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Abolish the People

In recent years, populism has become so much the destructive domain of the right — so thoroughly claimed by the Trumps, Mileis and Melonis of the world — that it might be strategic to cede it for the time being and seek out other terrain. One alternative, tricky in its own way, is the commons. The term typically describes a set of resources that are shared freely among a collective. But this is not a given condition, much less a natural state. Always contingent, the commons is in fact defined by its opposite: enclosure, or the claim of private property on things and places that were once, or should be now, collectively owned and available to all. More precisely, the commons is defined in resistance to enclosure. Crucial to this resistance is a utopian dimension which, I believe, could help us to subvert the dystopian impulses of many populist projects today, perhaps opening up a path beyond them.How to locate this utopian dimension in history, as opposed to before it or beyond it, and how to harness it in the present? In his essay on Surrealism, published in 1929 on the brink of economic catastrophe, Walter Benjamin praised this school of artists as ‘the first to perceive the revolutionary energies in the outmoded’. Benjamin described a number of decaying objects the Surrealists saw in this light, as André Breton scoured the Paris flea markets for disused items that had taken on an uncanny charge, and Louis Aragon roamed through the Paris passages that had entered into a spectral afterlife. Yet at the top of his list Benjamin placed what he called ‘the first iron constructions’ — the ambitious architectural creations of the rising bourgeoisie, such as those that housed the world exhibitions of the mid- to late-nineteenth century.‘Utopian’ may be a better word than ‘revolutionary’ to describe the energies trapped in these structures and spaces. Benjamin believed that any class on its ascent to power has the confidence not only of its new dominance in the present but also of its unfettered vision for the future. This is a future that — at least initially, at least in principle — is not restricted to this class alone, but radiates outward to society at large. In time, the class sacrifices its political vision in order to protect its economic privileges. It forfeits its own utopia. But the energies of that vision are not altogether lost; they continue to exist as a resource held in common, like a nontoxic fuel buried deep in the earth which can be extracted at a later date. For Benjamin, the Surrealists were engaged in exactly this sort of probing for the buried dreams of the bourgeoisie, and there is no reason why we cannot now attempt something similar, more than a century later.This means seeking out a commons of lost pasts: pasts with utopian energies, however faint; pasts with visionary futures that we hold collectively. While such visions are often rapidly compromised — the utopian can slip into the ideological and sometimes into the dystopian — we know that a utopian glimmer can still linger even in the most reified of things.A couple of kitschy images from the long life of the bourgeoisie might serve to evoke this particular type of commons. Here is a manipulated photo of the Empire State Building: a skyscraper built in the depths of the Great Depression and originally conceived with a towering dock for a new kind of air travel, which looked beyond the downturn of the present to a dazzling techno-future. This vision was never achieved, of course, but it still conveys a desire, a utopian desire, for a transformed world, even if what came to pass was anything but.And here is a still from the famous advertisement that introduced the Macintosh personal computer during the Super Bowl of 1984: a female athlete breaks into the drab prison-world described in the Orwell novel and smashes the giant screen of Big Brother with a sledgehammer. Here, the utopian energies take the form of a society transformed by information, liberated from its overlords by the diffusion of digital media. Once again, this utopian desire was later co-opted: we now know what our surveillant overlords, federal or corporate or both, can do with this kind of technology. Yet the fact that this transformative force was eventually rechannelled does not erase it from these early images of the internet age. It remains suspended there. Another resource waiting to be tapped.Along with this commons of lost pasts we can also point to a different but related one: a commons of damaged presents. This commons is made up of the industrial ruins that still lie, in pieces, around us — the decayed infrastructure of the modern city as a centre of manufacturing that has mostly disappeared: shuttered factories, defunct power plants, disused train lines, bypassed viaducts and the like. Over the last few decades this commons became an attractive target for a new wave of enclosures, as old areas of industrial production have been retooled as new sites of postindustrial spectacle (‘the Bilbao Effect’) or real estate speculation (‘the High Line Effect’). Although such utopian energies were short-lived, that doesn’t mean they didn’t stir, even or especially in the souls of the designers who worked out the redevelopment of these abandoned areas.Finally, there is another corollary version of the commons of damaged presents to consider, one that will inevitably expand in the coming years: the commons of lands scarred by climate change — fires, floods, and other natural and unnatural catastrophes — as a result of industrial capitalism. Obviously, private property persists in this situation too, as big banks and hedge funds circle the disaster zones like dragon vultures. But even so, might a claim for the commons be made for parts of this new terra incognita?This is to stretch the concept of the commons beyond recognition. But rather than pull back, why not push the idea of enclosure further as well? ‘Capitalism began with enclosure’, Fredric Jameson reminds us. As far back as 1516, Thomas More was warning against the predations of private property in his Utopia. Today, enclosure continues both at the micro level, in the monetising of our data or the manipulating of our genes, and on a macro scale, in the exploitation of the oceans or the planned colonisation of the planets. AI is a soul-killing expropriation of our cognitive labour, of what Marx called our ‘general intellect’: not so much an enclosure as an outright theft of untold amounts of intergenerational work. This struggle of the cognitive commons against technological capture may end up being as important as the environmental fight against fossil capital — from which it cannot easily be separated, given the proliferation of resource-hungry data centres.In Latin law, which remains vestigial in current international law, many of these entities — the oceans and the planets — would fall under the rubric of res nullius, meaning ‘things belonging to no one’, and res nullius est res communis, ‘things belonging to no one are things belonging to everyone’. This holds right up to the point when they suddenly belong to someone: that is, when they are expropriated. To insist on the commons in the ruins of the 2020s is to resist enclosures of this kind.‘Capitalism began with enclosure’, Jameson writes, and then continues, ‘and with the occupation of the Aztec and Inca empires.’ Historically, enclosure involved conquest, empire, resource extraction, labour exploitation (often in the form of chattel slavery) and settler colonialism. Slave plantations are enclosures, so are Indian reservations, so are the camps of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (extermination centres in Nazi Germany, concentration camps in the US during World War II, rendition centres after 9/11, refugee camps throughout the two centuries), and so are the Gaza Strip and ICE lockups today. To resist enclosures is to insist on the commons as a form of utopia in the etymological sense, as a no-place to claim in the name of everyone.If philosophy is class struggle in thought, as Louis Althusser liked to say, then ideology is all the more so, and on that front the right has beaten the left badly in recent decades. Progressive populism appears to be overwhelmed by reactionary populism, which speaks of ‘the people’ as though it had a monopoly on the category, as though it alone can give voice to a collective beyond class. My wager is that ‘the people’ may have now become a force of the anti-commons, of enclosure, in whose name detention camps and data centres are being built. Hence my vote for a temporary moratorium on the word, and a search for its utopian antithesis.

To Storm the Heavens

At his final campaign rally before winning the 2015 Greek general election, Alexis Tsipras gave a warm welcome to the new leader of the Spanish left, Pablo Iglesias, who strode onstage to rapturous applause as Leonard Cohen’s ‘First We Take Manhattan’ blared in the background. Iglesias embraced his Greek counterpart and the two stood with their arms raised in defiance: the image of a confident, insurgent left, poised to take power from a discredited political class at the height of the eurozone crisis.

Iglesias’s party, Podemos, had topped opinion polls in Spain early that year and seemed on course to replicate Syriza’s rise. Combining his personal charisma with an innovative communications style and populist vituperation against Spanish elites, the party had channelled mass discontent at austerity into a new transformative project — all within twelve months of its founding. ‘First we take Athens’, Tsipras tweeted after the rally, ‘then we take Madrid’.

Now, a decade later, both parties are exhausted and increasingly marginal in their respective nations, lacking the strong leadership and political orientation that were once their defining features. What explains this reversal, and what comes in its aftermath?

While Syriza’s trajectory was defined by its failed confrontation with the Troika, Podemos’s story is more complex: not a single moment of truth, but a gradual process of retreat and fragmentation, as its hopes of surpassing the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) receded and its poll numbers slid into irreversible decline. At the same time as its electoral ambitions came apart, though, another arc bent in the opposite direction, with Podemos continuing to exert a powerful ideological influence on Spanish politics, turning it into Europe’s progressive outlier.

We can only draw the right lessons from this experiment if we grasp these two distinct dimensions: the failure of Podemos’s radical mission, which flowed from its inability to resolve fundamental strategic and organisational problems, and its strange, lingering afterlife. Governing some of the country’s largest cities and eventually ascending to national office as the junior coalition partner to PSOE, Podemos and its allies made clearer policy gains than left-populist forces elsewhere on the continent. Spain’s recent positions on migration and the welfare state are a reflection of this legacy, which anchored PSOE to the left. Yet the regeneration of the old social-democratic establishment was a bitter pill for a party that had hoped to bury it.

The Podemos Hypothesis

The cracks within Podemos were apparent early on. Sergio Pascual, the party’s first Secretary of Organisation, remembers having ‘mixed feelings’ on the night of the 2015 elections. On the surface the results were impressive, with Podemos securing almost 21 percent of the vote to PSOE’s 22 percent. Yet Pascual knew that this one-point gap made all the difference. ‘We bet everything on the sorpasso of the Socialist Party’, he tells me, ‘sacrificing internal democracy and part of our programmatic identity to achieve it in an immediate electoral blitzkrieg. But once it failed to materialise, we faced a difficult institutional balance of power.’

Many of Podemos’s initial leading cadre, Pascual included, had previously worked as political advisors to leftist governments in Latin America. They saw a parallel between the Pink Tide backlash against neoliberalism and the crisis of representation in austerity-era Spain, arguing that the same conditions which had undermined traditional party systems in countries like Ecuador and Bolivia — allowing left-populist leaders to rapidly assemble new electoral majorities — had now arrived in Europe. The Indignados movement of 2011 was an unmistakable sign, bringing millions to the streets with the chant of ‘They Don’t Represent Us’.

By late 2013, Iglesias’s incendiary appearances on TV panel shows had turned the 35-year-old political scientist into a tribune for the disaffected. The pony-tailed professor eschewed the traditional language of the left and instead presented a series of populist binaries: el pueblo versus la casta, democracy versus oligarchy. After Spain’s existing left-wing party, Izquierda Unida, refused to join a united slate for the 2014 European elections, Podemos ran its own independent campaign with Iglesias’s face on the ballot papers instead of a party logo. It won 8 percent of the national vote. The leadership was convinced that a historic window of opportunity had opened. The task was to capture government within a single electoral cycle.

Blitzkrieg to Attrition

Podemos adopted a top-down organisational structure with a focus on media spectacle and message discipline, built for rapid advance at the ballot box. To ‘storm the heavens’, Iglesias declared, an ‘electoral war machine’ was needed for a twelve-month institutional assault.

One of the Podemos parliamentarians elected in 2015, Txema Guijarro, recalls the ‘epic character’ of that campaign: ‘Our Latin American experiences intoxicated us with the idea that winning was all-or-nothing. But maybe that was part of our miscalculation. In reality, the Spanish parliamentary system was never going to be as conducive to that kind of breakthrough, nor was the political system as fragile as it was in, say, Ecuador.’

The problem of translating the rapid insurgency into a more durable project became visible after the vote, which produced a deadlocked parliament and raised the prospect of a deal between Podemos and PSOE. There was no consensus among the leadership about how to move forward. For Iglesias the plan was simple: try to negotiate a coalition government of near equals, or, if that failed, force fresh elections. This threatened to deepen Spain’s crisis of governability and keep the right-wing government of the Partido Popular in power, but he reckoned it was worth the risk. ‘He knew our outsider appeal had a limited shelf-life’, says Pascual, ‘so he calculated that if PSOE would not share power with us, we should combine our vote with Izquierda Unida’s in a new electoral alliance that would allow us to beat PSOE in a second election’.

The party’s chief strategist, Iñigo Errejón, favoured a more conciliatory approach. He pushed for Podemos to allow PSOE to form a minority government so as to thwart the narrative that they were plunging the country into chaos. And he rejected the idea of forming a pact with Izquierda Unida, which, as he saw it, would mark a retreat from populism — with its below/above binary supplanting left/right — to a conventional strategy of ‘left unity’. Errejón began to organise within the party to challenge Iglesias’s dominance. As factional fighting spilled out into the open, amplified by a hostile media, Podemos lost momentum.

In the end Iglesias’s position won out; IU agreed to join a Unidas Podemos slate ahead of the June 2016 election, which was called to break the impasse in parliament. But much of the damage was already done. With more than a million left-wing voters deciding to stay home, the new alliance was unable to match the tally that Podemos had gotten just six months earlier. There now seemed to be no real possibility of eclipsing PSOE in the short term. The Iglesias and Errejón factions continued to clash: one calling for a line of open confrontation with PSOE, the other wanting to reduce antagonism and win support from wavering Socialists. The internal war accelerated the party’s downward spiral.

The Reset

Iglesias again emerged victorious from this dispute. He built his strategy on the assumption that Spain was headed for a grand coalition of the centre. PSOE had recently launched an internal coup against its progressive leader, Pedro Sánchez, which seemed to suggest that the irreformable establishment was closing ranks. Podemos thus tried to stick to its intransigent position and consolidate its outsider status. But soon enough the political landscape shifted. In a surprise turn, Sánchez took on the old guard of his party, faced down his right-wing challenger and triumphed in the 2017 leadership contest, styling himself as the saviour of the Spanish left.

This closed off much of the political space Podemos had previously occupied. ‘We underestimated Sánchez,’ Guijarro concedes, ‘not least in his ability to push through a certain renovation in his own party. In making his comeback, he incorporated elements of our discourse and programme while minimising any openings available to us institutionally.’

The wider coordinates were also in flux thanks to a partial economic recovery and a reactionary tide of Spanish nationalism unleashed by the failed push for Catalan independence. The supposed threat to Spanish unity was now top of the agenda, and Podemos was struggling to respond. Miguel Urbán, a leading figure in the party’s radical Anticapitalista wing, and a member of the European Parliament until 2024, highlights its misreading of the conjuncture: ‘The electoral war machine model, with its hyperleadership structure, had marginalised early on any role for activists in the party, just when there had been a wave of popular enthusiasm around the project . . . By the time Podemos’s core leadership realised it had gone too far and attempted to reverse course, it had already undermined the conditions that would have made such a change of focus possible.’

The power struggle within Podemos’s leadership meanwhile led to a major split in 2019. Sidelined by Iglesias, Errejón struck a deal with Madrid’s left-wing mayor, Manuela Carmena, to set up a new regional platform called Más Madrid. He took most of his allies from the party with him, launching an unsuccessful bid for the capital’s regional presidency. Guijarro sees this as the result of a broader ‘failure of method’, in which Podemos’s inability to ‘create effective mechanisms for institutional dialogue and bargaining’ made it impossible to mediate internal disagreements.

At this point Iglesias changed tack. The same leader who had previously called for maximal antagonism with PSOE was now increasingly convinced that entering a Sánchez-led coalition was the sole means to stabilise the left, while renewing his own public image and that of the party leadership. By going all-in on this alliance, he argued, Unidas Podemos could block Sánchez’s preferred option: a more piecemeal coalition in which the centre and the right would wield real power, while the radical left would get only minor concessions.

Faustian Pact

The path to this agreement was long, running through two more general elections in 2019, during which Unidas Podemos’s vote share fell even further, to 14.3 percent in April and 12.9 percent in November. Finally, after four elections in four years, Sánchez found himself with no alternatives: he was forced to form Spain’s first left-wing coalition since the 1930s, including five Unidas Podemos ministers, with Iglesias as deputy PM.

When I interviewed Iglesias in his ministerial office in October 2020 he acknowledged it was hard to get an electoral payoff as a junior partner — that PSOE stood to reap the rewards from any progressive measures they pushed through — but he insisted the arrangement had nonetheless opened up new possibilities for his party. ‘This allows us to make up part of the leadership of the state, it allows us to form government cadres which we did not have, it allows us an understanding of and a praxis in the state that you don’t get from local or regional governments. And’, he reminded me, ‘we are young — a political force that reached government after existing for only six years.’

Seven months later, Iglesias had resigned. Governing turned out to be a gruelling process for him and his ministers. Their social agenda came up against fierce PSOE resistance and they swallowed some unpalatable policies in areas like defence and law and order. In the febrile atmosphere of the pandemic, Unidas Podemos engaged in a series of highly charged controversies around lawfare, media bias and free speech, but lacked the heft to force PSOE’s hand on any of these issues. The bitterness of the struggle diminished Iglesias’s public profile. ‘It’s clear’, he conceded on the night he stepped down, ‘that at this point I’m not contributing to the cause’.

Still, Unidas Podemos’s impact on government was real. Even with its limited leverage, it passed measures that were among the standout achievements of the coalition’s first term: a 46 percent rise in the minimum wage, a major new social welfare programme, a Guaranteed Minimum Income scheme, and a successful energy price cap during the Ukraine war which effectively contained inflation. With the far right on the rise, Unidas Podemos also played a key role in resisting its bigotry, calling for migrants to have their status regularised en masse.

As Iglesias exited the stage, much of Podemos’s political capital dissipated along with its dominance on the left. The most popular left leader to emerge during this period was Yolanda Díaz. A labour lawyer and member of the Communist Party, she took up the post of labour minister and was praised for her Covid furlough scheme as well as her major progressive reform of the country’s employment laws, which strengthened collective bargaining rights and massively reduced the use of temporary fixed-term contracts. Her political approach was distinct to the left populism of Podemos: rather than stoking binary antagonisms, she pursued a more cautious tripartism, striking deals between workers, business and the state. When Iglesias anointed her as his successor in the role of deputy PM and figurehead of Unidas Podemos, he passed the baton to someone outside his own party, in what appeared to be a tacit acknowledgement of its exhaustion.

It then fell to Díaz’s new electoral vehicle, Sumar, to reactivate the country’s radical forces, with Errejón brought back into the fold as her de facto second in command. She set about integrating various national and regional formations into an alliance which, like its predecessor, was top-heavy and leader-centred, promising to extend the progress made under the coalition. But unlike Podemos, Sumar’s origins did not lie in a movement wave beyond the established institutions; the fact that it was built exclusively from high office ended up reinforcing its subordination to Sánchez. Díaz’s main task became balancing the competing demands of Sumar’s internal actors and continuing to negotiate from a position of weakness with PSOE. Without a transformative offer, she failed to build out from her pandemic-era popularity and construct a sustainable electoral brand. Sexual misconduct allegations against Errejón further undermined Sumar’s credibility, and it unravelled at striking speed.

Sánchez Hegemonic

This implosion was yet another blow for an already demoralised Spanish left. In retrospect it seems obvious that many of the strategic decisions of left populism — not just in Spain, but elsewhere in the West — were based on a fundamental overconfidence about the pace and extent of the establishment’s decline. When it became clear that the existing order could stave off collapse, the left found itself disoriented, and struggled to develop a more durable approach to institutional politics. It was one thing to channel outrage at elites during a moment of crisis, but another to create mass identification with a political project while putting down the territorial roots and extra-parliamentary structures needed for sustained electoral engagement.

The result was that Unidas Podemos was already in retreat as it entered cabinet. Though it exercised significant influence in certain areas of government policy, the main political beneficiary was Sánchez — who made a show of standing above the tense negotiations between his ministers and acting as the final arbiter. This allowed him to tack left in response to public pressure without giving elites much cause to worry. He struck a delicate compromise between the different elements of the wider governing bloc, carving out greater autonomy from the right of his own party, while advancing or frustrating the left’s priorities as circumstances required. Sánchez broke with the continent-wide assault on migrants and implemented the Podemos policy to secure their status, welcoming 1.5 million new arrivals within three years. He courted major investments in renewables, greening the Spanish energy sector more rapidly than its European peers and lowering utility bills. And he vowed to ‘defend the welfare state tooth and nail’ against cuts and privatisation. On his watch, tax revenues and public spending have soared, while the economy has grown faster than any other major eurozone country.

Yet Sánchez has also thwarted every part of the Podemos programme that relied on confrontation with the Spanish power structure. Even as he and his family became the targets of a concerted lawfare campaign, the PM refused to rein in the reactionary judiciary or democratise the state, for instance by removing the Francoist Official Secrets Act or restrictions on public protest. He has repeatedly shied away from challenging the rentier interests who dominate the property market, allowing the country’s affordability crisis to deepen as young people continue to be priced out of decent housing. His government has been mired in corruption scandals, with senior figures accused of influence peddling and skimming money off state contracts. The limits of his reform agenda are, predictably, being exploited by the right bloc — which has won a series of regional victories, and is determined to dislodge PSOE in next year’s general elections.

Yet perhaps the most consequential change to have taken place under Sánchez is the direction of Spanish foreign policy. With much of Europe’s political class lying supine before Trump II, Sánchez is one of the few Western leaders to have openly challenged Washington: rejecting its calls to raise defence spending to 5 percent, pushing the EU to end its association agreement with Israel, refusing the use of Spanish bases for the war on Iran, and forging closer ties with China and nations of the Global South — with investment in electric vehicles, batteries and other green technologies aimed at unleashing a new phase of industrial development.

This is not an index of Sánchez’s radicalism so much as his wager that Spain has more to gain from adapting to the new geography of global economic power than it does from clinging to the old Atlantic order. There is a certain irony here. Although the left populism of the 2010s drew inspiration from Latin America, its main focus was the gulf between masses and elites within the Spanish nation-state. Sánchez’s social democracy, by contrast, has no Third Worldist influences — it is a simple outgrowth of the PSOE tradition that emerged after the dictatorship — yet it has been effective in grappling with the changing international balance of power. Its willingness to reimagine Spain’s role in the global order and reject the logic of the New Cold War is its most consequential feature, which may have major implications further down the line.

More than a decade after Tsipras and Iglesias electrified the crowds in Athens, we now see Sánchez embracing Lula da Silva at the first ever Spain–Brazil summit in Barcelona — the two leaders promising to build an anti-war, anti-Trump bloc that will unite progressive governments across the planet. This is not an image of rebels primed to storm the heavens, but of statesmen offering protection from the excesses of a dying empire. Instead of a war on the establishment, the new centre left offers a refuge from the brutalities of neofascism. Their ambition for the existing order is not destruction but revivification. In a world sliding towards chaos, it’s easy to see the appeal.

The UK Must Break With Israel

‘We got Gaza wrong’, said Andy Burnham just before becoming Prime Minister. The apology was necessary after Keir Starmer’s two-and-a-half years of supporting the destruction of the Strip and losing progressive voters as a result. But if Burnham’s stance made strategic sense, limiting the contrition to his predecessor’s original mistakes in 2023 was too clever by half. Anyone who cares will know that Labour continued to supply Israel with surveillance data from RAF flights and parts destined for its F-35s, while welcoming its leaders to Britain at the height of the genocide. Throughout this bloody saga, ministers have proudly proclaimed themselves ‘Zionists’, tarred pro-Palestine protests as ‘antisemitic’, introduced a law to prevent repeated marches and banned Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist group’.

Palestine activists are therefore sceptical about Burnham’s supposed reset. Some have cautiously welcomed Ed Miliband’s appointment as foreign secretary, as well as hints that the government may take a stronger line on Israeli settlements, sanction additional Israeli ministers and restrict more arms supplies. Still, few believe that Labour can deliver anything like the change that’s needed.

The Genocide Continues

On Gaza, Burnham still talks only of the ‘disproportionate’ character of ‘what has happened’. This is the language of 2023. It fails to recognise that almost three years of deliberate Israeli destruction have inflicted appalling death, hunger and suffering. Gaza contains the world’s largest population of child amputees, and a new UNICEF study shows that the genocide has imprinted itself in children’s bodies, with one in eight showing signs of stunted growth.

Few apart from Israel’s apologists now doubt the genocide. According to polls, half the British public recognise it, despite media suppression of the term itself. Spain, the only other social-democratic government in Europe, has recognised that this is what is happening, as have Burnham’s cabinet ally, Louise Haigh, and Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. The PM needs to catch up.

The terminology is important. It captures the defining features of Israel’s policy: that it has, in the language of the Genocide Convention, ‘deliberately inflicted’ on the Palestinian national group ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction’ in Gaza. The Convention binds the UK to ‘prevent and punish’ genocide when the risk is evident, not years later when a court finally delivers a ruling. This duty was triggered in January 2024, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was a ‘plausible risk’ and deemed it necessary to order Israel not to commit genocide.

Now, for more than thirty months, Britain has not only failed in its duty but has remained actively complicit in the crime. The ministers, civil servants and commanders involved in negotiating the RAF’s aid to Israel could even be charged for it. Complicity has been fostered by the Labour Party’s longstanding support of Zionism, the Labour right’s reliance on pro-Israel donors, and its weaponisation of antisemitism to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The costs are now apparent in the rubble of Gaza, as well as in Britain’s changing electoral map.

The UK must belatedly fulfil its duty to prevent genocide and make reparation for the policies of the Rishi Sunak and Starmer governments. The genocide is ongoing and nothing has been done to aid the survivors. Meanwhile, Israel continues to expand its control of Gaza and disobey the nominal restrictions imposed by Donald Trump’s ‘peace deal’.

Recognising the genocide means that normal international relations can no longer apply to Israel; the situation demands nothing less than a repudiation of the UK’s alliance with it. The UK-Israel Military Cooperation Agreement, signed by Boris Johnson in 2020, under whose secretive terms Britain has aided the genocide, must be cancelled. Normal economic and cultural relations should be suspended. Members of the IDF who have taken part in the genocide should be denied entry to the UK, and visa-free access for Israelis should be ended to enable this.

Sanction the Occupying State

A coherent anti-genocide policy would certainly require the mother of all U-turns from Burnham. He has retained several ministers in senior roles who bear direct responsibility for the worst policies under Starmer. The temptation will be strong to keep any shift within the bounds of the symbolic and performative.

But that approach has already been tried: Starmer criticised settler excess, banned some weapons sales and sanctioned individual ministers, with little to no impact in winning back former Labour voters. It is betting a lot on Burnham’s communication skills to believe that this will work a second time. The Palestine Action ban also continues to be a major embarrassment. Almost every Labour MP voted for it, with only nine against, even though seven in ten Labour members opposed it. Unless the Supreme Court rules the ban unlawful, Burnham will have to grasp this nettle and lift it.

Labour continues to focus on intensifying violence and displacement in the West Bank, yet its response there seems to be an escalation of Starmer’s token sanctions. Labour Friends of Israel is lobbying against even this, on the grounds that sanctions on settlements will become sanctions on Israel.

But this is precisely what the sanctions should be doing: targeting the occupying state, not just the settlements it has put in place or the individual extremist politicians at its head. The illegality of the occupation was confirmed in 2024 in a comprehensive judgment by the ICJ. The Labour government, despite the faux support for international law of Starmer and his attorney general Richard Hermer, has still to respond to this ruling. A key test of the reset is whether Burnham will rise to the judgment’s challenge.

At the beginning of 2026, Labour might have worried that an anti-Israel stance would seriously undermine Britain’s relationship with the USA. But the fallout of the Iran War means that all bets are off; Israel is increasingly criticised on all sides of US politics. Burnham might reflect that the war into which Israel bounced Trump — and which Starmer aided even while claiming not to (assistance Burnham has apparently decided to continue) — is a major contributor to Britain’s continuing cost of living crisis.

Israel is increasingly the weakest link in both far-right politics and the USA’s imperial network. Breaking with it is not only the right thing to do for Palestine; this could also be how Britain finally begins to move away from its decades-long dependence on the United States. If Burnham and Miliband cannot execute this shift, the Palestine movement, the Green Party, and the left must make it happen.

The Cost of Existence

If lowering the cost of living is the paramount test for any new governing regime, how might Andy Burnham go about it? Under Starmer and Reeves, a chorus of ministers responded to rising bills and darkening forecasts by claiming that they would pull ‘every lever’ to keep prices down.They didn’t. A wide range of levers — including perhaps the most immediately effective, price controls — were left untouched, allowing Reform UK to feed off the lifeblood of public despair. To meet its promise, Labour would have had to adopt radical policies on a scale rarely acknowledged, underpinned by a firm political resolve.There are many other priorities for a truly Labour administration, not least the fumigation that’s needed after the infestation of Mandelsonian right-wingers like Morgan McSweeney. There are international challenges across Trump’s war-torn empire, from Palestine to Iran. There’s the domination of the bond markets over economic policy, the cancerous influence of the City, out-of-control defence spending, the crisis of social care and the need to reconnect with the trade unions.But it’s the cost of living that will determine whether the government succeeds in ‘turning things around’ for many who see deprivation as the norm. Four percent of households — 2.8 million people — are reliant on food banks, with millions more suffering from food insecurity. Food inflation is far ahead of the basic rate and rising further still, with some economists predicting it will reach 10 percent this year.If reversing this trend is the only way to undermine Nigel Farage’s hope of entering Number 10, then price controls, long seen as beyond the bounds of legitimate policymaking, need to be on the table. Even Reeves’s Treasury conceded the principle when supermarket chiefs were asked — very politely — if they wouldn’t mind capping some essentials. But this tentative plea came up against the brick wall of business, retailers and orthodox economists, who protested that it would ‘distort the market’, cause shortages and increase inflation. The Chief Executive of M&S Stuart Machin (remuneration £4m last year, down from £7m the year before) summed up the industry view when he described such measures as ‘completely preposterous’. The Treasury ministers scattered like startled cats.Yet the very fact that the Treasury was willing to entertain the possibility of price controls was a major step, with implications for the new administration. While supermarkets complain of thin margins of around 2 to 4 percent, the vast trading base delivers huge aggregate profits: in 2025 Tesco turned over £3.1bn and Sainsbury’s £1bn. Recognising the reality of the situation, governments in other countries have not been so pusillanimous. France and Spain have implemented both mandatory price controls and ‘name and shame’ policies for price-gougers, benefiting consumers with no consequential rise in inflation.Though there was an inevitable outcry from business interests in each case, politicians powered through. In France, seventy-five companies including giant food manufacturers such as Unilever signed an agreement with the government to cut prices on staples, including beef, pork and milk, in the knowledge that failure to comply would lead to checks and sanctions. In Spain, the Socialist government of Pedro Sánchez has introduced targeted anti-profiteering policies alongside rent controls and energy price freezes and caps, ramping up such measures in response to Trump’s most recent military adventure.Critics in the business world are masters of self-fulfilling prophecy. They tell us that when costs are kept low demand will go up, causing retailers to hike their other prices and sending inflation skyward. But these international examples show that price controls, when properly designed and able to balance between mandatory and voluntary iterations, can avoid this doomsday scenario. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now presiding over vote-winning citywide rent freezes and a publicly-owned nonprofit grocery network. It would be self-sabotage to rule out these policies here in Britain, where polling shows that they are widely popular.In Joanna Mack’s definitive new study of UK poverty, Impoverished (2026), one of her interviewees remarks that ‘It’s not a standard of living. It’s existence.’ Behind the sterile abstractions of economic discourse there is an uncomfortable truth: without a perceptible improvement in the texture of working-class life, the change of personnel in Downing Street will not restore the fortunes of the Labour Party let alone the country. Swapping out the main character isn’t enough when the entire script needs rewriting.

The State Wants to Label Me a Terrorist

On 6 August 2024, six Palestine Action activists used a repurposed prison van to crash through the fence of a research facility owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapons firm.I watched the footage of them destroying weaponry while coming under attack from Elbit’s security guards. I remember the striking moment when 19-year-old Fatema Zainab Rajwani, having just been handcuffed by police officers, says ‘You’ve been Pal Actioned!’The court was later told they had destroyed forty units of Israeli military equipment. Among these were quadcopter drones, which have been used extensively by the Israeli army during the Gaza genocide — playing sound recordings of crying infants to lure Palestinians onto the streets before shooting and killing them.A day before the Filton action, I joined other activists in a direct action against a Barclays outlet in Burnley, protesting the bank’s investment in Elbit. At around 2am, we smashed the windows, sprayed red paint on the facade and left behind a message that read ‘Nada Salem, 4. Slaughtered by an Elbit drone as she tried to hide in her sister’s arms’. The action lasted 50 seconds. We caused £212,000 pounds in damage. Our action followed dozens of similar ones against Barclays. The aim was to cost it more than it would gain from its partnership with Elbit. Two months later, it was reported that Barclays had pulled all of its shares, worth more than 3.4 million, out of the company.All this came after months of terror in Gaza. A study published in The Lancet estimated that the real death toll by the end of June 2024 was approximately 64,260, a figure roughly 40 percent higher than official reports on account of the bodies trapped under the rubble of decimated buildings. Now it is climbing towards 80,000.Even when the ICJ ruled that Israel was plausibly committing genocide, the massacres continued unabated. Five-year-old Hind Rajab was shot 335 times by the IDF, with six members of her family and two emergency rescue paramedics killed alongside her. Seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna’s mutilated body was photographed dangling from a destroyed building in Rafah. Mass graves were uncovered full of naked bodies with their hands tied. When our case went to trial and my co-defendant took the stand, his barrister asked him why he had felt compelled to take action. His answer was simple: ‘Murder on a scale I haven’t seen in my lifetime’.We traced the flow of blood back to our own country, to the factories that manufacture the parts embedded in the bodies of Palestinian children, and to the banks that finance them. For us, direct action was a way of obstructing the supply chain of genocide, damaging the machinery of death. We wanted, said my co-defendant, to ‘isolate and strip Elbit of its resources’.Elbit’s role in Palestine was not disputed during our trial. The prosecution lawyers admitted that it was a ‘primary supplier’ of military equipment to the Israeli army, including ‘drones, bombs and munitions’. They agreed that equipment manufactured by Elbit had been used by the Israeli military during operations in Gaza, and they acknowledged that ‘Barclays PLC provided investments, loans and other corporate financial services’ to Elbit.The fact that we took action in opposition to Israel’s campaign of terror could not have been clearer. But now the state is trying to sentence us as terrorists.Both the Filton action and ours took place more than a year before Palestine Action was proscribed. Over the following months, we saw the state take extraordinary measures to punish people whose only intention was to save lives. But through it all I remained optimistic about our case. The reality of the situation was plain to see.Then the news broke about the Filton 4. For the first time in British legal history, activists who had been convicted of property damage were sentenced as terrorists, with the jury kept in the dark about the possibility this sentence might be applied. Two weeks later, after a jury of ten had returned a guilty verdict for us, we were told we faced the same prospect. Judge Philip Parry was considering applying a ‘terrorist connection’ to our offence, using the Filton 4 ruling as a basis.When the CPS fell in line, it felt like the impossible had happened. We had just come out of a short trial for criminal damage before being told that we had actually been on trial for terrorism — unbeknown to the defendants, the lawyers and the jury.In 2023, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion staged a similar protest against Barclays, breaking windows at the bank’s Canary Wharf headquarters and causing £500k worth of damage. They were not treated as terrorists and they were even spared jail. In 2024, 62-year-old Alan Murphy was convicted of possessing explosives that he intended to use to blow up HSBC bank in Blackpool. He did not face a terror link at sentencing. Why is our case being handled so differently? It seems that in today’s Britain, terrorism is invoked the moment someone decides to turn their outrage at senseless killing into concrete action.Ellie Kamio is one of the Filton 4 and a former nursery teacher. In her closing speech before sentencing, she said every child she looked after was ‘the centre of someone’s world — their mum, their dad, their grandparents — and to imagine what it would be like for any of them with what was happening in Palestine it literally broke me.’ Kamio has now been branded a terrorist. Soon there will be hundreds more of us: teachers, students, support workers, artists, retirees, people from every sector of society carrying this label for life, all because of the state’s war on empathy with Palestinians.A day before we were convicted, I heard Fatema Zainab’s mother say that ‘If terrorism is saving lives, then so be it!’ Her words continue to resonate, and they reveal a truth the state cannot seem to grasp: that as long as there are people who believe Palestinian lives are worth saving, direct action against the Israeli weapons trade will continue.

Social Democracy Upside Down

As he stepped into political oblivion, Keir Starmer sought to reassure himself. He told the country and his successor that he had ‘saved’ Labour; that he had taken a ‘politically, financially, and morally bankrupt’ party and restored it to power. MPs and pundits nodded along.No special insight is required to see that this is brazenly wrong. Labour was in rude financial health under Corbyn and the party has rarely been more politically unpopular than it is today, to take just two aspects. But we should now move above these commonplaces and start trying to grasp the deeper causes of Labour’s decline. That means focusing on the class origins of the party’s struggles, their connection to the disintegration of the party system, and how that process might be intervened in. In 1920, Lenin designated Labour a party of workers that was nonetheless ‘thoroughly bourgeois.’ The formula captured a contradiction at the heart of 20th century Social Democracy: a political form that sought to reconcile working class demands for reform with the entrenched class relations of capitalist society. This was not merely a weakness threatening collapse or a problem to be solved. Like many contradictions, it also generated social power for its bearers. In the latter part of the 20th century, Labour performed important functions in the renewal of British capitalism, particularly after 1945. Through the party’s reforming achievements, a mass workers’ movement could be integrated into post-war British capitalism. Yet conflict could not be wished away. It inhered in the process, and by the 1970s this settlement was coming apart. Returning from its wilderness years under the leadership of Tony Blair, Labour quickly shed its working-class voting profile. Research by Professors Oliver Heath and Humphrey Southall has shown that between 1992 and 2010, the difference between Labour support in the most working class and most middle class constituencies fell from 31 percent to 24 percent. It then collapsed to just 12 percent by the 2024 election. Still thoroughly bourgeois, but not so much a party of workers.This process of class dealignment was mirrored in the withdrawal of principally working class voters from electoral participation. In the 1992 election, voter turnout was 77.7 percent. In 2024, it was just 59.7 percent. By this point, the list of constituencies recording votes under 45 percent maps to those with the worst deprivation rankings: Birmingham Ladywood, 2 of 543; Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, 8; Blackley and Middleton South, 9. Dozens of working class seats now turn out less than half of eligible voters at general elections. Yet even then, these figures understate the extent of electoral erosion among the working class. According to the Electoral Commission, somewhere between 7-8 million voters are missing from the roles, and these are disproportionately workers.This pattern was not sustainably reversed by the Corbyn years. The adoption of the second referendum position dealt a hammer blow to the remarkable Labour recovery of 2017, severing again the party’s connection to large chunks of the working class vote. Of the 54 English and Welsh seats Labour lost to the Conservatives in 2019, 52 voted Leave. The places where Labour lost the biggest vote share were solidly Leave-voting.Starmer’s election against an exhausted and reviled Tory party in 2024 did not reverse this damage, either. Though Labour returned in many seats it had lost and achieved an overall majority, it did so by winning just 35 percent of voters on a low turnout; a share just 1.4 percent up on 2019 and 5 percent lower than Labour’s 2017 narrow defeat. Few were shocked, therefore, when the same voters quickly turned on Starmer as he unveiled cuts and failed to meet working class concerns over inflation.Today, the traditional contradiction at the heart of social democracy has been largely displaced, as most fractions of the working class find themselves outside the tent. This means the Labour Party’s old function of systemic stabilisation through class mediation is not only limited but increasingly upturned. Labour and the wider party-political system have become sources of instability, manifesting a widespread mood of dissatisfaction and directing public anger at a point near the top of the state.The ‘union link’, always highly bureaucratised, reflects relations between a party machine and union leaderships which are by and large even more insulated from working class organisation and insurgency today than in decades past.The old connection between the working class and Labour still manifests spasmodically. Corbyn increased Labour’s vote among workers in 2017 (though not as much as he did among the young and formally educated). Andy Burnham romped home in the Makerfield by-election by signalling a return to old Labourist values while largely excluding the party brand from his campaign. But these flashes of muscle memory are reducing in frequency and potency.Now under Burnham, the hollowed-out shell of social democracy will be expected to carry out the main tasks of British capitalism today, such as reducing welfare spending and ramping up militarism. Winning consent for this programme will be a tall order for Labour, given the decades of its class base eroding.We can expect confrontations to brutally shake Burnham, as they did Starmer. The question is now whether working class anger can be harnessed to resist this drive to war and against working class interests, or whether it will form the backdrop for fresh assaults from the right.

Germany’s Rising Right

Europeans born in the early 2000s have never not lived in times of crisis. The Great Recession, the hysteria over migration half-a-decade later, the recent shocks from the war in Ukraine: Europe has been in turmoil for so long that one forgets it could be otherwise. The political establishment has paid a high price, with ‘populists’ on both the left and right booting out incumbents everywhere from Lisbon to Lithuania.

Everywhere, that is, except the Federal Republic of Germany, the largest EU member-state, whose long-term macroeconomic strategy has been to gain an edge on the world market by repressing domestic wage growth and consumption, and using the savings to maximise exports of cars and heavy machinery to China. This model weathered the downturn of the 1980s relatively well. It soldiered on after the global financial crisis under the steady hand of Angela Merkel, who presided over sixteen years of sustained growth and low unemployment, effectively neutralising opposition from across the spectrum, and enjoying the support of two-thirds of the electorate by the time she stepped down in 2021.

For a while, it seemed that Germany’s outlier status could last forever, that it would remain stable and predictable even as its neighbours descended into chaos. But now, as Merkel’s memory fades, the foundations of the German social compromise are beginning to crack. Erstwhile customers in the Global South are becoming competitors, placing the German industrial heartland under growing strain. In June, Volkswagen announced plans to cut some 100,000 jobs. Energy prices are high and growth is slowing. According to a poll conducted late last year, less than half of Germans held positive expectations for themselves or their families for 2026, while only 22 percent described their outlook on the country’s future as optimistic.

The consequences are familiar. While the political centre, embodied by the government of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, has not yet collapsed, it appears to be well on its way, with the parties placing second and fourth in the polls respectively. The conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has proven to be profoundly inept. Appointed last year, he is already the least popular chancellor in modern German history. Rather than forming at least a modicum of social consensus, as Merkel did so well, he is pushing a slew of aggressive cuts and ‘reforms’ to the welfare state. Some ten years after the initial populist wave crested, it would appear that Europe’s anchor of stability is now headed for its own. What is the likely outcome?

Searching for Alternatives

The forces harnessing this populist moment in Germany are not exactly new — the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was founded in 2013, far-left Die Linke in 2007 — but they have been given a new lease on life after years on the margins of parliamentary politics. This is particularly the case for the AfD, which is still subject to the political ‘firewall’ that all other parliamentary parties including Die Linke have erected around it, but is currently polling in first place nationally and on the cusp of winning a majority in some eastern states, where protest parties of different persuasions have traditionally been most successful.

At least for now, the AfD seems to be the first address for German voters looking to express frustration with the country’s political and economic situation. For years, exit polls have shown the AfD topping the polls among workers and the unemployed, whose economic anxiety has been ignored by the political mainstream. Like far-right parties practically everywhere, it is particularly strong among lower-middle-class men in rural areas. Yet it is increasingly gaining support among industrial trade unionists, at least some of whom have responded to external economic threats by turning inwards, seeking to protect their jobs by excluding potential competitors from the job market. Although its organised presence within the labour movement remains meagre, at least in demographic terms, the AfD is now Germany’s leading workers’ party.

Ironically, the AfD began as something quite different: a Eurosceptic formation founded in opposition to bailouts for Germany’s Southern European neighbours. Populist, perhaps, but certainly not popular. Indeed, the early AfD was eminently middle class and its activist core remains overwhelmingly so to this day. Its stunning success, then, has less to do with a supposedly populist agenda (as critics are keen to point out, the AfD’s economic programme remains well within the neoliberal mainstream) than with a mixture of deft opportunism and blind luck. As xenophobia began to spread in the aftermath of the 2015 ‘summer of migration’, the AfD quickly positioned itself as the anti-migrant party. When protests against lockdowns broke out during the pandemic, it again pivoted in time to become the voice of Covid-scepticism. The anti-migrant and anti-lockdown waves have long since subsided, but the AfD — now shorn of its more moderate layers — has endured, and is now stronger than ever.

Populism in Power

Precisely because of its exclusion from government and polite society, the AfD appears to millions as the only truly authentic voice of protest. The question is whether the party, on track to win a majority in the state of Saxony-Anhalt later this year, might become a victim of its own success: moving from an insurgent outsider to an established governing force. An AfD-led government is certainly an alarming prospect, particularly in a part of the country where its most reactionary elements dominate, but it would not mean the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany, as some alarmist voices tend to imply. The populist decade has already given us several examples of what the European far right in power actually looks like. The governments of Giorgia Meloni in Italy or (until recently) Viktor Orbán in Hungary succeeded in implementing regressive policies, but were — much like their counterparts on the populist left — domesticated by the institutions in which they operated. More importantly, they can, and almost certainly will, be voted out sooner or later, though it is less clear what will come next.

Could Germany’s belated populist turn therefore come to benefit the left? That is hard to say. Die Linke’s path to power has been rocky and winding. Teetering on the brink of political oblivion two years ago, the party has undergone a remarkable rejuvenation under the leadership of Ines Schwerdtner, once the editor of the German edition of Jacobin magazine. Today, it is gaining ground among disaffected centre-left voters and young people in urban areas, but has struggled to win back its traditional eastern electorate from the far right, and has made few inroads among working-class constituencies. As was the case for left populism in the rest of Europe, the resurgence in Germany remains largely restricted to downwardly mobile segments of the professional middle classes. Breaking out of this pattern will be key if Die Linke is to avoid the same fate as Corbynism or similar experiments that came to ruin.

It will also depend on whether the party can learn from the experiences of the last decade. In their book The Populist Moment (2023), Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello describe this trend among left parties as an attempt to ‘rethink mobilisation for an age of demobilisation; to organise for an age of disorganisation’. But while populism has had distinct success in mobilising an electorate, at least sporadically, long-term organising has proven far more difficult. In countries like Spain and Greece, where the left rode the populist wave into government but lacked corresponding structures on the ground, this project is now for all intents and purposes dead.

Schwerdtner for her part prioritises ‘building a house of stone’, meaning a solid organisation rooted in workplaces and communities, as opposed to a short-term electoral focus. But come September, Die Linke stands a good chance of taking first place in the Berlin elections and coming under pressure to join a cross-party coalition to exclude the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt. There are strong arguments for doing so: Berlin is desperately in need of public investment after years of austerity, and it is hard to see any government without Die Linke making the necessary expenditures. As with Zohran Mamdani in New York, the party hopes to turn the city into a beacon of hope for the rest of the country, showing that democratic socialists can not only govern reliably, but improve the lives of their constituents in a meaningful, lasting way.

At the same time, assuming government responsibility — particularly in a poor state like Saxony-Anhalt, where there is little fiscal room for manoeuvre — risks tainting the party as part of the rotten establishment that sparked the populist wave in the first place. As was the case with Syriza in Greece, Die Linke’s foray in government could ultimately end up bolstering the far-right’s reputation as the only ‘real’ opposition and accelerating the country’s rightward drift. Schwerdtner surely had this dynamic in mind when she spoke of taking ‘difficult decisions’ at Die Linke’s party congress back in June.

Whether or not the AfD or Die Linke find themselves in government later this year, the structural crisis of the German economic model will not be resolved anytime soon. Bearing that in mind, we can expect the populist moment to stretch far into the future, with all the political unpredictability that entails. For Germany’s — and Europe’s — sake, left populism needs to succeed where it failed in the 2010s. That means combining immediate electoral priorities, to restore confidence in the left as a force that can wield effective power, with the slower work of cadre-building and coordinating among our base. These are the foundations on which a house of stone must rest. Without them, parties like Die Linke will, in their desire to halt the advance of the far right at any cost, repeat the same strategic missteps which have undermined their projects in years past.