SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
nationalism
It Is Time to Build a World Based on Solidarity
We are at a crossroads in human history. We will either figure out how to share, or we will tear apart the fabric of the world that supports us.
Apr 22, 2025
In Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, a city responsible for producing the images of style and happiness that are propagated around the globe, there are 40,000 people living on the street. Even its wealthy neighborhoods were not safe from the disastrous wildfires of 2025. These problems are the result of an economic system that puts profits over human and environmental needs; a political system that allows money to impact outcomes; and a cultural system dominated by unregulated tech monopolies and other forms of corporate-controlled media.
While the technology is available to replace dirty energy with clean in the time we have left to stabilize the world at 1.5°C, many governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels at higher rates than they subsidize renewable energy. Levels of inequality are increasing both between the Global South and Global North and within countries all around the world. Living standards in the Global North are going down. One of the reasons for this is the corrosive nature of inequality. As long as a society tolerates high levels of inequality, it will contain high levels of social conflict. As people come to resent the existing social order, some turn to reactionary forms of ethno-nationalism.
All around the world voters feeling a sense of precarity have chosen to elect leaders such as former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and U.S. President Donald Trump. People’s faith in the future and sense of security are so under threat that in many places around the world, there are epidemic levels of anxiety and depression. California, one of the richest places on the planet with a two-thirds Democratic majority, has not figured out how to build a livable state. The global rise of right-wing nationalism is the symptom of a disease, rather than its cause.
We are at a crossroads in human history. We will either figure out how to share, or we will tear apart the fabric of the world that supports us. At this crucial moment we need to choose between a world based on reactionary nationalist sentiments and political power plays by the fossil fuel industry and other reactionary forms of capital, or we can figure out how to fairly share the resources we have and learn to live together in healthy relationships with nature. It is time to build a world based on relations of solidarity.
The Deep Roots of the Current Crisis
The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function.
Since its beginning capitalism has been challenged by those it has harmed: from slave revolts and anticolonial rebellions all around the world, to the Levelers and Diggers in capitalism’s original home of England, who opposed the privatization of land. And from capitalism’s beginning there have also been those who fought to get a greater share of the spoils of the system for working people. Unions have fought for better working conditions and wages from employers. Reformers have fought for the state to operate in ways that shifted the balance of power toward the interests of people and the environment.
In many European nations, accords between capital and labor were reached early in the 20th century as the result of strong labor movements. Those accords led to social democratic forms of capitalism, where living standards were kept high, and social safety nets were created, as states managed to regulate businesses while also allowing them to flourish and remain politically powerful. As inequality has increased and governments have been decreasingly able to deliver satisfying lives under these accords, many European nations have seen support for mainstream parties decline and support for right-wing nationalist parties rise.
If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
In the U.S., after the immiseration and social turmoil of the Great Depression, a similar accord was reached between capital and labor, where businesses were regulated by the state, living standards were somewhat protected, and wages rose. This accord lasted until it was challenged by former President Ronald Reagan, whose began his administration in 1980 by firing striking air traffic controllers. Since that time, the U.S. has seen a steady erosion of protections for workers, regulations to protect the environment, and living standards. The Depression-era accord was broken, and the U.S. has seen a steady decline in living standards ever since.
One could imagine a situation in which a new accord was established, and a detente could be reached again between the working class and capital. As the world falls further into chaos and people’s lives become more precarious, the old accords that were established between capital and labor are no longer holding. While it is possible that rational capitalists who want a stabilized system will come to the rescue and create a new accord, that outcome is highly unlikely, for several reasons.
One reason it is unlikely is the climate crisis. Clean energy is being installed at a rapid rate, and it is transforming lives in much of the Global South. Speeding the transition in ways necessary for our survival will require more regulations on polluting industries, and more government investments in infrastructure. And yet, the fossil fuel oligarchs continue to fight those changes tooth and nail, as seen in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The fossil fuel oligarchy holds dominant power is the U.S., Russia, the Gulf States, and many powerful transnational institutions. It is not going to peacefully wander into the sunset as the transition away from fossil fuels undermines its power and profits. The fact that the survival interests of a livable planet are in direct conflict with the interests of that politically powerful sector make it difficult for other sectors of capital to come to a new accord to stabilize the system.
Another factor making a new accord unlikely is the political power of the technology oligarchs whose social media products are responsible for much of the current chaos in the world’s information ecosystems. Those oligarchs and their firms are fighting globally to maintain their ability to operate as monopolies, and are preventing more benign forms of social media from developing. They continue to refuse to limit the spread of forms of misinformation that led to massacres in many places including Myanmar. They allow Russian bots and other malign entities to spread disinformation in ways that help us get outcomes like the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Those tech oligarchs are increasingly flexing their political power. A new accord between capital and human society would require strong action to reign in those destructive forces.
A third factor making a new accord difficult is that in earlier periods, businesses functioned largely by making things that met people’s needs. Consumers got the products they desired, and in many parts of the world, living standards rose. In the past decades, capitalism has entered a vampiric phase, where finance capital extracts profits while doing less to create things that meet people’s needs and desires. This has led to the rich getting richer without creating rising living standards as a by-product, as in happened in earlier phases of capitalism.
As inequality increases all around the world, a variety of social ills follow in its wake, as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson write in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. These range from obvious ones such as increased crime rates, to less obvious ones such as teen pregnancy, and a tendency for social cohesion to fall apart. Lack of social cohesion can then lead voters to put authoritarian leaders into power who promise to give them a sense of stability as their worlds fall apart.
Solidarity
Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
The term solidarity is a call to unite across differences to advocate for a common set of interests. It often means standing up for the needs of others, not in the form of charity, but in the form of building social relations that work for others, or stopping destructive forces such as wars, or social practices that lead to poverty, in the name of building a world based on healthy forms of interdependency.
The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world.
In every part of the world there are examples of people managing resources in ways that build solidarity. They are creating community gardens, community land trusts, time banks, and credit unions. They are finding ways to support and promote sharing, gift giving, and caring for one another. They are building networks of socially oriented enterprises. They are developing models to spread. They are working to transform the context in which these enterprises take place to foster their growth and increase their impacts.
Moving to a world based on principles of solidarity involves building that new world from within the belly of the old. We need to challenge the dominant structures that uphold the old order, while simultaneously building and living in viable alternatives, and rethinking how we understand the nature of our shared social world. We need to fight, build, and rethink.
The accords established to stabilize many countries early in the 20th century were the results of tremendous work by people organizing in trade unions and broad-based social movements. Unfortunately, the current crisis comes at a time when trade unions are not as strong as they have been in some periods in the past. And yet union power is developing as are a wide range of oppositional social movements. The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world. As we do all we can to stop the current onslaught against a livable world, we should also keep in mind our broader vision of a world that works for all of us, including the natural systems on which our lives depend.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Neo-Feudalism: the Enemy the Left Must Name to Defeat
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation.
Mar 18, 2025
In 1776, America declared independence not just from a king, but from an entire feudal order. The promise was radical: no more lords and vassals, no more aristocratic monopolies, no more inherited rule. It was a vision of self-governance, economic freedom, and political democracy.
As we know, this promise was deeply flawed from the outset—built atop the brutal reality of chattel slavery, which entrenched a racial caste system even as the revolution sought to break from feudal hierarchy.
Still, the revolutionary spark—that governance should belong to the people, not an inherited elite—set a course for future struggles, from abolition to labor rights to civil rights. The unfinished promise of 1776 has always been to extend that right to everyone, dismantling old forms of domination wherever they persist.
The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
Yet nearly 250 years later, we find ourselves under the shadow of a system that eerily resembles the one we once revolted against. Power is no longer held by monarchs but by corporate oligarchs and billionaire dynasties. The vast majority of Americans—trapped in cycles of debt, precarious labor, and diminishing rights—are not citizens in any meaningful sense.
We talk around this reality. We call it “money in politics,” “corporate influence,” and “economic inequality.” But these are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is neo-feudalism—a system in which power is entrenched, inherited, and designed to be impossible to escape. And unless we call it by its true name, we will never build the movement needed to fight it.
Feudalism may have faded in name, but many of its structures remain. Today’s hierarchy mirrors the past in ways we can no longer ignore.
- Then: Lords owned the land, and peasants worked it under their control.
Now: A handful of corporations and investment firms own vast swaths of housing, farmland, and industry. - Then: Aristocracies passed power down through hereditary privilege.
Now: Dynastic billionaires and corporate monopolies ensure that wealth remains concentrated in a ruling class. - Then: The peasantry was bound to their lords by custom, debt, and necessity.
Now: Student debt, medical bills, and stagnant wages trap entire generations in perpetual economic dependence. - Then: Political power was controlled by a small elite who ruled by divine right.
Now: The illusion of democracy masks the fact that billionaires fund both parties, controlling policy no matter who is elected.
This is not the free society America was supposed to be. It is a highly stratified system in which the many serve the interests of the few, with no meaningful path to real power. And worse, the establishment left—rather than challenging this order—has come to represent it.
The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class. Today, it has become the party of the professional-managerial elite—the bureaucrats, consultants, and media figures who believe that governing is their birthright.
The establishment left has in many ways absorbed the role of the aristocracy—not just in terms of wealth but in the way it positions itself as the enlightened ruling class. They claim to stand for “equity” and “democracy,” yet do nothing to challenge the real structures of power.
Instead, they manage decline while maintaining their own privilege—careful not to upset the donor class that sustains them.
As newly elected Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin put it, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
Pronouncements from global elites certainly don’t help either. The now-infamous slogan “You’ll own nothing and be happy”—popularized by the World Economic Forum and widely interpreted as a blueprint for a hyper-managed future—only fuels growing resentment toward an emerging system where ownership, autonomy, and mobility are increasingly out of reach for the average person.
This is why figures like Steve Bannon and reactionary populists have hijacked the narrative of neo-feudalism. Despite his own ties to oligarchs, Bannon has correctly identified that America is no longer a capitalist democracy but a feudal order where power is locked away from ordinary people.
He explicitly frames this crisis as a return to feudal hierarchy: “The ‘hate America’ crowd… they believe in some sort of techno-feudal situation, like was in Italy, back in the 14th and 15th century… where they are like a city-state, and there are a bunch of serfs that work for them. Not American citizens, but serfs, indentured servants.”
He has also drawn direct comparisons between modern economic conditions and serfdom: “Here’s the thing with millennials, they’re like 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re in better shape, they have more information, they’re better dressed. But they don’t own anything.”
However, Bannon’s solution—a nationalist strongman government—represents just another form of vassalage.
Reactionary populists like Bannon, President Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson exploit real economic grievances and redirect them into a revenge narrative. Instead of seeing neo-feudalism as a system that transcends party or nationality—one that has evolved from medieval serfdom to corporate vassalage—they reframe it as a nationalist grievance.
Bannon likens “globalists” (an ambiguous term) to feudal overlords, but insists that nationalism can break their grip. Trump labels the deep state and liberal elites as the enemy, but assumes the role of a strongman to restore justice. Carlson says the working class is being crushed, but blames cultural elites rather than the billionaire class as a whole.
This misdirection is key. Rather than exposing the true architects of neo-feudalism—corporate monopolists, financial barons, and entrenched dynasties—these reactionaries redirect public anger toward an amorphous “cultural aristocracy” of media figures, academics, and bureaucrats. The real oligarchs escape scrutiny, while the working class is fed a narrative that pits them against cultural elites rather than the economic structures that keep them in servitude.
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation. The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
The question is no longer whether neo-feudalism exists. The question is whether the left will finally recognize it—and act before it’s too late. If it fails, the fight will be lost to those who see the problem but offer only deeper subjugation as the solution.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump’s Sovereigntist Imperialism Will Trigger Self-Defeating US Decline
As Trump transforms the United States into pariah nation, he will be accelerating the nation’s fall from power, generating increasingly dangerous domestic and international turmoil and insecurity.
Feb 15, 2025
Days after November’s Trump-MAGA election victory, a senior Russian diplomat asked his American interlocutors how great a historical transformation it signaled. Was it the equivalent of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal, or the South deserting the Democratic Party in response to the 1965 Civil Rights Act?
Within days of his inauguration it was clear, Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times, that U.S. President Donald Trump and his cronies were “waging war on the American system of government.” Billionaire plutocrats captured Washington to increase their immense fortunes, to eviscerate our limited social safety net, to eliminate corporate regulations, and to turn the clock back on 70 years of civil and human rights gains. A month on we find ourselves in the midst of what is politely described as a “constitutional crisis,” as Trump and his co-conspirators signal they will refuse to respect court orders that overrule their illegal and unconstitutional actions.
The chaos and calamity the Trump regime is wreaking within the United States extends beyond our borders, near and far. Counter-productively Trump and company are swinging their recking ball at the foundations of the United States’ liberal and sometimes democratic empire which has subsidized the U.S. economy for more than a century. The murder of as many as 3 million Vietnamese; NATO’s generation-long Afghanistan War; and continuing supply of billions of dollars’ worth of advanced weapons, as well as diplomatic support, for Israel’s genocidal second Palestinian Nakba, give lie to a benign U.S. led “international rules-based order.” Reinforcing the image of the Ugly American, the Trump-Musk assault on the U.S. Agency for International Development is killing innocent aid recipients around the world by denying them food and medicines. Trump’s 25% tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, targeted primarily against China, provide an unexpected opening to the Middle Kingdom. They violate the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement and a trade agreement with Australia, signaling to the world that, like Hitler before him, Trump operates as if treaties are not worth the paper they are written on, and that the U.S.’ word is not to be trusted. This spells international chaos and economic pain for many U.S. Americans.
Trump’s needs and insistence on dominating anyone or any nation that refuses to kowtow to his demands will inevitably result in the alienation of valued and essential partners and painful isolation.
That era of liberal imperialism is over. It has been coming since the end of the Cold War, as China’s rise and that of the most influential nations of the Global South have created the still uncertain and fluid multipolar disorder. Trump and company’s “peace through strength” is a response to the United States’ relative decline and is being pursued in a nationally self-defeating sovereigntist imperial tradition.
A New York Times article explained that the early sovereigntist movement sought “not only America’s formal sovereignty… but also the traditional forms of rule to which its white, native-born leaders were accustomed… they understood international cooperation as a threat to their personal sovereignty as well that of their nations.” Sovereigntists played leading roles in the 1930s’ fascist “America First” movement and opposed creation of the United Nations, the International Court, NATO, and the World Trade Organization as infringements on U.S. sovereignty. Sovereigntists supported racist Rhodesia as a “brave little country” and defended apartheid South Africa against U.N. sanctions. The Trumpist Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proclaimed that “international organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed. They should be abandoned.”
The conservative Trump critic Bret Stephens describes the sovereigntist ideology serving as a means for “a country doing what it wants to do… an indifference to the behavior of other states, however cruel or dangerous, so long as it doesn’t impinge on us.” It means that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” In Trump’s case, we know that he despised the “rules-based order.” His former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien reported that he ”adheres not to dogma but to his own instincts.” That is to say his personal narcissistic sovereignty.
Thus, we have threats to seize Greenland and to annex Canada for minerals in order to outpace China in the technological and economic races for dominance. Panama is threatened in order to restore U.S. control over the strategically vital canal. And while the U.S. spends 3.4% of its GDP, nearly a trillion dollars, Trump has raised his demand that NATO nations increase their military spending to a staggering 5% of their GDP so that the Pentagon can concentrate its military and economic power on containing and dominating China. A fool’s errand.
Some governments, for example Poland, Japan, and Colombia, are kowtowing to Trump’s crude demands. Others—including Denmark, France, and even Germany, at least in the face of Trump’s Greenland demands—are insisting on respect for their national sovereignty. We can expect linkages as Trump goes beyond his threat to encourage Russia to invade nations that don’t meet his exorbitant military spending demands with tariff threats and other demands for those who fail to kowtow to the new lord’s orders.
Trump has yet to fully reveal his military and diplomatic approaches to Europe and Russia. In his return to power, Trump seems less smitten by Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that the Russian autocrat is “destroying Russia.” Trump has threatened further and useless sanctions against Moscow and increases in military support for Kyiv if Moscow refuses to come to the negotiating table on Trump’s terms. He has also offered continued military support for Ukraine in exchange for significant quantities of rare earth minerals needed for the industrial and the technological arms race with China. The Ukraine War, of course, is not only for control of that long-tormented borderland. On all sides, it is being fought to shape and define the Post-Post-Cold War’s European order and strategic architecture.
At the same time, Trump, who believe it or not is driven in part by his Nobel Peace Prize ambitions, as well as his transactional way of being, could attempt to negotiate a comprehensive grand bargain with Putin over the heads Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukraine, and European leaders. It could include everything from the future of Ukraine to conventional and nuclear weapons in Europe, and to whatever follows the expiration of the New START nuclear treaty in February 2026.
On the other hand, if Putin is not willing to accommodate Trump’s demands we could see renewed commitments to the Biden administration’s goal of dealing Moscow a “strategic defeat,” and to the new Cold War.
On the international economic front, Trump’s tariff threats are more than temper tantrums. Rejection of the 70-year-old liberal imperial disorder includes the ambition of replacing the Bretton Woods-WTO systems with what Trump’s former Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer terms a “new American trade system.”
Lighthizer, who ignited the economic warfare with China during Trump’s first term, recently wrote that “countries with democratic governments [as of this now applies to the U.S. -jg!] and mostly free economies should come together to create a new trade regime. This system could enforce balance by having two tiers of tariffs.” Punitive tariffs would target “nondemocratic countries as well as those that insist on beggar-thy-neighbor aggressive industrial policies to run large surpluses.” Those within his new regime “would pay lower tariffs and they could be adjusted over time to ensure balance.”
The imperial naivety and ambition of this strategy brings to mind the disastrous Bush-Cheney-Abrams belief that with “shock and awe” that they could simultaneously export democracy to Iraq and seize control of the “sea of oil” on which that nation floats.
By definition, the narcissism of admiring one’s reflection in the mirror and insisting on personal or national sovereignty at the expense of others means ignoring the needs and agency of others. Trump’s needs and insistence on dominating anyone or any nation that refuses to kowtow to his demands will inevitably result in the alienation of valued and essential partners and painful isolation. Just as no man is an island, neither is a nation. As Trump transforms the United States into pariah nation, he will be accelerating the nation’s decline, generating increasingly dangerous domestic and international turmoil and insecurity.
We saw that with the end of the Cold War, based on common security and win-win diplomacy, there are alternatives that will enhance our personal and national security. In the words of the Jewish sage Hillel, “If not now, when? If not me [us] who?” We and the world’s nations are not powerless. U.S. and international strategies that target Trump’s stock market Achilles heel or ultimately a general strike could discipline this most undisciplined and dangerous despot.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular