these countries who support their government because they see it as the best and most reliable guardian against Western aggression. They may also support some of the economic or political policies. This doesn’t mean we need to agree with everything they believe, of course. I think Shi’a Muslim Iranians who support the suppression of Baha’i or secular women are wrong, but I doubt this is the only reason they support their government. I don’t need to think someone is entirely right to respect that they are rational from their own standpoint, and that their standpoint is fundamentally justified.

Lastly, it is important not to simply lump all states that are targets of imperialism together. North Vietnam, Cuba, and China are nothing like the theocratic or nationalist governments that are also targets of intervention. The reasons why the US opposes these governments are distinct as well. It opposes China as a strategic and ideological rival and used to oppose Vietnam for the same reasons. Even then, it remains on relatively more friendly terms with China’s government since Nixon visited in the 1970s. China and Vietnam have lifted hundreds of millions of their people out of poverty over the past few decades, and do not impose misogynistic or homophobic laws based on their distinctive religious doctrines. Drawing these distinctions is intellectually honest and theoretically sound, even if we categorically oppose imperial violence against all of them.

In conclusion, while there is at least some value to the debate, it is overblown by radicals caught up in their sectarian squabbles. Now that mainstream democrats are getting involved in the debate as seen with the recent attacks on Hasan Piker, it is even more important that we emphasize that it has more to do with sectarian score-setting than real concern with the fate of the global south.

On the private moral character of this bourgeois hero, among other things: “The large grant of lands in Ireland to Lady Orkney, in 1695, is a public instance of the king’s affection, and the lady’s influence... Lady Orkney’s endearing offices are supposed to have been — fœda labiorum ministeria.” (In the Sloane Manuscript Collection, at the British Museum, No. 4224. The Manuscript is entitled: “The character and behaviour of King William, Sunderland, etc., as represented in Original Letters to the Duke of Shrewsbury from Somers Halifax, Oxford, Secretary Vernon, etc.” It is full of curiosa.)

Marx, Capital Volume 1

With Hegel, evil is the form in which the motive force of historical development presents itself. This contains the twofold meaning that, on the one hand, each new advance necessarily appears as a sacrilege against things hallowed, as a rebellion against condition, though old and moribund, yet sanctified by custom; and that, on the other hand, it is precisely the wicked passions of man — greed and lust for power — which, since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development — a fact of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for example, constitutes a single continual proof.

Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy”

One of the ideas I’ve explored in my writing is the way society produces ever-more decadent and degenerate individuals as it ages, and as its structures and institutions pass their sell-by date, as it were. There is a Confucian version of this story in the “Mandate of Heaven”, and the Muslim philosopher and proto-sociologist Ibn Khaldun has his own version inspired by the fate of Arab and Berber dynasties. The decline and fall of Rome was a classic obsession of European historians and philosophers. The version I am most familiar with is the Hegelian-Marxist variety. In a simplified telling of this version, a new model of social organization is formed around the thinking and practices of some revolutionary class. This may happen slowly or quickly, but it births a new system that improves the conditions of the people in various ways. It always comes at a price, but the price is worth it as the contradictions of the old society had become intolerable and insurmountable. This new system is more dynamic, spurs all sorts of reforms, builds useful institutions and rebuilds old ones in its own image, creates new techniques and technologies, and revolutionizes what it is to be human. Yet eventually, the ideas, institutions, and so on cease to be revolutionary. Eventually, they become regressive and hold humanity back. The ruling class increasingly becomes a fetter on the wellbeing of everyone else. Now is time for some new revolutionary class to displace the old and usher in a new epoch.

The reality is more complex in many ways. It’s not that the story I just told is entirely wrong, but it is entirely too simplistic. For one thing, even old and decadent classes have insights and values which should be preserved, though critically of course. Don Quixote is a fool for playing the role of a knight-errant, but we can still admire his enthusiasm for justice. Just as importantly, this story presents the birth of the new system in rosy terms. Let’s return to the fact that a price must be paid for the new system. What is this price? What is lost when a new society is born?

We can begin with a critical look at the just-so story about the emergence of capitalism. When political economy was emerging in the 1700s, thinkers like Adam Smith were figuring out how the new market economies worked. By this point, capitalism had been slowly replacing the old and decayed feudal order for a few centuries. Political economists wanted to figure out how the mechanics of these markets worked, and capitalists themselves were keen to learn from them for obvious reasons. What they came to was a theory where capital, labor, and land were somehow united in some process that produced value. Though they had numerous theoretical disagreements in how this worked, there was broad agreement that capital grew by more efficiently meeting demand in the competitive market. Yet how did this capital come into being in the first place? How did it come to pass that some people owned the factories, while others had to work in them?

It was easy enough to explain how the land came into the hands of the nobility. This was a holdover of the old feudal order. Unlike the capitalists, they simply enjoyed the rents obtained through their monopoly on the land. The capitalists were different. They obtained their wealth through competition and innovation, and through meeting demand more efficiently. How did it come to pass, however, that there were a handful of wealthy industrialists owning vast factories and armies of unemployed workers? In other words, how did political economists explain the original emergence of the capitalist class?

The just-so story is that some people were harder working, more innovative, and more austere than their neighbors. This allowed them to save up the earnings of their labor so that they could become capitalists. Meanwhile their wasteful, inefficient, and lazier neighbors eventually lost their wealth and had to find employment with these more industrious neighbors. Thus, the early capitalist class emerged in a microcosm of the 18th century and 19th century free market of England. The capitalists were the capitalists because their ancestors were the innovators.

This just-so story was appealing because it was at least sometimes true on an individual level. There are many cases of inventive small businessmen figuring out some new technology or method then getting fabulously wealthy once they secured enough investment to scale up their idea. Yet this story presupposes the existence of someone already wealthy enough to invest in them. How did this venture capitalist gain their capital?

This is the just-so story Marx intends to demolish in the final chapters of Capital. He puts forward the term “primitive” or “original” accumulation, or the initial accumulation of wealth which allows the wealthy to hire workers in the first place. Thus, this part of book describes the genesis of capital as the precondition for exploitation. This genesis has two equally important and entirely interdependent components. First, there is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, and second there is the dispossession of the wealth of the many. Of course, these are two different moments in the exact same process. The public assets on which the masses depended to survive were privatized into a few hands. This meant that a small number of individuals owned the capital, and the people could only survive if one of these newly enriched people hired them.

The most notable instance of this is the enclosure of the commons. In feudal England, the land was common property, and the peasants could access it to feed their flocks. They divided some of it amongst themselves so that every family could cultivate grains and vegetables on their own plot and retained the rest of land for shared use like grazing. The people were poor, but they could all get by through the sweat of their own brow. The lords had fiefs and other rights to the land and could charge rents or require peasants to do labor for them, but these obligations were limited. The lords depended on the peasants anyways and overburdening them would only kill the goose, as it were. Feudalism was a grossly unequal system, of course, but there were worse fates than peasant life and it did have a kind of freedom to it (at least when warfare wasn’t causing their lords to demand too much of them or a bad harvest wasn’t driving them into desperation). The downside for early merchants and other would-be capitalists is that it was hard to hire anyone because peasant life was a good enough alternative. They might be able to hire a few peasants on off seasons, but the price of labor was expensive.

Starting around the time of the Reformation, the nobility of England began privatizing these common lands in various ways. This turned them from feudal nobility with rights over the land but obligations to the peasants into private landlords. This not only enriched them but allowed them to exploit the land more productively. They could hire some portion of the peasants to work the land, while the remaining ones had to move to towns, ports, or colonies to find work.

This was lucrative for the new big farmers, of course. They became far wealthier than before and could switch from studying warfare to studying business and trade. They became a kind of hybrid class we still see between the old nobility of England and the new Capitalists (think Downton Abbey, Downstairs Upstairs, and all those other British historical dramas). They in turn invested in colonial corporations like the East India Company, or in the merchants shipping rum, sugar, and slaves in the Atlantic triangle trade, or in the various engineers coming up with new and more productive technologies. This created the world which the physiocrats, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other early political economists aimed to explain.

Yet this also damned the now-landless former peasants into a precarious existence entirely dependent on the demand for their labor. The luckiest could become apprentices to journeymen craftsmen and master some trade like cobbling, masonry, or smithing. Their fate would eventually be sealed by the rise of modern industry, however, as new industrial methods made their skills redundant (many of these tradesmen would become the machine-smashing luddites, as they could not compete with the companies that owned said machines).

The process of primitive accumulation is violent, criminal, corrupt, and a violation of common morality. The first beneficiaries were largely those members of the aristocracy who were more ambitious than their peers, and who had the right connections. In the late 17th century, for instance, Lady Orkney gained large land grants by becoming the lover of the king. Marx makes it a point to include a footnote quoting old letters describing how she leveraged her “endearing orifices” to win these land rights. Adultery and sexual favors are not just and righteous means of enrichment in any society, especially not a sexually conservative Protestant society. Nor does it speak to her exceptional virtue as a businesswoman. Rather, she leveraged the lust of her liege to secure access to wealth for her lineage.

Another case is the Duchess of Sutherland. Unlike the Lady of Orkney, there is no evidence she traded sexual favors for wealth. She certainly caused significant harm, however, as she displaced the traditional Scottish clans who inhabited her land. She had studied her political economy and knew that the land was not profitably utilized by her clansmen. Her land was full of subsistence farmers who did little to enrich her. Thus, she displaced most of them and turned her fief into grazing land for her sheep. Later, she figured she could profit even more by replacing the sheep with deer, displacing the remaining peasants who had been working as shepherds, and letting wealthy Englishmen to hunt deer on her land. Thus, her Highland Scottish fief went from the homeland of 15,000 clansmen to a gigantic ranch for sheep to a vacation destination for the elite. The former Scottish clansmen, on the other hand, were forced into small coastal villages where they had to learn to fish and now had to pay her rent on top of that. Some resisted resettlement, with a few being killed in the process. This is a part of the Highland clearances. Today, the Scottish Highlands are famously empty of people, and feature broad, beautiful prairies and peatlands with stunning views. They were once full of Scottish peasants who were driven into the industrial towns like Glasgow to work as factory workers. As Highland peasants, they were poor but self-reliant and industrious, but as urban workers they were just as impoverished but now entirely dependent on the factory owners. A part of the tragedy is that the clans had always loyally served the noble families in war and peace and had honored their obligations to them. Now, the avarice of this same nobility repaid this loyalty with the prize of poverty.

Marx is particularly harsh in his description of the Duchess of Sutherland. He is most indignant about her raw hypocrisy, as she was something of an abolitionist when it came to slavery in the United States. She saw slavery as intolerable bondage, and certainly it was. However, she was only willing to criticize the exploitation committed by others. She had no interest in acknowledging her own avarice and exploitation. When she did not benefit, it was easy for her to criticize the brutality of bondage, but when it was the people who had served her family and when she stood to profit her conscience was silent.

The British aristocracy, who have everywhere superseded man by bullocks and sheep, will, in a future not very distant, be superseded, in turn, by these useful animals.

The process of clearing estates, which, in Scotland, we have just now described, was carried out in England in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Thomas Morus already complains of it in the beginning of the 16th century. It was performed in Scotland in the beginning of the 19th, and in Ireland it is now in full progress. The noble Viscount Palmerston, too, some years ago cleared of men his property in Ireland, exactly in the manner described above.

If of any property it ever was true that it was robbery, it is literally true of the property of the British aristocracy. Robbery of Church property, robbery of commons, fraudulent transformation, accompanied by murder, of feudal and patriarchal property into private property — these are the titles of British aristocrats to their possessions. And what services in this latter process were performed by a servile class of lawyers, you may see from an English lawyer of the last century, Dalrymple, who, in his History of Feudal Property, very naively proves that every law or deed concerning property was interpreted by the lawyers, in England, when the middle class rose in wealth in favor of the middle class — in Scotland, where the nobility enriched themselves, in favor of the nobility — in either case it was interpreted in a sense hostile to the people.

Karl Marx, “The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery”

It’s clear that Marx could not stand these hypocritical, self-righteous, and avaricious early capitalists. He shows them more contempt than the Manchester factory owners who exploit their workers and compete with one another. They violate the old morality of feudalism from which they emerged, but they also violate the ideals of the new bourgeois morality they profess. They betray the peasants that feudalism calls them to serve, and they also do not innovate and outcompete their rivals like the “good” capitalist. They did not even gain their riches through “free” and “fair” exchange on the market. Rather, they show up to the market already enriched.

This is even more acute in the colonial setting. English capital enriched itself enslaving Indians and Africans, smuggling opium to the Chinese, and impressing poor Englishmen1 to work as sailors. There is a big debate among Marxists like Vivek Chibber, Bilal Zahoor, and Vijay Prashad about how much colonialism drove early capitalism. While the role of colonialism can be exaggerated, colonial looting and violence was certainly a part of primitive accumulation. One particularly galling case is the famous mountain of silver in Potosi in modern Bolivia. This mountain helped finance the Spanish Empire for generations, and to this day is still mined by indigenous people who plumb its depths for the precious metal. Countless Quechua and Aymara people died digging silver from the earth, only to see the profits of their hard work accumulate in the vaults of vast South American haciendas and Madrid.

Notably, this original accumulation is still occurring. Anywhere where there are public lands and other common resources, there are politically connected individuals trying to loot them. When the USSR fell, the vast public industries of the state became the target of Russia’s and Ukraine’s emergent bourgeoisie. These, in turn, became the oligarchs which dominate the Russian and Ukrainian economy today and continue to corrupt the politics of both states. Other post-Soviet states like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have seen similar fates. Likewise, the Mexican revolution restored much of the land to peasant communities in the form of Ejidos, or collectively owned lands, but during the neoliberal era President Salinas “reformed” the Mexican constitution to allow some of this land to be privatized. Even in the USA, we see the federal government selling off land at dirt cheap rates to various extractive industries. One might even argue that this kind of accumulation has returned to the UK, as US tech firms like Palantir have been privatizing the vast amounts of data collected by the British National Health Service.

Whether it occurs at the beginnings of capitalism, or whether it occurs later once capitalism has already been established, primitive accumulation occurs through a process of corruption, violence, dispossession, and plunder. It does not follow the rules of “free” and “fair” exchange which play to the strengths of capitalism despite its faults. Rather, it simply enriches those most willing to betray the values, laws, and customs established by their society and tread all over the public interest.

Thus, capitalism did not exactly emerge pure and become corrupt over time. Rather, the system has always been dominated by the most avaricious and corrupt individuals. Capitalism still brought vast new improvements to society, like the productivity increases and modern infrastructure of the industrial revolution. It also did lift up many clever, ambitious, and brilliant businessmen who revolutionized the economy. However, it could not wipe away the stain of this original sin. The pioneers of this new system were giving sexual favors to the king, plundering foreign lands, plundering their own lands, dispossessing the peasants, and doing other scandalous things to enrich themselves.

This should be kept in mind when we look at the Jeffery Epsteins, Bernie Madoffs, Ken Lays, and other decadents and degenerates who dominate the modern global economy. Their existence is not novel, even if their viciousness seems more outlandishly extreme than ever. The whole system has always been dominated by people like this.

In the 17th century, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes put forward a deterministic and mechanistic theory of human history. Hobbes argued that human beings are by nature egotistical machines pursuing what they take to be good in their immediate context. Humans are simply pursuing what they desire, and these desires are determined just as much as a falling object is moved by gravity. This challenged the classic theodicy put forward by the Catholic church (and a significant portion of Protestant theology) that evil exists in the world because God wanted us to have the freedom to will the good or to will sin. Hobbes’s theory was part of a general move away from ancient and medieval theories towards a mechanistic worldview. Galileo paved the way for Descartes, a rival of Hobbes, to put forward a mechanistic theory of physics, and Newton would eventually set the stage for the enlightenment with his own. In this view, objects simply interact in lawlike ways, and if human beings utilized the correct mathematics to grasp the interaction of bodies, they could precisely predict the outcomes of events. When this is extended to humanity, as with Hobbes, the question becomes how social mechanisms can be grasped. Perhaps the best way to govern people is to understand the mechanisms which determine their actions and their thoughts. This approach can become a self-fulfilling prophecy where we take these mechanisms for granted, and they come to dominate and constrain us in various ways. It may also lead to an undue arrogance, where we think we can correctly predict outcomes by overstating the reliability of these mechanisms. We should reject a strictly deterministic view of society, in favor of one where mechanisms are not absolute and choice remains a historical force.

The question of free will versus determinism on a metaphysical level may never be entirely resolved. Of course, the human brain operates through chemical and electrical impulses that follow the laws of physics, but that does not mean there isn’t room for individual choice in there somewhere. Since our physics is fundamentally mechanistic at this point, it’s not even clear what a physicist or neurologist would need to look for to find “free will” in any empirically “scientific” way. There is another question, however, raised by the application of mechanistic thinking to sociology and economics. Whether or not we as individuals have “free will” in who we love or which flavors of ice cream we choose, vast social systems do seem to operate according to lawlike tendencies. Adam Smith’s invisible hand and David Ricardo’s comparative advantage both appear, to some extent, as mechanistic theories for how society operates. When you increase the supply of a good, the fall in price is inevitable and predictable, although these predictions about where that price might land are less precise than the ones we might make for the acceleration of a falling object. However, we might explain that inaccuracy through our lack of sufficient knowledge, thereby preserving the sense that we are talking about lawlike mechanisms. It is certainly true that at least some social phenomena operate in mechanistic ways.

Modern institutions presuppose this, building out from economics, sociology, and social psychology to achieve predictable outcomes. This is why our modern bureaucracies, businesses, hospitals, schools, and armed forces are so obsessed with metrics and data collection. They need to discover the right numbers to measure and assess the relative benefits and harms of their choices. Our institutions often fail in this, as their metrics are always inherently limited in what they do and do not show. Despite their failure, their assumption is that with the right metrics, they could figure out which policies produce the most reliably good outcomes.

Perhaps the grimmest example of how mechanistic thinking can shape the decision-making of major institutions, we only have to consider the way Malthusianism shaped the thinking of British bureaucracies in the 1800s and 1900s. The 18th century political economist Malthus put forward a starkly mechanistic theory of population growth and its relation to agricultural production which led him to the conclusion that famine is inevitable. He used this to argue against too much government assistance to the poor, since it would just lead to larger famine in the future. When famines hit Ireland and India long after Malthus’s death, the British authorities were leery to intervene in the market on the pretext that helping the starving people would just lead to a worse catastrophe in the next generation.

Marx adopted mechanistic ideas in his analysis of capitalism, but he was wary to treat these mechanisms as absolute and reliable. He built on the ideas of Ricardo, Smith, and others to argue that there were clear mechanisms underpinning capitalist economies. Knowledge of these mechanisms produce fairly good predictions, although imprecise ones. For instance, capital seeks to increase the productivity of labor, which drove the progressive increase in machinery relative to workers (what Marx called the organic composition of capital). Thus, increasing automation is a predictable outcome of letting a capitalist economy hum along on its own terms. The invention of robotics and LLMs in the modern era are just a continuity of the process Marx identified in the 1860s. A related phenomena was centralization, as capitalism tends to become dominated by a few large businesses that are simply more efficient than their smaller rivals.

After Marx, there was a debate among socialists about whether or not history is deterministic, or at least the extent to which it is. Some took socialism to be an inevitable outcome of the mechanisms of capitalism. This view was popular among reformists who took the downfall of capitalism to be the inevitable outcome of capitalists centralizing production into ever-larger monopolies and trusts. On the other extreme was a voluntaristic view that socialism could be achieved rapidly by the sheer willpower of an enlightened working class.

The determinist view justified an increasingly quietist politics, where the vast machinery of the economy was moving us inexorably towards socialism. This sort of politics became ever less ambitious and implicated in the capitalist system they formerly opposed. The voluntarist view on the other hand justified radical activist groups who agitated workers and peasants. Sometimes they succeeded, but in many countries they remained at best a radical fringe and at worst curious and doctrinaire oddities. Once in power, the former voluntarist movements often became determinists too, as government policies could be justified as the obvious and necessary consequence of that historical moment.

Marx himself did argue that mechanistic forces were critical to understanding the development of capitalism. Yet he didn’t seem to be strictly mechanistic, either. Rather, his view is perhaps better captured by the following famous passage from his 18th Brumaire:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

Marx’s point is that human beings are making autonomous choices, but always under conditions already given to them. Their habits and overall worldview are already culturally conditioned by all the baggage that came before. Luther may have been free to break with the church, and could have chosen otherwise, but his reasons to do so and the course he went were already framed by the ideas and the material reality of the church. Had he instead decided to convert to Buddhism, he would have instead just been killed as a heretic and forgotten, and the first sect of Protestantism would just bear the name of a different dissident. Even then, he never would have thought to do so as a man raised and habituated within the confines of the church.

This insight operates on two levels. First, there is the cultural and psychological one, which is what Marx is directly addressing in that passage. The revolutionaries of today are always operating from a standpoint informed by the words and deeds of revolutionaries (and counterrevolutionaries) of the past. Beneath this, there are vast economic and technical systems operating which constrain individual freedom in various ways. I live in a world with cars, where Marx lived in a world shaped by trains. Before then, Smith was living in a world dominated by canals. Whether anyone has a specific job next year is going to be determined by this vast social machinery. If the institution which hires you runs out of money, you will be laid off as they cannot summon money out of nowhere.

Importantly, the big mechanistic forces which dominate, crush, exploit, and dispossess us in various ways (and sometimes enrich us) are systems that we made. This makes them very different from the mechanisms of physics. These mechanisms often fail to operate “properly” because of some outside political, social, or ecological disruption. At least some of these disruptions are intentional decisions. The way coins flowed through a 16th century economy was predictable according to certain mechanisms that could be identified, but if the King decided to cut in half the amount of silver in those coins those mechanisms could be thrown topsy turvy. In a modern context, workers going on strike might disrupt the normal operating mechanisms of the market economy. In the most extreme case, we could chose to abolish those mechanisms altogether. Perhaps fewer Irishmen would have starved during the 1840s famine had they done so, and simply taken the beef and wheat being exported by Ireland when their potato crops failed. Yet that wheat and beef that they grew was not theirs. It was one thing for a natural disaster like a potato blight to disrupt the mechanisms of the economy, but another thing altogether for the government or the masses to disrupt them.

The fact that people take the rules and institutions which underpin our economic machinery is a consequence of what Marx calls alienation. We came up with ideas like money, trade, corporations, debt, wages, and shares, and now our fate is determined by these institutions. That is to say, they are reified which is to say, made real by our practices and a kind of sustained social consensus. Our economic institutions do operate in a mechanistic, Newtonian way in many respects, but we could have institutions that operated according to very different rules if we so decided. The problem is, no individual is free to abolish those rules on their own. I might decide that I can wear the expensive sneakers sponsored by a famous basketball player without paying for them, but the store owner and police would object. If those shoes don’t sell, the store owner might not want his business to go bankrupt, but his creditors will come after him anyways. The only way to free ourselves from the constraints of those mechanisms is through a broader socio-political movement which wrests freedom from the alien institutions we have created.

Even then, Marx doesn’t think that capitalism is strictly mechanistic. He does make some mechanistic claims about how markets operate, but individuals and groups existing within these mechanisms make choices which will redirect them in many ways. Thus, Marx is as often describing trends as he is making hard predictions about the way things will go. This seems confirmed by a quick observation of economic history. We can predict that a crisis (recession or depression) will happen, but it’s hard to say when. Even if one figures out a crisis is around the corner, this is often only when the conditions producing it are inescapable. In 2006 it would have been impossible to predict the 2008 crisis with any precision, but of course by 2008 some clever investors knew to start shorting.

One feature of mechanisms in capitalism and other social systems isn’t the elimination of freedom but the constraint of freedom. This is different from physics. I might want to fly by flapping my arms, but physics is such that I cannot. Yet the mechanisms of our society will put forward certain incentives and disincentives and will restrict freedom more or less. Today, many business leaders are choosing to “pivot” to AI because that move will reward them with an immediate boost to shareholder value. They might not do so, but some businesses face considerable pressure to make that choice to raise investment they desperately need. If they do not heed these mechanisms, they may go out of business.

This is not unique to economics. Consider the current war/“special military operation” between Iran and the United States. After attacking Iran in a surprise assault, Trump put himself in a bit of a pickle when Iran asserted its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz (or, as Trump called it in an apparent Freudian slip, the Strait of Iran) and endangered the whole global economy. Either he could back down and give Iran a victory, or he could escalate the conflict and risk the deaths of US soldiers by sending in ground forces. He is seriously disincentivized to deescalate and negotiate a sensible deal with the Iranians since it could cost him the midterm elections. Thus, he might well choose to escalate for political reasons. The Iranians likewise are heavily incentivized to not back down because escalation would allow them to seriously harm the economy of the US (and with it, much of the world). Robert Pape, a professor who loves to go on podcasts and profusely flatter the audience, has made a name for himself by laying this out as an instance of what he calls the “escalation trap” where military aggression increasingly narrows the options for both parties by creating ever-harsher disincentives for diplomatic solutions. A war might begin with low-stakes interventions like strategic or tactical bombing, but when these fail the aggressor is pushed towards ever-more extreme interventions. Though one might dispute the reliability of all of his predictions, what Pape gets right is that even the most powerful people and institutions face hard material constraints to their freedom, and that these constraints can become even narrower due to their own errors.

Returning to the economy, automation functions along these lines. It is certainly a free choice for businesses to automate production, at least initially. Ford could have decided not to implement his assembly line production in his automobile factories. However, as a particular form of automation becomes more widespread, capitalists face stronger and stronger pressure to go down that path. At this point, every business would suffer catastrophic effects if it decided to abandon the assembly line in favor of the previous model. Rather, the choice now is how many workers to replace with robots.

This points towards a better alternative to the strict determinism and voluntarism of some of the early socialists mentioned earlier. Rather than capitalism being nothing more than a vast social machine moving inexorably toward socialism, and rather than a radically voluntaristic view of how capitalists and workers shape their world, individuals and classes operate within the constraints imposed by the economy. They can only expand their freedom in practice by grasping the role of social and political mechanisms. This is how Engels reinterpreted Hegel’s famous claim that freedom is the recognition of necessity. By understanding and grasping the laws of nature, we become free to determine the ends to which those laws operate, and by failing to do so we become blind subjects to their whims. By failing to understand how we have shaped our world and created our social conditions, we also become blind subjects of vast social machineries that dominate us just as much as nature.

To a certain extent, this is what the bureaucracies, businesses, and other institutions mentioned earlier are trying to master when they gather metrics to optimize their operations. However, this is not entirely the case as they are not free to determine their ends. Even if a business understands the operations of the market, the ends to which they put their knowledge will always be profit. Even if a university understands the way that a specific policy impacts student retention or graduation time, the ends to which they put their knowledge is always improving their rankings and putting on a good face for potential donors. Thus, these institutions remain bound to the mechanisms of our political economy, and are simply trying to move through these mechanisms more smoothly.

We can instead imagine an alternative where the knowledge of the mechanisms of nature and of the social institutions we build can free us to set our own ends. Our knowledge of physics, biology, and chemistry can allow us to mechanize tedious, unpleasant, and time-consuming necessary labor like harvesting wheat or cleaning public toilets and free us to act with fewer constraints for the rest of our time. By understanding the mechanisms of nature, we can free society of its own self-imposed mechanisms. This would really free is in a way that is hard to imagine from the our standpoint.

As Marx writes in the third volume of Capital:

In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

Thus, real freedom comes not only from understanding the mechanisms of our political, economic, and social orders but also from understanding how we created them. This is a prerequisite for us to turn these institutions to our own ends, and reduce the amount of time, effort, and resources we devote to stuff outside of our control. By mastering the mechanisms of our society, throwing away what fetters us and keeping only that which helps us manage our labor, politics, and leisure more effectively, we can free people from our self-imposed domination. We may need some social machinery to keep the lights on, the trains running, our homes comfortable, and our meals hearty, but in a sufficiently modest dose this may be edifying instead of soul-crushing.

The response from the White House to the Vatican’s moral critique of their war of aggression against Iran was telling. They treated the criticism as something akin to a rhetorical definition of war and responded by threatening a redux of the Avignon Papacy. The Avignon Papacy refers to a time when France moved the Papacy to Avignon so that they could have control over the church. The message was obvious. We think the Pope is wrong, and the most sensible response is to find our own Pope who agrees with us. The White House is not run by a clique of secular Marxist-Leninists clashing with the church. Rather, it is dominated by Christian conservatives, including many Catholics. They are a certain type of religious conservative who treats their religion first and foremost as an identity, and not as a set of serious doctrines and values that challenges the believer. Those who are Catholic have an aesthetic appreciation of its rituals, its Gothic cathedrals, its heavy use of Latin, and its antiquity. They like the idea of having traditions more than they care what the substance of those traditions are. This type of Christian conservatism contrasts with the traditional type that emerges from commitment to longstanding values and the basic premises of their theology.

This is something which struck me when Victor Orban was arguing for strict immigration controls and the construction of fences around the country. He insisted that Hungary needed electrified fences to protect the traditional Christian values of the country from Muslim immigration. Evidently, the irony was lost on him. Consider the famous passage from Luke 10:25-37:

²⁵ On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

²⁶ “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

²⁷ He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’^[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^[b]”

²⁸ “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

²⁹ But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

³⁰ In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹ A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³² So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³ But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴ He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵ The next day he took out two denarii^[c] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

³⁶ “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

³⁷ The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

The message of the passage is more clear if you know who the Samaritans are. They are a religious sect, distinct from Judaism but closely related to it, which probably descended from the practices of the Israelite tribes who split from Judah (and whose rulers were deported by the Assyrians). As religious “brothers” of a sort, Jews and Samaritans lived in a kind of sibling rivalry and did not get along. They frequently lived in different areas, with the Samaritans inhabiting the north (what Israeli settlers call “Samaria” today, and where most of the remaining Samaritan Palestinians live alongside the descendants of those who converted to Islam). Thus, Jesus’s message was that the Samaritan could be the true neighbor to the Jew despite their different confession and the prejudice between their communities. This simple message is clearly not included in the “Christian values” which Orban is claiming to uphold. Switch Jew for Catholic and Samaritan for Muslim, and the reason why is clear. The historical conflicts between Islam and Catholicism take priority over the actual values of the Catholic religion, all in the name of defending Catholic values.

Clearly, the White House’s Christian conservatives are no different as their rejection of the church’s pacifism shows. The theology of the Catholic religion is grounded on a universal message of brotherhood and life. This theology is applied consistently, whether or not it leads them to endorse “conservative,” “liberal,” or even “leftist” positions. The value of life leads them to reject abortion, but also the death penalty and unjust war. They have spent 2,000 years working out a robust and systemic theology to justify these positions, and do not simply adopt or abandon them on a whim. Their beliefs can change, but it takes time, and a viable justification from the first principles of their religion. The religion of Augustine was not the same as the religion of Aquinas, which in turn is not the same as the Catholicism of today, but their tradition has a deep story of continuity. Hence, when the Catholic church sees a war which clearly violates their theology, they are compelled to speak up and object just as much as they are when they see abortions being done or gay couples getting married.

Vance and the other Catholics (“Catholics”?) around the President do not seem to care about this rich theological tradition. Conservative Catholics of this sort instead emphasizes Catholicism as an identity, its practices and symbols, and the social recognition of being Catholic. Where they endorse the values of Catholicism, it is the aesthetic values not the moral ones. This emphasis on aesthetics is perhaps reflected in the ironic choice to place a Methodist church on the cover of JD Vance’s new book about converting to Catholicism. What matters is the image of the church and the sentiments it recalls, not the ideas and values within that church. Thus, it recalls JD Vance’s idea of what Christianity looks like as an American from a specific place, not the principles and values it alludes to.

Their moral views might, at times, concur with that of the church, but this is more a matter of luck as the rational order between one’s confessional identity and one’s moral commitments are reversed. The Catholic priest disagrees with gay marriage because that lifestyle conflicts with Catholic natural law theory, while this sort of religious conservative identifies with Catholicism because they dislike gay marriage. Since their “Catholicism” emerges out of a one-sided affirmation of their already-existing sentiments and prejudices instead of an active process of learning and growth, there is no interest in seriously wrestling with the faith.

Of course, liberal Catholics disagree with church doctrine all the time. There are many pro-choice Catholics both in politics and in the broader public. Yet liberals would not deny that their principles sometimes conflict with church teaching. One might argue that their religion is bad faith, that their politics is bad faith, or that they are being inconsistent, however they know and recognize the conflict between their beliefs. They are, after all, not religious conservatives.

There are also conservatives who are Catholic, but not “catholic Conservatives”. They might agree with the church on abortion but disagree with it on the death penalty or war. Politically, they may be closer to the Catholic conservatives I am critiquing here, but intellectually they are closer to the liberals in identifying with the church and embracing some of its values while knowingly disagreeing with others.

The irony is that for many “trad Catholics”, the actual substance of the tradition is irrelevant. They like the idea of having traditions, but don’t pay any attention to the ideas behind those traditions. Statistics suggest many of them do not even go to church for mass. Hence it is very important for them to say they are Catholic, to think of themselves as Catholic, and to present to others that they are Catholic. They remain in a largely performative and symbolic level and are uninterested in wresting with its doctrines. They project their own values onto this religion while claiming to be, in one way, shape, or form, fundamentalist or traditional. It’s more about defining who they are than providing a way to understand their world and their fate.

This isn’t a matter of education. A Catholic priest will be educated in the nuances of Catholic theology, but they distill those values into their work as ministers of their community. It is their job to engender an appreciation and understanding of those values into a lay community which lacks the time or requisite skills to master theology. Conversely, many of these “traditional Catholics” have the free time to go to church, read the bible, and at least grasp the basics of theology. Some are highly educated, albeit in business (or, like Vance, law). Many are converts, or people who returned to the church later in life. Thus, an “uneducated” lay Catholic can have a far richer appreciation of Catholic values than a more educated person who adopts “traditional Catholicism” as mere identity.

Catholicism is not the only faith plagued with this way of thinking. While I am detailing this issue among Catholic conservatives, the same phenomenon exists among Protestants (it may be worse among them). If anything, it was perhaps an ideological cross-pollination from Protestantism’s emphasis on individual faith. While Luther surely wanted Christians to understand and endorse Christian values, his emphasis on the faith of the individual made room for a highly atomized, egotistical notion of religion. The most important thing was that one be Christian and have a personal relationship with Christ. It’s not a huge leap to go from that to thinking one’s religion is merely a matter of how one identifies as an individual, and not a system of values and ideas which one must embody. Thus, as American Protestantism influences the way Americans in general see religion, it is not a surprise that it begins to influence Catholics too.

This is perhaps why many Protestants have also latched on to Catholic imagery, especially that of the crusaders. Protestant Pete Hegseth has a crusader cross on his chest, and the crusaders were of course the armed wing of the Catholic church. It does not matter that the Church turned its back on the violence of crusading due to its conflict with the core values of the faith. What matters is that the crusaders fought Muslims, and Muslims are not fellow Christians but the enemy. The idea of being a Christian warrior who combats Muslims and the imagery surrounding it becomes the basis of faith, instead of the texts and the doctrines which emerge from it. It does not matter one iota that Protestantism emerged out of a long, bloody war with Catholic warriors not unlike the crusaders.

Other religions, too, have similar phenomena. Though they are not necessarily “conservative” (and may skew liberal), New Age people are renown for adopting Buddhism, Hinduism, indigenous traditions, paganism, and so on as an identity while ignoring the values. They adopt the superficial elements, like decorations in their house or embrace a handful of practices like doing yoga three times a week, but they are not interested in the values or deeper mysteries of the religion. Luckily, these groups tend not to politicize their religion in the same way.

Buddhism and Hinduism has its identarian conservatives too, however. Like in Catholic Hungary, many Buddhist Burmese see Muslims as a threat to the values and lifestyles of Buddhism. The Burmese far-right organized against the Muslim communities of their country under the leadership of radical monks. This was done with the tacit (and sometimes explicit) support of the military government. Yet this clearly goes against the basic tenets of Buddhism. Buddhist doctrine rejects attachment and emphasizes compassion, including towards non-Buddhists. Yet the Buddhist conservatives advocate cruelty towards Muslims because of their attachment to their national identity. Once again, Buddhism as an identity devoid of the values of their religion. Hindutva conservatism (and fascism) likewise reduces Hinduism to an identity, although the complex history and theological diversity of Hinduism make this a far more complicated beast.

Consequently, this isn’t the product of any particular religious community. Rather, it’s the bizarre contradiction between embracing the idea of traditionalism while disregarding the values of those religions in practice. It turns the religion into a mere means of ego consolidation and political organizing. It gives one an aesthetic, a vibe, and a history to fetishize. One already has their values, and they just project these onto the religion they feel most attracted to. The religion then gives them a sense of certainty in the values they have projected upon it. When the religion pipes up and says “actually, that’s not what we believe, you say it’s Christian to bomb the Iranians but it is not” or “actually, putting up an electric fence to defend Christian values betrays Christian values”, it ought to be disregarded because the priests have clearly become too “woke”.

The criticism sometimes made from these quarters that the church is now “woke” just exposes how empty their notion of the religion is. They do not understand that the theologians reject the death penalty based on principles related to the ones which lead them to reject abortion. In fact, they don’t much care. What they want to be true is that abortion is bad but killing criminals is good. They lack any curiosity as to why the priest is telling them that war or execution is just as evil as abortion. Rather, they just assume it must be because this priest already been captured by the “wrong” side of the culture war they’re already engaged in. It was this culture war against multiculturalism, secularism, and other bugaboos which brought them to the church in the first place. If the church then embraces some of these values, it could only be because the church is wrong.

This is why this type of “conservative” religious person responds with such open hostility when the clergy corrects them. By using the theological doctrines of their faith to criticize the acts, policies, or words of a particular “religious conservative,” the church exposes the shallowness, hypocrisy, and vacuity of their religious affiliation. It exposes that they are not who they think and say they are, and that their religious identity has become a mere fetish.

It is also what makes this form of religious conservatism so dangerous. It is impervious to rational argumentation from its own principles, or any kind of immanent critique, because there are no first principles or coherent worldview. Rather, it is motivated by raw sentimentalism and social grievance. It is fundamentally anti-intellectual. They feel Catholic, and that is good enough for them. The conservative Thomist is entirely different. When they argue against abortion I might disagree with them, but I can trace their thinking back to a series of foundational beliefs which I can identify and engage with. Even if my disagreements are irreconcilable, I can know what motivates them. Consequently, I can treat their Catholicism as a true theology as opposed to a mere identity that is only skin deep.

Traditional religious conservatives are sometimes enemies and sometimes allies of liberals, socialists, anti-imperialists, and even communists. They might object profusely to state atheism, secularism, abortion rights, gay rights, gender fluidity, and so on, yet they can also become allies on war, mass incarceration, social welfare, and other issues. They are not always principled and may even be ruthlessly opportunistic at times. Yet it is clear that they do not simply project their own preferences onto their faith. They respect clerical authority and established theology. Consequently, they are not so easily reducible to partisan political camps on the right and left.

The point is not to say that one type of conservative is better or worse, or more or less dangerous. Yet the memeification of religion and its reduction to an aesthetic and a mere political camp is notable. It is a product of an era where poorly socialized youth are rediscovering religion through social media and gaining a superficial grasp of its doctrines.

Of course, we shouldn’t get excited too yet. Netenyahu insists on continuing the war in Lebanon, so this cease fire might not hold that long.

(1) America has “the most powerful military in the world” in that it specializes in destroying large amounts of enemy equipment, killing lots of soldiers and leaders, and blowing up a bunch of civilians along the way with comparatively few casualties. It specializes in this, and has since at least WWII. It has gotten even better at this since then. It has contributed to the US being such a warmonger power, as its political class isn’t overly burdened with people being upset about their friends and family dying. Compare this to, say, Russia, Iran, or even Ukraine and Israel. These countries don’t love casualties, but they are still far less casualty averse. The problem is the US can only accomplish this by throwing vast, vast sums of money at its military. The way it fights wars is cheap on human life, but very expensive.

(2) However, this way of fighting war has also led American politicians to basically misunderstand strategy. They understand good strategy in terms of kill counts. The person who kills more of the enemy while losing as few men as possible is the winner. Everything is about “kill counts”, and a good “kill count” is associated with winning. We sunk their boats, we killed X number of enemies, etc. You saw this with McNamara and Westmoreland during Vietnam. They kept presenting the number of dead Vietnamese versus the number of dead Americans as victory. This tendency has only gotten worse, as we see with Trump and his boosters.

(3) However, Iran is a country of chess players, in fact they and their Indian neighbors invented the game. They know that strategy isn’t just about kills and deaths, it’s about seizing and holding strategically advantageous locations, and surviving. It’s also about logistics and economics. The other side takes out some pawns, which sucks, but it’s worth it if their king wanders in the Strait of Hormuz and gets checkmated. In this respect the Iranians are a lot like the Vietnamese, who defeated America with a weaker hand and despite heavy casualties by using clever strategy. This should make sense, Iran has effectively been planning for this war for decades. Their smartest move was decentralizing their command and control, which meant they could keep fighting however many government officials the US and Israel blew up.

(4) Iran also understands the economics of warfare better than the Americans and their allies. Yes, America is better at blowing up your tanks and airplanes, but it does this with missiles that cost way more than those items (maybe not at time of purchase, but most of Iran’s “expensive” stuff are antiques the Shah bought). Lobbing a cruise missile that costs ten million dollars against some old rusty t-72 is a massive waste of money. These economics are even more skewed if half the stuff they blow up are $100 blow-up dummies bought from China. That’s to say nothing of the fact that their drones are cheaper than the interceptor missiles used against them. If Iran is winning economically and the global economy is at risk, then the US is in a double bind since it has to spend more with less money. Iran is in the opposite situation. The higher the oil price goes, the more money they have, so ironically they were profiting from this war.

(5) Iran also understands the importance of geography, which they incorporated into their strategy. They control pretty much the whole coast of the most prized trade route on earth. Not only do they control the coast, but it’s a vast wall of cliffs and mountains they can hide behind and inside. Remember how Trump threatened to send his navy through Hormuz, didn’t, then asked everyone else to? Some admiranl obviously told him that the straight is full of bunkers full of artillery and missiles which will sink any boat that tries it. Those bunkers are dug deep and well hidden, so the famed US bunker busters can’t do much against them. It turns out those ballistic missile stockpiles were dug deep into the mountains too. Their supply was never destroyed, even if Trump kept thinking they had because they were bombed. Evidently, their missile silos got repeatedly bombed only to keep lobbing more rockets towards their enemies.

(6) Trump got frustrated because he thought he had won because of the kill count, yet somehow everything was going south for him. Iran was still able to lob ballistic missiles freely. The Iranians also effectively held the global economy in their grasp, to the point where every corporation and world government is begging him to stop. Whatever happened over Easter Weekend didn’t go as planned, even if they got the pilot out. This is why he went as far as basically threatening genocide on Iran. He’s not only a bad loser, he’s a bad loser who is incapable of understanding how or why they lost in the first place. He needs to get a win out of this psychologically, so threatening to kill everyone was the only way out of it. It didn’t really work, but maybe he will have an easier time taking the L if he thinks his war crimes blackmail caused them to back down.

(7) I suspect it dawned on Trump that the only way to win was to take their oil depot at Kharg and their oil fields in Khuzestan. That or grab their highly enriched uranium. This is the only chance at gaining leverage. Yet I think it also dawned on him that this would just drag him into an extended land war. Iran would have kept lobbing missiles, a bunch of Americans would die (because at that point, they’d be fighting a land war instead of just bombarding from the safety of their airplanes and destroyers), and the Strait of Hormuz would still be closed. US soldiers would have been butchered by drones and missiles like we haven’t seen in a very long time. Even if he did his nasty little plot of blowing up their power plants and infrastructure (or worse, even if he dropped some nuclear weapons) it would not have changed the strategic fact that a large, well-armed Iranian military controlled the heights around the strait.

Thus, if we end here, Iran was the clear winner. Worse for Trump, it’s hard to see how he could really make Iran capitulate without WW2 levels of militarization and there is no evidence Americans have any interest in that.

The danger here if the US does end up backing down and manages to convince Israel to lay off, you’ll get that same idiotic “stab in the back” myth that rightwing American militarists got after Vietnam. So many Americans refused to admit they lost that war, and were convinced that the only reason it seemed like they had was that hippies, cowardly politicians, draft dodgers, and journalists caused the US to back down. They will drag out the kill counts, just as Trump did, in a vain attempt to convince others that they weren’t absolutely humbled by a poorer, weaker country that showed strategic foresight.

There’s a famous prediction which Marx allegedly makes in his Capital that capitalism will increasingly immiserate the working class, making poverty ever worse until a revolution overthrows the system and abolishes capitalist exploitation altogether. Sometimes, the failure of this to happen is taken to be a refutation of some or all of Marx’s theories on economics or politics. After all, the average worker today is much better off than 19th century factory workers, so this kind of immiseration is just empirically untenable. This interpretation is not entirely baseless, in fact far from it. Marx does predict that the mechanisms intrinsic to a capitalist economy make workers poorer over time. Forces such as unemployment, the deskilling of labor, and automation make this inevitable. Moreover, Marx did think that this immiseration would cause increasingly severe social crises and motivate socialist politics among workers. At this point you might be asking “well it sounds like Marx really did endorse the immiseration theory, so what’s wrong with this interpretation?” Simply put, Marx also thought that a politically organized working class could push back and even reverse immiseration, at least in the short term. Moreover, he did identify counter-tendencies to immiseration, such as the need for ever-more trained engineers and managers to keep complex machines, factory floors, and logistics chains operating.

In his intellectually mature Capital, Marx’s clearest endorsement of something like the immiseration thesis is in Chapter 25:

We saw … when analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. This antagonistic character of capitalistic accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of production.

The processes behind immiseration are detailed throughout Capital, especially in the first volume. The core incentive behind immiseration is the structure of exploitation Marx lays out in the book. Simply put, the value of labor-power is the wage which keeps the worker alive, while the value of labor for Capital is how much the capitalist makes from the labor. The difference between these values Marx calls the surplus value, and surplus value is the source of profit (though not the same thing as profit). If a capitalist has less money after a worker has done their work, he will not be making any profit off of them but instead will be losing money. Said worker will probably be laid off. Thus, a capitalist always has an incentive to pay as little as possible for labor-power, which is just to say, pay the lowest possible wages for that amount of work so that they can maximize that surplus value.

Marx argues that the value of labor power in practice is based on the price of a worker’s subsistence. Wages must cover food, clothes, housing, and the other basics they need to stay alive. Thus, immiseration is caused by the capitalist’s desire to reduce the money spent on wages as much as the market will allow. This will limit the money the worker has to spend on their necessities or that of their family, forcing them to inhabit ever-poorer slums, eat ever-worse food, and drape themselves in ever-rattier rags. As wages go down, living conditions go down.

Importantly, Marx didn’t see this as just the consequence of the capitalist’s avarice. Surely that did play a major factor, and we don’t need to make excuses for the greed of the employer. However, Marx saw other forces at play.

First, the desire to maximize surplus value incentivizes further automation of labor. If I employ 100 workers to make $10,000 worth of whiskey, and I spend $3,000 on the distillery, $3,000 on the grain to distill (and other resources), and $3,000 on wages, I make $1,000. If I can buy a $4,000 distillery that automates half the labor, I will only need to spend $1,500 on wages for 50 workers and my profit will increase by $500. This is the basic incentive structure behind the massive flurry of automation we’ve had since the industrial revolution began, including the recent spread of LLMs.

Even if one company doesn’t want to automate, competition will push it to do so. As automation makes its rivals more efficient, it must also automate if it wants to keep existing. If it fails to do so, it will become steadily less profitable until it either goes out of business or is simply bought out. Thus, even if the boss of every firm wants to keep their workers instead of automating out of some moral principle like loyalty, the force of competition will not give them an option.

Automation has the side effect of increasing unemployment. What happens to the 50 workers fired from the whiskey company? They will need to find new jobs. They are now competing with the 50 workers at the distillery who still have jobs, as well as the workers at all the other whiskey distilleries in town.

Yet it gets worse. Automation also generally deskills the work, which is to say, the machines automate many parts of the labor which are difficult and require special knowledge and training. This means that the whiskey distillery no longer has to find unemployed whiskey specialists but can hire any unemployed worker. This puts more pressure on the 50 remaining workers to accept lower wages because of the more competitive labor market. In fact, this deskilling can increase the labor pool even further, since now women and children can do jobs they could not have done before. So now those workers are not only competing with their fired former colleagues and other whiskey-makers, but all the other unemployed workers, their unemployed wives, and their unemployed kids. In our own society, this simpler labor can also be done by immigrants or internal migrants (depending on your country) who don’t know the local language well, as the language barrier is diminished.

Finally, the disgusting rotten cherry on top of this shit sundae is a paradoxical side-effect of automation. It seems, at first glance, that automation would make the work easier (if also more tedious, alienating, and uninteresting) while also allowing the boss to reduce the working day. If my new distillery allows me to double the productivity of my distillers, maybe I could let them off an hour early. Yet the paradoxical effect Marx notes is that automation actually increases the length of the working day. While he was not the first to notice this, he sought out an explanation of this phenomenon in the mechanisms of the market economy.

Marx’s solution to this apparently paradoxical outcome begins with the fact that automation is enabled by expensive technology. The whiskey company had to replace their old distillery with a new, more expensive one. Even better pieces of technology will be released in a few years, which will be bought by the competing whiskey companies, and they will become even more efficient. Thus, the whiskey distiller is incentivized to pay for that new automated factory as quickly as he possibly can so that he can squeeze all the value out of it before he buys a new one. This means he needs to keep that distillery working as close to 24/7 as possible. He could hire 3 workers to work 8 hour shifts. Unfortunately for the workers, though, if the value of their wages is determined by their cost of subsistence then it makes more sense for the whiskey magnate to hire 2 workers to work a 12 hour shift as opposed to 3 workers to work an 8 hour shift. Thus, capitalists are incentivized to work fewer workers for as many hours as possible as opposed to letting his workers win some leisure time through the new technology.

This tendency to over-work the workers only increases the aforementioned unemployment problem. If the whiskey distillery decides to cut that 50-worker workforce to 40 workers and just work them longer hours, then their profit goes up by $300 and there are ten more unemployed workers on the market. You might say “hey, won’t the workers object to being made to work even more hours for the same wage?” and, of course, the workers might say that, but with all those unemployed workers they won’t have the bargaining power.

Thus, the mechanics behind immiseration seem inevitable. Was Marx wrong? Well, no. First, he did notice some counter-tendencies, though he thought they would generally be weaker than the forces leading to immiseration.

One thing is that automation leads to the means of subsistence becoming cheaper. Since there is less labor used to make everything on the market, the supply increases and the price goes down. The whiskey made by the now-automated distillery will make more money initially by selling the whiskey at the same price as before, but once its competitors also automate the prices will go down.

Another thing is the increased need for engineers to build and maintain those machines. Yes, the machines do lead to factory work being deskilled, but those machines will need highly trained technical experts to design, build, maintain, and even dispose of. Thus, there is also new demand for specialized, higher-paid positions.

Yet these explanations aren’t really adequate to explain why immiseration didn’t happen on their own. The barista is not a highly paid technical expert but can afford far nicer housing than a 19th-century Manchester slum. Moreover, they can afford goods and services that haven’t been automated, like dentistry, far more easily than the 19th century factory worker. Is there anything else Marx might have to explain this?

The most important factor is a little-noticed aspect of his economic philosophy found in Chapter 6 of Volume I where he argues that the level of subsistence in a society is moral (and therefore cultural and normative):

The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this special article. So far as it has value, it represents no more than a definite quantity of the average labour of society incorporated in it. Labour-power exists only as a capacity, or power of the living individual. Its production consequently pre-supposes his existence. Given the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a given quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour-time requisite for the production of labour-power reduces itself to that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the labourer. Labour-power, however, becomes a reality only by its exercise; it sets itself in action only by working. But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, &c., is wasted, and these require to be restored. This increased expenditure demands a larger income. ^[6] If the owner of labour-power works to-day, to-morrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a labouring individual. His natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing, vary according to the climatic and other physical conditions of his country. On the other hand, the number and extent of his so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them, are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the degree of civilisation of a country, more particularly on the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed. ^[7] In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element. Nevertheless, in a given country, at a given period, the average quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the labourer is practically known.

In the bold section, we note that Marx is introducing a variable that is beyond the hard market mechanisms he is describing in Capital, which is the normative standard of living. The cost of subsistence is more than just the cost it takes to keep a worker alive, but the cost it takes for workers to enjoy the quality of life taken to be normal in their society. This is a moral notion captured by the concept of a “living wage” in popular discourse today, which is to say, the wage which most people (including most capitalists) take for granted as the cost of giving workers a sustainable life. These days, subsistence includes many things it did not in the 19th century, like cellphones, refrigerators, air conditioning, computers, and a car. In fact, employment assumes these costs, as workers need to commute (especially in America, with its dearth of public transportation) and need to be able to receive emails and phone calls from their boss.

This normative element has been decisive in American history. Consider the spread of American suburbia, and the way that the 1950s American worker enjoyed a quality of living unimaginable for a 19th century worker. In fact, many post-war factory workers enjoyed a quality of living akin to the lower nobility of the 19th century … a comfortable home, a nice yard, a bunch of appliances, running water, heating and their own vehicle. This was an expectation seen as a just reward for the working-class Americans who defeated the fascists, and proof that their way of life was the best.

If the cost of subsistence is a moral concept, then what is all that stuff about immiseration? “Marx needs to make up his mind,” you might think, “are wages driven down by automation or determined by this moral question?” Marx thinks that capitalists always have an incentive to push down this cost of subsistence. Think about all those insufferable think-pieces after the 2008 recession complaining about spoiled Millennials wasting their money on expensive avocado toast, and how they should be able to make do with less. Capitalists wanted to drive wages down because firms weren’t profitable enough, and reducing the cost of subsistence by dropping “extravagances” like avocado toast was one way to do it. Berating workers for their “luxurious” tastes was the ideological and social dimension of this.

Yet to actually accomplish the task of driving down wages, the capitalists need to improve their bargaining position. This is where the unemployment mentioned before comes in. Once unemployment is sufficiently high, capitalists will have the bargaining power to erode the standard of living slowly but surely. It might not happen overnight, but eventually workers will be living out of their cars, wearing hand-me-downs, and living off of the crummiest food available.

Other factors will contribute to this too. When the moral standard for a decent standard of living is higher in one place than the rest of the world, competition kicks in to level the playing field even if unemployment is low.

First, high wages and low unemployment in one country will give a significant incentive to immigrate to that country. A poor worker in the third world might as well take their bets on crossing the border to enjoy those higher living standards. This is the reason why many capitalists support immigration, as well as the main motivation for anti-immigrant sentiments in the working class. That being said, the US saw a rapid improvement in the standard of living across the 19th and 20th centuries despite sky high immigration rates. More immigration also means more demand for goods as well as the benefits of economies of scale. Thus, immigration by itself doesn’t cause immiseration (something we ought to keep in mind before we use the job market as a pretext to oppose immigration).

Second, and perhaps more importantly, as logistics becomes more cost-efficient production can move to countries with lower wages. We have seen firsthand how free trade has reduced the prices of many consumer goods, but it has also kept wages from increasing as fast as productivity. So much industrial production has moved to Mexico, China, and other trading partners with lower wages since the 1970s oil crisis and the beginning of the neoliberal era. Alongside US businesses moving to countries with lower wages, there is also more competition from foreign businesses in those same countries. By the end of the Cold War, Toyota and other Japanese and South Korean companies were giving US corporations a run for their money, aided by a skilled workforce happy to work for a lower wage.

Thus, the higher normative wage will, in the longer run, lead to more competition and put the improved wages and living conditions at risk. This is part of why immiseration has returned as a problem since the late 1970s. This immiseration did not happen overnight, but we have seen a persistent stagnation of wages in spite of high increases in productivity. The introduction of computers, the internet, low-cost electricity, massive container ships, and other inventions have made labor vastly more productive than it was in 1979, but all these gains went to the top. The increase in immiseration has gotten notably worse, with health insurance rates, rent, car prices, and other costs ballooning despite all our improving technology. Credit cards have given workers some short-term ways to defer these costs, but that is transparently unsustainable.

This all being the case, how is it that workers ever managed to counteract all these forces to increase wages in the first place? How does Marx think workers can enforce their own norms and improve the moral standard of living?

Marx argues that the only mechanism workers have to improve their living conditions is collective political and economic action. As workers organize, they come to understand themselves as a collective subject with real power and the ability to determine the standard of living:

Thus the movement of the working-class on both sides of the Atlantic, that had grown instinctively out of the conditions of production themselves, endorsed the words of the English Factory Inspector, R. J. Saunders

“Further steps towards a reformation of society can never be carried out with any hope of success, unless the hours of labour be limited, and the prescribed limit strictly enforced.”

It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity “labour-power” face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no “free agent,” that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, ^[163] that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” ^[164] For “protection” against “the serpent of their agonies,” the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. ^[165] In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.” Quantum mutatus ab illo! [What a great change from that time! – Virgil]

• Chapter 10

Capital works on both sides at the same time. If its accumulation, on the one hand, increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of labourers by the “setting free” of them, whilst at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain extent, independent of the supply of labourers. The action of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital. As soon, therefore, as the labourers learn the secret, how it comes to pass that in the same measure as they work more, as they produce more wealth for others, and as the productive power of their labour increases, so in the same measure even their function as a means of the self-expansion of capital becomes more and more precarious for them; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as, by Trades’ Unions, &c., they try to organise a regular co-operation between employed and unemployed in order to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic production on their class, so soon capital and its sycophant, Political Economy, cry out at the infringement of the “eternal” and so to say “sacred” law of supply and demand. Every combination of employed and unemployed disturbs the “harmonious” action of this law. But, on the other hand, as soon as (in the colonies, e.g.) adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army and, with it, the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class, capital, along with its commonplace Sancho Panza, rebels against the “sacred” law of supply and demand, and tries to check its inconvenient action by forcible means and State interference.

• Chapter 25

Obviously, this begins within factories through the formation of unions and other working class social institutions. These institutions must unite in turn to collectively push for a shorter working day and higher wages. Marx argues that the legal reduction of the working day or workweek is the moral foundation of the working-class movement. Not only does it ensure that workers have the leisure and rest they need to live a bearable life, but it reduces unemployment since now employers will need to hire more people to keep their factories fully productive. When unemployment goes down, these same working-class institutions can push for higher wages since the job market becomes less competitive.

Other factors Marx didn’t detail in Capital (but follow implicitly from some of his arguments) can contribute to reducing economic misery. When the working class becomes more powerful, they can demand more from the state which, in turn, will need to employ some workers to meet these demands. Though capitalists complain about the costs imposed by hiring and maintaining fire departments, schools, and public transit, in the long term these developments make capitalism more efficient while also improving general living standards. The presence of the public transit system, for instance, means your workers don’t need to waste their money on gas to get to work. Unemployment insurance means that newly unemployed workers don’t need to rush into the first job they can find but can look around for alternatives. Pensions and social security keep the elderly out of the job market as well as giving them an opportunity to relax. College education means that more people are entering the job market later. While all such programs are presented as an unfortunate burden by conservatives (and often by liberals too), they serve to keep the job market a little less ruthless for the working class. Pretty much the only jobs program they reliably support in the United States is the military. Marx may have considered these issues more closely had he finished Capital (he was hoping to write a volume on the state but never got around to it).

The point isn’t that Marx thinks immiseration is inevitable. Rather, it is an outcome of mechanisms which an organized and indignant working class can counteract. Thus, the immiseration thesis is a call to action to get organized, it is not a bet he is making on how capitalism will continue moving forward. Marx’s core thesis has been validated, which is that immiseration can be counteracted by shortening the working week and keeping the labor market tighter. It is only through its political agency that the working class can sustain those conditions, however. One of the key goals of the neoliberal era was loosening the labor market. This began with the Volcker Shocks under Carter, not under Reagan as some “progressives” remember it (though Reagan surely deepened it). The working class had won massive victories between the end of the Great Depression and the late 1970s, and across the US and Europe had reached levels of affluence remarkable by historical standards. Yet the job market was tight and the economy began to suffer persistent stagflation (which is to say, a combination of economic stagnation and inflation). Loosening the job market was the response, and the common thread uniting the neoliberal economic reforms of the US, UK, China, and France before becoming the global norm by the 1990s (not, as many say, getting the state out of the economy).

The slow degradation of living standards in the US and Western Europe despite high economic growth has been a persistent problem for decades. So has the demobolization and depoliticization of the working class. Unions are in retreat, socialist parties are only socialist in name or are politically irrelevant, and the competitive labor market is taken to be the path to prosperity. Keynes predicted in the early 20th century that by our time, we would be working less than twenty hours a week while enjoying comfortable lives. His projections were based on the increasing productivity he saw, and we have become more productive as he predicted. Yet why was his prediction about our standard of living wrong? The answer to that question is political.

Classical tellings of history generally focused on the great individuals. It was not regular people like you and me who made history in aggregate, but the Caesars, Alexanders, and Hannibal Barcas. The engine of historical change was their ambition and genius, and without those factors the world would have turned out very differently. This was embodied best in Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history, where these singular figures were primarily responsible for the fate of the world for good or ill. Yet over time, this theory of history was increasingly abandoned in favor of social theories, where individuals receded into the background and were overshadowed by titanic economic and social forces. The will of the individual was, at best, secondary, and the main story was the thoughts or actions of countless individuals operating under Smith’s “invisible hand” or Hegel’s “cunning of reason”. This is most evident in the Marxist theory of history, where the predominant forces in the human story were bigger phenomena like economic classes, ecological shifts, and technological changes. Marxists were often inconsistent on this point, as many would make exceptions for their favored “Great Helmsman”, but these cults of personality would eventually make way once more for sober analysis. This analysis ultimately wins out, as the decisive forces on history in the long term will be the great economic and political trends which transcend any one individual.

Yet I was struck when watching Trump’s incoherent and rambling address to the nation and the world last night how much damage can be caused by an unhinged individual stripped of any institutional constraints and surrounded by sycophants. He stood there on the world stage and spouted nonsense everyone knew to be false with no coherent argument to make it even remotely plausible, contradicting our own brute empirical experience. His own personal irrationality has forced its way into world history, whether we like it or not, like a drunk, methamphetamine-addled bull in a china shop, and there is nobody who can stop it … at least not right now. Is the “Great” Man theory of history true after all, or does it at least have exceptions for not-so-great men?

The point of social theories of history isn’t to do away entirely with the individual. Leaders are still important and their priorities and personal quirks do shape the course of events. However, their actions are still largely constrained by the interests of the classes they represent. When George W Bush decided to invade Iraq, he had multiple institutions behind him, and he was acting in their interests however much he saw it as a moral crusade of sorts against authoritarianism in the Islamic world. His actions advanced the interests of oil majors, defense contractors, logistics companies, intelligence agencies, and significant chunks of the political and military establishment. Voters at large also overwhelmingly approved of the invasion. Of course, he was free to not invade Iraq and probably would have done just fine not doing so. However, had he decided to invade Mexico or China for some reason, the institutions of the state and economy would have gone in motion to stop him. War with one of these nations would have wrecked the economy, and all the institutions which either supported the war on Iraq or got out of the way would have reacted with horror at attacking a major trading partner. Bush would not have wanted to go down in history as the man who caused an economic crisis by attacking a major trading partner (and recipient of US investment) without reason, and so such a decision would have appeared unthinkable and absurd to him too.

The point isn’t that the individual leader has no power, but that their power is enabled and constrained by a complex system of institutions and interest groups with their own ideologies, incentives, and sentiments. These groups expect certain things from their leaders and will lobby, petition, protest, vote, fund, and organize around those expectations. They will also put up barriers whenever they see leaders making decisions they simply cannot stomach. They also have other levers of power in any political system, not least one with clearly defined checks and balances. Thus, interest groups shape the priorities and decisions of leaders and hold them accountable whenever those priorities go haywire. This prevents individual avarice, incompetence, and madness from having too decisive a course on world history.

Of course, sometimes decisions go terribly wrong and have catastrophic “unforeseen” consequences. Usually, the “unforeseen” consequences were predicted by a handful of people who were simply ignored. Some did know the Iraq War would end badly, like those who understood how Sunni-Shia sectarian divides would destabilize the country, saw how Iran would react negatively to its neighbor being occupied by its greatest geopolitical rival (and one, incidentally, which would bomb it twice in a year eventually), knew many Americans and allies would die, or had some inkling of how it would drive up oil prices. Yet whether due to ignorance, conflicts of interest, or ideological blinders, many of the big interest groups nonetheless thought the invasion would go well.

The classical Great Man theory, of course, was less interested in the role of interest groups, classes, and institutions. It had the madness of Nero, the decadence of Caligula, and the cruelty of Commodus as examples of how individual vice and evil could become a historical force despite social conditions. Of course, when one’s historical narratives focus on despots, the will of the individual does become more central. Yet in all these cases, the bad leader was removed before they could do too much damage, as the interest groups of Rome did not want to see their needs undermined. Whenever the individual did act contrary to those interest groups, it was only because some social base or another attached themselves to the individual the way many of the veterans rallied around Julius Caesar against the plutocrats of Rome (and even then, the plutocrats still eventually won, and Caesar himself was a plutocrat who still had some support among the rich).

Sometimes individual leaders do act in ways which get their countries obliterated. Hitler invaded the USSR, and Hirohito attacked the United States. That ended with Hitler shooting himself in a bunker and Japan getting carpet bombed. Yet in both of those cases, the establishments behind Hitler and Hirohito thought that the war was necessary and possibly winnable. Even Japan, whose chances of victory were always slim, thought it could win if only it got far enough in the first six months.

What we see with Trump’s invasion of Iran is rather different. We see an unpopular President initiate a war few in the military, economic, and political establishment actually support. The Pentagon had war-gamed a conflict with Iran many times, and in every case it ended up badly. Yes, there are some supporters, but most know full well that this war will drive up oil prices, wreck the global economy, and get a bunch of people killed for no gain. Even Trump’s own base voted for him in large part because he promised we would no longer get in stupid military entanglements in the Middle East. The supporters are mostly marginal figures from within the Iranian diaspora, Israelis (most of whom are not US citizens and thus cannot vote), the most deranged of the neoconservatives, some of the Saud clan, people who would support Trump no matter what he does, and Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Pretty much everyone else either knows or feels like this war will be a disaster. Groups like the Pahlavi cult in the Iranian diaspora have vanishingly small political power when compared with the Gulf States whose economies are getting wrecked, shipping companies who are now blocked from one of the most vital trading routes in the world, and the majority of US voters who hate this war.

One cause of the war seems clear. One cause is the pro-Israel lobby, perhaps the only part of the pro-war coalition with any real political weight in the US, and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu. Clearly, Netenyahu fooled Trump into starting this war by convincing him it would go well. Yet this explanation is in itself inadequate. Netenyahu has been warning world leaders that Iran was months away from a nuclear weapon for decades, and this did not get George W Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden to invade Iran. For that matter, in his first term Trump also avoided this mistake. Moreover, this war has been a bit of a disaster for Israel, as the Israeli economy is suffering under the weight of never-ending war mobilization and the fact nobody there has gotten any sleep for a month. That is to say nothing of the considerable economic devastation caused by drones and missiles on the small country. Anyone with half a brain could have seen that this would have been the outcome, although most Jewish Israelis were polled as supporting the war.

The bigger cause seems to be Trump’s own cognitive decline and the fact that he is totally surrounded by sycophants. He was once smart enough to run a successful real estate empire, and however stupid he appears in most respects he did know how to market himself and his enterprises. If a conman needs one capacity in spades, it is marketing. Yet he is also clearly no longer even functioning at the level he was in 2016 where his lizard brain cunning was able to lead him to victory over the rest of the GOP primary field and even defeat Hillary Clinton (a formidable political foe despite her smug arrogance and overconfidence). His decline has led him to take ever-more erratic decisions and endorse ever-more absurd political projects, from his economically illiterate “liberation day” to his decision to put a ketamine-addled and chronically online billionaire and his army of Gen-Z techbros in charge of the bureaucratic apparatus (all in the name of “efficiency”).

How can it come to pass that Trump took such a catastrophically foolish decision? It is easier to explain how Netenyahu ended up there. Israel is increasingly dominated by an irrational settler class whose sole interest is appropriating as much Palestinian land as possible, and their final goal can only be accomplished if the main international backers of the Palestinian cause (Iran and Turkey) are either subdued (as happened with Egypt in the 1970s) or eliminated (as Israel is trying to do to Iran today). Moreover, Israelis have been caught in a long struggle for two and a half years against Iran’s allies in Hamas and Hezbollah. Thus, even if the war is a disaster for Israelis, it is at least easier to understand how they thought otherwise.

The real puzzle is how an unpopular Trump decided to begin an unpopular war against Iran which will inevitably have unpopular consequences. The American voters at large are clearly not enthused, but neither are most of America’s major interest groups. How is it that Trump was ever convinced this would help him politically, and how was it that none of the interest groups or their representatives in the bureaucracy, legislature, and military blocked this misadventure? In other words, how is it that US policy became so detached from the real material and political interests of … pretty much everyone in America, especially when everyone knew it was not in their interests? We cannot explain it in terms of the ignorance of voters or interest groups, the way we could with the disaster of the Iraq War, nor can we explain it as some kind of five-dimensional chess where Trump knew what was in their interests before they did. At this point, there is no coherent case to be made that Trump is some genius Bonaparte.

I think three causes emerge into the foreground. First, he has managed to enforce his cult of personality within his party, to the point where it is no longer possible for Republican legislators to functionally check his mistakes. They might object to this tariff or that ICE deployment, but for the most part they must play ball or risk losing their jobs because his supporters form a majority of their political base. The only exception seems to be Thomas Massie, a singular figure in the GOP willing to expose the crimes and misdeeds of the President. This political heft has freed Trump to avoid any kind of legislative check on his individual decisions.

Second, he has been forced into a corner by the Epstein story. We all know how US voters at large are outraged by Trump’s association with Epstein, and don’t buy his denials. This has forced Trump to take increasingly erratic decisions to keep everyone’s focus from the salacious allegations he just cannot shake. This compounds itself when these erratic decisions have their own negative consequences, requiring even more desperate acts.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Trump has become entirely surrounded by sycophants. The incentives to engage in sycophancy have a material force all their own. If you want a career at the top of America’s political pyramid, you must modulate your views to fit Trump’s sentiments. You must flatter and placate, regardless of the truth, and not doing so means the end of one’s career. If you lose your job, you will not easily find a political home anymore among the anti-Trump crowd because you decided to work for Trump in the first place (this was an easy move to make in his first term, where people could build a career by getting sacked by Trump or resigning). Thus, keeping one’s job means simply telling Trump whatever he wants to hear and contributing to this fantasy world his unhinged brain inhabits. Of course, this only makes the problem worse, because it deepens his utter disconnect from the reality the rest of us live in. It feeds the delusions of his base, which you need to placate to preserve any hope of a future on the right, and it feeds his delusions too. Every week this gets worse, as telling Trump the truth (even if it helps him) only conflicts ever more deeply with this fantasy world. Since everyone else is a sycophant too, you have to get with the program and flatter him even more than your colleagues to rise to the top. This third condition prevents the real and legitimate concerns of interest groups from reaching the Oval Office.

This has led to an unfortunate circumstance where Pete Hegseth is taken by Trump to be the most knowledgeable figure on military issues. This is obviously delusional, as Hegseth is a profoundly stupid (and probably corrupt) individual. Yet if you’re one of Trump’s other advisors, what are you going to do? Challenge the fantasy world Hegseth is helping to build? This only risks your job advancement, and won’t do anything to actually help the country since you’ll be fired and replaced with another toady. Better to just play the game.

This can be seen in the fate of Tulsi Gabbard, former Berniecrat and anti-war veteran. Gabbard made a hard turn right when she saw that Bernie Sanders was no longer her ticket to a cushy administrative job and hitched her wagon on the Trump Train. Her general opposition to US wars abroad jibed well with Trump’s superficially anti-war message, and whether out of self-advancement or principled opposition to further US war, she endorsed him over Kamala Harris. Trump gave her the job of the chair of the intelligence council, where she became something of a check on the warmongers who wanted Trump to attack Iran. Yet she made the mistake of countering Trump’s narrative with the truth. Trump evidently assumed Iran was only enriching uranium to build a bomb, and so when she told him that there was no evidence they were attempting to do so she got sidelined. Then Trump attacked Iran, and to preserve the fantasy that he saved the US from a nuclear Iran he had to double down on his conclusion Gabbard was mistaken. Any intelligence she brought which contradicted that, however true it was, had to be ignored to sustain this delusion he built for himself. Now she has the unfortunate position of being hated by the part of the country which also hates Trump while still being seen as an idiotic joke by Trump himself. Despite not having lost her job, it’s clear that Trump no longer takes her seriously for the high crime of actually doing her job.

Behind the appearance of Trump driving history despite the real or perceived interests of US voters and interest groups, there is something even darker. There is Trump creating his own insular, circular, and self-justifying interest group solely devoted to sustaining his delusions. This extends beyond the immediate circle of sycophants and into the wider Republican political infrastructure and media space. Trump cannot act alone on history, but what he can do is direct a sinking ship crewed by individuals whose sole interest at this point is keeping him happy. Sadly, for us and for millions across the globe, we are stuck on this boat too, and we will inevitably suffer for his mistakes.

One classic fallacy with a particularly catchy name is the “No True Scotsman.” It works as follows:

A Scotsman is reading the newspaper and comes across a story about an Englishman murdering his wife and children in a fit of rage. “No Scotsman would ever do something so degenerate!” he says. His wife says “well actually, there was that guy in Glasgow who did that exact same thing last week, don’t you remember?” Her husband responds in a huff “well, no true Scotsman would ever do such a thing.”

The nature of the fallacy is clear. It’s similar to moving the goalposts (though its not quite the same thing) and consists of trying to dismiss a counter-example through a kind of purist definition which assumes what you’re trying to argue.

This fallacy is a favorite of political discourse. When confronted with the corruption, poverty, and market instability of a capitalist system, some free-market libertarians will assert “well, true capitalism has never been tried!” When confronted with the problems of populist demagoguery and polarization in a democracy, some democrats will say “well, true democracy has never been tried!” And when confronted by the economic errors or oppression of Marxist-Leninist states, some communists will say “well, true communism has never been tried!”

The capitalists who argue “true capitalism has never been tried” simply have a silly definition of capitalism. Capitalism is not just some platonic ideal of exchange without government interference, something which is impossible (since you need a government to define who owns which piece of property), but a system where the productive technology of society is capital. This is a simple, elegant definition which gets to the root of the matter, instead of some idealist picture of a pure market. As for the democratic example, the relevant issue is whether the masses are empowered to hold politicians accountable and this is clearly true in most of the countries we call “democracy” (even if those politicians are able to abuse their status to make this less likely, they can only do so because the demos lets them). Of these, the last is the most interesting because it is simultaneously wrong but also contains a kernel of truth that leads to some interesting nuance. The kernel of truth is that communism is defined as a stateless classless society, and none of the Marxist-Leninist states were stateless (whether or not they were classless is a matter of hot debate). Yet the argument still fails, since what most non-communists mean by “communism” is “socialism” and unless you’re an anarchist, you still have to explain how socialism today would avoid the mistakes of historical socialist experiments.

First off, the claim that “communism has never been tried” is wrong in virtue of the fact that there were stateless and classless societies, and they functioned for tens of thousands of years. In fact, there are still some scattered across the globe. Marx and Engels called them “primitive communism”, and they are the small, tribal societies of everyone’s ancestors and some small handful of people today. These societies do not have a state (though remaining ones exist within the borders of existing states) as the modern state was a creation of the Enlightenment, and earlier forms of the state have only existed for a few thousand years at most. The state is a hierarchical model of social organization with laws, officials, and some individual or committee at the top. As Max Weber argued, they tend to have the monopoly on violence (in that they control the army and police) and they enforce their laws. This monopoly on violence can break down or be constrained (see Hezbollah having an army more powerful than Lebanon’s), but if this leads to instability we call it a “failed state”. The state also has clear demarcations on a map and defines the property relations within its borders through its laws. Finally, most everyone is either a citizen or subject of a specific state and is recognized as such by other states.

“Primitive Communist” societies lack all this. Instead of laws they have customs which everyone takes for granted, and instead of kings or presidents they might have chiefs who can only “rule” through the consent of their people. Anyone in the tribe can function as a warrior, and responsibilities are enforced collectively instead of by some special people with a uniform. There is no money or exchange, so people simply share what they make the way we share with members of our family. Decisions are made through deliberation even if everyone agrees that a chief is needed to adjudicate this deliberation. For most of human history, people lived in such “primitive communist” societies. In places like the Amazon, societies like this still exist, and the Zapatista Caracoles in Mexico are arguably “communist” in this sense. Yet certainly the USSR, China, and so on never were.

The state emerged slowly and organically out of these earlier tribal societies as they grew ever-larger and required more elaborate forms of social organization and as they found themselves in long-term conflicts with their neighbors. Exchange emerged, as did the disciplining of labor since we started creating jobs nobody wanted to do.

Does the fact that the USSR wasn’t really “Communist” mean the “no true Scotsman” is at least half right? No … the USSR never considered itself communist (outside the brief period of “war communism”, and what they meant by this is a bit different). Rather, it considered itself to be a socialist state that was trying to transition into communism (some argued it wasn’t even socialist yet, but “state capitalist”, but that’s a whole other debate). Moreover, with only a few exceptions (like anarchists), most every communist thinks that we need to transition to communism through socialism.

Thus, even if one is a communist, they still need to contend with the failure of the USSR or the market reforms of the PRC. Josef Stalin did his purges and forced collectivization because he saw these as necessary to achieve communism in the future. Even if we assume he just did these things because he was a big mean dictator who just wanted power for himself, most of the people in the Communist Party who followed his line of reasoning accepted the party line. Likewise, Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms were supported by members of the Communist Party as necessary measures to incorporate free market ideas and capitalist investment into their socialist systems to give it new life.

Thus, the puzzle of the USSR for the communist isn’t trying to argue that it wasn’t a “true” communist country since Stalin himself admitted as much (as did Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on). Rather, the problem is in explaining how their model to transition into communism was mistaken, and how we’d do it differently today. Thus, the fact that the USSR wasn’t “communist” according to our definition of the term (even if it was according to the everyday definition) doesn’t mean that we don’t have to address it, since it was (at least in theory) trying to transition into communism through socialism.

This is made easier by the fact that the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Ethiopia, and the other revolutionary Marxist-Leninist states all took over countries which, according to Marxist theories of history, politics, and economics, lacked the means to easily transition to communism. The difference between the primitive communism of those nomadic and early agrarian peoples and the communism which modern activists want to build (at least the vast majority who aren’t primitivists) is that we have modern technology, which in theory would allow us to organize a stateless, classless society on a global scale and with far more affluence. The problem is the revolutions always took place in the most backwards and impoverished countries, not the wealthy industrial ones, meaning the revolutionaries inevitably ended up taking extreme (and often catastrophic) policy responses.

Marx argued that the proper transition to modern communism would occur through some kind of industrialized socialist society. As he argues in the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” people in modern society are accustomed to hierarchies, discipline, and trade. Our habits, morals, skills, technological systems, logistics chains, sanitation systems, and so on are all premised on the idea that not working will drive us into poverty, and that we have to pay for the roof over our head. Our entire system of production, in fact, is premised on such things. If we transitioned to communism overnight, we would end up with fights between the people who did work and the lazy freeloaders. Goods would go undelivered since there is no longer an incentive to direct those goods where they need to go. People would be unable to come to decisions through deliberation since there’s no longer bosses to tell us what to do. The list goes on. Thus, Marx imagined a long technological and social transition to a “higher phase” of a true stateless, classless society, which Marxists today refer to as “socialism”:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

…

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Marx doesn’t say how long this transition would be, and he never claimed to know. It’s likely he thought the length of such a transition wasn’t fixed, but conditional based on any number of factors. Yet it’s clear that he fundamentally disagreed with the anarchist idea that a stateless, classless society could be achieved tomorrow if only enough workers wanted it. To make communism work, we would need high levels of automation, solidarity, and political equality, none of which exists today.

The problem is that the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. all lacked the industrial capacity to transition. They were all majority-peasant countries that depended on the world market to meet their industrial needs, meaning they needed to sell goods on the world market to survive. Thus, the question was how they could transition to communism without the requisite industrial base and largely on their own. This is what motivated Stalin’s policy of Socialism in one Country and forced collectivization, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and other policies (many of which, like the Great Leap Forward, had disastrous impacts on some or all of the citizens of these countries). There were leaders who advocated different paths. Both Trotsky and Bukharin advocated different approaches to Stalin’s, and famously Deng Xiaoping took a totally different approach (of which we see the fruits in modern China).

Thus, what the “true communism has never been tried” argument really misses (aside from the fact that there are historical communist societies, albeit non-industrial ones, and on top of being a fallacy) is that it is a negative argument, merely denying any relationship to those problems, when what we need is a positive argument of how we’d do it differently. “Well communism hasn’t been tried” … maybe, but socialism has, and there’s no way to get to communism without socialism of one type or another. Thus, whose who say “… but what about the famines in the USSR and China?” or “… but what about the purges and political persecution?” do need to be addressed in a more thoughtful way than hitting them with a No True Scotsman fallacy. We don’t need to deal with the lack of industrial capacity which the Bolsheviks did, so at least it’s easier for us to answer problems like how everyone will get fed. We have the tractors, fertilizers, and trains. However, we have whole new problems like vastly more complicated logistics chains than anything which existed in Marx’s lifetime, nuclear weapons (and nuclear power, for that matter), rapid global climate change, and so on.

I’ve seen some folks looking on the activist response to the war in Iran (or more appropriately, lack thereof) with despair. Why aren’t people marching in the streets? Why aren’t the universities getting shut down? Where are the picket lines at ports? In the Iraq, Vietnam, and even Afghan wars there were big protests. Yet Trump has launched the biggest and most absurd war since Vietnam (if not WWII if it escalates) and the streets are silent. I’ve seen some decry the failure to learn the lessons of these earlier protests. I’ve also seen some moral condemnation of American sensibilities and the broader acceptance of imperial violence since, at the end of the day, we all benefit from it. I don’t think either of these explanations are quite fair.

First, this war came out of the blue in a way which the Iraq war did not. Well, it didn’t really come out of the blue. I was worried Trump would start a war with Iran before he was elected. Yes, he ran on being anti-war and rejecting the neoconservative tendency of not knowing a Muslim majority non-monarchy they didn’t want to either occupy or turn into a puppet state. But he also ran on taking a tough line on Iran because of Obama’s “terrible” JCPOA and didn’t seem to comprehend that Iran had suspended its weapons program, and that Iran is a country structurally unlikely to capitulate to the US. Iran’s whole geopolitical strategy is built around avoiding foreign domination by being too stubborn and too painful to attack to mess with. Yes, you can negotiate, but you don’t surrender your sovereign rights because if you give the US an inch it will take a mile. Trump was also a jingoist with an overly inflated sense of US capabilities despite his belief that foreign entanglements had been a disaster, not to mention his overly inflated sense of his own genius. Yet despite all this, Trump did market himself as the man who would end foreign wars and take an “America first” approach. Even most of his opponents believed him, especially after he cut ties with neoconservatives like John Bolton.

It also came out of the blue because there were negotiations, because Trump had bluffed about war so many times and for so long in the past year (not to mention his first term), and because he seemed to wimp out of the last brief war only a few days in. It seemed that he had gotten burned and had suddenly remembered how he didn’t want to get stuck in some Middle Eastern quagmire. He also seemed annoyed at Netenyahu about getting dragged into the whole thing. Of course, with all the assets moving into the Middle East, and with the fact that he had used negotiations as a ruse to attack in the last skirmish, it shouldn’t really have been a surprise to anyone watching closely. Yet with all the confusion and with Trump’s tendency to bluff, it is understandable that people’s guard was down.

Iraq, on the other hand, had a long and clear buildup. Not only were we already in a war in Afghanistan, but the Bush administration spent many months building up to the invasion. Thus, when it came people were ready. Existing activist groups had considerable time to get their act together and prepare, and the citizens who opposed the war were all aware it was going to happen. This is why millions came out marching across the capital cities of Europe. I remember the anti-war protests in my high school even. It is worth remembering that the Iraq War was vastly more popular than the Iran war, yet that leadup by the administration gave the minority opposed to it months to get organized.

Second, people have also been both distracted and exhausted by the other crap the administration is doing. We’re just months out from a huge controversy and protest wave over ICE excesses and brutality. The protests worked enough at least to cause Trump embarrassment to the point that Bondigo and Noem got sacked, and the ICE presence on the streets has at least been reduced. It’s not exactly surprising that people are feeling a bit of whiplash now and aren’t organized enough to deal with the next thing.

Then there were two years of protests over Gaza which left people exhausted. These protests didn’t seem to do much and were isolated by constant allegations that the protesters supported terrorism or were motivated by antisemitism. The genocide happened anyway, and people in Gaza are still in terrible conditions. People in the West Bank are still being mistreated. The dominant forces in both parties haven’t shifted much. I think this has all been very demoralizing for the very people who form the core of any protest movement on foreign policy and imperialism. It is frustrating to turn up to protest a war because you are horrified at the killing of children like Hind, only to get accused of being an antisemite (a jarring experience, I am sure, for the many Jewish protesters) and potentially suspended from university.

In fact, historically anti-war protests are of exaggerated importance. They do have an effect, but it often isn’t directly to end the war. Often, the benefit is just psychological, as you don’t feel so crazy anymore for mistrusting the politicians and pundits who support the war when so many others are on the streets agreeing with you. The actual direct effect on policy is questionable at best, at least in most cases. Large protests against Iraq didn’t end that war. The war continued and people on both sides continued to die until an unstable republic was eventually hobbled together by the various pro- and anti-US forces there, and until a new war against ISIS began (in many ways, a continuation of the Iraq War). As for ‘Nam, the protests were only one of many things which led to the end of the Vietnam War … the persistence and capability of NVA and VC forces played a big part of that, too. The last serious foe faced by the US air force were North Vietnam’s fighter aces and anti-air weapons, and the number of lost USAF planes was staggering especially when compared to the paltry numbers downed by Iraq. On the ground, the Vietnamese rarely won tactical victories but couldn’t be defeated. It is naive and a bit narcissistic to center the activists over the Vietnamese people in ending that war. We romanticize the Vietnam protests, and we remix footage of it to make montages set to Buffalo Springfield. We tell a story about their importance since it was one of the last times the collegiate left was large and united, and because those people spent the next few decades ruling our world. Even when they sold out in the 80s and 90s, they remembered their youthful courage against an imperialist war, and we have inherited that reverence (at least, outside the dead-enders who blame the media on the US loss in Vietnam). None of that is to dismiss the protests or impugn their motives. They were important. Yet they were not sufficient in themselves to end the war.

Now, we absolutely should take to the streets and protest this war. For one thing, I think the protests will be effective inasmuch as Trump is exceedingly vain and this war is unpopular. This is why the anti-ICE protests worked so well. Trump was getting support from his base over it because they’d love him whatever he did, and because they don’t care if some “libtard protester” gets shot by the cops, but he was losing the middle ground which is the market he really wants to keep. If this war continues and big protests become a regular occurrence, there’s a good chance that it will add to the reasons for him to pull out.

Yet I’m leery of overly moralizing the reasons why people aren’t protesting or connecting it to any broad support for imperialism by US citizens. There are conditions which explain the relative lack of major protest so far. It is true that most Americans are far too enamored with the military and US imperialism after a lifetime of uncritically absorbing so much Hollywood slop and chauvinistic militarism. Yet that is less true today than it was in Iraq, and during the early years of the Vietnam War at least. Israel has finally entered net unfavorable territory in the US, and there is a general distaste for foreign interventionism (especially in the Middle East). There is also more cynicism about US motives than ever, at least between the Epstein files, Netenyahu’s apparent influence campaign, his waning popularity, and the total uninterest in even providing a coherent casus belli. I think the character of US imperialism may well be more widely understood today (even if the broad literacy crisis and popularity of conspiratorial slop means people have poor theoretical explanations of why this imperialism is bad).

Long before I began writing my work on Marx’s ethics, I worked and reworked a paper on Fanon that seems critically relevant to our current context. As Fanon argues in Wretched of the Earth, colonial ideology is characterized by a Manichean worldview. What is Manicheanism you might ask (unless you’re an ancient religion nerd)? It was a gnostic sect and early competitor with Christianity that fused Abrahamic notions of God with Zoroastrian notions of struggle between good and evil. In the Manichean division, there was a good, pure god of truth ideas who was in a perpetual struggle with a debased material god of delusion and profane matter. This struggle could only ever come to completion once humanity united against this evil. Zoroaster, Jesus, Buddha, and Mani came to us to reveal this dualistic truth and guide people away from the evil forces of the cosmos. Now, Fanon was obviously not saying that Europeans in the 1800s and 1900s were secret Manicheans. Rather, he was drawing an analogy between the moral dualism of Manicheanism and the dualistic moral worldview of the colonist, where the colonizers were civilized, beautiful, wise, and intelligent and those they colonized were savage, ugly, foolish, and ignorant. Fanon wanted the colonized subject to unite and struggle against this system, but he saw a fundamental problem faced by the colonized subject that the colonist had built a world which corresponded to their moral dualism. Colonial systems deprived their subjects of education, health care, sanitation, and other basic necessities. Consequently, both the colonizer and the colonized had no obvious empirical reason to doubt the colonial worldview. The colonizer saw a world which fit their Manichean view of things, while the native internalized their oppression and formed a kind of inferiority complex.

In light of this, Fanon needed to find a way to break the native subject out of their conceptual prison. His earlier work, Black Skin White Masks, delved into his own attempt to work through this puzzle as a black French citizen from Martinique, Free French soldier, and psychoanalyst. Wretched of the Earth turned this problematic outwards to show how the revolutionary struggle of the Algerians (and others) confronted and overcame this challenge. Thus, Wretched of the Earth was (among other things) a kind of decolonial work of social epistemology, where Fanon was describing how the revolutionary native could counter the illusion of their essential inferiority.

As Fanon argues, the colonial world is one divided in two. There are colonial quarters for the settlers where beautiful, modern, European buildings housed educated and pampered elites, and the wretched quarters of the natives filled with slums, crumbling religious buildings, and social decay. The Europeans were rational, well dressed, beautiful, and happy, where the natives lacked sanitation, decent housing and clothes, and modern culture. By depriving the natives of the benefits of modernity, the Europeans ensured that they appeared intrinsically backward and in need of cultural and political guidance from the Empire. The native was uneducated, unsanitary, and uncouth, and always failed to reach the standard of humanity set by post-Enlightenment Europe. In this way, only the European is essentially “fully human” while the native is essentially subhuman, sharing some human qualities but remaining closer to our ape ancestors in other ways.

In such a situation, the natives had two immediate options. One was to assimilate and take on the culture of their colonizers, seek out an education, and find employment in the institutions of their oppressors. Another was to double down on their indigenous culture, rejecting modernity and all the technological and social improvements which come with it. As a young man, Fanon had taken the first route by getting a college education, fighting the Nazis as a Free French soldier, and becoming a psychiatrist. His Black Skin White Masks details the inadequacies of this approach, as it is premised on the inferiority of one’s own cultural background and, more importantly, as it depends on the recognition of one’s oppressor. It gives all the power to the oppressor, and even if one is successful they remain “one of the good ones” who must continually prove that they are adequate (unlike the French, who were fully human simply in virtue of being French). Yet doubling down on the indigenous culture is not a viable alternative either, as it means rejecting all the social, medical, and economic benefits of modernity. It meant keeping women oppressed, embracing archaic superstitions, and tolerating profound levels of poverty.

Ultimately, both assimilation and indigeneity remain locked within the very Manichean worldview which oppresses them. It is a false choice, in Fanon’s eyes, and the native must find an alternative route to assert their humanity. Being a leftwing Hegelian and a Marxist (though a heterodox Marxist), this path was organized revolution. By organizing a revolution, the native could assert their humanity through force.

Revolution meant claiming the moral and epistemic benefits of humanity on one’s own, without the need for recognition by the European. To understand why, we need to consider the epistemological standpoint of the colonists. Europeans had the right to defend their political rights against oppressors through violence because of their humanity, but since natives were not “fully human” any use of violence was illegitimate. When the Germans occupied France, the French saw themselves as within their rights to fight back and organize guerilla armies, but when the French occupied Algeria any Algerian uprising was intrinsically illegitimate because they needed the French to guide them. This moral chauvinism was epistemically justified through the defeat of the natives. When the French invaded Algeria, they did so with a modern military with the newest technology, and they could use those modern weapons and strategies because they were rational. The Algerians who fought them used traditional weapons and strategies, organizing armies and fighting in ways not unlike they did a century earlier as Barbary corsairs. Inevitably, the French won and demonstrated their superiority over the Algerians through their victory. Were the Algerians really civilized and rational, they would have also adopted the modern strategies and weapons of their conquerors and won, and their inability to do so legitimated imperialism.

This was a common problem faced by the peoples subject to colonialism. The Native Americans fought well and bravely, but their tribal differences prevented them from uniting against the US (though we know today that the demographic collapse caused by disease played a greater part). The Mayan rebels against the white elites in the Yucatan in the 1840s went home at the cusp of victory because it was planting season, and they were armed peasants instead of a professional army who had to tend to the crops. The Zulus who embarrassed the British at Isandlwana refused to adopt firearms because their founder Shaka thought that charging warriors with spears could easily overwhelm soldiers armed with muskets—this was true when he was alive, but by the 1870s was no longer the case. While the spear charge won them a few victories, it was unable to overcome the Gatling Gun. The Qing Army refused to adopt modern weapons and tactics, which lead to the British drug lords butchering their armies during the Opium War. Time and time again, indigenous tradition was incapable of responding to the dynamic and rational models of warfare embraced by the colonizers. Only the Japanese were truly able to buck the trend prior to 1950 by adopting modern weapons and strategies in the late 1800s.

Thus, the military and industrial supremacy of Europe (and Japan) ideologically legitimated their conquest and granted them the right in their eyes to conquer and oppress the natives. This meant that the native had to learn from the Europeans and defeat them to obliterate the ideological basis of colonialism by force. They also had to do this to demolish their own internalized inferiority complex, as the native had come to adopt the European belief in their own inferiority. The Japanese had done this at Tsushima by sinking the Russian fleet with barely any losses, gaining de facto status as a “European” power despite being in East Asia. Through such a victory, the native could once again view themselves as human, with all the rights and privileges that entails, and if the Europeans continue to insist on the inhumanity of the native then they can die with their prejudice.

This could only be done through reason, and by abandoning the constraints of traditionalism. The traditions of the native populations made them predictable and easy to control. European universities were full of academic anthropological programs explaining and understanding the cultural quirks of the peoples they colonized. As much as this was motivated by a genuine desire to understand and even appreciate the native cultures, it was also motivated by a desire to dominate. By learning from the Europeans and outwitting them, the native was able to prove that they were just as rational as their oppressors. In fact, by using the prejudice of the colonizers against them, the colonized people could demonstrate the falsehood of these prejudices.

Consider the brilliant movie Battle of Algiers by the Marxist Italian director Pontecorvo. The movie details the early stages of the Algerian war for independence, and the way in which Algerian rebels outwitted the Europeans. Though the first generation of rebels were largely wiped out, they nonetheless demonstrated that they were capable of fooling the Europeans and became martyrs for the next generation to continue the struggle. In one scene, the Algerian rebels intended to get revenge for French war crimes against Algerian civilians. Yet the French had built fences and checkpoints to keep Algerian rebels out of French neighborhoods. To get around these checkpoints, the Algerians used the prejudice of the French as a weapon. The French presumed that, as Muslims, Algerian women would only ever dress modestly, which meant they could distinguish them from the French. The Algerian rebel women cut their hair short, put on miniskirts, and waltzed right on through the checkpoints to leave bombs at French discos and clubs. The French imagination was incapable of breaking out of the Manichean view where only French women could be modern, and where Algerian women were entirely constrained by tradition. Thus, the Algerian women were successful in their bombing run.

We would rightly condemn terrorism against innocent civilians, as the victims of the Algerian bombings were not soldiers but youth. Yet we can nonetheless recognize the brilliance of the strategy, and the way it not only destroyed some discos but the presumption that Algerian women could be reduced to the petty stereotypes of the French. This is not to assert a “two wrongs make a right” line of reasoning, of course. The point is not moral but epistemic, as by outwitting the French the rebels undermined the conceptual basis for the French chauvinism, and for the Algerian inferiority complex.

There is still a moral angle to this. The rebels asserted the equality of Algerian civilian life to French civilian life - if the French government asserted that it was acceptable to murder Algerian civilians, then it was also acceptable for the Algerians to murder French civilians. For the French to condemn the Algerian killing of civilians, they would also have to implicate themselves for killing civilians. Before, they could simply state that the Algerians weren’t fully civilized and their murder was simply a logical consequence of the need to bring reason to them.

Once again, however, Fanon’s point here is not moral but epistemic. Far too many leftists who read Fanon today misread it as a moral endorsement of terrorism. This is a time-honored tradition, as Jean Paul Sartre’s introduction to the book is basically such a misreading. Sartre interprets Fanon’s argument from the standpoint of bloodlust, understanding it as a moral justification for natives to murder colonizers wantonly. Rather, Fanon’s main point is that the native must prove to themselves and their victimizers that they have all the rational faculties of any other human being, and that trying to dominate the native will lead to a violent backlash just as much as trying to dominate European peoples will.

Consider Iran’s strategy to counter American dominance. Iran is not a colonized country per se, but it was the victim of de facto colonization by the British and Russians before becoming a Western puppet state under the Pahlavis. While the Iranians shook off Western dominance by getting rid of the Shah, they still suffer under the constraints of US imperialism. US aggression is premised on the idea that it is fundamentally rational and enlightened in a way in which any indigenous Iranian government could never be. Thus, Iran ought either submit to US dominance or live in a permanent state of economic sanctions and occasional military assault.

Previous US administrations were not wholly bound to the Manichean thinking of the imperialist. While Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama all opposed Iran’s theocratic system, they all understood it was an adversary that needed to be respected, and could cause more trouble than it was worth. Yet Trump, surrounded by Fox News jingoists, sycophants, and other cultists, are so high on their own supply that they really believed that Iranians are not full subjects but irrational ones deserving of Western domination. They are too irrational, too primitive, and too unsophisticated to outwit American power, and thus can be attacked with impunity by superior American power.

The Iranian strategy has put this sense of American dominance in crisis. The US builds anti-aircraft missiles capable of shooting down any Iranian aircraft which cost millions of dollars. So what do the Iranians do? They fire cheap drones at the Americans to the point that they run out of interceptor missiles. The Shahed drone is a domestic Iranian invention which demonstrates that Iranian engineers are just as capable of reinventing military doctrine in ways which the Pentagon could not foresee. The US devastates Iran’s economy through sanctions and by blowing up critical infrastructure. So what do the Iranians do? They shut down the Strait of Hormuz while continuing to sell oil themselves. By forcing ships to sail between the islands they control, they can police who can and cannot enter the Persian Gulf. Trump evidently thought he could just send the invincible US Navy into the strait to force it open, only to discover that if he tried that the Iranians would probably sink his boats.

Now we see that Trump is stuck. Conceptually imprisoned by his own Manichean sense of American superiority, he has been outfoxed by the Iranians who now have the world economy hostage thanks to his own mindless war of aggression. Continuing the war means destroying his reputation as a responsible steward of the US economy, and possibly destroying the image of US military invincibility. Yet ending the war now means destroying his self-perception (and reputation among his supporters) as a genius world leader capable of “winning so much Americans will be tired of winning”.

This is why even if Iran keeps facing catastrophic tactical losses in terms of leaders and civilians killed their strategy is working. The Iranians are capable of exposing the hubris and emptiness of Yankee militarism. Even if many if not most Iranians hate their government (and they have so many good reasons to do so), they will benefit in the long term by the humiliation of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netenyahu by proving that the Iranian people are a worthy adversary, and not just some weak, predictable, and easily manipulated native population in need of domination by the “civilized” west. A failure to resist would mean ending up like Venezuela, which has become a vassal state after the kidnapping of their president.

Fanon understood that the logic of imperialism can only be overcome through acts of resistance that make that logic empirically untenable. By failing to resist, the Venezuelans have become objects of American domination and exploitation. Fanon knew full well that the anti-colonial forces could (and probably would) become oppressors in their own right, and much of his work is devoted to explaining the hazards of post-colonial governments adopting the methods of their former colonizers and becoming tyrannical. It is worth repeating, his work was not an uncritical moral endorsement of anti-imperial forces, however much many leftists today want to read him that way. Yet he understood the epistemology of imperialism and resistance better than anyone before him.

Many commenters, right, left, and center, have been projecting rational narratives onto Donald Trump and Benjamin Netenyahu’s Iran adventure. On the right, this is often cope by arguing that Trump has somehow undermined China by taking away its cheap oil supply (even though Iran has been supplying China with oil during the whole war). On the left, this is either contrarianism targeted towards liberal rejection of Trump or a mistaken faith in the discipline and rational self-interest of bourgeois institutions. On the center, this is a long-repressed desire to see Iran cowed finally being realized. In all cases, the view projects 5d chess onto a clearly foolish and ham-fisted decision.

The presumption is that Trump must not have miscalculated in his attack on Iran. He must have known Iran would try to close down Hormuz because the military always knew this was the case. He must have known Iran would lob missiles and drones at all the US bases, successfully destroying much of America’s military infrastructure. He must have known that taking out Khamenei would have not ended the political system and cowed what was left of the regime. Since he must have known these things beforehand, the appearance of confusion and incoherence at the top is merely that … an appearance, and the reality is that our military and political institutions accounted for these possibilities

The truth is that systems are not always rational or self-interested. In fact, sometimes systems are taken up by fundamentally self-destructive downward spirals of irrationality. This occurs most frequently when political systems are beset by hubris, decline, a loss of legitimacy, or corruption. Importantly, the US (and Israel) are facing all of these issues to varying degrees.

Add to this the reality of toxic sycophancy. A rational system presupposes that accurate information is moving to the top properly, and that whoever is running the show does not discriminate this information based on his personal sentiments or grievances against individuals. Yet it is painfully obvious to anyone observing the Trump administration that his cabinet is far from the “team of rivals” executive ideal pushed by Doris Kearns Goodwin about the Lincoln administration. Rather, Trump punishes and rewards his advisors based on how well they flatter him. He promotes those who fit his prejudices and sentiments, and casts aside those who make him feel uncomfortable. In such a setting, the obvious career advancement comes from convincing Trump that whatever he feels like doing right now is doable and that his power is effectively limitless.

This is fundamentally an epistemic problem for the leader. Their action requires accurate knowledge to be successful. Yet this requires them to have good sources of knowledge, be able to adjudicate these sources, and then to ensure these sources aren’t bullshitting them for ulterior motives. How do they know that they know what they need to know? For a normal person, this might be doable, but for a decrepit leader beset by narcissism and surrounded by advisors scared of his whims, how can he know he’s getting good information? What’s worse, your advisors have their own agendas, and you know they often lie to advance their own interests over yours or the state’s. You can only adjudicate these things based on your own feelings and limited knowledge, driving paranoia which in turn drives more sycophancy. Beyond a certain point, this problem can become terminal and the leader inevitably follows the advice of fools. During the German invasion of the USSR, Stalin had cowed his advisors to the point where they were scared to give him the information he needed to properly delegate and deploy forces to survive, while Hitler gave his generals free reign to use their expertise. Yet the catastrophes for the Soviets in 1941 disabused Stalin of his over-reliance on fear and sycophancy to control those around him, while Hitler became increasingly obsessed with his own genius. By 1943, the roles had reverse and Hitler was increasingly dominating his sources, while Stalin was listening to his brilliant generals like Zhukov to plan overwhelming campaigns.

Consider the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump may well have been told that the straits would have been closed, but then was convinced by someone around him (like the braindead sycophant, jingoist, and television performer Hegseth) that the power of the US Navy could simply sweep it away. Then the war began, the straits were closed, and he told the navy to do it. They told him they couldn’t, and he went on air suggesting that they and the tanker captains were chicken for not wanting to run the blockade. The actual naval experts knew full well that Iran would blow their ships out of the water and it was impossible. Iran has tube artillery, missile and rocket artillery, speedboats with cruise missiles, naval drones, and long range torpedoes, and this would have been quite the gauntlet for a US destroyer to run an escort mission through. Now Trump is left begging his allies to send ships, after previously arrogantly telling the world he didn’t need help from the Brits and French because the US military was powerful enough to do it on their own.

Perhaps in another war this would have been done. American frigates and destroyers faced down German U-Boats and Japanese cruisers because the country was facing an existential threat, and they did so alongside their British allies. Yet nobody with a memory is buying the “Iran is a week away from the bomb” line, or Trump’s gut feeling that Iran was going to strike first.

This desire to project rationality onto an irrational regime is unjustifiable, and leads thinkers to fundamentally misdiagnose the crisis we find ourselves in. It leads thinkers to overlook the hazards of individual irrationality on political systems, and the way our social pathologies are reproduced in even more acute forms at the top. And it leads otherwise intelligent people to ignore the possibility we’re being driven over the edge of a cliff.

One thing that was clear from following the growing dissent in Iran was that the virulently anti-American and anti-Israeli politics of its government was losing its appeal. More and more Iranians were blaming the government for their sorry economic state and resenting the strict imposition of religious law. Khamenei and the IRGC did their best to redirect anger towards the Americans that were sanctioning them and the Israelis that were killing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Yet that line was losing its luster. The diaspora especially was happy to blame a theocratic regime which they fled, and to support aggressive US policy towards their former homeland.

Then the US and Israel decided to wage a surprise total war on Iran. The US began dropping tomahawks on schools and desalination plants, while the Israelis began dropping bombs on hospitals and neighborhoods. Many residential areas were also targeted. Cultural sites have also been bombed. With the attack on Iran’s oil supplies, Tehran has been clouded in a toxic haze which will be sure to have long-term health effects on its millions of residents. They also decided to martyr the theocratic head of the government himself, Ayatollah Khamenei. Thousands of Iranian civilians are dead, thanks to a war purportedly being engaged to liberate them from a government that kills them too. Many of these dead are schoolchildren.

In a move which really highlights the depravity of the US war effort, reports indicate that the bombing of the school was a double tap strike. This abhorrent practice involves dropping a first bomb, then a second bomb sometime later to kill any civilians or first responders who arrive on the scene. One cannot begin to imagine the anguished Iranian parents running to the site where their children were killed, only to be then targeted themselves. Despite the fact we know that the bomb which fell there was an American cruise missile, Trump brazenly lied and claimed it was an Iranian bomb. These people really are shameless.

Ironically, this only serves to vindicate the anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric of the Iranian government. However much Khamenei was to blame for the situation Iranians find themselves in, his argument that Americans and Israelis really just oppose freedom and sovereignty for Muslim countries and are willing to wantonly murder innocent civilians to pursue their ends was demonstrated to be accurate after the fact.

Now, even many members of the diaspora are looking on with horror and questioning why they supported this war. Many hated Iran’s government for the harm it was doing to its own people, culture, and environment, though some like the Shah’s failson prince clearly just hated the fact that they were locked out. Yet the theocratic government never dropped bombs on Iranian schoolgirls or demolished its historical buildings. That was the foreign aggressor in this case.

Trump has also made clear that the last thing he wants is Iranian sovereignty to be restored. He has demanded the right to decide personally on who runs Iran next, a war goal roundly rejected by the Iranian government, and also to control its oil. The same seems true of Netenyahu, whose war aim seems to be to drive Iran into a civil war which will cripple it and prevent it from challenging Israel for at least a generation. Both leaders want an Iran entirely unable or unwilling to defend itself from foreign aggression. Both have suggested the Balkanization of the ethnically diverse country, and if anyone wants to understand the immense human costs of breaking a heterogenous society into ethno-states they should just look at the fate of Yugoslavia.

Thus, the diaspora and any Iranians in Iran who naively hoped that liberation would come at the warhead of a US missile have been embarrassed and betrayed. Those many Iranians who were, if not outright dissatisfied, on the fence and not entirely convinced of the government’s rhetoric face a war which corresponds precisely to Khamenei’s gloomy discourse. We can only imagine the conversations going on in Iranian households between those who defend the government and those who oppose it.

Of course, anyone who knows their history should know that this would have been the outcome. No regime, however authoritarian, brutal, or unjust, has ever been destroyed by strategic bombing alone. Many Germans hated the Nazis, but learned to resent the Western allies when British and American bombs rained down on their cities. The Nazis just put their heavy industry in bunkers, minimizing the harm of total war on their armaments production, but the civilians had nowhere to go and by the end of the war many of the Germans who survived were homeless. US strategic bombing in North Korea and North Vietnam imposed significant suffering on the civilians of those countries yet didn’t dislodge either government. In fact, in the case of Vietnam it only hardened resistance and contributed in many ways to their victory. Iran and Iraq spent 8 years strategically bombing one another, only to sign a peace treaty that kept both governments in place with the same borders they started the war with. Israel has failed to dislodge either Hamas or Hezbollah with intense strategic bombing. Russia’s strategic bombing of Ukraine has done little to sap the will to fight, and their successes are almost entirely a consequence of their slow and costly battlefield gains. Most famously of all, the German strategic bombing of British and Soviet cities only fueled the will of those nations to continue the fight. The only exception might be Japan, where their surrender is often attributed to the nuclear devastation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet even then, surrender only came after a long island-hopping campaign, a hopeless and endless war in China, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria which was the death knell of their overseas empire. As much as the bombs motivated Japanese surrender, the possibility of a Soviet occupation heralded by the ability of the Red Army to land forces on Sakhalin (and potentially to hop on to the more sparsely defended north of Japan) was also a major contributing factor. After all, the Japanese Imperials did not want to end up like the Romanovs!

If strategic bombing can rally a people around a government as ruthless, dishonest, autocratic, and genocidal as the Nazi party, especially when the Nazis themselves started that war, how do we possibly think strategic bombing will end an Iranian government attacked in perfidy by a United States it was supposedly negotiating with? Especially when Khamenei had been warning of the cruelty, dishonesty, and ruthlessness of the US and Israel, even on increasingly deaf ears? Yes, Khamenei was a ruthless dictator

I’m no fan of the Iranian theocracy and abhor its religious sectarian politics and imposition of religious law on those who do not want to be subject to it. I have many friends whose family left Iran to escape the kind of authoritarianism which exists there. It tortures its citizens, disappears its rivals, and executes people for crimes which shouldn’t even be crimes. Yet I cannot fathom how many Iranians would have any response except to pray that the missiles of their government kill the soldiers trying to kill them. And I am sure that many of those who, for good reasons, had learned to mistrust if not hate Khamenei and his IRGC, will now think that they had a point all along. Liberation for the Iranian people cannot come from a foreign power willing to massacre its people, and any such total war is likely to only strengthen its legitimacy.

At the outset of the incoming Trump administration, I argued that the Trump administration had abandoned neoconservatism in favor of neojingoism. I think the past 12 months have proven this right to an absurd degree. Yet we’re also seeing a fracturing in the sentimental politics of jingoism, and a skepticism of military aggression by many “patriots” who in the past might have uncritically supported war.

What is a neoconservative?

Neoconservatives are a tendency in US foreign policy thinking (though there are similar trends in other Western countries, most notably Israel) which go back at least to the 1970s and the rightwing reaction to Jimmy Carter’s attempt to implement a “moral” foreign policy and resist calls for intervention. The neoconservatives like Jeannie Kirkpatrick argued that Carter had pulled back on the US obligation to intervene in other countries thanks to Vietnam. In the eyes of the neoconservatives, the US had the best possible political and economic system, and this system needed to proactively intervene against other countries which challenged this order. It was the best because it was a representative democratic republic with a finely tuned and sophisticated market economy with well-ordered laws. Therefore, it was entitled to spread this model to other countries.

Paradoxically, this interventionism violated their own democratic pretenses, but they had an explanation for this. The obligation for the US to intervene was true, they argued, whether or not the people in these countries agreed with the intervention. Only countries with a sufficiently developed array of institutions and a sufficiently educated and affluent population could handle the huge burden of democracy. If a democracy voted in socialism, Islamic theocracy, or a radical welfare state, it was because they aren’t ready for self-governance. Therefore, the US was within its rights to conspire with local elites, militias, and military officers to topple any system which diverged from the US model.

This extended to popular revolutions against US-backed authoritarian governments. Dictatorships like the Shah of Iran or Somoza’s junta in Nicaragua were not democratic, but the fact that they were aligned with the US meant that their systems buttressed the superior Western democracies even if they tortured and killed their own people. Therefore, the US was obliged to intervene in Nicaragua and Iran to prevent the popular revolutions in these countries. The problem with Jimmy Carter was prioritizing the sovereign rights of Iranian and Nicaraguan citizens over the superior American model of republican governance. It didn’t matter that the Shah and Somoza also fell short of that model, since they still stood for the global economic and political order headed by the US.

This is how the neoconservatives came to justify the interventionism we saw under Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton. Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, support for Nicaraguan contras, support for Apartheid South Africa, and so on were all justified by this geopolitical idea. It didn’t matter that South Africa, for instance, was a crypto-fascist, racist, colonialist, and authoritarian system which deprived black people of the right to vote because it advanced the agenda of a US-ordered world. Thus, while democracy itself is a part of the neoconservative self-justification for why the US is “better” than, say, the USSR, democracy as an ideal took a back seat to the goal of sustaining the hegemony of this “superior” system. Thus, the Shah is better than Khomeini even if Khomeini was more democratic (he was hardly democratic, but Iran did have elections) simply in virtue of the fact he maintained US hegemony.

Neoconservatism ultimately became a victim of its own success. When Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, he was surrounded by neoconservative advisors who wanted to reshape the Middle East through US power. Yet now the neoconservatives became more ambitious than ever, and wanted to make Iraq a democracy by fiat. Of course, their support for democracy was still hypocritical. They had no interest in democracy in Egypt and Saudi Arabia because again, these countries supported the system of US hegemony. Yet Iraq, because it was in opposition to this hegemony, could be like a sandbox for them to play with.

Of course, Iraq didn’t turn out like they wanted. To begin with, they installed a US citizen Ian Bremmer to run Iraq as a temporary dictator, reordering the whole economy of Iraq along neoliberal US lines and purging the system of Baathists. It didn’t matter what Iraqis wanted because the Americans knew better. Thus, the neoconservatives retained their arrogance and undemocratic tendencies despite their longer-term goal of building a democracy. Then when it became clear that the Iraqi people rejected their political model, it became necessary for them to simply stay in the country killing people until anti-occupation Iraqis were no longer a significant force to oppose their designs.

Eventually, the neoconservatives would fade, although they left their mark on the Obama administration (see the war in Libya and coup in Honduras), the first Trump administration (see the killing of Soleimani), and the Biden administration (see the war in Ukraine and the limitless support given to Netenyahu’s genocidal war in Gaza). Americans became reluctant to intervene and more prone to questioning US-backed governments. The Arab Spring was welcomed as an indigenous democratic pushback against US-backed dictators like Mubarak (as well as ones the US opposed like Assad).

Yet the neoconservatives were never fully purged, and figures like John Bolton and Lindsay Graham remain dug in like a tick which won’t fall off.

What is a (neo)jingoist?

Jingoism resembles neoconservatism in many ways, but it is not a coherent ideology. Rather, it is a cluster of sentiments rooted in ideological patriotism and militaristic chauvinism. It’s about “supporting the troops” no matter what the troops are doing, draping the flag in whatever one does, denying our side ever commits war crimes, and accusing opponents of any war of being traitors. It’s about feeling offended at anyone whose foreign policy views diverge from an uncritical support of military action, and identifying support for the soldiers as virtuous individuals with support for the war.

Jingoism in the American context stemmed out of the Indian Wars, where US settlers and cavalry were brutally dispossessing Native American tribes, and the Mexican-American war when the US invaded its neighbor to steal its land. Thus, jingoism’s origins come from American manifest destiny, and the belief that America has a god-given right to expand. It reached its climax in the turn of the 20th century, when the US took over Hawaii from its indigenous monarchy and invaded the Spanish colonies under the false belief that the Spanish blew up the USS Maine.

Unlike the neoconservative, the jingoist never needed any elaborate justification for US intervention. Rather, intervention was just simply because we’re better than the other side. Since we’re ontologically better than the other side, we’re right regardless of what we’re doing and how.

Jingoism depends on mobilizing people’s sentiments. It centers on a symbolic politics, and prioritizing that symbolism over substance. This requires the performance of patriotic actions to signal one has the right view, and the failure to perform correctly is treated as a moral failure. Consider the fake controversy over Obama not wearing a flag pin. The failure of Obama to do performative patriotism properly proved he was a secret traitor to the jingoist mind.

The marriage between neoconservatism and jingoism

Despite being different from one another, there was always a kind of perverse ideological and political alliance between neoconservatism and jingoism. Most voters, conservative, liberal, or otherwise, don’t understand the complexities of global geopolitics. Moreover, if one presented the basic claims of neoconservatives to them in plain language, they would probably recognize its hypocrisy and imperial arrogance. By draping neoconservatism in the flag, the neocons could weaponize patriotic sentiments in their favor.

This was a dynamic I noticed growing up in the era of the Global War on Terror. The Bush administration was chock full of neoconservatives, but they needed to justify this ideology to the wider American public. Thus, they depended on Fox News and other “patriotic” voices to popularize their views among the wider public. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other meathead pundits would accuse critics of the Iraq War of hating the troops, hating Bush, and hating America to deflect from the substance of their criticism. Thus, they were able to weaponize America’s popular patriotic passions to dismiss any dissent.

The jingoism became particularly important when US war crimes in Abu Ghraib were exposed. The US soldiers had been torturing, abusing, and killing prisoners of war in the old Iraqi prison, and the government needed to change the narrative. By utilizing jingoistic rhetoric, they could marginalize the critical voices identifying the extent and depth of US war crimes. They could also protect the politicians, generals, and administrators responsible like George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld who the administration wanted desperately to keep safe from accountability.

The fake divorce …

Yet jingoism and neoconservatism eventually diverged. American patriots were turned off from the neocons by the Iraq War. Many neocons, like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon would eventually abandon neoconservatism in favor of a quasi-jingoistic populism. Trump would run twice on no forever wars, mobilizing the anger against neoconservatism among Republican and moderate voters to defeat his rivals like Jeb Bush. Other neoconservatives like the Cheneys and John Bolton would eventually clash with Trump over his refusal to bomb the countries they wanted to bomb.

Despite his rejection of neoconservatism, Trump doubled down on jingoism. He pardoned US soldiers convicted of serious war crimes against Afghans and Iraqis, he accused his rivals of being anti-American or unpatriotic, and he pushed a muscular and aggressive foreign policy. Many ex-neocons like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon would rally around Trump due to his opposition to new “forever wars”.

Yet Trump always depended on the neoconservatives too. He put John Bolton in his cabinet and surrounded himself with other neocons, sidelining Bannon. He remained influenced by their aggressive foreign policy, and waffled between his commitment to rejecting foreign engagement and his jingoistic tendencies.

In his second term, jingoism quickly won out, sidelining the neocons. He has threatened Greenland, Mexico, Venezuela, Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, and many other countries. He leveraged the naive jingoistic patriotism to justify these politics. He doesn’t even pretend to have the kinds of justifications we saw during the War on Terror. Bush spent six months consistently hammering Americans with arguments on why the US must intervene in Iraq, and was relatively consistent on the justification (at least, until they didn’t find those Iraqi WMDs). Trump doesn’t give a shit about the institutions which the neocons glorified as proof of America’s civilizational superiority, beyond being mere tools of his aggressive warmongering.

Yet this has also created something of an ideological crisis. Since jingoism is a form of sentimentalism instead of a real ideology, it can be paired with many different ideologies. It might be married to neoconservatism as we saw, but also might be married to mindless militarism (as with Trump and Hegseth) or even skepticism about military action (in the case of Tucker Carlson). For folks like Tucker Carlson, it is good to make America great, but it doesn’t make America great to mindlessly send them to die in some war on Israel’s behalf, or to sully the good name of our nation by signing off on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Thus, Tucker Carlson has come out against Trump and Netenyahu over their wars with the Palestinians, Lebanon, and Iran. Some neocons, like John Bolton, disagree with Trump’s attack on Iran since it’s not premised on their ideas (although others, like Lindsay Graham, have stuck with Trump).

Of particular concern to the anti-war jingoists is the way the US is largely fighting these wars, in their eyes, thanks to Israel. These wars aren’t about making America great again, but about making Israel able to attack everyone again. Netenyahu knows Israel cannot defeat Iran alone, at least without nukes (and nuking Iran would possibly be the end of Israel, turning it into a pariah state forever). Tucker Carlson and others are increasingly identifying Israel as a racist settler-colonial state whose animosity towards Muslims (and Arab Christians) is entirely unjustified, and something which sullies the name of America. Thus, jingoists who have at least a handful of principles and scruples are increasingly disgusted with Trump, seeing him as a pawn of oligarchs, Israel, and the arms industry.

The neocons too seem split, some recognizing that Trump is making Americans less interventionist than ever while others are moving towards the Democrats. The Democrats never really opposed the premises of neoconservatism, and since the end of Jimmy Carter’s administration have often been nearly if not just as neoconservative as the Republicans. Yet others are simply happy that Trump is attacking the countries they don’t like for challenging American hegemony and opposing Israel. Some even seem to think that placating him makes it more likely he will stick with Ukraine, where he had until recently been more interested in ending that war.

None of this has slowed down the jingoistic bullshit dripping from the executive branch. Just watch Pete Hegseth’s pathetic performances justifying US aggression in Iran, as he uncritically defends US military aggression. Yet it has created something of an ideological crisis, as fewer and fewer Americans reliably respond with the “right” sentiments to support Trump’s policies. At this point, many people are simply asking questions about why we’re bombing countries, with no real coherent answer being offered. Trump openly claims he bombed a country based on a “feeling” they would attack first without any real justification. The country is at a loss about why the administration is doing what it is doing, and it seems like only the most diehard MAGA jingoists really believe it. Perhaps one reason some of the neocons are moving away from Trump is they realize that after all this, pro-war politics in the US could be dead for at least a generation the way it was after Vietnam.

Of course, it will be too late to save the Iranian schoolgirls killed by US or Israeli bombs, or stop the levelling of Iranian hospitals. The best case scenario is it infuses future generations of Americans with enough skepticism to avoid the bullshit jingoism spoon fed to us by a performatively patriotic media, and we won’t have to go through this again. Sadly, it seems the only education which works on this front are flag-draped coffins returning to US soil, and the unnecessary deaths of foreign civilians in wars of our chosing.