In the Third World War: A Political Lexicon for Today’s Struggles

By Connessioni Precarie

February 28, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image courtesy of connessioniprecarie.org | copyright: Stella Chirdo

This is the English translation of the original introduction to our book, Nella Terza guerra mondiale. Un lessico politico per le lotte del presente (DeriveApprodi, 2025). We are now publishing its English translation as a free ebook. Read online the 2026 Preface to the English edition, and download and share the book.

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In the Third World War: A Political Lexicon for Today’s Struggles

This book emerges from three years of struggle against the war. Immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we—together with hundreds of activists from the Permanent Assembly Against the War, which was formed within the Transnational Social Strike Platform—worked to find ways to break the fronts that were rapidly solidifying. Activists from Russia and Ukraine began to speak with others from virtually every part of the world, and at times we managed to build forms of joint initiative. After 7 October 2023 and the invasion of Gaza, the assemblies grew to include Palestinians and Israelis as well. Again, we tried not to get sucked into the logic that builds existential enemies outside of any consideration of the social, sexual and historical relationships within which war conflicts mature. This political choice has never meant practising an easy equidistance; instead, it has required taking a clear stand against war and its world.

However, the experience of these many assemblies—and of the many agreements they produced—also revealed the limits of the discourses and initiatives. Divergent positions often led to paralysis and even aphasia, or to a conscious decision to bracket the war in order to find convergence on almost anything else. Without cataloguing everything we have seen and heard over these three years, we want at least to note this: without reflecting on how we speak about war, and how we try to read it alongside all the other conflicts in everyday life, we cannot come to terms with it.

This book was written as a response to this need. It does not claim to describe the current war in all its facets and internal dynamics, nor to situate it fully within the history of wars. Nor do we aim to retrace the myriad of ways in which peace and war have become tools of domestic political legitimisation since Donald Trump’s election. Instead, we argue that it is essential to recognise war as an urgency that cannot be ignored by anyone unwilling to accept the present order of things. For this reason, we discuss several key terms through which the discourse of war extends beyond the battlefield. These terms redefine large domains of political intervention—migration, climate conflicts, the state—as well as the concepts that legitimate war (militarism) and those that make its contestation so difficult (decoloniality and resistance). Our aim is to help build a lexicon for the struggles of the present: one that equips us with tools to oppose war and overcome the deadlocks that have hindered us in recent years. Faced with the omnipresence and apparent omnipotence of weapons, we have taken a step back and returned to the weak weapon of criticism, armed with the conviction that it can move us a few steps forward in our opposition to war.

Beyond rejecting the rule of weapons, we hold that a radical critique of war is necessary because war cannot serve as a model for class struggle. War claims to establish compact and homogenous fronts by simplifying and neutralising social relations, making it impossible to grasp or develop their complexity. Its logic is the ideological and material elimination of everything—and especially everyone—that exceeds the war fronts. It is the armed denial of the multiplicity of differences that make up contemporary living labour and gives no practical guidance on how these differences might be organised.

The political hypothesis underlying this work begins from this critique of war and the recognition that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the start of the Third World War. By this, we do not intend to conjure up the image of an unstoppable escalation and inevitable widening of the conflict. We are not interested here in pursuing the geopolitical dimension of the war or drawing up future scenarios of an international order. We are not interested in war as a system of order in which different regimes can be identified, each with its own capacities of governance. Instead, we approach war from the standpoint of living labour in all its heterogeneity, convinced that locating our own position within and across war’s fronts is the first step toward overturning its logic.

As in the first two world wars, the decisive issue in this Third World War is not the hegemony of one or several states, but the governance of the living labour in the world market. The Third World War hypothesis allows us to move beyond the particularities of individual conflicts—conflicts in which some wars are deemed paradigmatic and others secondary, some enemies the only true ones. Speaking of a Third World War creates a field of visibility in which a common logic can be recognised across acts of war, whether in Ukraine, Taiwan, Gaza or Rojava. Above all, it opens the possibility for different forms of anti-war struggle to communicate with one another. In this way, we aim to inscribe onto the map of geopolitics a different history: that of other conflicts and divisions.

This political hypothesis can be fully understood only within a transnational dimension—one that today marks the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of politically governing the world market and what has been called globalisation in recent decades. Within this transnational framework, the governance of living labour becomes increasingly complex, and war and militarism return as plausible instruments of command. The tensions in the Middle East (Iran, Israel, Turkey, Syria), as well as those in the United States and Russia, clearly reveal a shared attempt to respond to the fractures running through regimes of social governance across vast regions of the planet.

While it remains possible that war could assume a genuinely global dimension, our question is not how to prevent war from spreading, but how this war can end. We ask whether living labour, in all its multiplicity, can exert a political claim on the ending of war. Can the peace we seek be something other than a condition that must simply be endured? Because violence, devastation and massacres overwhelmingly fall upon the poor, women, migrants and wage-earners in every case, it is absolutely necessary to open space for action and reflection against war. What is at stake is the possibility of producing organisational processes commensurate with the transnational importance of living labour.

It would seem reasonable, at this point, to note that the hypothesis of an emerging Third World War is not contradicted by the fact that it is not fought with the same intensity everywhere—from Donald Trump’s actions to Vladimir Putin’s intentions to the European Union’s ‘rearmed peace’. Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu is allowed to ignore that the hour of peace has come, enabling Israel to continue slaughtering Palestinians with impunity. The Pax Trumpiana—for now more proclaimed than concretely achieved—likewise includes the bombing of Yemen and the continual threat toward Iran and its oppressive regime, from which many Iranians also seek liberation.

Many will insist that a bad peace is almost always preferable to any war. And it is undeniably true that those living under bombardment, facing hunger, cold and imminent death, welcome any peace or even a fragile truce. In the face of war, of any war, the first demand is always that the weapons fall silent.

Yet despite the peace plans and ceasefires that have been proposed, we still consider the Third World War hypothesis valid. The fragments of peace currently granted to us appear to be merely the continuation of war by other means. The Pax Trumpiana is justified as necessary for processes of capital valorisation—above all US accumulation—and is presented as a “Versailles of capital”: a series of peace agreements proposed, imposed or coerced in the name of the needs of US capitalism. After World War I, Lord Keynes argued that the Versailles peace contradicted economic reason and would therefore lead inevitably to another war. We, by contrast, argue that Pax Trumpiana’s attempt to crush the social and political conflicts proliferating worldwide prevents the causes of war from being eliminated.

 Peace cannot consist in the territorial concessions that the Ukrainian government may be forced to accept in exchange for access to rare minerals. Peace cannot rest on the pacification of the Middle East through legitimising Israel’s war of extermination against the Palestinians. Peace cannot mean that economic supremacy is pursued through threatened or imposed trade tariffs. And peace cannot be built upon the persecution of migrants—by legal or illegal means—or upon the legal suppression of all forms of sexual freedom.

Trump’s supposed pacifism is not the opposite of Biden’s warmongering; it is its continuation. In both cases, war is severed from the social contradictions of the US and the world, and social relations are overwritten according to its logic. Their synthesis is easily visible in the European Commission’s policies: it first rearmed Ukraine and now resolutely aims to rearm the EU, fully aware that, in both cases, war erases any possibility for social reconstruction. Because the political and social roots of war are not being addressed, we do not believe that a genuine prospect of peace is emerging.

Commenting on Zelensky’s theatrical ouster from the White House, Viktor Orbán declared: Strong men make peace, while weak men make war. In this formulation, peace becomes the legitimating privilege of the “strong man,” the figure to be trusted—or rather, submitted to. It becomes the misogynistic and patriarchal fantasy of a man who imposes a hierarchy of interest through his superior will, a peace that coincides with subservience to power. This is the opposite of what we have understood in recent years as the transnational politics of peace.

This is not a pacifist book. Our concern is not to end the war by imagining peace treaties or proposing truces. Those who seek peace at any cost fail to see that in doing so, they simply reproduce the old conception of peace as the mere absence of war. They overlook the fact that peace is the continuation of war by other means, that it is a peace subservient to the despotic power of a capital in its political incarnations. For such perspectives, the absence of bombs is enough: social conflicts, tensions, and daily oppressions are assumed to resolve themselves. We disagree. While we welcome every truce and pause in wartime violence with relief and joy, in this book, we attempt to look at war not only through the lens of danger, death, and destruction—though these must be avoided at all costs—but also from the standpoint of the organisational processes we can create within and against war (TSS Platform 2023). Our problem is not simply to condemn war but to oppose its harsh reality with words and practices that escape its logic.

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Preface to the English edition

When we published the Italian edition of this book in May 2025, it was already clear that what we called the Pax Trumpiana was an integral part of the Third World War scenario. The fragments of peace achieved have been nothing but the continuation of war by other means, while both peace and war have become tools of domestic politics and ways to impose the needs of US capitalism. Since he took office, the “pacifist” Trump bombed Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria, and now has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro. He did so to force a reversal of the policies of state control over strategic commodities—oil first and foremost—set in motion by Hugo Chávez twenty-five years ago, and thereby to curb Russian, and above all Chinese, influence in Latin America. The “special military operation” ordered by the Trump administration lays bare the essentially void nature of any appeal to international law. It belongs fully to the Third World War—understood as beginning with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—because it is driven by an arrogant and desperate attempt to reassert U.S. supremacy amid a transnational disorder that is increasingly ungovernable.

The celebration of supposedly irresistible American power confirms that militarism is steering the White House: military action is explicitly legitimized as the means to secure safety and profits for the United States and for those who submit to its claim to hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. This is one of the key principles of Trump’s new National Security Strategy. For this reason, the military operation in Venezuela goes well beyond the aim of “regime change”, an aim that, day by day, appears less relevant and less necessary in light of Caracas’s readiness to cooperate. It also goes beyond the repudiation of national sovereignty and peoples’ self-determination, principles that international law has in any case ceased to safeguard for some time now.

In this transnational disorder, it is no longer necessary to invoke the exporting of democracy—which for today’s West has become little more than an antiquarian relic—to justify war. Nor is it any longer necessary to wrap brutality in the cloak of progress, civilization, or modernization: the old rhetorical screens have fallen. War is asserted openly as war—an ever-available means of seizing other people’s territories and resources, and a tool for ensuring the valorization of capital. The Trumpian state thus behaves like a textbook imperialist state, promising individual capitalists fresh opportunities for valorization and a smoother rhythm of accumulation, but it does so in a phase defined by instability and shocks—features of a world war that cannot, in truth, be governed.

We must therefore ask: does this resurgence of imperialism amount to its full-scale return, or is it rather a posture—an ideological maneuver saturated with militarism—without the material foundations to give it real substance? Placing the latest events in Venezuela within the Third World War means for us to question the old words that were used to read a reality that has by now irrevocably passed. As a matter of fact, if there are continuities with Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-century imperialism, and with the neocolonialism of the late twentieth century—“the last stage of imperialism,” in Kwame Nkrumah’s famous formulation—there are also stark differences. The major oil firms have proved slow, if not openly reluctant, to fall in behind Trump’s imperial designs. And Trump’s insistence that he will be the one to decide Venezuela’s fate does not resolve the issue of the institutional, financial, and political guarantees that companies demand before making investments.

Trump’s imperial projections—and the surplus of political command he must continually invoke the more its ineffectiveness becomes apparent—do not, in short, offer capital a safe bargain, as was the case in classical imperialism and, in different ways, in neocolonialism. And this is not because of the still-uncertain transition at the top of the Caracas government, but because no state—not even the United States—now possesses the capacity to tame the transnational disorder and impose stable political control over it. There is no longer a Wilhelmine empire able to mobilize German industrial and financial capital for its power politics in Africa and Asia; but neither is there a Gaullist state that, with one hand, abandoned Algeria while, with the other, escorted French energy companies into the heart of the Sahara to exploit its oil fields, according to the classic neocolonial model. Nor is there any longer a George W. Bush state that, through “international policing,” could still aspire to restore an order and a peace steeped in terror to the global market. Those state forms have been swallowed by the swirls of transnational disorder, and they are unlikely to resurface.

However much it postures as a collective capitalist, it is therefore reasonable to doubt that the Trumpian state can truly function as one today, given capital’s fully transnational character and the infrastructural power that operates within global production chains. Beyond the United States’ overt imperial stance, alignment between the state—in this case, the United States—and the largest capitalist firms is far from guaranteed. That is also why the Trump administration must lift its chin and flex its muscles, proclaiming that it can subordinate to its designs a transnational capital that has long made instrumental use of the state when necessary while retaining wide margins of autonomy. In this way, too, the militarist ideology that fuels the world disorder of war is displayed—an ideology that, within national borders, is meant to bind together social blocs that are beginning to fray or to revolt, as they did in Minneapolis, New York, Portland, and other U.S. cities against the unpunished violence of ICE’s thuggish squads.

The price Trumpian militarism is extracting from living labor in the United States is enormous. Dismantling what remains of the social content of the old twentieth-century state and replacing it with a state free to act through its military apparatus requires the full availability for work of men and women who have been stripped, among other things, of collective bargaining—even in those workplaces where it continued, battered, to survive. Resignation to dark times is never an answer. Instead, we must look to those subjects who move beneath Trump’s imperial pretensions, within and against the contradictions and limits of his militarism as of his fragile peace projects, to make out the contours of a plausible social opposition—one whose image is currently obscured by a muscular display of force in Latin America and, tomorrow, perhaps in Greenland.

To underline the contradictions of this purported imperialism does not mean waiting for opposition to Trump to come from transnational corporations, which will, as always, find spaces in which to expand their balance sheets. In the context of the climate crisis, the capital Trump would like to command reveals its irrationality precisely in its refusal to abandon—or even scale back—fossil fuels. If Trump speaks of Venezuela only in terms of oil, it is nonetheless clear that all his threats toward Latin American countries are part both of a global trajectory of confrontation with China’s rise and of a kind of encirclement war against the progressive governments of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Trump and Trumpism are trying to settle accounts with governments that have actually intervened in wealth distribution and in long-standing hierarchies, unleashing processes of mass politicization.

From our standpoint, however, we also have to reckon with the limits of those experiences and with the contradictions and polarizations they generated within their own social base, so as not to capitulate to what today may otherwise appear as total political impotence in the face of the violent and uncontrolled ascent of the right in countries such as Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. From the standpoint of living labor, it is not possible today to defend the indefensible Maduro or to mourn Chávez’s Bolivarian project. For this reason, beyond the geopolitical puzzle of Latin America and without indulging in nostalgia, our concern is to reassert the standpoint of women, workers, and migrants—even now, when that standpoint seems to vanish before the apparently unchallenged supremacy of armed violence, state authoritarianism, militarism, and patriarchy.

We must recognize that labor, feminist, and Indigenous movements in Venezuela do not accommodate themselves to the present state of affairs. We must stand with the miners of the Orinoco Mining Arc, whom Maduro—already with Decree 2248—handed over to hyper-exploitation and sexual violence, to forms of slave- and child-labor fed by U.S., Canadian, Russian, and Chinese multinationals, and whose conditions will certainly not improve under the new Trumpian course. Beneath the surface of a bankrupt Bolivarianism—one that has financed Venezuela’s recent economic growth by compressing workers’ wages—there is a social conflict to improve living and working conditions that, in the public as in the private sector, has challenged government repression and today constitutes the only credible opposition to Trump’s plans and the tenets of the only politics of peace that erases the very causes of war.

We must therefore take their side, as well as the side of the tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants on U.S. soil who, already deprived by Trump of guarantees of residence, now wonder what will become of their permits once Venezuela is supposed to return to being a country “freed” from the odious “dictator.” The specter of deportation makes clear one of the principal spoils of this war—especially since National Security demands that whatever government sits in Caracas manage migration flows from Venezuela according to the principle of profitable security.

In the search of a lexicon for the struggles of the present, we ask: does the lens of anti-imperialism really help us understand these movements, and what they share with those who, on this side of the ocean, oppose a Europe at war, and with those in the United States who reject Trump’s policies? We doubt it, because it tends to reproduce the logic of campist geopolitics, preventing us from fully embracing the transnational character that social struggles, too, must now assume if they are to unfold politically. Transnational disorder nullifies any hope of socialism in a single country—or a single region—and of an internationalism that nourishes false hopes in “resistant” states or conjures alliances among peoples who are not invincibly united but are traversed by fractures and differences that can be rearticulated only on a transnational level. The transnational dimension does not pose merely a quantitative problem of scale, but a qualitative one: it changes the nature of the social relation of capital within, across, and beyond state borders and therefore demands a new organizational structure of class relations—no longer recomposable within any international, national, regional, bipolar, or multipolar order. The essay added as an appendix to this English edition, and previously published in Italian on our website, shows that the genocide in Gaza and the project of the Gaza Riviera cannot be understood simply as the repetition of a century-long colonial logic but needs to be considered as the reactivation of that conflict within new transnational dynamics.

Anti-imperialist and campist options thus remain perpetually one step behind a Third World War that, day after day, presses forward, intensifies, and ramifies. We will not build opposition to this war and to Trump’s imperial plans by backing supposed dissident governments. They don’t become our friends simply because they are outside of the Western axis. We will build an opposition to the Third World War only from the movements and struggles of women, LGBTQ+ people, migrants, workers, students, and working people that already exist or are taking shape. We need a transnational politics of peace to expand these movements and struggles and to rearticulate them within a broader political space in which all those who, everywhere, are paying the military and social costs of the world war now under way can communicate and recognize one another. A politics capable of opposing a war that is not localized in a single point but claims to saturate our entire lives—leaving them suspended by the thread of bombardment on battlefields, crushing them elsewhere in the gears of unending labor, impoverishing them everywhere until not even the shadow of refusal and insubordination remains.

Yet this nightmare of a Trumpian night is not already reality, nor it is our destiny. Not only do we see flashes of opposition to the current administration spreading across the United States; in Palestine as in Ukraine, in Iran as in Venezuela, men and women have never ceased to fight against the “double siege” of those who bring war and extermination from outside and those who, from within, seek to neutralize every form of struggle that is not subordinated to the logic of blood and oppression that war itself imposes. This is the path traced by those who, in recent years, have survived and resisted missiles, drones, and snipers. It seems to us a path worth taking also for those who, on this side of the world, within a Europe at war, are struggling—in a more or less organized way—against militarism and its logic.

At the end of the book, we wrote that, against the inevitability of war, we need to build an organization that should turn our politics of peace into a practical guide for preparing the conditions of a transnational social strike against the war and its world. In autumn 2025 we saw dozens of Italian cities being stormed by workers, students, migrants, women, men and LGBTQ+ on strike against the genocide in Palestine and the logic of war, while hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating around the world. We have seen students in Germany going on strike in 100 cities against the introduction of compulsory military service. We are now seeing millions of people in Iran risking their lives and refusing to entrust their liberation from the Islamic Republic to the bombs threatened by Trump. Now we can sense what a strike against war can actually mean more clearly than we did one year ago. This makes the call for a transnational organization that is up to the task of making this possibility a long-lasting force even more urgent.Email

Connessioni Precarie

Connessioni Precarie is a political movement of migrant and Italian people, whose central theme is the global and precarious condition of contemporary labor, and thus the transnational intertwining of patriarchy, exploitation, racism, and the rejection of war. We pursue a discourse and political initiative that aims to transform the differences that fragment and divide living labor into political connections, to point to possibilities for struggle that can strike where capital is produced and reproduced.

 

Ecosocialism or extinction: Defending life, building free territories and ecosocialism from and for the peoples

By Various

Published 1 December, 2025

Statement from the Second Ecosocialist Meeting, held in Belém, Brazil, November 2025, with the participation of 99 organizations and more than 350 people, including a strong presence of organizations representing Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants.

We don’t sell our land because it is like our mother. Our territory is our body. And we don’t sell our body. We don’t sell our mother. We wouldn’t sell it, because it is sacred.
And we start suffering pressures of invasion, pressure from mining, from agribusiness, which has expanded a lot, pressure from logging companies, which are deforesting our territories. And we have been resisting. 
—Auricelia Arapiun, Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB).

We gather at moment of profound capitalist attacks on life, within the framework of the actions organized by the peoples in response to COP30. This meeting has allowed us, once again, to reaffirm that both the rise of the far right and the false solutions proposed by governments that call themselves progressive (yet do not hesitate to privatize the commons or facilitate attacks against peoples and leaders who face daily the consequences of the logic of infinite capital growth in their territories) push us to struggle for a world in which living systems are at the center of all our political constructions, and to forcefully reject any attempt at intimidation.

We have seen an example of what happens when, instead of strengthening the struggles of peoples who defend their territories at the risk of their own lives, the defenders of progressive neoliberalism place themselves at the service of capital and predatory extractivism. The political threats suffered by our Indigenous comrade Auricelia Arapiun during her intervention in our roundtable on the current conjuncture clearly reveal a sector acting within communities to sow fear and fragmentation. Yet we — just as Auricelia expressed in her response to the threat — neither remain silent nor compromise.

The offensive of the far right also manifests in our territories through attempts to violate our sovereignty, reproducing the same logics of subjugation and domination that existed in the past and persist today. Against this imperialist offensive, we, ecosocialists, defend a united front to resist and protect ourselves.

Ecosocialism, as a tool to build another world, has become necessary and urgent. The accelerating destruction of ecosystems’ capacity for reproduction and the neocolonial and imperialist character of the supposed alternatives proposed by the very system that created the current climate emergency represent a threat to our continuity as a species, leading us toward a point of no return.

Faced with this challenge, the only possible path is the coordinated organization of our struggles in order to surpass the capitalist system. The organized struggle of peoples, their resistance to systems of domination, and their progress in building other worlds founded on solidarity, complementarity, and reciprocity — respecting the knowledge and cosmovisions of different peoples as well as their legitimate rights to self-defense and self-determination — form the fundamental basis of our strategy.

These days of debate brought together representatives of peoples in struggle from different regions of Abya Yala [an Indigenous name for the Americas, meaning “Continent of life” —ed.] and other continents, who have raised their voices globally to denounce that capitalist and imperialist extractivisms are causing environmental and human destruction in many territories. It is necessary to strengthen the alliances among peoples in resistance in order to combat this destruction, while consolidating forms of life-production historically developed by the peoples and today threatened by the contamination and appropriation of water, land, and air by transnational corporations and governments.

The voices of Indigenous peoples were central in this gathering, identifying a shared context of colonialism, invasion, dispossession, extractivism, and false solutions — accompanied by policies of annihilation and genocide, which not only kill but also render these peoples invisible through criminalization and persecution. At this stage, we see the relationship between body and territory as a fabric where structural violence resides, but also the struggle for life. This struggle manifests in alternative forms of resistance, through the valorization and articulation of knowledge and cosmologies in which ancestry and nature are inseparable; and through self-defense, self-determination, community life, and the importance of hope and unity across territories.

These struggles for life also appear in ecofeminisms, highlighting the struggles of women and feminized bodies across different territories of Abya Yala as they confront the close and historical relationship between capitalism and the violence inflicted on the land, the territories, and women.

From the various forms of extractivism emerges a violence expressed through the contamination and destruction of land; the predation and theft of our commons; the fragmentation of cultural perspectives; and upon the feminized, impoverished, and racialized bodies of thousands of women of the Global South.

This analysis, in addition to identifying capitalism as the structural origin of all territorial violence, also proposes solutions capable of overcoming these contradictions — such as community water management, food autonomy, self-government, community justice, and a subversive conception of care. This vision of care arises from a structural critique of the neoliberalization of the care discourse, which continues to support the logic of capital. In contrast, we position ourselves in favor of collective and community care for radical transformation.

Eco-unionism is a fundamental component of the ecosocialist struggle. The fight for more and better working conditions, combined with the awareness that the exploitation of the working class and the dispossession of our commons serve the interests of capital and mutually reinforce each other, creates the conditions needed to mobilize and advance the structural causes of the oppressions we suffer under capitalism. In this sense, rejecting fracking in Colombia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and worldwide is a task we assume with responsibility to contribute to building free territories. We know that this will only be possible if trade unions articulate with social, popular, Indigenous, and peasant movements in each country, while maintaining their autonomy in defending territories, life, and its reproduction. Through internationalist solidarity, we commit to promoting spaces that denounce violations of labor, human, and natural rights.

From within this shared fabric, we unanimously cry out: Free Palestine, from the river to the sea; ceasefire in Gaza; and condemnation of the genocidal State of Israel for the massacre of the Palestinian people. A people who resist, who sow, who maintain the conviction to stand tall — and whom we embrace through internationalist solidarity, multiplying global actions of support such as BDS and the Flotilla, examples of grassroots resistance that the State of Israel considers threats.

We also demand that governments in the region break their relations with Israel, as in the case of agreements with Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, which has become an instrument of colonial domination. Water is a common good and, in Palestine, it is used as a political and economic weapon: Israel controls water sources, prevents Palestinians from drilling wells, collecting rainwater, or maintaining cisterns, thereby creating total dependence and a system of water apartheid. Palestine is a laboratory of domination whose techniques spread to other territories, and resistance and solidarity with the Palestinian people must be global. We, ecosocialists of the world, stand with and build active solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to exist.

Days before the start of COP30, we once again observe that this space is incapable of responding to the needs of territories; on the contrary, it presents itself as a mechanism for the financialization of nature. This is why we reaffirm our denunciation and rejection of the payment of odious and illegitimate debts, and call for the dismantling of the international mechanisms that drive and legitimize them. These mechanisms mortgage our future in exchange for the delivery of strategic goods that capital needs for its unlimited reproduction. It is essential to dismantle the debt system, which subordinates and limits the capacity for a planned exit from the system.

We expect nothing from these spaces that propose projects such as carbon credits, which — just like TFFF — embrace the narrative that the problem is that the commons are not yet fully commodified and that there exists a “market failure” to overcome. We also denounce governments complicit in ecocidal projects, such as the Brazilian government which, only days before COP30 in Belém — an Amazonian territory — approved offshore oil exploitation at the mouth of the Amazon, and which, during COP30, approved the registration of 30 new pesticides.

We reaffirm agroecology as one of the paths that build our ecosocialist strategy. The production of agroecological food, rooted in peasant and Indigenous traditions, is not only an alternative to the dominant agro-food system — whose main actors are agribusiness and commodity production — but also a way to restore and rebuild ecosystems, and to break the alienation between countryside and city, making it fundamental in the fight against climate change. It is crucial to understand that agroecology cannot exist within green capitalism, as it involves, as a political practice, a structural transformation of current relations of production and life.

Recognizing that ecosocialism has for years worked to build manifestos and programs defining this strategy, we discussed the next steps and concluded that there can be no ecosocialism without free territories. We are certain that eco-territorial struggles and the construction of a livable world are the path we must follow, strengthening our initiatives in solidarity, and creating spaces where we can advance the construction of ecosocialism from and for the peoples.

To reach this goal, it is necessary to accumulate victories that show us the way. Carrying out mobilizations and campaigns among the different collectives engaged in building this ecosocialist project is essential to consolidate an integrated and internationalist process of coordinated resistance and shared strategy.

The continuation of this struggle and the construction of the ecosocialist program we need, along with the internationalization of the ecosocialist movement, are tasks we began ten years ago in these gatherings, and which were consolidated with the formation of the Internationalist Network of Ecosocialist Encounters in 2024, following the meeting in Buenos Aires.

Among new initiatives, we announce the Seventh Internationalist Ecosocialist Gathering, to be held in Belgium in May 2026; the International Ecosocialist Seminar, to be held in Brazil as part of the First International Anti-Fascist Conference; and the Third Latin American and Caribbean Ecosocialist Gathering, in 2027, in Colombia. We are convinced that these gatherings must transcend borders and generate common actions of struggle capable of striking simultaneously at the concentrated powers of capitalist extractivism in each territory where we are present.

However, Ecosocialist Gatherings alone are not enough to advance the construction of a program truly rooted in concrete struggles. For this reason, we propose the creation of joint actions and campaigns on Palestine, fossil fuels, mining, debt, and free trade agreements; the defense of water; the struggle against agribusiness; and forest restoration. We also propose mapping which companies are aligned with ecocidal projects in Latin American and Caribbean countries, in order to issue joint denunciations and communiqués. Additionally, we propose organizing territorial ecosocialist meetings prior to the one in Colombia, so that the debates reflect eco-territorialized formulations and proposals.

Finally, we want our space of construction to be living and diverse, capable of generating deep debates among its collectives, in order to think about and question our understanding of ecosocialism — reaffirming that ecosocialism is not a green-tinted socialism, but a proposal for a profound transformation of our relationships, both among ourselves and with nature. It is another way of doing politics, capable of building a new world, dignified and beautiful to live in, for human beings and all other living beings.

Trump’s Education Plan Seeks to Make Cruel Domination Into “Common Sense”

Trump isn’t even trying to hide his authoritarianism within social acceptability.

By George Yancy ,

Truthout

September 13, 2025

Protestors on the campus of New College of Florida chase after Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and New College of Florida trustee, after he attended a bill signing event featuring Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed three education bills in Sarasota, Florida, on Monday, May 15, 2023.Thomas Simonetti / The Washington Post via Getty Images

U.S. democracy has always been fragile, and we are now witnessing its dismantlement.

The rising tide of political violence poses one threat to democracy in this country, but another quieter threat is also hard at work via the erosion of free speech and critical thinking, both of which are necessary for a flourishing democracy.

Trump’s book bans and attacks on opposing political ideas, the blocking of independent journalism, the intimidation of news organizations, and the defunding of public media are all part of this erosion. These attacks are neither accidental nor incidental, but systematic and dangerously consequential to this country

Trump’s regime is driven by a form of authoritarian control (both political and military), disinformation, and a blatant disrespect for the U.S. Constitution. He has ushered in policies rooted in forms of fascism, where the act of dominating the people is articulated and enforced as “common sense.”

The concept of hegemony helps to capture what this regime is attempting to accomplish — or is in fact accomplishing. Hegemony, within the current U.S. context, captures what I see as an unmitigated criminal process of domination.

In this exclusive interview, education scholar Stephen Brookfield offers clarity on the concept of hegemony, how it is linked to white supremacy and authoritarianism, and how critical education and educators can mount a necessary form of resistance. Brookfield is an adjunct professor at Columbia University Teachers College in New York and professor emeritus at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis-St. Paul. His goal is to help people (including himself) identify and challenge the dominant ideologies they have internalized. Brookfield is the author, co-author, or editor of 21 books, including Becoming a White Antiracist (with Mary Hess), Teaching Race, and The Handbook of Race and Adult Education (with Vanessa Sheared, Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Elizabeth Peterson & Scipio A. J. Colin III). The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

George Yancy: Define hegemony and explain how it is negatively related to processes of education and learning.

Stephen Brookfield: Hegemony exists when a set of ideas that claim to explain how the world works, and the associated practices linked to these, sustain a particular social order. The question to be asked about hegemony is: Whose interests does it serve? Is it an unrepresentative minority whose position is bolstered by the widespread acceptance of these ideas and practices? Or does this hegemony reflect and promote the interests of the wider majority? Hegemony is always being contested as groups within a society constantly try to promote their own interests. When hegemony is most successfully in place, there is no need for paramilitary control because people have internalized the dominant ideology so completely that they police their own conduct. And, as Michel Foucault pointed out, they often take sensuous pleasure in doing so.

In the United States right now, there is a clear attempt to create a hegemony based on particular ideologies. One of these is monopoly capitalism, hidden behind the valorization of free-market enterprise as the best guarantor of freedom and liberty. Another is patriarchy. A third is white supremacy, the belief that European settlers “tamed” and “civilized” a continent, and that their “superior intelligence” and capacity for clear decision-making helped create the greatest nation on Earth. Mixed into this combustible cocktail is authoritarianism, the belief that a strong leader is needed who brooks no dissent from their vision and policies, and whose certainty appeals strongly to those confused by the maelstrom of forces they see swirling around their individual lives. Erich Fromm’s work outlined this dynamic beautifully three-quarters of a century ago.

At the heart of a successful state hegemony is control of what Louis Althusser called ideological state apparatuses. One of these is education. Control the curriculum and you control the range of ideas that people are exposed to. This is why schooling is inherently political. In earlier parts of my career, I had colleagues who disagreed with me on this point. Now I don’t know anyone who disputes it. Early pointers of this hegemony were Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s targeting of New College of Florida, and the federal abolition of critical race theory as a term used in federal training programs. As the current administration hits its stride, we have revisionist history in place that erases any analysis of slavery. Add to this the targeted removal of any institutional practice or office that mentions the words diversity, equity, or inclusion (DEI); the ridicule of anything that describes itself as “anti-racist” as “woke”; and targeted lawsuits aimed at any university that resists these restrictions — and we have the clear attempt to install white supremacy as an official, state-approved ideology.

Antonio Gramsci, whose work is usually associated with the term hegemony, was particularly focused on how cultural mechanisms enforce a certain picture of the world. As Fox News moved to occupy an important place in U.S. TV networks and right-wing radio and podcasts gathered steam, white supremacy, patriarchy, and authoritarianism were all fully legitimized and reinforced as “sensible” ways to order society. The betrothal of the Trump administration to right-wing media is consummated by senior cabinet and advisory positions being filled by pundits drawn from these sources.

The overt nature of this attempt to create hegemony is striking. There is no need to hide authoritarian control behind socially acceptable signifiers. The stream of billionaires traveling to kiss the ring of the president shows just how far business has caved.

Black history is under attack. Through a right-wing hegemonic retelling of Black history, where the reality of the brutality of anti-Blackness is being erased, memory is being controlled by those who would rather tell a pleasing lie than face the horrors of truth. While there was important pushback, I recall that a group of Texas educators had proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught in second grade social studies as “involuntary relocation.” Or think about the Florida Board of Education and its approval to teach middle school students “that enslaved people gained a ‘personal benefit’ from the skills they learned under slavery before the Civil War.” My sense is that partly undergirding this attempt to whitewash and rewrite the brutality of anti-Blackness within the U.S. is the aim to maintain a history and ideology of “white innocence.” Given your important work on whiteness, explain how the meta-narrative of white innocence is part of the core of what Trump is up to.

George W. Bush said that the worst moment of his presidency was not 9/11 or leading the country into an invasion that killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq. Instead, it was being called a racist after his administration’s lackluster response to Hurricane Katrina. This shows the deep-rooted belief held by many white people that we are essentially racially innocent. Sure, our ancestors may have enslaved people, but that was what was considered culturally appropriate at the time, and anyway it has no relation to who we are today. We treat others as we would want to be treated, we don’t make judgments about the content of character based on skin color, and we treat people of color with goodwill. So how can we be racist? This act of self-congratulation is a common signifier of white innocence.


“Control the curriculum and you control the range of ideas that people are exposed to. This is why schooling is inherently political.”

Innocence is a delightfully complex term, something that is often projected as a desirable state to which we should aspire, but also something that suggests a certain childlike naivete. Recently, the protestation of white innocence has become weaponized as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the anti-racist momentum that built in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. This weaponization has multiple dimensions. First, there is the reinterpretation of colonialism and imperialism as a generally innocent and beneficent phenomenon in which the supposed improvements conferred (instilling morality, religious conversion, and an adherence to European values) far outweigh any unfortunate mistakes such as genocide and slavery. Second, we have the contemporary claim that even if some bad things were done in the past, that has nothing to do with anything that’s happening today. The strident rejection of white guilt is one aspect of this; as is the belief that referring to the history of slavery and settlement is a “woke” device that folks of color use to blame their situation on the past, thereby ignoring their need to take personal responsibility for their lives and work harder.

A deeper sense of innocence is that which Shannon Sullivan describes as the innocence of “good white people.” This is the innocent belief in our essential humanity, in our commitment to “treating people as we find them,” in our subscription to the color-blind viewpoint, and in our belief that we act out of the best possible motivations. Under white innocence, the sincerity of our actions is what matters the most and “justifies” any unintended harm we might commit.

This describes a worldview that I internalized early on in life and that still resides within me. One way that structural inequity stays in place is by the majority assuming that a level playing field exists so that we interact as equals unaffected by history. In this worldview, the past does not matter, and structural barriers are overcome by exercising goodwill. Under white innocence, words and actions that came from a “good place” cannot be viewed as racist, owing to the purity of their intentions. If we are told that we have behaved or spoken in a racist way, we apologize. But in our hearts lies the unspoken conviction that really the other person was being overly sensitive. Or, that they’ve misinterpreted a beneficent communication and taken offense at imagined slights that were really not there. In this way, innocence regards racism as an unfortunate problem of miscommunication owing to what we call “cultural differences.”

As the current administration systematically defunds any institutional efforts to address racism, those who were made uncomfortable in the past by DEI programs can now breathe a sigh of relief. In their minds, we are back to “normal.” Balance has been restored after a period of whites being unfairly blamed for colluding in white supremacy.

If you recall, in George Orwell’s 1984, the dystopian Party can control what people think and do. In fact, in that book, the belief that “2 + 2 = 5” is taken as true and is indicative of the extent to which political power can be used to brainwash people. Fascism works to create a world where what is blatantly false has become what is deemed “common sense” and “true.” Under Trump’s neo-fascist regime, we must fight against the perpetuation of systematic falsehoods and ideologies of distraction. You argue that the process of “doing ideology critique involves adults learning to become aware of how ideology lives within them as well as understanding how it buttresses the structures of the outside world that works against them.” Understanding and deploying the concept of ideology critique is indispensable at this moment. Explain ways in which teachers in schools and universities might use ideology critique to contest the attempt by the right wing to accept blatant falsehoods as “commonsense wisdom.”

One of the greatest challenges in my teaching has been to work out how to get students to think structurally; that is, how they learn to realize that their individual actions are framed by their social location and that wider economic forces and dominant ideologies constrain the options they consider. The ideology of individualism, so lauded throughout the history of the U.S., is a major barrier to this task. It posits life’s journey as one of grit, determination, and struggle in the face of barriers that are unexpectedly thrown up to block the realization of our full potential.

I am not a rigid economic materialist. I don’t believe that individual choice is purely a comforting myth, and I do believe that individual consciousness is, ultimately, inexplicable. Chance, unpredictability, and serendipity are powerful elements of the human condition. But our choices are fueled by the ideological oxygen we breathe. Ideological state apparatuses such as education and religion, official government policies and statements, and the daily bath in social media present the range of possibilities that we view as both desirable and realistic. When a government controls the flow of information and intimidates schools and media outlets into legitimizing their worldview, then hegemony becomes easier to establish.

The key as an educator is to find a way to interrupt this dominant ideological narrative. In adult education, a great deal of attention has been paid to what the transformative learning theorist Jack Mezirow called “disorienting dilemmas.” These are the moments when our settled expectations about how the world works are thrown into confusion. Examples would be facing an unexpected health crisis and finding care unavailable, being fired after a history of professionalism and assiduously working to achieve institutional goals, or being conscripted to fight in a war. For George W. Bush, it was being called “racist.”


“As the current administration systematically defunds any institutional efforts to address racism, those who were made uncomfortable in the past by DEI programs can now breathe a sigh of relief. In their minds, we are back to ‘normal.’”

As we negotiate our response to being caught in such dilemmas, we are brought face-to-face with our paradigmatic assumptions. As we realize that these assumptions are flawed, we are forced to examine why we believed them to be so accurate in the first place. We seek other, more satisfactory meaning schemes and perspectives that make more sense.

In the classroom, teachers need to create disorienting dilemmas that unsettle and confound our students’ expectations. And, as we do so, we need to judge how much dissonance can be tolerated. Too much, and we risk them dismissing our activities as unrealistic. Too little, and we allow them to stay comfortable. In ideology critique, I present a cultural or institutional action that seems benign and desirable and then ask students to answer several questions about it: What assumptions are embedded in the practice? What is it intended to achieve? Whose interests does the practice serve? Who is most harmed by it? Why do those who benefit not recognize the harm it creates? How could the action be reimagined in ways that were fairer or socially just?

A similar approach is to institute equity pauses as a required element in decision-making across a university. As program changes are made, admissions criteria altered, and curricula revised, we need to pause very deliberately before deciding on a particular course of action and ask the ideology critique questions above.

We also need teachers and institutional leaders to model the practice of critical reflection. White leaders need to talk publicly about their own struggle to recognize that they have a racial identity, and to acknowledge the benefits this brings. This kind of disclosure needs to become normalized, so that discussions of racism are not prefaced by a collective intake of fearful inhalation. Neither should it be confessional, in which whites purge themselves of the sin of racism by asking absolution from colleagues of color. And courses need to be taught by racially mixed teams who can model what a difficult racial conversation looks like — stilted, characterized both by periods of uncomfortable silence, and also displaying strong emotions and feelings.

In my own capacity as a philosopher and a teacher, I have attempted to model what it means to engage in critical reflection. Indeed, critical reflection is inextricably linked to critical pedagogy. But what we are witnessing is the very opposite of critical reflection. In The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching, you describe the problematic process of creating what you call “adult educators as professional ideologists.” What will education in the U.S. look like as “adult educators as professional ideologists” continue to gain traction? And what are the larger implications for U.S. democracy?

I have argued that critical reflection focuses on power and hegemony — on understanding how and when an elite group uses power in an authoritarian way to impose its cultural hegemony on the majority of people. It also reveals the tricks of ideological manipulation that result in people voting enthusiastically for politicians whose actions and decisions end up harming those same voters — and then continuing to do it over and over again.

Adult education as political detoxification seeks to remove the addictive chemicals of white innocence from our consciousness. It demonstrates the falsity of believing that we all act on a level playing field, or the naivete of thinking that our actions are motivated solely by a humanist concern for everyone to get along. It unmasks power.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).

Considering Marx’s Ideas of a Non-Alienated Labor and Life As a Basis For a Socialist Humanist and Feminist Alternative to Capitalism

By Frieda Afary

August 26, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Manfred Brückels, Creative Commons 3.0

[This article is part of a short series on Marxism and its relevance for left resistance in today’s challenging geopolitical and ecological climate, and for the continuing effort to win a better world beyond immediate crises. A previous ZNetwork article written by Michael Albert, entitled Should Our Resistance Enrich or Transcend Marxism?, was the catalyst for the series, and the subsequent articles use this one as their jumping off point. You can see all articles in the series here.]

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In my book, Socialist Feminism, A New Approach (Pluto Press, 2022), I argue that, in the twenty-first century, we need a humanist alternative to capitalism that challenges all forms of domination and transcends the oppressive models of the former USSR and Maoist China, as well as more recent claims to socialism as in Venezuela.  

While making a distinction between Marx’s body of ideas and the totalitarian forms of rule that have claimed his name, I argue that his humanist philosophy as a whole advocates revolutionizing human relations, including what Ann Ferguson (2018) calls “affective practices” (p. 184).

Marx critiques capitalism as a system based on alienated labor and hence monetary value production. He does not simply call for the abolition of private property of the means of production and an end to the rule of the market. Marx’s early writings in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 argue that alienated labor is not only about the alienation of the producer from their products but also from the process of labor, from their ability for free and conscious activity, and from other human beings. In those very same essays, Marx relates the issue of alienation to marriage, love, and the man-woman relationship. He argues that “in the relationship with woman, as the prey and the handmaid of communal lust, is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself” (Marx & Fromm, 1961, p. 126, emphasis in the original). He further emphasizes that the relationship of man to woman is the measure of how developed or undeveloped a society is, because in this relationship, in relating to another human being, one is relating to one’s own sexuality. One can interpret Marx as saying that when in relating to another human being, one is also relating to one’s own sexual desires, it becomes more difficult to hide feelings and attitudes that one might be able to cover over in other social interactions.

It is true that Marx’s (1976, 1981) Capital does not theorize the relationship between women’s domestic and reproductive labor and capitalist accumulation. As Silvia Federici (2019) has acknowledged however, the phenomenon of working-class housewives did not exist until the 1890s, after Marx’s death (p. 157).[i] However, Marx was very well aware of the fact that capitalism uses the unpaid domestic and reproductive labor of women to reproduce the working class. He also devoted extensive sections of Capital to capitalism’s “pestiferous” exploitation of women, children, and the family (Marx, 1976, pp. 620–1). Marx assumed that from the vantage point of capitalism, women’s unpaid domestic and reproductive labor does not directly contribute to the accumulation of capital because capitalism defines “value” as only labor that is sold in the market and produces surplus value.

I would argue that socialist feminists who specifically wish to theorize an alternative to capitalism that takes into account the transformation of gender relations, still need Marx’s body of work for various reasons:

1. Marx’s understanding of the capitalist system does not limit it to a system based on economic inequality. He identifies capitalism as a system based on alienated labor that takes the mental/manual division of labor and the separation of mind and body to the extreme. To him, the degradation and violence that women experience is a clear manifestation of this separation.
2. Marx’s affirmative alternative is not limited to reclaiming the commons and collectivizing labor or abolishing labor and simply relying on machines and technology to do the work. While in the draft of Capital known as the Grundrisse, Marx’s’ language in some passages may create some ambiguity about the role of technology, in Capital itself, which is a later work, he clearly states that technology as such is not the key to liberation.[ii] He argues that technology can give us possibilities to spend less time on the work of material production of our basic daily needs. It can also help us spend less time on domestic and reproductive labor and more time on developing ourselves as multidimensional human beings with various natural and acquired talents. However, he emphasizes that technology, under capitalism, also turns human beings into cogs in a machine and denudes their work of all interest. Far from having an uncritical view of technology, Marx advocates the emancipation of human beings from alienated labor and “human self-alienation” in favor of a conscious existence, and a two-way relationship between mind and body as the key to human liberation. That is why in his early writings, he calls his philosophy a “fully developed naturalism” or “humanism” or “the return of man [Mensch] himself as a social, that is, really human being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development” (Marx & Fromm, 1961, p. 127).
3. Marx did not advocate an essentialist view of human nature and a human essence based on productivism or what Kathi Weeks (2011) calls “the work society perfected” (p. 30).[iii] When in his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx wrote of “a higher phase of communist society” in which “labour from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life” (Marx, 1966, p. 10) he was referring to the flowering of the human potential for free and conscious activity. As Judith Grant has noted, for Marx, true human essence is about constantly transforming oneself. This is what he, in the Grundrisse, also called “the absolute movement of becoming” (Marx & Engels, 1986, pp. 411–12).

Both Maria Mies and Kathi Weeks advocate a feminist concept of time. Marx too was arguing for a different concept of time involved in overcoming capitalist alienated labor. At issue for him was the idea that under capitalism, the amount of time necessary for the production of a use-value is determined “behind the backs of the producers” (Marx, 1976, p. 135), and is constantly reduced to satisfy capitalism’s incessant drive for the expansion of value. He argued that under capitalism, “socially necessary labor time,” that is, a global social average time for the production of each use-value, dominates the process of production because producers are not allowed to determine the amount of time they need to do their work based on their abilities and their local conditions.

The capitalist concept of time, Marx demonstrated, is a manifestation of the capitalist mode of production. We cannot possibly create a free, conscious, and non-alienated existence when we are made to work faster and faster in order to keep up with capitalism’s demand for a shortening of socially necessary labor time. We cannot do our work thoughtfully and have time for meaningful interpersonal relationships when we are constantly made to push ourselves to the extreme to keep up with capitalist time or what the late social theorist Moishe Postone (1993) called “the treadmill effect” (pp. 289–91).

How is it possible to overcome this capitalist push to speed up labor time? Clearly Marx did not think it could be done only by abolishing the private property of the means of production and by doing away with market mechanisms. It demanded overcoming the alienated mode of labor itself. Does this mean that socialism, as Marx envisioned it, assumes that the contours of the utopian future can be predetermined with a blueprint, and closes the door to an open future, as Kathi Weeks (2011, p. 30) argues? 

Peter Hudis’s (2012) Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism sheds light on this question. He argues that when the young Marx wrote that “Communism is the necessary form and dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not itself the goal of human development—the form of human society” (Marx & Fromm, 1961, p. 140),

Marx is here reflecting on the future on two levels: One is the idea of communism—the immediate principle of the future—that has as its task the elimination of private property and alienated labour. The other is a realization of the idea of freedom that is much more open-ended and harder to define or even give a name to, since it involves the return of humanity to itself as a sensuous being exhibiting a totality of manifestations of life. (Hudis, 2012, p. 75)

 Marx was cognizant of the fact that even if humans succeed in creating such a life form, we would not have perfectly rational human beings who would stop grappling with the conflicts between passion and reason. We would, however, live under conditions that allow us to deal with those conflicts in a peaceful and creative manner instead of killing and destroying each other.

My aim in discussing the relevance of Marx’s concept of an alternative to capitalism for theorizing a socialist feminist alternative is not to be uncritical of Marx. Clearly, although he was a great visionary, he too had contradictions in his personal life and most importantly saw his philosophical project as a work in progress that needed further development.

Rather, I believe that socialist feminists who are truly serious about theorizing a vision that goes beyond private and state capitalism and all forms of oppression cannot make progress in this direction without grappling further with Marx.

We can have constructive debates as to what it means to overcome alienated labor and the capitalist concept of time, or whether it is really necessary to have what Marx envisioned as a two-phase process, to get to the point where the link between work time and income could be completely severed. However, we cannot simply skip over the issue of alienated labor and its connection to alienated human relations by advocating a return to a rural existence and subsistence farming, or by simply abolishing private property and the market and replacing them with cooperatives or a universal basic income as if these would solve the problem.

References

Federici, Silvia  (2012) Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Federici, Silvia (2019) Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of Commons. Introduction by Peter Linebaugh. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Ferguson, Ann. (2018) “Socialist-Feminist Transitions and Visions.” Radical Philosophy Review,21(1):177–200. https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev201841687.

Hudis, Peter. (2013) Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism..Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Marx, Karl. (1961) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In Marx’s Concept of Man, by Karl Marx and Erich Fromm. New York: Frederick Ungar.

Marx, Karl. (1966) Critique of the Gotha Program. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl. (1976) Capital. Volume 1. A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowles. New York: Vintage.

Marx, Karl. (1981) Capital. Volume 3. A Critique of Political Economy. Introduction by Ernest Mandel. Translated by David Fernbach.London: Penguin Classics.

Marx, Karl.(1986) Marx and Engel Collected Works. Volume 28 of 50. New York: International Publishers. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/index.htm (last accessed February 24, 2021).

Marx, Karl, and Erich Fromm. (1961) Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Frederick Ungar.

Mies, Maria. (2014 [1986]) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. Foreword by Silvia Federici. London: Zed Books.

Postone, Moishe. (1993) Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weeks, Kathi. (2011) The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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[i]. In Re-enchanting the World, Silvia Federici (2019) writes:

When Marx was writing Capital, very little housework was performed in the working-class family (as Marx himself recognized) for women were employed side by side with men in the factories from dawn to sunset … . Only in the second part of the nineteenth century after two decades of working-class revolts in which the specter of communism haunted Europe, did the capitalist class begin to invest in the reproduction of labor power. (p. 157)

[ii]. In her Re-enchanting the World, Federici (2019) begins to acknowledge this: “It is also agreed that there are important differences between his two major works, Capital and the Grundrisse” (p. 152).

[iii]. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, we saw the ways in which Marx (1961) contrasted alienated labor to the human potential for free, conscious activity. In Capital, Marx contrasts abstract or alienated or value-producing labor to concrete labor. In the first chapter of Capital, where he discusses what he calls the “dual character of labor under capitalism” (Marx, 1976, p. 131), he writes: “Labor, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself” (p. 133). Under capitalism, however, labor becomes “simple average labor” (p. 135). It is denuded of its particularity and specificity. Labor under capitalism becomes something mechanical.  

Furthermore, for Marx, labor as “an exclusively human characteristic” is not an instinctive but a purposeful process in which an ideal developed in the mind is realized in the labor process. Hence,

what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. (Marx, 1976, p. 284)

But “[t]he less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be” (p. 284). In sum

The labor process as we have just presented it is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use values … . It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between humans and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence , or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. (Marx, 1976, p. 290)

In contrast to this labor process, he presents “the valorization process” which is characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. In this process “use-values are produced by capitalists only because and in so far as they form the material substratum of exchange-value, the bearers of exchange-value” (Marx, 1976, p. 293). Labor is considered only in so far as it creates value. One type of labor differs in no respect from another. “We are no longer concerned with the quality, the character and the content of the labor, but merely with its quantity” (p. 296).        From the standpoint of the valorization process, the means of production consume the human being as a means for the expansion of value as an end in itself (Marx, 1976, p. 425). “[T]his inversion, indeed this distortion which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production, of the relation between dead labor and living labor … is mirrored in the consciousness of the capitalist” (p. 425). This inversion or what Marx calls the domination of dead over living labor becomes the basis for capitalism’s constant revolutionizing of the technical basis of production.

Thus, capitalism seeks to extract more and more value from less living labor by increasing the productivity of labor. In doing so it takes the mental/manual division of labor characteristic of all class societies to an extreme, and fragments and alienates the human being more and more.Email

Frieda Afary

Frieda Afary is an Iranian American librarian, translator and author of Socialist Feminism: A New Approach (Pluto Press, 2022, Audible, 2025). She produces Iranian Progressives in Translation and Socialistfeminism.org.