Nothing in politics is ever inevitable, but once a particular dynamic has solidified it can be tempting to see it as permanent.

Such has been the case since Mark Carney’s election victory a little over a year ago and, in poll after poll, Liberal fortunes have only seemed to rise further; the Conservatives gradually losing ground and the NDP mostly treading water. In short order, both in the sense of public psychology and the Liberal Party’s seat count in Parliament, the Carney era has seemed to consolidate itself as the new norm.

On a personal level, Carney himself has often looked politically unassailable: the cool and collected new face of elite managerial competence in an uncertain time; popular and politically ambidextrous enough to attract floor crossers from the Conservatives and the NDP alike. This popularity has been compounded by generally high approval ratings for the government itself and — as you can read here in this recent analysis from — by the sense among some 47 percent of Canadians that the country is headed in the right direction (that figure representing a ten-year high). At various points, the Liberal Party has even looked poised to leapfrog the Tories in Alberta.

For the first time since April 2025, however, we are beginning to see at least a nascent shifting of the political winds.

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Note: For the next little while, you can get a full year’s paid subscription for half off the regular price. If you enjoy my work and would like to support it, please consider taking advantage and subscribing for 50% off at this link.

In any case, I’m pleased to publish the whole conversation in full for those who weren’t able to join us live. For those interested, here are a few related links:

• On AI and art — The tedious power of storytelling, by Cory Doctorow

• Lord Byron Defends the Luddites in his Maiden Speech in the House of Lords

• Cory’s forthcoming book — The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late

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Since he entered provincial politics in 2018, Ontario premier Doug Ford has consistently maintained a level of discipline that always eluded his late brother Rob. For what it’s worth, I mean this as an observation rather than a compliment and there are plenty of caveats to be issued — in part because the bar there isn’t particularly high. Ford has often been a wildly impulsive politician, prone to teasing the most hair-brained schemes imaginable in public and strong-arming his way through perceived obstacles without a second thought. Yet, under his leadership, the Progressive Conservatives have managed to stay in power for eight years in spite of themselves.

It’s somewhat perplexing in light of everything that’s transpired, from the many instances of breathtaking dishonesty and rank corruption like the Greenbelt scandal (which saw Ford’s government effectively conspire with a small group of handpicked developers to inflate the value of protected public land it planned to sell off) and contemptible negligence (thousands of deaths in for-profit long term care homes during the pandemic) to the many far more ordinary things going badly in Canada’s largest province (the cost of living remains completely out of control, Ontario is short tens of thousands of nurses, and the list goes on).

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There’s a viral clip of Holly Valance that’s been making the rounds on social media in which the Australian actress, asked about her political trajectory, says this: “I would say that everyone starts off as a lefty and wakes up at some point after you start either making money, working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home and realize what crap ideas they all are.” Valance, who has been a quite vocal supporter of politicians like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, may be a somewhat distinct case here. But I also think the sentiment she’s expressing is one plenty of people — including non-conservatives — have internalized even though it isn’t really true.

As an addendum to the piece below, which is now a few years old, it’s worth acknowledging that right of centre parties like the Conservative Party of Canada have actually been faring somewhat better among young voters in elections since. Though I wrote what follows partly to explain the drift of many millennials and zoomers to the political left during the 2010s, I think recent developments only serve to underscore the underlying point that the way many people like to generalize about how political values necessarily correlate with either youth or age leaves much to be desired.

A version of the following was first published in Jacobin in 2020.

Some years back, I attended a panel discussion at the Manning Centre Conference — in its day the biggest annual gathering of Canada’s conservative movement. A number of well-known Conservative MPs gave speeches, and in the Q&A that followed, the moderator asked each to offer some insight into how they thought conservatives might make their project more appealing to the young. Most or all issued some version of the same reply: “Young people love freedom, and so do we!.”

As the solitary socialist in the room, I found myself privately scoffing. Whatever this reductive declaration was supposed to mean, it was obvious — then as now — that the word “freedom” meant something very different to the people on stage than it did to me. In the 2015 federal election, for example, despite an unprecedented increase in youth turnout, the Conservative Party had finished firmly behind both the centrist Liberals and the social democratic NDP among those aged 18–24.

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In context, however, the sentiment did have a certain coherence. It later occurred to me that these Tory MPs positing a frictionless union between their own conception of freedom and the values of today’s young were all either Gen-Xers or youngish members of the baby boomer generation — which is to say: people who grew up against a backdrop of postwar growth and came of age politically during a period of broadly shared prosperity (at least when measured against the present day). Keynesianism was the economic order of the day and the welfare state, though still relatively new, was an integral part of the political consensus.

Within such a climate, it’s not terribly difficult to see how the ascendant project we now today call neoliberalism might have had intuitive appeal to some people under the age of 30. New and insurgent, it quite ingeniously channeled the individualist zeitgeist of the 1960s while recasting it in market-centric terms. It promised liberation from the supposed fetters of an activist state it also successfully blamed for various crises and social malaises. Perhaps more to the point, the thrust of its intervention came after many Gen-Xers had already enjoyed the fruits of postwar social democracy in their early years: consistent growth, high union density, rising wages, free or nearly free college and university, etc. It was in this context that conservatives of a particular generation forged their politics and worldview.

Not everyone felt the same way, of course. Generations are, by definition, a somewhat hazy and arbitrary construct and plenty of people, young and old, fiercely resisted the right-wing counterrevolution of the 1980s and ‘90s. But, considering how many eagerly jumped on board, this history is a useful corrective to the popular idea that youth engenders radicalism and age sees it melt away. This is, I think, a widely believed truism about the typical person’s political trajectory and is perhaps best expressed in that famous quote erroneously attributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty-five, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re thirty-five, you have no brain.”

The thing is, a perfunctory glance at the political behaviour of young people belonging to different generations suggests this just isn’t true. In both Britain and the United States — neoliberalism’s two most significant political epicentres during the 1980s — young people actually voted in large numbers for the conservative politicians who carried out the dismantling of the welfare state. Ronald Reagan essentially tied Jimmy Carter among voters 18–29, winning easily every other age group including people 30–44. By 1984, this dead heat became a rout. Here, for example, is how the New York Times reported on Reagan’s youth prospects mere weeks before an election he would win in a landslide:

“In the late 1960’s, the rallying cry for many young Americans was, ”Don’t trust anyone over 30.” In 1984, by contrast, the youth culture appears to put its trust in a President who is over 70. According to combined figures from the two most recent New York Times/ CBS News Polls, taken before the Presidential debate on Oct. 7, voters from the ages of 18 to 24 supported Mr. Reagan by 61 percent to 30 percent over his Democratic challenger, Walter F. Mondale.”

Margaret Thatcher actually won the youth vote in her first two elections, drawing about even with Labour among voters 18–24 in 1979 and winning every demographic over 35 by 10 percent. By 1983, the Tories got more support from those 35–44 than those 65 and older and secured some 41 percent support from those voting for the first time.

If this picture grates against our intuitive sense of the correlation between political values and age, it’s probably because young people today are often more likely to lean left than they were four decades ago, the generational gulf separating millennials and zoomers from boomers and Gen-Xers being pretty difficult to ignore.

During the 2020 Democratic primary race, as in 2016, Bernie Sanders won the youth vote in unprecedented numbers, with older voters breaking overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. In the United Kingdom’s general election upset of 2017, Labour won every age group under 39, capturing more than 60 percent of the vote from people aged 18–29. A Gallup poll conducted in 2018, meanwhile, found that only half of young American adults now have a favourable view of capitalism — down 16 percent since 2010 — while about the same proportion now has a favourable view of socialism. Though a less than negligible plurality of older people also view socialism positively, it’s undeniable that a considerable majority favours capitalism.

Rather than assume these trends reflect attitudes that inherently come with either youth or age — which, as we’ve already seen, doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny — we might ask why it is that young people today are often so much less inclined towards capitalism than their parents or grandparents. The simple, though oft-ignored answer is that the average young person in the 21st century has had a radically different set of experiences and developed a quite different set of political values to match them. In 1960 the median American house price was around $97,000 adjusted for inflation; today the figure is $226,000. Whereas wages grew steadily for workers in the decades between the 1940s and the 1970s, most haven’t seen the value of their paycheques improve since. In many societies, social mobility has plummeted while education has grown increasingly expensive and good jobs harder to come by.

Common Experience

If you’re under 40 today, there’s a good chance capitalism hasn’t served you particularly well and that exhausted political narratives emphasizing individual grit and personal responsibility carry a very different connotation than they once did to an earlier generation. The postwar/Keynesian version of capitalism, and the economic prospects it once guaranteed, are completely unimaginable to most of us today. Some of the hardest working people I know barely hover above the poverty line and even the more professionally successful among my friends and acquaintances are unlikely to have much in the way of savings (though they probably have plenty of debt).

This is anecdotal, of course, which is a good moment to issue the standard caveats about conceiving of politics in generational terms. First of all, generations aren’t monolithic things: their boundaries being somewhat arbitrary and people within them having a limitless multitude of social backgrounds and experiences. Not every millennial or zoomer is hostile to capitalism and there are plenty of people over 60 who either radicalized with age or never abandoned the left-wing politics of their youth. Generations also have plenty of material and cultural divisions within themselves, making the imposition of some unitary narrative a messy and sometimes pointless exercise. They’re also, to some extent, an invention of capitalism itself. As journalist and music critic Jeff Chang has argued: “Generations are fictions, often created to suit the needs of demographers and marketers.”

Still, there’s no denying that generalized trends predominate among particular age groups and that some degree of shared experience is the most obvious explanation. This experience is the key because political ideology is ultimately the intellectual and moral shorthand through which people explain and interpret their reality. There is nothing inherently radical or reactionary about belonging to any particular generation just as there’s nothing inherently progressive or conservative about being a particular age. There is no singular epistemology that comes with youth and wanes with maturity, but there are a broad set of experiences and social facts that inevitably shape people’s attitudes and political views.

Millions born at the end of the twentieth century or the early part of the twenty first did not enter life with some special disposition that made them receptive to socialist or left wing politics. Rather, looking to political alternatives like socialism or opting out of political engagement altogether (something large numbers of young people also do) are rational responses to the world as they have experienced it: one defined by the manifold crises, financial meltdowns, and political upheavals liberal democracies have experienced since the end of the 1990s.

This does not mean, of course, that the left should start dealing in crass generational politics or rest on its laurels while awaiting rescue from some imagined future cohort that will inevitably sweep it into power. (In an odd way, understanding the sources of generational belief actually stands as a warning against the very idea of seeing politics in generational terms, insofar as this tends to presume some intrinsic correlation between age and conservatism, or vice versa.)

Instead, social and material realities — not the discrete internal cultures thought to belong to people of different demographics — should be our guide: the better to understand how capitalism is failing, and why so many young people are now looking to political horizons quite different from those of their parents and grandparents.

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Sometimes in politics the stars momentarily align to make the outcome in a small local race feel as consequential as a national election. It’s a rare thing but, when it does happen, an individual politician can suddenly wield the kind of influence few will ever possess. When there’s widespread hunger for change, that effect is only magnified. With this in mind, it’s worth putting the scale of the opportunity that’s just been handed to Greater Manchester’s Mayor Andy Burnham.

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A few weeks ago, I recorded a lengthy conversation with Bhaskar Sunkara: founding editor of Jacobin (where I’ve been publishing since 2014) and president of The Nation magazine. Bhaskar was in town to deliver the 2026 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture, which you can watch in full here, and this conversation — filmed and recorded the next day at Toronto Metropolitan University — gave us the opportunity to dig more deeply into the past, present, and future of the socialist project.

In September, Bhaskar and two his coauthors (Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs) will publish The Blueprint, which offers a remarkable sketch of what socialist economics might look like in the 21st century. The book is quite hard-headed about the failures of the socialist project in the 20th, particularly when it came to the question of economic planning. In different ways, this was true of both major strains of socialism: the social democratic model that became dominant across much of Europe and the Leninist variant that held power throughout the Eastern Bloc. It proved especially true of central planning, whose limitations you’ll hear Bhaskar and I discuss at length.

How should the left approach the question of economic organization? Is it still possible or necessary to embrace a political horizon that reaches beyond not only liberal capitalism but also traditional social democracy? How might a socialist economy achieve an efficient allocation of labour and resources while avoiding the maldistribution of wealth and power inevitably engendered by the market system?

In this conversation, you’ll hear us engage both questions like these and less abstract topics like the resurgence of socialist ideas among millennials, the electoral successes of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the nascent mayoral administration of Zohran Mamdani. I’d like to thank my partners at the Broadbent Institute and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and I hope you enjoy the discussion — included here in full in both podcast and video form.

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-Luke

NOTE: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but as a freelancer I depend on the income I receive from writing so please consider subscribing for as little as $5 a month if you can afford to contribute. Those who do so will get instant access to every paywalled piece in full, including those from the archives.

I can’t quite remember when it was, but I once watched a TVO panel about housing policy. The details aren’t hugely important, but part way through one of the more conservatively-minded panelists made a derisive comment in response to someone else’s fairly straightforward case for the building of new non-profit public housing (“Oh, so you want a future where millions of people live in units owned by the government?” or something to that effect).

It didn’t matter, evidently, that public housing has both a long lineage and a pretty good track record in Canada — or did, at any rate, before Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin killed the National Housing Program back in the 1990s. It didn’t matter that Canada is in the midst of a massive housing crisis and that non-profit houses and rental units are by definition more affordable than what’s currently on offer from an overpriced and overly financialized housing market. The idea of the state involving itself in the construction or provision of housing was just inherently uncouth, full stop.

I’ve been recalling this little episode over the past few days while looking on at events in the UK. For context, the British government recently asked supermarket chains to cap rising prices on essential foodstuffs amid continued inflation. I say “asked” because what we’re talking about here is something completely voluntary rather than the imposition of actual price controls (Scotland’s SNP government, for what it’s worth, is doing just that). The government, in fact, has apparently even tried to nudge grocery conglomerates by offering them some regulatory cuts in return.

But even this, it seems, is a bridge too far for Britain’s market ideologues. Here’s just a sample of the reaction so far:

“Completely preposterous…My advice is that the Government should reduce some of the tax and regulatory burden and free us up in a very competitive market.” — Stuart Machin, chief executive of Marks & Spencer

“I think the whole idea is the stuff of nonsense and it will never fly. This smacks of state control, it’s idiotic, it’s dangerous, and it’ll never work. [There is] no better system than a free market economy.” — Lord Stuart Rose, former chairman of Ocado and Conservative peer

“Rather than introduce 1970s style price controls and trying to force retailers to sell goods at a loss, the government must focus on how it will reduce the public policy costs which are pushing up food prices in the first place.” — Helen Dickinson, the chief executive of the British Retail Consortium

“Lost for words. Never thought I’d see a British govt trying to set food prices. If there is one highly competitive sector it is food retailing. Do we really want to live in a country where the state sets these prices?” — Paul Johnson, Provost at The Queen's College, Oxford and former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies

“We did have price caps and purchasing caps during the Second World War. And of course Stalin and his successors were pretty good at capping prices and that’s how they ran the economy. But in general, outside of wartime or a state planned economy, finding ways in which you can cap the price of ordinary goods…in general people have not done it because if you try and do it it all goes wrong.” — Ed Balls, former MP and Labour Shadow Chancellor

It’s quite remarkable, really.

Britain is a wealthy country where there’s more than enough for everyone to eat, yet millions are going hungry and food bank usage is reportedly up 45 percent relative to pre-pandemic levels. For those quoted above, however, the real crisis is the notion that the state might intervene. The sheer incredulousness of these reactions is, I think, telling in and of itself. The market system may be failing to meet a basic need here but acknowledging this, let alone doing anything about it, is state-ism, Stalinism, an attack on freedom itself. In Canada, incidentally, NDP leader Avi Lewis’s proposal for publicly-owned non-profit grocery stores has been greeted with a similarly doctrinarian reaction from the same crowd.

This species of market dogma has its roots in old Cold War hysteria and in some ways reaches back even further (Ayn Rand, for example, thought Roosevelt’s New Deal represented the creeping encroachment of communism in the United States). Here, healthy scepticism about the possibility of state overreach was superseded by the far more radical belief that the market system is so foundational as a bulwark of freedom that constraining or limiting it in any way poses an existential risk. Even when markets are failing to provide something quite fundamental, this thinking goes, having the state — even the democratic state — intervene will inevitably yield a worse outcome.

It’s a view that stays fixed regardless of how the world changes and what actual evidence might say to the contrary. Here, for example, is how Ronald Reagan — then still in his Hollywood era — made the case against socialized medicine in a now infamous 1961 propaganda recording cut for the American Medical Association:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it…in our country under our free-enterprise system we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to choose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other. But let’s also look from the other side…The doctor begins to lose freedoms…From here it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay, and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go, or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.

Needless to say, countries throughout the world have established systems of socialized medicine without anything even faintly resembling Reagan’s dire warnings coming to pass (I’m incidentally fortunate to live in Canada and would take its model of nationalized health insurance over the healthcare dystopia that exists south of the border). The same can be said about price controls, public housing, rent caps, and plenty else as well. Just look at what governments are doing right now in places like Mexico and Spain.

Once again, to a particular species of market dogmatist this stuff simply doesn’t matter. Paying $3000 a month to a private landlord for a 450 square foot box in the sky is freedom but paying half that amount to a publicly-owned rental company for more space is communist tyranny. The state providing everyone with health insurance will end in death panels but leaving profiteers to their own devices guarantees “choice.” And between letting people go hungry in the richest societies on earth and reforming a system that is visibly failing, the former is somehow deemed the more desirable option.

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Last Friday night I stayed in to watch the Toronto Blue Jays play the Detroit Tigers. Neither the game itself nor the Jays’ offence was particularly remarkable — they lost 2-3 but did thankfully take the series with a 4-1 win on Sunday — but the broadcast itself was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.

By way of some background, what you need to know is this: for reasons that are thoroughly uninteresting, roughly 5-10 Jays games a year aren’t available via their usual provider (Sportsnet) and are only viewable on Apple TV. And, since I wanted to watch the game and had no desire to give Apple my money, I got a free trial. Judging from Twitter, I wasn’t the only one to find the whole thing pretty strange. The best that can be said about how Apple chooses to broadcast baseball is that there are no ads between plays. When you watch on Rogers Sportsnet, you’re relentlessly bombarded by the parent company’s agitprop and paid segments informing you that one of Canada’s biggest banks loves the Blue Jays. If nothing else, it was blissful to enjoy a game without that stuff.

Beyond this, Apple TV makes for strange viewing and does some really peculiar things with baseball — among them showing highlights from earlier plays while the game is underway and getting the names of players wrong (at one point on Friday I heard one of the Apple commentators confuse Ernie Clement and Andrés Giménez, and I don’t think this was the only error of that kind).

Still more bizarre was the channel’s decision to conduct live interviews during the broadcast, including one with elite Jays pitcher Dylan Cease about his love of oysters. As it happens, I find Cease charming and in a different context would probably have enjoyed his banter. But how anyone thought it was a good idea to put this on the screen while the main event was quite literally going on in the background is beyond me. I wanted to watch the game and I’ll bet Cease did too.

On an aesthetic level, Apple’s somewhat uncanny presentation created an odd feeling of remove from the game itself. And speaking of betting, a statistic like the one below was also on-screen during every single at bat.

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The following was originally published in Jacobin in 2024.

In 1956, a utopia-minded politician predicted a future in which Americans could work less and the forty-hour week would become a thing of the past. “These are not dreams or idle boasts,” declared the Marxist firebrand (one Vice-President Richard Nixon) “they are simple projections of the gains we have made in the last four years.” In the “not too distant future,” he anticipated, “[the] backbreaking toil and mind-wearying tension will be left to machines and electronic devices.”

Nixon, it hardly needs saying, was neither a radical nor a friend of the American worker. But his sentiment nevertheless reflected a certain conventional wisdom about technology and the future of work. With the help of robots and automation, it was long assumed, machines could increasingly take on the most mundane and laborious tasks, leaving ordinary workers with more time to spend however they saw fit.

The same logic can be found in Senator Bernie Sanders’s recently tabled “Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act.” Introduced by Sanders earlier this month (and notably backed by a broad coalition of trade unions), the legislation would, as its title suggests, gradually reduce the standard forty-hour work week to thirty-two hours over a period of four years without loss of benefits or pay. (Workers, of course, could still work more but would receive overtime for every additional hour.)

All things considered, it’s a modest, commonsensical, and decidedly non-utopian idea. For one thing, as my colleague Nick French has noted, the average American worker is already clocking hundreds more hours every year than her German, French, and British counterparts. There’s also a mountain of evidence from pilot projects in the likes of Germany, the UK, and Iceland to suggest that reduced working hours not only don’t lower productivity but can sometimes even modestly increase it.

Which brings us to National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry and his recently published case against Sanders’s thirty-two-hour workweek proposal. Lowry’s argument is a flimsy one, but it’s also surprisingly anguished given the relatively modest aims of the legislation. Opening with some garden-variety right-wing hysterics about Marx and communism, we soon get to the first of his actual objections to the idea of shorter working hours:

[The] belief that work is basically a capitalist imposition that is unnatural and bad for people still holds sway on the left, and Sanders is, accordingly, proposing to move from a 40-hour to a 32-hour work week to make us healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Before we go any further here, it’s worth noting that plenty of the work performed throughout the American economy is quite literally a capitalist imposition. When the federal government distributed stimulus checks and other payments to workers during the pandemic, conservative publications like the National Review were quick to complain that they represented “disincentives to work.” This wasn’t exactly wrong either: given a choice between returning to unpleasant and badly paid jobs or taking a few months to stop and enjoy their lives, many quite understandably chose the latter (and were all the better for it).

The takeaway, though, is that millions of jobs really are so underpaid and exploitative that getting even a few hundred dollars a week in the mail was enough to make staying home a more attractive prospect than going back to them. That’s because the capitalist labor market is, at its core, a mechanism of coercion that offers most workers the “freedom” to choose between low-wage work and going hungry. Given that reality, what’s typically called an incentive is functionally much closer to a threat. For millions of American workers, especially the most badly paid, work is thus — quite literally — something imposed rather than something taken on willingly.

Lowry goes on to make some perfunctory economic arguments against a shortened working week — among them that “[w]hat we earn is not an arbitrary number, but is linked to what we produce.” It’s ironic, given his own attempt to label Sanders’s proposal “a frank expression of economic illiteracy,” that Lowry is so guilty of it himself here. American workers are some 400 percent more productive today than they were in the 1940s but, as Sanders rightly points out, the value of their wages has been stagnant for decades. What people earn, in other words, is quite visibly not linked to what they produce.

Lowry, to be fair, does at least acknowledge the reality of increased worker productivity. But this somehow leads to what may be his most ridiculous flourish of all:

Sanders complains that American workers are 400 percent more productive than they were in the 1940s, yet they are still working long hours. Over time, though, we have worked less. In 1830, the average working week was more than 70 hours, and over the course of the next century, it dropped by almost half.

Putting aside the shoddy logic here (most everyone would probably agree things are better now than they were in 1830 — so what?), it’s worth pondering why, exactly, the average working week was so much shorter during the twentieth century than it was in 1830.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, workers across the industrialized world organized themselves in trade unions and political parties with the goal of securing better pay and basic dignity on the job. In America, these years of agitation eventually yielded the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) — which, among other things, established a shortened working week of forty-four hours.

As California representative Mark Takano, the lead sponsor of Sanders’s bill in the House, recently put it:

Before these federal labor standards were established, workers — including children — in the early 19th century were on the job more than 70 hours a week, often in horrendous and dangerous working conditions. In the late 1800s, workers conducted major strikes for an 8-hour workday, coining the historic slogan, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will.”

That most of us work fewer hours today than we did in 1830 is not random, arbitrary, or the inevitable outcome of capitalism’s benevolence — it’s the product of political struggle. But it also reflects the reality that technological progress lessens the overall number of hours that have to be expended on tedious, dangerous, or backbreaking tasks.

Unless, of course, you hold the belief that endless toil and low pay is simply what most people — i.e., those who aren’t capitalists or don’t occupy a right wing sinecure at somewhere like National Review — deserve. Tellingly, the author chooses to conclude his piece by citing a book which argues that work “is good for us, indeed an inherent part of the human condition.” Much like Ben Shapiro, who recently suggested abolishing the retirement age so that more people are forced to work after sixty-five, Lowry apparently sees intrinsic value in an economy that forces millions to spend the majority of their waking lives grinding away in the workhouse just to obtain the bare necessities of life.

In this respect, the most revealing passage of all in his piece actually comes much closer to the beginning:

“It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life,” the Vermont socialist insists. “It is time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.” The last clause is the key one. If everyone can work less and produce and earn exactly the same, why not? And if this is possible, why stop at four days a week? It’d be positively cruel to make someone work four days when they can work three days with the same outcomes.

Positively cruel indeed.

NOTE: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but as a freelancer I depend on the income I receive from writing so please consider subscribing at one of the paid tiers if you can afford to contribute. Those who do so will get instant access to every paywalled piece in full, including those from the archives.

I’ve also been sick this week, so apologies for the slight dearth of content. Regularly scheduled programming will resume soon.

It’s unclear how much longer Britain’s prime minister Keir Starmer will last, but it’s safe to say his proverbial goose is cooked. A leadership challenge is coming, possibly within days, and the only real question is which faction of the Labour Party — the soft left (behind Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband, or Angela Rayner) or the right (behind Wes Streeting) — strikes first. It’s worth pausing to underscore just how remarkable Starmer’s collapse has really been. In less than two years, he’s successfully bungled a massive parliamentary majority and seen his approval ratings fall below those of even Liz Truss.

On the other hand, little is surprising about this outcome at all. I was an early critic of Starmer’s and all you could really do was laugh at attempts by the Westminster media bubble to make him seem dynamic and exciting. It’s a profound indictment of British politics that someone so vapid and brazenly dishonest could ever ascend to lead a government. In a just and rational society, the benighted Sir Keith would probably be the third best trial lawyer in Swindon — not leader of the party founded by Keir Hardy and prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Anyway, I wrote what follows for Jacobin almost exactly five years ago in the aftermath of a different set of poor local election results and am proud to say I had Starmer’s number from more or less the very beginning. Enjoy.

Faced with an absolutely disastrous set of results in last week’s local elections, Keir Starmer waited a few hours to emerge from the shadows and answer questions from the media. And when he finally did appear, the leader of the Labour Party had nothing to offer beyond a series of verbal circumlocutions so meaningless he might as well have stayed silent. Asked by the BBC about his catastrophic election performance — which saw Labour hemorrhage council seats throughout the country, but also the County Durham constituency of Hartlepool, a solid Labour seat since its creation in 1947 — Starmer proved so unable to say anything of substance that he was ultimately forced to regurgitate the same stock answers for several minutes straight.

STARMER: This is not a question of left or right. It’s a question of whether we’re facing the country. We have changed as a party, but we’ve not made a strong enough case to the country. We’ve lost that connection, that trust, and I intended to rebuild that and do whatever is necessary to rebuild that trust.

BBC: But what does change mean in, say, policy terms?

STARMER: It means stopping, as a party, quarreling amongst ourselves, looking internally, and facing the country, and setting out that bold vision for a better Britain . . .

BBC: Sorry, Sir Keir, what is that vision?

STARMER: . . . changing the things that need changing, and that is the change that I will bring about.

Pressed again and again by his interviewer, Starmer’s evasions only grew more absurd — his solitary brush with anything even approaching a political vision being a momentary reference to ending “the injustice and inequality that millions of people face every day.” Encouraged to develop the idea further, however, he again defaulted to the same vague language about learning lessons, facing the country, and rebuilding trust:

BBC: What are you going to change over the next few days? What are you referring to?

STARMER: I will set out what we need to do to reconnect the Labour Party to the voters that have cast their verdict on us last night, particularly in places like Hartlepool. We have changed as a party. We have changed as a party. But we need to go further, and we need to set out that strong case to the country. We have not done that.

BBC: So you’re going to set out a new policy agenda? Is that what you’re saying?

STARMER: I am going to set out a strong case to the country, learn the lessons of the elections that have come in so far, and accept that we must reconnect and rebuild trust with working people, particularly in places like Hartlepool.

Paul Williams, Labour’s candidate in Hartlepool, could do little better when asked by Owen Jones to articulate his party’s vision for Britain earlier this month:

JONES: Don’t use any platitudes when you answer this: What is Labour’s vision for the country now? What does Labour stand for? Don’t say “fairness” and everything being nice . . . What, concretely, is the vision?

WILLIAMS: People in this election aren’t talking, though, about Labour’s vision for the country. They’re talking about Labour’s vision for Hartlepool.

JONES: Okay, what is Labour’s vision for Hartlepool that is unique and different and distinct?

WILLIAMS: Yeah, so . . . the best companies come to Hartlepool to provide the best jobs because we have the best trained people . . .

JONES: Do the Tories disagree with that?

WILLIAMS: . . . because we’ve invested in people right from the start of life. And you make that difference to children, so by the time they start school, they’re able . . . they’re not behind their peers, they can read . . . they can . . . you then have small class sizes and really, um, you know . . . You help people get to a point where they can be . . . have really great skills, really great training, and then employers come to you not because you’ve got the lowest taxes [but] because you’ve got the best people.

Even for those unsympathetic to him, it can be difficult to fathom how a politician like Keir Starmer, capable of rising to the leadership of a major political party, has proven quite so unable to offer anything resembling a coherent political vision or statement of purpose after more than a year on the job. Whatever its original pretensions may have been about offering a more digestible and electable version of the program championed by Labour under its previous leadership, Starmerism has been a vapid farce from its outset: a Westminster-centric project with no discernable agenda or policy offerings, unwilling to fulfill even the most rudimentary obligations of a parliamentary opposition during a period of crisis, and so wedded to branding as an organizing principle that its adherents seem to think they can reverse structural political decline simply by bludgeoning erstwhile Labour heartlands with patronizing slogans and empty flag-waving.

Under Starmer’s leadership, the party has bled more than one hundred thousand members, been outflanked by the Tories from the left on corporation taxes, and, as of last week, can add electoral catastrophe to its ignominious roster of political achievements. If nothing else, it’s a somewhat ironic outcome for a leadership whose entire modus operandi was supposedly about offering a veneer of professional “competence” that its predecessor lacked.

Having followed up last week’s electoral disaster with a botched reshuffle that has further inflamed internal tensions and will ultimately see Labour’s front bench become even more right-wing, Starmer will presumably spend the coming weeks attempting to craft answers to the questions he so spectacularly failed to answer on the BBC. Whatever sound bites he and his besieged team of advisers do manage to assemble, it’s decidedly unlikely they’ll amount to much beyond a more polished (or perhaps a more explicitly conservative) version of what Starmerism has offered already.

Though it’s invariably tempting to put the failures and vacuousness of a political project down to individual leadership, centrist hollowness of the kind reflected in a figure like Keir Starmer is not ultimately about the personal flaws or deficiencies of a single person at the top. Starmer might have proven a better retail politician or someone quick enough on his feet to avoid cringeworthy phrasings like “changing the things that need changing,” and he’d still have been ill-equipped to offer a coherent vision or meaningful contrast with the government he’s charged with opposing.

Revisit the Labour leadership hustings from 2015, and you’ll similarly find the coterie of largely interchangeable centrist automatons who dominated its earliest stages struggling to articulate anything resembling a positive political vision beyond a handful of buzzwords. From the vaguely centre-right figures (Chuka Umunna, Tristram Hunt, Liz Kendall) to the vaguely centre-left ones (Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham), there seemed little of substance to debate beyond how a warmed-over version of New Labour–era triangulation was going to be packaged. In Starmer’s leadership, we’ve finally gotten a glimpse of what the Labour Party might have looked like between 2015 and 2019 had any of the various alternatives to Jeremy Corbyn succeeded, and the result has been every bit as politically nebulous as the early race to succeed Ed Miliband.

Once again, it’s tempting to ascribe this lack of dynamism to the individual calibers of the current cohort of centrist politicians. And, true enough, there has been a marked decline in talent among those who broadly embrace the New Labour consensus since it was first inaugurated nearly a quarter century ago. It’s next to impossible, for example, to imagine a Liz Kendall or a Keir Starmer laying out their political vision with the clarity, rhetorical skill, and ideological zeal possessed by Tony Blair in 1998:

My vision for the 21st century is of a popular politics reconciling themes which in the past have wrongly been regarded as antagonistic — patriotism and internationalism; rights and responsibilities; the promotion of enterprise and the attack on poverty and discrimination . . . Human nature is cooperative as well as competitive, selfless as well as self-interested; and society could not function if it was otherwise. The grievous 20th century error of the fundamentalist left was the belief that the state could replace civil society and thereby advance freedom. The new right veers to the other extreme, advocating wholesale dismantling of core state activity in the cause of “freedom”. The truth is that freedom for the many requires strong government. A key challenge of progressive politics is to use the state as an enabling force, protecting effective communities and voluntary organisations and encouraging their growth to tackle new needs, in partnership as appropriate. These are the values of the Third Way.

Blair was ultimately able to articulate his vision in such lucid terms not because he was a vastly superior politician — though he was — but because it gave real expression to the zeitgeist of the late 1990s. In 1997, the neoliberal consensus (whatever else you might say about it) was still relatively new and untested in its post-Thatcherite incarnation, and there remained plenty for the apparatchiks of New Labour to do when it came to sweeping away the old order. If the neoliberal centre today seems unable to communicate any substantive vision beyond the inane language of focus groups, a major reason is that the project that originally animated it has, by and large, already succeeded.

Blair’s revolution has come and gone, and with it a world where anything about its core tenets could be recognized as dynamic or modern. With neoliberalism now firmly embedded as the lingua franca of British politics, there remains little for its present-day adherents on the centre-right and centre-left to do except put lipstick on the proverbial pig. To this end, they debate empty catchphrases and microscopic differences of policy, trading in vague narratives about how British capitalism might be rebranded to seem ever so slightly less cruel. (The only other course available is to fall back on old slogans, reflexes, and habits — a fact that explains why the Starmer leadership has found its few moments of genuine energy in fighting or purging the Left.)

With the Conservative Party still dexterous enough to reinvent itself every few years, these efforts will come to nothing in nine elections out of ten. Large sections of the British media, and even larger sections of British capital, will invariably prefer a Tory government over even the most neutered Labour opposition. Labour’s structural decline will continue as long as its leaders preclude the kind of radical critique and mass membership strategy that enabled Corbyn’s near-victory in 2017 — the sole exception to two decades of hemorrhaged votes and professionally managed political ossification (and, more recently, a handful of Labour councils where local activists bucked the leadership and ran on municipal socialism).

Keir Starmer’s spluttering inability to respond to even basic questions about the contours of his vision is thus about much more than the ineptitude of a single, sleep-deprived centrist out of his depth and suddenly worried about his job after a year of kid-gloves treatment from the media. The terror we saw in the Labour leader’s eyes was that of a politician not only unwilling to offer answers but congenitally unable to even imagine what they might be. A less mediocre figure than Starmer might have possessed the skills necessary to avoid the disastrous press tour and subsequent near-toppling that accompanied last week’s election results. But anyone waiting for a more politically savvy leader to draw a substantive political vision from the desicated corpse of Britain’s neoliberal centre will inevitably come away just as empty-handed as his interviewer on the BBC.

NOTE: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but as a freelancer I depend on the income I receive from writing so please consider subscribing at one of the paid tiers if you can afford to contribute. Those who do so will get instant access to every paywalled piece in full, including those from the archives.

That includes this one, which is a longish essay about Donald Trump, JD Vance, the so-called trad Cath movement, and the new right’s bizarre relationship with “tradition.” Enjoy.

There’s a viral clip of Russell Brand that’s recently been making the rounds on social media. If you haven’t seen it, Brand — who is facing multiple charges of sexual assault — was asked by Piers Morgan about a Bible he seems to have brought with him to the set. Suggesting it’s a Bible he’s also been bringing with him as a talisman to court, Brand then spends a full 90 seconds trying and failing to locate the “relevant passages” he’s been consulting amidst his legal troubles. It’s pretty hilarious, and I think most people who saw the clip will have drawn the obvious conclusion that the reason Brand couldn’t find the passage was because his newfound Christian identity (he converted and was “reborn” about two years ago) is totally fake. So fake, it seems, that he hasn’t even bothered to do the reading.

We’ve seen versions of this all over the place, and they’re not always conservatively-coded (remember Kevin Spacey coming out as gay the moment he was accused of sexual misconduct?). But religious conversions have occupied a particularly special place on the right during the Trump era, and conversions to Catholicism especially. Why Catholicism specifically? There’s probably no single answer here, but it’s likely some combination of the following.

First, Protestants are more numerous in America than Catholics, and among right wing Christians the proportion is probably even more lopsided. So there’s a whiff of hipsterism about people who suddenly come out as trad Catholics in that they get to feel they’re part of a special niche that is smaller and consequently has greater cultural cache. Catholicism also lends itself to the kinds of intricate theological and doctrinal debates that allow recent converts to become nerds about it if they want to.

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I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but as a freelancer I depend on the income I receive from writing so please consider subscribing at one of the paid tiers if you can afford to contribute. Those who do so will get instant access to every paywalled piece, including those from the archives.

Late last month, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced the creation of a “people’s fund” in the mould of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, explaining it like this:

A sovereign wealth fund is essentially a national savings and investment account. It's designed to grow wealth for future generations of Canadians. Many countries, many countries that are blessed with natural resources, like Norway, have sovereign wealth funds. Canada hasn't had one until now. The new Canada Strong Fund will give all Canadians a direct stake in building Canada strong.

If you haven’t heard of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the basic background is this. In the late 1960s, Norwegians discovered they boasted some of the world’s greatest offshore oil reserves. Beginning in the 1990s, the state started putting a share of the revenues into a giant public fund the country could draw on in the event it needed to and quite explicitly planning ahead for a future in which it inevitably transitions from fossil fuels. But as I explain in my latest piece for the Toronto Star, there was ultimately something more than hard-headed North European pragmatism at work here:

Norway, just like Canada, boasts vast oil reserves and, in the early 1990s, its government decided to start putting a share of the revenues into a fund that would be publicly-owned and controlled. This was partly because it recognized that oil is a finite resource and that Norwegians should probably start preparing for the day it inevitably runs out. But the plan also expressed the egalitarian ambitions of Norway’s social democratic Labour government. If a country is awash with resource wealth, the logic ran, then a share of it should necessarily belong to every citizen and be readily available for socially-useful public investment in periods of economic transition or instability. The result? Today the fund is worth roughly $3 trillion, is still growing, and will be available to finance Norway’s eventual shift away from fossil fuels.

What the Carney government is proposing, as I further explain, is essentially the opposite of this. I won’t quote further from the piece since you can just as easily read it for yourself. But there’s a broader story here about the profound dissonance between how Carney is actually governing and the story he’s telling Canadians to sell his agenda.

Across multiple fronts, this is the most right wing government Canada has had since at least the 1990s. Its agenda is one of massive public sector cuts, corporate subsidies, deregulation, and privatization (the Star’s , incidentally, recently examined these aspects of the government’s program in greater detail). But Mark Carney is quite visibly offering a very different public narrative about all this. Since taking office before last year’s election, he’s seized on a left-tinted language of economic nationalism. He’s pursued deregulation and corporate subsidies while calling this an “industrial strategy.” He’s invoked postwar imagery of mass public housing construction but his government has not adopted anything even faintly resembling the housing program enacted by the 1945 government of William Mackenzie King.

I didn’t have time to get into this in my Star piece, but something similar is also happening in the realm of foreign affairs. What many people heard in Carney’s Davos speech was a stirring call for a new spirit of progressive internationalism in the age of Trump. But, as I wrote back in January, this is not in fact what Carney was really saying at all: the speech being largely conservative in its implications.

The disjuncture between Carney’s actions and his words is, in my view, about more than just the hyperbole or narrative finessing through which leaders and governments sometimes seek to represent themselves to the democratic public. As I argued last month, there is something of a Straussian quality to the way Carney conducts himself — by which I mean he often seems, simultaneously, to be saying one thing to a mass audience and something quite different to a far narrower and more elite one.

Here, his supposed “sovereign wealth fund” is merely the most latest example.

You can read my full piece in the Star here.

NOTE: In light of strong interest, I’ve decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you can take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox.

In my last post, you’ll recall that I recounted a 2018 exchange between Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson in which the latter argued for a blanket ban on self-driving trucks. More notable, though, was how Carlson justified his case. Here’s their exchange again for conveniences’ sake:

Shapiro: You talk in [your] book about technology and how it’s shifting and taking away jobs from folks, and you make specific reference to truck driving and the fact that there are going to be these automated cars on the roads. So would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favour of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to, sort of, artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?

Carlson: Are you joking? In a second. In a second. In other words, if I were president, would I say to the Department of Transportation, “We’re not letting driverless trucks on the road, period”? Why? Really simple. Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school–educated men in this country.

The piece wasn’t specifically about the trucking question. But after I published it I received a rather interesting note from that merits a friendly addendum. If you’re unfamiliar with Cory’s work, he’s doing some of the finest writing in the field of AI and his recent book Enshittification is the best intervention I’ve personally encountered on the question of why so many online platforms have become totally unusable. In any case, there’s a section in his forthcoming The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI that deals directly with the trucking issue and what it contains is very interesting.

In his reply to Shapiro, it turns out, Tucker Carlson was in fact regurgitating a rather flimsy talking point being circulated by AI’s corporate boosters. I won’t quote directly from the book since it isn’t out yet, but the essence of what Doctorow alerted me to is this: in their quest to hype up AI technology, the tech lobby started circulating the narrative that truckers — who performed the most popular job in all of America — were about to be made redundant en masse.

The rub was that both pillars of this claim were actually inaccurate. I won’t bore you too much here, but basically there was a transparently bogus inflation of Bureau of Labour Statistics figures regarding how many people are paid to drive trucks. What Carlson was invoking in the service of his point was a male-coded image of big rigs spluttering plumes of black smoke from their phallic-shaped exhaust stacks — said rigs being driven by burly guys who never went to college. The thing is, the BLS counts a lot of other workers in the same category and the majority of them drive smaller vehicles like delivery vans. And this matters because it’s going to be pretty hard to replace delivery drivers with self-driving vehicles. Why? Because there still needs to be someone there to make the delivery.

Finally, Doctorow points out, even if AI-powered self-driving vehicles did take over big rig trucking the economic impact would be negligible because the industry is already so precarious and underpaid (a fact Carlson rather notably does not raise in the exchange) and because there would need to be a dedicated highway lane (which is just another way of saying AI boosters may soon make real that fantastical projection of the futurist imagination called a “train”).

While I don’t think this information moots the thesis of the original piece, I do think there are some interesting takeaways here. One is just that this is clearly a case study in Silicon Valley misinformation, which has been a more longstanding problem for which credulous science and tech journalism is at least partly to blame.

Second, and more notably I think, Carlson’s ill-founded intervention is yet another reminder that what passes for class politics on the right is usually about something else entirely. So much of the newly pro-worker conservatism we keep hearing about is really just rebranded conservatism of a more familiar kind. It’s not, fundamentally, about the working class as an economic or material category but rather as a collection of aesthetic signifiers that really stand in for other things: hierarchy, a patriarchal concept of the family, reactionary nostalgia for an idealized age of single-income, male breadwinner households before those godawful feminists started burning their bras and demanding equality.

In this case, it seems, Carlson was so keen to push his own socially conservative line he didn’t bother to make sure that the statistic he was citing was true. And even if he’d known it wasn’t, it seems doubtful he would have cared.

In light of strong interest, I’ve decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox. NOTE: A version of the following was originally published in Jacobin in 2023.

Last year, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro debated Tucker Carlson on the question of automation. Ventriloquizing a familiar market-conservative argument, Shapiro asked his guest point-blank whether he would support restrictions on the use of technology in order to protect jobs. In his reply, Carlson was nothing short of incredulous.

Shapiro: You talk in [your] book about technology and how it’s shifting and taking away jobs from folks, and you make specific reference to truck driving and the fact that there are going to be these automated cars on the roads. So would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favour of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to, sort of, artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?

Carlson: Are you joking? In a second. In a second. In other words, if I were president, would I say to the Department of Transportation, “We’re not letting driverless trucks on the road, period”? Why? Really simple. Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school–educated men in this country.

In this answer, there’s a hint at where Carlson’s argument is ultimately rooted. For him and other social conservatives, the question of automation is primarily about the stability of the patriarchal family unit, with the male breadwinner at its centre. As far as his prescriptions, Carlson even went as far as saying that the government should contrive a phony pretext for banning self-driving trucks altogether.

There is, of course, a third option that neither Shapiro’s market dogmatism nor Carlson’s reactionary luddism was willing to entertain. As conservatives, both clearly see some inherent good in people having to work. The former might favour the “creative destruction” wrought by markets and the latter certain restrictions on them, but neither views technology as a potentially liberatory tool for workers.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people simply took it for granted that technological progress would eventually give rise to a leisure society in which people, freed from the necessity of toil, would have all the time in the world to pursue and nurture their interests as they saw fit. Over the last hundred years, however, only one half of this prophecy has been borne out. Technological progress has been unprecedented, making production more efficient and all kinds of difficult tasks less arduous. Between 1950 and 2020, the United States experienced a 299 percent increase in labour productivity, and jobs of all kinds became safer and easier.

At the same time, many were eliminated — and with them the livelihoods they once sustained. Better telecommunications technology, after all, means you don’t need switchboard operators. Self-checkout units reduce opportunities in retail employment. Aided by machines, factories can now produce more with fewer workers involved. With the advent of AI technologies and self-driving vehicles, the same process will only unfold at an accelerated pace in the decades ahead.

This is hardly an original thought, but the social consequences are pretty alarming to contemplate. Despite being more productive than ever, workers’ wages have long been stagnant, and punishingly long working hours are already causing a needless seven hundred thousand deaths per year, according to the International Labour Organization. As millions more jobs are eliminated and service work in particular becomes more precarious, a process that could — and should — benefit workers will instead be one that makes their lives more difficult and insecure.

That the current political climate precludes potential solutions to this problem doesn’t make those solutions any less obvious. Modernization presents a clear opportunity to legislate shorter working weeks — something for which there is already historical precedent. As Bernie Sanders put it recently: “In 1940, the Fair Labor Standards Act reduced the workweek to 40 hours. Today, as a result of huge advances in technology and productivity, now is the time to lower the workweek to 32 hours — with no loss in pay.” (Iceland’s experiment to this effect, incidentally, has already yielded great results, which you can read about here in my 2021 discussion with researcher Guðmundur D. Haraldsson.)

During a recent interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan, Sanders also raised the prospect of a robot tax that would compel companies to pay a premium for replacing workers. Though the idea remains underdeveloped at the level of detail, it’s one that’s been floating around in various forms since the 1980s as a potential response to automation and could help generate the revenue needed to fund new public goods and universal services.

In the end, it’s ultimately these that represent the best solution to the problems posed by automation. Despite what some on the reactionary right might insist, there is no need to artificially limit technology in order to preserve jobs that can be performed by machines. With high-quality, universal services in place and an economy structured around the imperatives of social need rather than those of private profit, the importance of work in daily life would dramatically recede. Freed from the constant grind of tedious and unnecessary labor, countless millions would instead be able to spend their time however they chose without having to grind and struggle just to obtain bare subsistence. This, in some ways more than anything else, has always been the fundamental goal and basic objective of socialism. As Chris Maisano writes:

The one-sided focus of most Marxists and socialists on distributional questions has obscured the fact that the animating principle of the Left is not so much equality, but rather freedom — freedom from alienating work and freedom to use our time and creativity for our own self-directed ends. Socialism does not equal the roughly equal distribution of stuff; the martyrs of the labour movement didn’t give up their lives so that everyone could have the right to buy an iPhone or a plasma screen TV, or to waste their lives working at crap jobs…So long as the Left does not seek to fundamentally alter the labor process nor shorten the working day to the least amount of time possible, it fails to act on what should be its most fundamental principles.

Here, we are hardly grasping for some utopia. The socialist project, in spite of what its critics might say, isn’t striving for a society without problems. Instead, to borrow from Freud (by way of ), socialists seek a future in which hysterical misery has been transformed into ordinary unhappiness.

Unless you’re wedded to retrograde ideas about work, gender, and the family, there is no reason not to welcome such a future with open arms.

In light of strong interest, I’ve decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox.

A version of the following was originally published in Jacobin in 2022.

At its best, futurist thinking represents a flourishing of the human imagination. Emboldened by the invention of new technologies, artists at the turn of the twentieth century envisioned a world largely free of everyday toil, in which the work of machines would allow ordinary people to live fuller and happier lives without the grinding poverty and tedium associated with industrialization. This vision may have reflected a kind of misplaced techno-utopianism, but it was also a genuine expression of progressive thinking in a world of growing class consciousness and democratic militancy.

Today, what passes for futurist optimism is often more a sign of civilizational paralysis and economic stagnation — the increasingly absurd billionaire space race offering us a counterfeit vision of utopian promise in the form of climate-destroying vanity flights and dystopian fanfiction about Martian colonies. Unlike earlier iterations of futurism, this plutocrat-manufactured version substitutes the transcendence of earthly inequalities for their extension into the solar system, imagining a century of space exploration planned and carried out by a tiny handful of the world’s wealthiest people. This makes sense insofar as it reflects both the prevailing logic of a top-heavy and decadent global economy and a political order incapable of accommodating real alternatives to the status quo. When a system looks exhausted but reforming it also seems impossible, the only option left is to scale up and hope it yields a better result.

Something like this is at least the implicit premise of a new report from the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute entitled Space Invaders: Property Rights on the Moon, which mounts a Lockean case for the ownership of land off-world. To researcher Rebecca Lowe’s credit, the argument is intellectually quite rigorous and represents a philosophically consistent application of classical liberal thinking. Noting that earlier, more universalist frameworks for the exploration of space feel less viable today than they did in the 1950s or ’60s, Lowe proceeds to consider an approach that is neither nationally or globally based and would instead see individuals “to attain morally-justified property rights in space.”

She’s certainly correct that anything resembling the egalitarian vision of space once represented in the popular imagination by something like Star Trek looks decidedly more distant in a world of transnational competition and disempowered nation states. She’s also right to recognize that the codification of rules and regulations surrounding interstellar colonization are bound to be complex and also that debates about them will inevitably reflect unresolved disputes about the design of existing human societies.

In true libertarian fashion, the case for property rights is asserted as axiomatic and advanced as fundamentally egalitarian in spirit. “Moral property rights,” Lowe writes, “are rights that simply reflect truths about morality, and which do not depend on positive law.” While democratic nations, she argues, may be in a position to “share fairly amongst their citizens the opportunities of the national appropriation of space,” the existence of authoritarian societies means some will be unable to reap the off-world bounty:

Under such [national] approaches, for instance, if democratic Country A was newly allowed to appropriate a certain amount of space land, then separable parts of this amount could, for instance, be made up for grabs amongst competing citizens, on fair terms. But the same could not be expected from authoritarian regimes. There is an egalitarian argument, therefore, that the arbitrary oppression of opportunity that some individuals already face simply by being born in, or otherwise inhabiting, particular countries should not be further entrenched by a nation-focused approach to the governance of space opportunities.

Ethically speaking, it’s not a bad argument. Having basic egalitarian commitments, after all, implies not wanting people to be disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth or subject to what Lowe calls “arbitrary oppression” — of opportunity or otherwise. The irony is that market societies have such oppression built-in by design, and that modern apologists for inequality regularly invoke property rights as the preeminent justification for not eliminating it. According to this line of thinking, properly functioning markets offer everyone the same opportunities to own and to compete.

The problem, of course, is that they do nothing of the kind. Market societies are, by definition, also class societies in which a comparatively small few own the means by which wealth is generated and a much larger group must earn subsistence through wage labor. The latter group produces, while the former extracts rents and skims the surplus value. In lieu of radical measures like the complete abolition of inherited wealth from one generation to the next, “equality of opportunity” is mostly a mirage and markets inevitably yield social relations defined by entrenched domination.

This obviously has profound implications on its own. But it’s also relevant if we’re considering hypothetical frameworks for the future use of space. What is presently called “private space exploration,” after all, is in practice the domain of a few exorbitantly wealthy billionaires, and there’s no particular reason to think that would change with the extension of property rights onto the moon.

Putting aside the question of whether lunar colonization will ever be viable or commercially profitable to begin with, the inherent asymmetries in global capitalism mean that any realistic version of it will simply project structural inequality into the heavens: a small few among those who are already rich will own and profit, while others will work and attempt to subsist. (One clue in this regard was offered by none other than Elon Musk when he was asked about the high costs of transport to Mars. His answer? That those unable to afford the price of a trip could take out loans and pay them off by toiling in Martian sweatshops upon arrival.) Equality of opportunity under a system of lunar property rights is thus every bit as mythical as its earthly equivalent.

Rigorous and systematic as it is, Lowe’s proposal therefore suffers from a broader problem inflecting much of what passes for futurist thinking today: namely, that it remains bound up in the logics of the very status quo it promises to transcend. While people in every era may struggle to see beyond their own immediate horizons, what the late Mark Fisher called capitalist realism arguably makes ours unique in this respect. From billionaire-led space exploration to cryptocurrency to the so-called Metaverse, the various schemes and technologies currently trying to claim the futurist mantle are so fatally limited by their allegiance to capitalism that they are inevitably strained of emancipatory potential.

Plutocracy is bad enough on earth. If humanity ever does expand into the heavens, let’s hope it’s in a future that has left billionaires and class hierarchies far behind.

In light of strong interest, I’ve decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox.

There was a revealing moment on the episode of CBC’s Power and Politics that followed the New Democratic Party convention in Winnipeg a few weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, the panel’s Conservative voice Fred DeLorey had little nice to say about the NDP’s new leader Avi Lewis, speaking dismissively about his association with “extremists” and casting him as an electoral dud incapable of moderating sufficiently to win (by way of contrast, DeLorey favourably cited the example of former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair — a funny thing to do given what happened in 2015 when the latter made his pivot to the so-called “centre”, but I digress).

This is the kind of spin we’re liable to get from these panels and it’s par for the course. But, in describing the left wing policy agenda with which Lewis won the NDP leadership, DeLorey abruptly shifted into a more alarmist register:

DELOREY: “This is a guy who wants to nationalize grocery stores, defund our military…”

CATHERINE CULLEN [HOST]: “He was very specific earlier this week that he does not want to nationalize grocery stores…He wants there to be publicly-run grocery stores…”

DELOREY: “Maybe that’s a slippery slope to his eventual plan to nationalize. But even then, having Canada Post delivering groceries, is that next on his plan too?”

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My first encounter with Straussianism, perhaps appropriately, came while reading Machiavelli as a second year undergraduate.

“Straussianism,” for those unfamiliar, refers to a broad camp of political theorists who draw on the thought of the late German émigré philosopher Leo Strauss. Many (though by no means all) of them are politically conservative and some have even been active in right wing politics. The exact nature of the relationship between Strauss’s thought and Straussian conservatism has been fiercely debated and is well beyond our remit here. Regardless, the main thing to know about Straussians is that they champion an esoteric approach to reading and interpreting great texts like The Republic. In plainer language, you might say they look for hidden meaning: forensically parsing subtext; peeling back artifice; identifying obvious gaps in a writer’s arguments and wondering (sometimes justifiably) whether they might be intentional.

In light of strong interest, I’ve decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox.

In reading The Prince, for example, I learned it could be useful to ask questions like why Machiavelli had chosen not to mention Christ in a list of “armed prophets” alongside Moses, Theseus, Cyrus the Great of Persia, and Romulus (the mythical founder and first king of Rome). Was he in fact making a cryptic claim about the political fecklessness of Christian morality here? In cases like these, the Straussian approach can be genuinely useful and yield real insight. Indeed, there’s no inherent reason why such an interpretive method should be conservatively-coded at all.

Straussianism often intersects with right wing politics, however, because many of its disciples also believe that major texts in the philosophical cannon were intentionally instilled with multiple layers of meaning by their authors — the deepest of which are, by design, only accessible to a tiny elect capable of identifying and grasping them.

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I was particularly struck by two of Zohran Mamdani's recent videos: one a reflection on Ramadan, the other a St. Patrick's day message to Irish New Yorkers. As is typically the case with Mamdani, the depth and substance in both is striking. He speaks well, is characteristically engaging, and there's a lot more reflectiveness and history to be found here than what one generally sees from politicians doing these sorts of things ("Today, we recognize the distinct and ongoing contributions of Culture X or Diaspora Y to [insert jurisdiction here]..." etc etc).

Here, and elsewhere in his communications, Mamdani is doing a very useful kind of public education. To this end, his Ramadan video manages to be, at once: a gently moving tribute to Muslim life in New York,1 a celebration of the different backgrounds and traditions — geographic, culinary, and so on — that reside within Islamic culture, and an introduction to the meaning and rituals of Islam's holy month for non-Muslims. In this case, there's obviously a personal dimension at work. But regardless, it's a far cry (in the best sense) from the rather shallow style of diversity theatre that became so popular among liberal politicians during the 2010s.

Note: This piece represents a continuation of ideas I first explored in a lengthy 2020 review of Barack Obama’s memoir A Promised Land (co-authored with Nathan J. Robinson) which you can read in full here.

In light of strong interest, I’ve also decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox. Enjoy.

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In light of strong interest, I’ve also decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox. Enjoy.

Among the most striking features of the US-Israeli war against Iran is the near total indifference of American elites in particular to public opinion. I was 14 when the Bush administration invaded Iraq and can still vividly remember the year of concerted propaganda that came beforehand. If you weren't born or were too young to remember, it's difficult to convey how aggressive this actually was. It was a campaign truly global in scope, advanced on multiple fronts, and something that showcased in pretty terrifying fashion the awesome power of the modern state and its media surrogates to manipulate public opinion. By the time the actual invasion was launched in March 2003, a majority of Americans were basically baying for blood and more than half had been convinced Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11.

Fast forward to the present day and you see something quite different. From the outset, polls have shown there's very little support within the American public for this war. And it hasn't really mattered a lick, registering only in the tortured triangulations we've seen from people like Trump, Rubio, and Vance. Whereas the Bush administration sought to create both a humanistic pretence for its war — and one concerned with national security, weapons of mass destruction and so on — Trump and his people have barely even seemed to try.

We have, it seems, evidently moved beyond propaganda as it's traditionally been understood. The classical form of propaganda still assumed it was important, indeed necessary, to establish and maintain some kind of public legitimacy for the actions of the state or regime. That's been true in liberal democracies as well as totalitarian societies (and has plenty of precedent in pre-democratic and pre-liberal societies too).

What we have seen in Trump's otherwise quite lackadaisical messaging around the war is a concerted attempt — or rather a never-ending series of them — to prod and manipulate market behaviour, particularly when it comes to oil prices. In some instances, this looks to be straightforward case of insider trading. Here, for example, is how the New Yorker's John Cassidy recently described the aftermath of a single Trump TruthSocial post:

Since the war began, trading in the futures markets has been heavy and, sometimes, frenetic. In terms of their absolute size, the trades that took place immediately before Trump’s announcement last Monday weren’t off the charts. But the volume of trading was unusually large for the time of day: according to data collected and analyzed by Bloomberg, it was roughly nine times the average volume at the same time during the previous five days. The sudden surge in trading of stock futures was also unusual: until Trump’s post, there had been no big news. “The timing and the fact that the two trades were placed at the same time, it kind of smells like something was off,” Mike Khouw, a veteran futures trader and portfolio manager who used to run a derivatives desk at Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street investment bank, told me.

Beyond this kind of rank corruption, however, I think there’s ultimately something else at work. For Trump and Vance — who, lest we forget, won a narrow victory in a cost of living election less than two years ago — the prime concerns here are financial markets and gas prices rather than public opinion vis a vis the war itself.

It’s a perfect illustration of what the market society really means. Insofar as there’s propaganda, its target constituency is not the people but Wall Street. And insofar as there’s democracy, it’s simply the democracy of consumers — who have no real power or influence as citizens but who might angrily ask to speak with the manager if prices remain too high.