A manual for how the left can fail to agree

By Alberto Garzón

Published 18 October, 2026

First published at Ecosocialist Notebook.

When I stepped back from frontline politics three years ago, I was invited to write a book about what I saw as one of the most intense political decades in Spain’s history: from the 15-M protests to the Spanish government. Many of my comrades who had left before me, and even many who are still active, had ventured into this kind of political literature with similar books. In most cases, however, these were not only personal accounts of what had happened, with their legitimate biases and particular points of view, but also brutal settling of scores. I dislike that approach because I don’t believe more detailed knowledge of what is usually called “dirty laundry” would do any good for the country, the left, or the working class. For that reason I turned the project down.

I mention this because I think I understand why the Spanish left is finding it so hard to reach agreement at such a crucial moment. In theory it shouldn’t be so complicated. Most of the parties that make up the left share 90% of their political programme, so if, as Julio Anguita used to say, we stick to that criterion, agreement ought to be relatively easy. If, in practice, it isn’t, it is because other factors come into play, factors that make what looks easy far more complex.

The main distorting factor, as obvious as it may sound, is that people make politics. And we are all prisoners of both our virtues and our vices, including needs such as recognition, identity, respect, material livelihood, and social relationships… In short, human beings are complicated creatures. Even when we come together as people who, like us, want to change the world, and even when we share almost the entire worldview and plans for the future, seemingly insurmountable differences end up emerging one way or another.

The political world I have experienced is full of episodes that are, strictly speaking, completely absurd. People so ideologically close that they become couples and start families, only to separate over time and end up disagreeing politically about everything down to the colour of the doors. People who, with enviable assertiveness, say one thing today that becomes its opposite tomorrow, and the day after that, if need be, changes again. People who take a position only after the debate is over, always guided by the question “which of us won?”. People who started out as friends and comrades but, as things evolve, become the ones who deny ever having said hello to you. In short, situations of political divergence that might fall under the labels of cynicism and hypocrisy, but that at their core express something deeper: the social inertia of complex human beings.

Actually existing politics is a meat grinder for people, so it is hardly surprising that those who know how things work refuse to take on new responsibilities. Others are braver, or more reckless, and take on impossible challenges even knowing the costs are high. It was never easy, and in other times doing politics meant far graver things such as torture or murder, but we cannot deny that the last fifteen years have been a centrifuge for human beings. Just as quickly as politics became an attraction and a source of hope for tens of thousands of people, drawing many of the best minds in this country to the front line, it also soon became a human-grinding machine that wore down and expelled all that raw material and its original freshness.

When I entered institutional politics in 2011, as someone raised in the republican and socialist tradition, I deeply distrusted leadership: “neither in gods, kings nor tribunes lies the supreme saviour,” says one of the most influential texts in political history. But when push comes to shove, I’m afraid someone is needed to bring some sanity, serenity and calm to the chaotic world of flesh-and-blood humans. Someone who, perhaps through charisma or intelligence, knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff and keep the focus on what really matters. Someone with enough emotional and political intelligence to rise above human pettiness while bringing out human virtues. That, for me, is the main function of a leader, and the left is fortunate to have many people who fit that profile. The problem is that almost nobody wants to waste part of their life on such a toxic and thankless task.

People often say leaders and parties are to blame for all of this. But let us admit the problem doesn't lie only with the leaders. It also lies with us, because we all participate, one way or another, in the incentives that make the atmosphere unbearable. With our pettiness, we don’t let the grass grow. From the comments on social media, completely vampirised by hatred and brutality, the toxic atmosphere starts from below. Like any other leader, I became a candidate already hated by a considerable part of the electorate and even by my own people, before I had even opened my mouth. And that was before social media existed in its current form, that is, as a megaphone for the darkest passions. If that happens just for arriving, there’s no need to dwell on what happens when, like all human beings, we make mistakes. Be that as it may, on the left, and perhaps just as elsewhere, we tear each other apart first and only afterwards, if at all, reflect on why.

These days, with so many rumours circulating about how to put together a Frente Amplio (Broad Front) ticket, it is not easy to find someone with a brilliant idea, but it is very easy to find thousands of people with destructive criticism of every possibility: he or she would be the worst candidate in the world and I won’t vote if that goes ahead; that one said such-and-such a hundred years ago and for me that’s a red line; that other one is even worse because he’s spineless or, worse still, a traitor for not insulting the bad guys enough; but this one here is almost worse, because he’s not from my party; and so on. And it isn’t only those who are active and putting themselves on the line who take the hits. My latest social media “flame” (read: public lynching) came from members and leaders of Adelante Andalucía, who didn’t like me pointing out that the electoral law penalises fragmentation. Even though I was their comrade until a few years ago, even though we campaigned together many times and I have never had a bad word for them, it didn’t matter: the backlash was as passionate as it was disproportionate. The kind anyone would unleash against an enemy to be defeated. Perhaps even more so.

It would be foolish to think that all this is just basic psychology. The left wants to transform social structures, but it often refuses to acknowledge that its own organisations are shot through with the same power relations, material incentives and identities it seeks to transform. For example, people have to make ends meet, and, believe it or not, so do people on the left; ideological affinities are intertwined with our livelihoods. If my party says it’s raining, even if I can see a perfectly clear sky through the window, it may be inconvenient to acknowledge that contradiction, and it may be in my interest to overact and insist that the storm is about to break. We used to call them “traffic lights”: people who switch to amber when it’s still unclear who will win (which means choosing who will allow them to keep earning a living), and whose political sense of smell is so finely tuned that when they turn green, backing someone or something, you know there’s no better poll. This keeps the same profiles in place and reproduces practices that distort any honest debate. And another day, if the occasion arises, we can talk about the incentives facing insiders who have, moreover, spent their lives in a socially penalised activity (because your CV says you’re the company’s next subversive) when it comes to leaving politics and, imagine the whim, continuing to earn a living.

Material ties are not the only ones that bind parties to their leaders and members. An emotional or symbolic bond also exists, which, like every identity, arouses as much passion as a romantic relationship, or more. One can understand that a lifelong activist who has devoted decades to a cause embodied in a logo or an acronym feels an attachment to their party and its symbols that goes beyond the rational. But we also see the same thing among people who have only just joined a party, or in parties still in their cradle. Party patriotism takes root quickly, but it introduces dynamics that have nothing to do with the tidy rationality of the programme Julio Anguita spoke of. They have more to do, obviously, with the irrational drive that every nationalism awakens, even when it is disguised in party rhetoric. And, needless to say, all of this is a first-order obstacle to getting different people to agree, people who bring very different identities, experiences, and relationships from home.

Be that as it may, even if we addressed and resolved all of the above, and we are still a long way from that, the substantive debate would remain: what to do when your cards are so few and the barbarians are at the gates. After all this time, I have reached a practical conclusion: whatever Frente Amplio decides, I will support it. I will keep my insider comments to myself, and I will humbly help support the people who are there, the ones who have been brave enough to put themselves on the line for all of us at such a difficult time. That matters far more for the country than reading or listening to the left-wing activist who knows everything and who, above all, has a magic idea and a problem for every solution.

The car war that is changing the world economy

What a Chinese state-owned carmaker's arrival in Galicia reveals about Spain's place in the value chain — and about Europe's sudden conversion to neo-mercantilism.

Alberto Garzón
Aug 18, 2026
Ecosocialist Notebook -

A few days ago it was leaked to several media outlets that the Ministry of Defence has reservations about the construction in Ferrol (Galicia) of an electric vehicle plant belonging to the Chinese company SAIC, on the grounds that it risks becoming an enclave for espionage by the government of the Chinese Communist Party. A few hours later, however, the ministry clarified that it would allow the project, which also enjoys the enthusiastic backing of both the national government (PSOE-SUMAR) and the regional one (PP). What really matters in this case, though, is the economic dispute between the European Union and China, a dispute that also involves the United States.

While the EU is sceptical about Chinese foreign investment and is promoting regulatory measures to shape it, and Spain shows a clear interest in attracting it, the United States is far more hostile and fears an alignment of European interests with Chinese ones. That is the geopolitical backdrop. Right now, Spain is one of the main playing fields on which this redefinition of Western industrial policy is unfolding, in a context of clear superiority on the part of the Chinese car industry. As I shall argue in this analysis, the Ferrol case is only one episode within a larger battle that is reorganising both the car sector and the world economy as a whole.
Spain is a car factory


Spain is not one of the main pieces on the board by chance. The first thing to bear in mind is that the car industry has been a pillar of the Spanish economy for many decades. With forerunners such as Hispano-Suiza, which allowed a substantial network of component manufacturers to develop in Catalonia, Spain attempted during the Second Republic to promote the production of national vehicles. The civil war frustrated the project, which was only partially resumed in the 1950s when, under the Franco regime, Seat was set up with majority Spanish capital (albeit with a stake held by Fiat, which supplied the technology). Those years also saw American multinationals enter the country, and by 1971 Spain was already exporting more vehicles than it imported, becoming an important node in the international car industry.

Over the following decades, Spain signed agreements to liberalise its economy, turning the country into an attractive location for multinationals seeking to take advantage of low Spanish wages and use it as a platform for vehicle exports. The 1980s were a time of restructuring that favoured the new multinationals and worked against those already established (Seat, for instance, was sold to Germany’s Volkswagen). After that process, Spain reinforced its importance in the international car sector, but in a secondary role and at the cost of giving up nationally owned, and even publicly owned, firms.
But only in the lower-value segments


In reality, no single company or country manufactures a vehicle in its entirety. Modern production is far more fragmented than it was a century ago, and falling transport and communication costs have made it easier for global value chains to expand in the vehicle sector as well. What begins in research and development and product design offices continues in the mines and refineries, with the extraction and processing of the natural resources required for all the parts — from sheet metal to electronics — going on through assembly, and ends in transport, distribution, sales and after-sales tasks. Firms aim to position themselves in the higher-value segments of that chain, which are those at the beginning (R&D, design, and so on) and at the end (sales, financing, after-sales, and so on). It is well established in development economics that countries wishing to climb the development ladder must work to ensure that their firms capture the higher-value tasks and stop specialising in those that capture value only residually; a process usually referred to in technical terminology as “upgrading” (see, for example, the whole body of work by Gary Gereffi).

This distribution of different tasks along a long production chain makes it possible to speak of a hierarchy, whereby some firms (and countries) take on the tasks that capture the most value and deliver the greatest benefits to their economies, while others take on more thankless tasks, or ones that offer lower economic and social returns. Another common way of referring to this hierarchy is through the notions of core and periphery (and semi-periphery). In the car sector, for example, Petr Pavlínek, among others, has studied this at length. In his latest book, Pavlínek shows that the industry is configured in Europe so that Germany holds a clear core position, reserving for itself the tasks that capture the most value, followed by France and Italy. Spain, by contrast — and despite the fact that the car sector accounts for around 8% of total industrial weight and that exports of vehicles and vehicle parts represented 9.73% of gross exports in 2024 — falls into the semi-periphery category, mainly because of its limited control over the production process and its concentration on assembly work. The periphery, finally, would be occupied by the countries of Eastern Europe, which in recent decades have attracted large capital investments seeking to exploit their low wages and their proximity to the German core.

Historically, core countries have made considerable efforts to keep firms under the control of national capital or even to hold them directly in public ownership. As the chart below shows, Germany has the highest level of national ownership in the sector (79%), whereas in Spain the figure is 29% (defined as control of more than 50% of share capital). This is precisely one of the features that the literature identifies as distinguishing core from peripheral countries, since it allows the former to control firms’ decisions. Nor is it a general trait of the Spanish economy, but a characteristic specific to this sector: national control stands at 73% for industry as a whole and at only 29% in the car industry.



Another relevant figure is that Germany invests two and a half times more in R&D in the sector than France, Italy and Spain combined, which is explained by the fact that it has reserved the highest value-added segments for itself while offshoring and outsourcing others. Both figures reinforce the idea that a hierarchy exists within the chain, placing Spain subordinate to the core (and therefore to the core’s interests).
China’s recent irruption


The arrival of the electric vehicle has changed not only the composition of value chains (where there was once a combustion engine, there are now batteries and other products with different technological and natural-resource requirements), but also international economic geography. The shift of the world economy towards Asia has one of its main vectors here. China began its technological “upgrading” in electric vehicles at the start of the century, when it included them under the well-known Programme 863 on high technology. The new objective was to develop and control the entire value chain of the electric vehicle industry and its critical components, such as batteries and electronics.

As a consequence of those decisions, according to the latest report by the International Energy Agency, China currently controls the refining of as much as 91% of graphite, 85% of rare earth separation, 75% of cobalt, 70% of lithium and up to 49% of copper; in every case these are critical natural resources, since they are indispensable for the production of electric vehicles (although they are also required for other electronic products, such as laptops or smartphones). China also produces 80% of the world’s batteries, and installed capacity is such that there is a real danger of overproduction.

This near-monopoly has, moreover, made Western countries highly dependent on Chinese production, to the point that European battery output covers only 43% of demand, with the rest having to be imported from China — although that share is expected to grow precisely because of the new Chinese investments announced for Europe. These firms dominate the world market by a wide margin (in 2025 CATL held 39.2%, BYD 16.4%, CALB 5.3%, Gotion 4.5% and EVE 2.6%), and clearly outstrip their South Korean and Japanese rivals. European firms, for their part, are some 10 to 20 years behind in technological capability in the battery market, according to a recent research article.

This dominance over batteries extends to electric vehicles as a whole. Behind that success lies the Chinese government’s industrial policy, which takes advantage of economies of scale (with a vast domestic market), technological ecosystems, and the resources devoted to research and development. Most leading battery firms are private, such as BYD and CATL, but other electric vehicle companies, such as SAIC — the firm behind the Ferrol plant — or Chery, are publicly owned. Although the European Commission now criticises the role of Chinese subsidies and accuses its competitors of unfair competition, the fact is that Europe’s decades of neoliberalism were, in this respect, decades lost to China’s far more effective industrial policy.

The world production figures speak for themselves. According to the International Energy Agency, 22 million electric vehicles were produced in 2025, 72% of them in China. And although the European Union is the second-largest producing region, its global share was only 14.6%.



European consumers are also increasingly buying Chinese vehicles, since Chinese manufacturers are achieving relatively low prices through rapid innovation in batteries, electronics and software. As the chart below shows, China is now the EU’s main vehicle supplier, and by a wide margin over those that follow, such as Turkey, Japan and Morocco. This is a radically different picture from five years ago. There are qualitative differences too, however: most vehicles imported from China and Japan are electric (over 70%), whereas those from Turkey or Morocco are internal combustion models.

The role of countries such as Morocco and Turkey deserves to be highlighted here, because their growth as exporting countries reveals the creation of new peripheries by the car multinationals. In the search for cost reductions, these countries offer fiscal, labour and economic incentives with which to compete internationally. In this respect, as far as we know the transition to the electric vehicle has not brought about changes in the core-periphery configuration within the European Union: a recent study by the economists Manuel Gracia, María J. Paz and Mario Rísquez has shown that Germany is managing to reinforce its dominant role in Europe, as against the subordinate role of countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy, and despite the growing importance of Hungary and Poland in battery production. China’s rise as a major automotive power is, however, seriously affecting German business, as we saw in this other analysis discussing Germany’s economic crisis, which some analysts describe as “China shock 2.0”.
Chinese foreign direct investment


Concerned about the competitiveness of Chinese vehicles, the European Union authorities responded by accusing Chinese firms of benefiting from unlawful subsidies, that is, of unfair competition. That made it possible to trigger an anti-subsidy clause, imposing high tariffs on Chinese companies. In SAIC’s case, these reached the maximum rate of 35.3%, for failure to cooperate. In truth, the European Union is not seeking to halt Chinese foreign direct investment, but rather to make its arrival conditional, requiring firms to meet certain commitments in exchange for being allowed to produce within European territory. Spain, incidentally, abstained in the vote on the tariffs — something that may perhaps explain why the SAIC plant will land here and not in Hungary, as was initially mooted.

Another part of the European response has come through the Industrial Accelerator Act, a proposal that is not yet final and is clearly designed to place conditions on China’s expansion. Under the proposal, where FDI exceeds €100 million and originates in countries with a global manufacturing share above 40% — read: China — firms will have to meet at least four out of six conditions, such as not exceeding 49% ownership, having half of their workforce made up of European workers, technology transfer, R&D commitments in the EU, and sourcing at least 30% of inputs from Europe. The regulation is still going through the approval process, and we are still a long way from knowing whether it will work, although it fits the new neo-mercantilist spirit of Western countries.

What is clear is that in 2025 Chinese foreign direct investment in Europe rose by 67%, the highest level since 2018 — when Chinese capital was investing in all manner of activities, many of them considered high-risk by the Chinese government, which eventually curbed them. Indeed, the dynamics of foreign direct investment have changed in recent years, shifting from a focus on mergers and acquisitions to investment in new plants, as in the Ferrol case. It is particularly important to note that 45% of this investment has gone to the car sector, and the overwhelming majority of it to electric vehicle value chains.

According to Rhodium Group data, Chinese FDI is increasingly heading to Spain, although it remains at very modest levels compared with the figures received by other European countries. As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in electric cars has soared since 2019 and, above all, since 2023. Those investments have gone mainly to the periphery and semi-periphery, with a prominent role for Hungary and, more recently, Spain. This is what one would expect from investments that seek to externalise only those parts of the production process that capture the least value. The capital remains Chinese, and R&D and design remain in the Asian giant.



According to official information, the investment in Ferrol amounts to some €200 million, with 120,000 vehicles a year expected to be produced and around 2,000 direct and indirect jobs created in total. The plant’s operations, however, will be those typical of assembly, using previously manufactured components and bodies, and will not yet include stamping, body construction or painting. These operations, along with the manufacture of other components, are envisaged as later developments of the overall project. This is the kind of task within the value chain that the literature identifies as characteristic of peripheral or semi-peripheral countries, since it does not incorporate the upstream tasks of R&D and design, while the downstream sales and after-sales tasks remain uncertain, depending on whether the products are destined for export or for sale in Spain.
The open questions


Several dilemmas overlap throughout this analysis. On the one hand, Spain still depends largely on the European core when it comes to internal combustion vehicles. Pressure from those manufacturers already led, in December 2025, to the European Commission abandoning its plan to ban such vehicles by 2035. Meanwhile, the transition to electric vehicles is rapidly altering power relations within the industry and opening the door to new centres of production and decision-making. Spain has also shown itself in favour of maintaining a degree of autonomy in the dispute between the United States and China. That position may give it an advantage in attracting investment, but it remains to be seen whether it will translate into a structural transformation of our position within the industry.

The problem is that what is at stake is not only how much is produced in Spain, but what is produced, who controls it and who captures the value generated. A country can increase its industrial output, its exports, and its employment and still remain in a subordinate position if strategic decisions, technology, design, research, and a substantial share of the profits remain beyond its borders. The result is enormous vulnerability, as well as a less solid and less prosperous productive structure. That is precisely what has happened over much of the development of the Spanish car industry, as we have seen: Spain is a huge vehicle factory, but the firms that control the main strategic decisions are mostly foreign.

The arrival of Chinese capital also poses a paradox. It may help to reindustrialise Spain and, at the same time, reproduce the country’s position within global value chains. Replacing German investment with Chinese investment does not necessarily change Spain’s position in that chain. If the new plants are confined to assembly, and the higher value-added activities — R&D, design, technology, intellectual property and strategic decisions — remain in China, we shall have gained productive capacity without necessarily gaining economic capacity. But it would not be right to assume this will inevitably be the case. SAIC’s arrival in Ferrol may create jobs and economic activity, but its real industrial impact will depend on whether suppliers, technological capabilities, training, research and new higher value-added activities develop around the plant. Those ideas appear in the official tender documents as aspirations, but with no guarantee that they will materialise.

The European response is a paradox too. For decades, the European Union trusted that liberalisation, competition and international specialisation would be enough to maintain its industrial position. Now, faced with Chinese competition and Chinese technological leadership, it is reaching for tools it long regarded as anathema: tariffs, local content requirements, conditions attached to investment, state aid and industrial policies. Europe, in other words, is turning — partially, but at great speed — towards an industrial policy of a neo-mercantilist character.

It is therefore a mistake to frame the debate around what nationality we want incoming capital to have, whether Chinese, German or American. Reducing it to a matter of espionage is even clumsier. What matters most is knowing what we want to do with the arrival of that capital. If foreign investment expands the country’s productive, technological and knowledge capabilities, it can be an instrument of reindustrialisation. China’s own historical example shows precisely that it can be a viable lever. But if that foreign investment simply turns Spain into the place where various multinationals assemble their products in order to access the European market, the change will be far more limited: we shall have more factories, but not necessarily more control over our own economy. We are trapped in the classic dilemma that has tormented all peripheral and Global South countries — and all development economists — for a century. And that, in itself, already tells us something.

Trump’s Threats to Annihilate Iran

It is not possible to excuse, justify, or condone this kind of rhetoric. The only question is what to do about it.

by Ivana Nikolić Hughes and Peter Kuznick 

Of all of the things that Donald Trump has said publicly since returning to the White House, his threats to annihilate Iran are arguably the worst. This is not only because the repeated statements are deeply immoral and illegal – deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime – but because they represent the kind of irresponsible rhetoric that will lead us into a global apocalypse and collapse of not just the Persian nation but human civilization as a whole. It is not possible to excuse, justify, or condone this kind of rhetoric. The only question is what to do about it.

As much as some well-meaning people might want to see nuclear weapons as instruments that ended World War II and have kept the peace ever since, the exact opposite has actually been true. Nuclear weapons brutally murdered a couple of hundred thousand civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and injured and sentenced to years and decades of illness and suffering many hundreds of thousands more. As we have written before, multiple alternatives existed to end the war in 1945. In many ways, the false narrative of the atomic bombings averting an invasion and saving lives has enabled the perpetuation of nuclear weapons, bringing the risks to humanity’s survival to levels previously unimaginable. Turning a brutally violent beginning of the nuclear age into something positive has managed to complicate and obfuscate an issue that should never have been complicated. Nuclear weapons are and have always been immoral. Their possession should be illegal.

Although the end of World War II coincided with the advent of nuclear weapons, and we have technically not fought another world war since, this is merely a correlation. Other significant changes in our world, including the founding of the United Nations, technological and scientific progress, and globalized trade, took place over that same time period. In addition, one has to wonder, whose peace we are talking about. Since 1945, over 20 million people have died in armed conflicts around the world, with up to 50 million more indirect deaths stemming from those conflicts. Today, there are nearly 100 armed conflicts across the planet according to the Geneva Academy, and 25 international armed conflicts involving more than one nation state.

All along, in addition to the deaths and suffering in war zones across the planet and the horrific toll exacted by poverty and inequality, humanity has been waiting almost helplessly for another nuclear weapon to explode by accident, miscalculation, or intention, likely triggering a full-blown nuclear war in which tens or even thousands of nuclear weapons are used. The past eight decades have witnessed numerous incidents in which human wisdom and decency or just plain luck interrupted a course of events that seemed inexorably leading to nuclear war. Nuclear weapons have not brought the peace. Quite the opposite  –  they threaten what little of it we have each and every day.

And yet, for all of his threats on Truth Social and most recently in the halls of the United Nations, Trump has also stated that nuclear weapons “could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over,” calling for “denuclearization.” In fact, two days after his unacceptable statement to “drive [Iran] into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness” at the UN General Assembly in September, Trump suggested to President Xi in DC that there be a nuclear summit between China, Russia, and the United States.

Trump did so knowing full well that Xi’s government’s participation in arms control negotiations is contingent upon China achieving rough parity with the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia. This should be pursued not by China continuing to expand its arsenal to the gargantuan size of the U.S. and Russian arsenals, but by the U.S. and Russia reducing theirs to the size of China’s, and adopting China’s demand for an across-the-board no-first-use policy.

Since his latest threat, delivered in the world’s premier diplomatic space unlike his earlier Truth Social rants, including the one on April 7 that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump actually seemed to welcome Iranian destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego at an election rally. Even if he now unconvincingly claims that the original clips, which suggested that such destruction was a small price to pay, were taken out of context and the small price to pay was about the price of gas, it is not reassuring to have the US President talking about nuclear bombs exploding over American cities. Never mind that Iran neither has the nuclear weapons nor the ability to send missiles toward US soil. Nuclear Armageddon seems to be on Trump’s mind.

Is the real estate developer who seemed to understand that a lot of effort, capital, and human ingenuity, not to mention time, go into building modern cities gone? What happened to the businessman who in 1986 “summoned Dr. Bernard Lown of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) to the Trump Tower for a meeting?” Trump sought advice from Dr. Lown on negotiating nuclear arms agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev just after IPPNW had won the Nobel Peace Prize a year earlier. Is that person no longer here or do his “denuclearization” comments offer some hope?

Among those refusing to be passive in all of this is Pope Leo XIV who has not only deplored war and called for nuclear disarmament but who recently decried leaders, presumably including Trump, who are “beginning to speak about nuclear weapons and wars that are becoming ever more destructive,” and urged leaders to “come together, sit down, engage in dialogue.” The Holy See was one of the original parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and remains a strong supporter of nuclear abolition.  It is time for Pope Leo XIV, speaking for the planet, to use his unique moral authority to demand an emergency summit of, at a minimum, Trump, Xi, and Putin to get us off this path of war and potential nuclear annihilation.

In addition to insisting on such actions from others, each of us needs to think long and hard about what we can do to address the insanity of Trump’s threats and the insanity of nuclear weapons.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of numerous books and co-author (with Oliver Stone) of The Untold History of the United States.

Polymers and Power: The Material Basis of the War in Iran

The war in Iran is not just about oil — it's a blow to the petrochemical backbone of global capitalism

Alberto Garzón
Apr 16, 2026
Ecosocialist Notebook 


The 1920s and 1930s pitted the German chemist Hermann Staudinger against almost everyone, both within his discipline and in the political arena. A pacifist during the First World War, the son of a Social Democratic militant and married to a communist, Staudinger would end up being denounced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger with the rise of Nazism. Yet at the time of that denunciation, Staudinger was an adviser to IG Farben, the industrial giant formed in 1925 through the merger of Germany’s major chemical firms — among them BASF and Bayer — which would become a fundamental instrument of Nazi power during the Second World War. That power was derived largely from Staudinger’s own scientific discoveries; in 1953, he would receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on macromolecules.

As early as 1920, Staudinger had argued that molecules could be joined into long chains. It took more than a decade for the scientific community to accept the idea, but today we call those macromolecules polymers (DNA, RNA, starch and proteins, for instance, are all polymers). As though it were a train, each polymer is made up of a series of subunits — the carriages — called monomers; and the way the monomers are combined determines the chemical properties of the polymer in question. We can think of them as building blocks that can be arranged in different ways, giving rise to different substances which are naturally present all around us. And which can also be created artificially.


Take the case of vulcanised rubber, a semi-synthetic product created from natural rubber, which in the 1930s was obtained 90% from Sri Lanka, India and Malaysia — a dangerous concentration from a geopolitical point of view. Rubber was indispensable militarily, used for tyres and for sealing and insulating vehicle components, so learning to create fully synthetic rubber became a central objective of the chemical industries — always backed by, when not directly run by, the state. In those turbulent times, countries sought to guarantee their self-sufficiency, which required both active control over natural resources — a driver of territorial expansionism and imperialism — and a reduction in their commercial dependencies on other countries.

From the late twenties, and above all during the thirties, discoveries of how to build synthetic polymers on a large scale cascaded one after another. PVC, synthetic rubber, polyethylene — the simplest polymer of them all — nylon… all came onto the scene. As on other occasions, the military industry became the catalyst for innovation and discovery. Indeed, the researcher Adam Hanieh argues that the Second World War can without exaggeration be labelled the ‘Polymer War’. In any case, these products transformed the world: they made goods cheaper and reproducible on a large scale, ideal for war, but also paving the way for the subsequent democratisation of consumption and the multiplication of goods. This was the deployment of the petrochemical industry, and our present-day world cannot be understood without these events — even though they scarcely feature in contemporary debate.

To understand why the current war in Iran is not merely a matter of barrels of crude, but a blow to the very heart of contemporary material production, we need to open the black box of the petrochemical industry and grasp what it is made of.
They Are Fossil Products


With the production of synthetic polymers, countries managed to escape their dependence on certain natural resources, freeing themselves from geographical servitudes. In reality, one form of dependency was swapped for another. The problem is that, then as now, the importance of fossil energy was underestimated: whether coal or oil, it was so abundant that it was not considered a serious constraint on the production of polymers and consumer goods. But the fact is that the entire petrochemical industry depends on these energy sources, and according to the International Energy Agency it currently accounts for 14% of global oil demand and 8% of natural gas demand. What is relevant here is that this demand is for use not only as energy but also as an input into the productive process itself.

It should be borne in mind that when crude oil is extracted from the wells, what comes out does not look much like the petrol we put into our vehicles every day. It is a mixture of hydrocarbon compounds which have to be transformed, or ‘refined’. This refining phase follows extraction, and consists of chemically separating the different components of the crude using processes involving very high temperatures. At the same refinery the qualities of the resulting products are also typically treated and upgraded — among them petrol, which represents around 45% of the barrel of crude, along with gas oil and diesel, jet fuel, and other substances used as inputs by the petrochemical industry, such as naphtha.

In a third phase, the chemical industry takes the relevant inputs from the refining process and transforms them into basic petrochemical products. Thus, what enters this phase is naphtha, ethane, propane and methane — all derived from the refining of oil and natural gas — and what comes out are products such as light olefins (ethylene and propylene) and aromatics (benzene, toluene and xylenes). All these names are wholly alien to our daily lives, yet they form the basis of 95% of all manufactured goods: few of today’s goods are not produced in one way or another by the petrochemical industry. For example, product packaging accounts for 36% of global plastic demand, followed by the synthetic textile industry, the construction industry, and consumer goods such as toys and household utensils — as well as medicines, solar panels, spectacles, bicycles, and even bulletproof vests.

The central point of this analysis is to understand that all of these manufactured products depend on the extraction and processing of fossil energy. As I have already mentioned, fossil fuels — primarily oil and natural gas — are used both as fuel and as raw materials. This explains why vertical integration is so common — that is, a single company's ownership of both the extraction and refining and petrochemical phases. It also explains the advantage the Middle East enjoys in developing the petrochemical industry: its energy costs are much lower.
The Middle East’s Pivot Towards China


As I explained in an earlier analysis, the growing importance of oil at the start of the twentieth century turned the Middle East into the central object of European imperial rivalry — with Great Britain directly or indirectly controlling everywhere from Egypt to Iran, where it acquired control of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), today’s BP. After the Second World War, hegemony passed to US companies, but nationalist movements also emerged, culminating in episodes such as the Iranian nationalisation of APOC — by then known as Anglo-Iranian — under Mossadegh in 1951, and the subsequent Anglo-American coup d’état. As Adam Hanieh has shown in Crude Capitalism, that nationalist spirit crystallised in the creation of OPEC in 1960 and, in the heat of the Yom Kippur War, in the wave of oil nationalisations of the 1970s. Significantly, those movements to socialise companies were not reversed in the following decades when neoliberalism became the official ideology of the West.

Indeed, during the eighties and nineties, Western countries embraced the neoliberal ideology that championed the triumph of the market over the state, leading to a wave of privatisations that also reached Spain, with more than a hundred public companies privatised. The irony is that at that very moment, China was rolling out a development strategy based on state-led industrialisation, with a huge role for public and semi-public enterprises. The Gulf countries, for their part, not only retained public control of their companies but also embarked on a process of diversifying their economies to reduce dependence on oil extraction.

The Gulf states became convinced that they had to industrialise by developing new manufacturing sectors, as well as refining and petrochemicals, but they did not entrust this to the free market. On the contrary, as early as 1968 a country like Bahrain launched its first five-year plan aimed at creating an aluminium industry and shipyards; something Dubai and Oman would also do a few years later. In 1976, Saudi Arabia made the leap with the creation of the Saudi Arabia Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), today one of the world’s leading petrochemical companies and owned principally by Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil and gas company. Other countries, such as the UAE, have likewise used their state oil companies for decades to control the refining and petrochemical phases and, in this way, to exercise greater control over the fossil chain while partially diversifying their economies. The Gulf’s state-owned firms are not entirely public, but are also held in part by private capital, both domestic and international — which has given rise to the proliferation of a billionaire elite tied to their governments.

This energy strategy has not been confined to the region. China’s industrialisation process, and its incorporation into the world economy from 2001 onwards, required vast quantities of oil which the Gulf countries were willing to supply. Since then, relations between the Gulf and China have become so close that 2024 was the first year in which Gulf–China trade surpassed Gulf–West trade. In the case of petrochemical exports, the Asian orientation is clear: China accounts for 28% and India for 23%.

In 2024, the two world regions which grew most in petrochemical production were China (6.8%) and the Gulf countries (5.7%). The interrelation, however, has not been purely commercial but also in terms of investment, with Asian capital investing in the Gulf and Gulf capital investing in Asia. As Adam Hanieh has pointed out, between 2017 and 2021 more than 30% of China’s oil investment was directed towards the Middle East — five times more than in the previous period. The reverse is also true, with companies such as Aramco taking positions in Asian refining and petrochemical industries.
The Problem of the War


The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has not only interrupted the passage of oil but of all the trade that crossed it. And that includes fertilisers and petrochemical products. The entire industrialisation strategy of the main Gulf countries — Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar — has been brought to a halt, to say nothing of the costs inflicted on the infrastructures under attack. In Saudi Arabia’s case, the impact is somewhat smaller because it still has an outlet via the Red Sea — at least so long as the situation in Yemen continues to allow it.

The consequences, however, ramify far beyond the region. The interruption of refined-product supplies directly affects East Asia’s petrochemical plants, which depend on these inputs, thereby raising the cost of producing plastics, synthetic textiles and nitrogen fertilisers, among other things. For Europe, which had already reduced its dependence on Russian gas after the war in Ukraine — albeit while increasing its reliance on liquefied natural gas from the United States — the closure of the Strait of Hormuz represents another shock to the energy and industrial supply chains. And the longer it lasts, the higher the inflationary waves will be.

On a global scale, the conflict accelerates a trend that was already underway: the bifurcation of petrochemical supply chains between a Euro-Atlantic bloc trying to retain its power and a Gulf–Asia axis deepening its integration. But this bifurcation does not resolve the underlying problem, since both blocs continue to depend on the same fossil material base — only now fragmented into tenser circuits that are more vulnerable to the next geopolitical disruption.

In that context of reconfiguration, the Qatari analyst Khalid Al-Jaber, who is linked to the Doha government, has recently suggested that the war in Iran has shown the Gulf countries the need to ‘reformulate’ the alliance with the United States. The reading is clear: Washington has proved incapable of guaranteeing the security of its Gulf allies when that objective collides with its commitment to Israel. Yet reformulation does not necessarily mean breaking. What is taking shape instead is a scenario of multiple hedging, in which the Gulf countries maintain the military alliance with the United States while deepening economic integration with China — already their main trading partner — and exploring ties with other actors such as India and Turkey. The new global scenario does not allow them to choose a side; rather, it forces them to move within a precarious, highly unstable equilibrium, aggravated by the frustration of having watched war break out without Washington taking their interests into account.

As I have argued on other occasions, we are witnessing the reordering of the international division of labour in a context of a war for hegemony. But this very fact also reveals the structural fragility of an economic system built on an extremely concentrated and finite material base. After all, we live in a world of synthetic polymers and fertilisers whose existence depends on continuous flows of oil and gas that pass through a handful of geographical bottlenecks. When those flows are interrupted, as is now happening at Hormuz, the energy supply wobbles and the social metabolism that sustains daily life in industrial economies begins to crack. The real question, then, goes beyond who controls the Persian Gulf or the Strait of Hormuz and instead points to how far it is viable to sustain, indefinitely, a civilisation based on the expansion of a global petrochemical infrastructure that, sooner or later, comes up against its own material limits. We live in a historical anomaly made possible by fossil fuels, and the necessary adaptation involves far more than a mere energy transition: it demands rethinking the material base on which the global economy is organised.

How feudal income became respectable again

How rent, housing and finance turned unearned income into the core logic of contemporary capitalism

Alberto Garzón
Feb 13, 2026

Ecosocialist Notebook 




One of the great nightmares of the first political economists was embodied by a social group whose wealth multiplied without any effort on their part. They were called rentiers, although, in practice, at the time, this was more or less the same as saying landowners. In their view, this social class was a feudal remnant that obstructed the development of capitalism and dragged down economic growth. As John Stuart Mill wrote, landowners “grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking or economizing”.

This rentierism was attacked from two angles. The first was moral in nature: was it fair that some people should become wealthy solely by virtue of owning property, without contributing any labour or adding to collective well-being? After all, landowners obtained rents as a toll for allowing others to work the land, which is why people very soon began to speak of “unearned income.” The second critique was economic: if those rents were too high, capitalist profits would be squeezed, and growth would slow. Rentierism was not only unjust but also inefficient.

For the classical economists, what truly mattered was the increase in capitalist profits, since these were the only ones that could be reinvested in productive improvements capable of driving growth. The problem with landowners was that their rents were usually spent on luxury goods and services that did not contribute to general welfare—although the Reverend Malthus defended them because of the role he attributed to these proprietors in maintaining the traditional social order. By contrast, economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill himself valued effort and work—virtues they did not see reflected in a nobility educated in the values of feudal elites. For them—and as later economic historiography would also acknowledge—one of the great problems of the Spanish Empire was that it devoted the enormous wealth extracted from the Americas not to improving its productive capacity—industrialisation, as we would say today—but to conspicuous consumption that reinforced the social position of merchants, conquistadors and elites in general. That is, a form of rent-seeking (not in the neoclassical sense).

Over time, the concept of rentierism disappeared from the vocabulary of most economists. Today, it is rare to read or hear economists question certain types of income: in conventional economics, all incomes are treated as equivalent and considered equally functional for economic development. However, before this intellectual shift took place, the debate reached a critical moment with the figure of Henry George, a controversial economist who came second in the 1886 New York mayoral election.

George extended the classical line of reasoning and vigorously defended a single tax on land. His proposal was grounded in a very particular economic vision: he supported the free market and private ownership of the fruits of labour, but argued that natural resources belonged to the community as a whole. Consequently, he considered it unjust that owners should enrich themselves by appropriating something that belonged to everyone, such as land. This way of thinking led him to make the fight against rentierism the central axis of his political-economic programme.

The core of the argument was simple but very powerful. As John Stuart Mill had already noted, land rents increased without the owner having to do anything: their value depended on the community's economic dynamics. George illustrated this clearly: land acquired in a remote and isolated location would be worth little more than the value of the products grown on it. But if that area developed with the arrival of merchants, businesses and infrastructure, the very same plot of land would multiply in value even though its productivity had not changed at all. That new value would be entirely the result of collective development, yet the rent generated would go exclusively to the owner. Hence, George proposed a high tax on that appreciation, so that what the community had created would be returned to it. It is therefore unsurprising that these ideas provoked fierce opposition from property-owning elites and an especially harsh conflict with the Church—which excommunicated a priest allied with George and even went so far as to debate banning the economist’s works.

What matters is that both George’s argument and his proposal remain fully relevant today. Land is revalued according to its geographical centrality: the greater the surrounding economic activity—businesses, infrastructure, services—the higher its value. This is a paradigmatic case of rentierism: the extraction of “unearned” economic rents simply by owning a scarce resource. From the 1930s onwards, and largely following Keynes, the debate on rentierism shifted from land ownership to the financial sphere. The growth of the financial system showed that it was also possible there to grow rich “while sleeping,” while at the same time diverting resources that could have been allocated to productive activities. Over time, however, the concept of rentierism vanished from the dominant economic grammar.

The problem is that today it is impossible to understand central processes of our time—such as the housing crisis or the hegemony of finance—without recovering this classical concept. The difference with the nineteenth century is that today large segments of the population participate in this rentierism, albeit to varying degrees: the “democratisation” of access to home ownership and to financial products has made it easier for many households to supplement their regular income with rents that seem to fall from the sky—money that multiplies while we sleep.

Today, housing offers returns comparable to those of any other financial activity, such as investing in medium-sized firms. If speculating in housing yields a return of 15 per cent—as happened in Spain in 2024—while investing in government bonds yields 3 per cent, capital will rationally flow towards the former. This is precisely what the classical economists denounced as an inefficient allocation of resources. And this is, broadly speaking, our current landscape: it is not uncommon to hear that large fortunes—artists, television presenters or politicians—invest in real estate through investment funds that operate as genuine rent-extraction machines. What future awaits an economy with such incentives, where capital is not used to modernise the country but to allow certain social groups to live off rents?

The classical economists would also have reminded us that unearned incomes exist only at the expense of other people’s work: they are, in essence, parasitic incomes. Just think of the housing market. When someone buys a home as an investment and later sells or rents it out, the income derived is exclusively from ownership, not from any effort. And those rents do not fall from the sky: they are extracted directly from the pockets of other citizens—non-owners—who need these scarce goods and must work hard to pay for them. In the financial sphere, the mechanism is more sophisticated but fundamentally the same: money appreciates because funds engage in rent-extraction operations, for example, by buying companies, restructuring them, and cutting workers’ wages.

Conventional economics has abandoned discussion of property and power, making the reproduction of rentierism easier. The logical consequence is rising inequality, since only those who already own scarce assets, such as housing, can access “unearned” rents. The concentration of ownership increases inequality and, in turn, generates new dynamics of concentration. How else can one explain that, in Spain today, the richest 10 per cent of households own 50 per cent of total wealth?

The great paradox is that today we do not live under the capitalism imagined by Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, but under its reverse. Those authors conceived capitalism as a system that, for all its limits, rewarded work, innovation and productive investment, and that should actively combat unproductive rents for both moral and economic reasons. Contemporary capitalism, by contrast, has done exactly the opposite: it has normalised unearned incomes, stripped them of any moral charge and integrated them into the very heart of its functioning.

Thus, rentierism has ceased to appear as an anomaly or a dysfunction and has become a respectable—even desirable—form of accumulation. This shift is not merely technical or academic, but profoundly political. By giving up talking about rents, economics has helped to neutralise the social conflict they generate and to legitimise a structure of inequality based on the concentration of property. When housing, land or financial assets are treated as mere investments, it is concealed that the rents they produce are extracted from other people’s labour and from collective effort. The result is a system that rewards ownership over contribution and consolidates an increasingly parasitic economy.

If Capitalism Had a Beginning, Will It Have an End?

Reviewing Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History: merchants, commodity frontiers and the question the book leaves open

Alberto Garzón
Sep 22, 2026
Ecosocialist Notebook 




This week sees the Spanish publication of Sven Beckert’s monumental Capitalism: A Global History (Crítica). It runs to more than a thousand pages of exhaustive description of capitalism’s historical trajectory, plus more than three hundred pages of bibliography and notes. Works this well documented are rare, and rarer still are those that are also enjoyable to read. It strikes the ideal balance between the scholar's deep knowledge and the popularising impulse that leaves the ivory towers of the university to reach a wide audience. The book was published in English at the end of last year and received an enthusiastic reception that acknowledged, above all, Beckert’s capacity to synthesise the vast body of knowledge accumulated on the history of capitalism.

That said, it has also been criticised for its overall approach, for how it handles various issues, and for certain absences or shortcomings. But of course, when someone sets out to write nothing less than the history of capitalism, reaching back to processes that took place a thousand years ago, I suppose we take it for granted that pleasing everyone is impossible. There is not, and cannot be, such a thing as a perfect work. One thing is clear, though: Capitalism is already an indispensable reference for anyone who wants to know where we come from and who also wants tools to better understand where we are heading.
The engine of transformation


In Capitalism, we should think of capital as a kind of virus, first documented in the twelfth century in Aden, in present-day Yemen. There, we have documented evidence of profit-maximising practices among a notable group of merchants, that is, people who made money by trading goods. Although this was a fundamentally agrarian and tributary society, governed by social norms and customs, these merchants followed an entirely different logic. That logic is what justifies treating Aden as an “island of capital,” a seed of what was to come.

Beckert stresses that Aden was not the cradle of capitalism, but it was proof that capitalists already existed in bygone times. And not only there: the same was true of other places on the planet where capitalists were marginal elements within non-capitalist societies. From this perspective, capitalism took shape gradually through the interconnections between these islands of capital, spreading its logic to other parts of the world and eventually infecting the entire planet. If today almost everything around us is a commodity, and consequently has a price (including ourselves, as labour power), it all began on those islands of capital.

Thus, in Capitalism the founding actors of the modern economic system were merchants. Although we traditionally associate merchants with mere commercial intermediation, Beckert shows that many of them took direct and indirect control over production. Merchants, industrialists and financiers are abstract figures who in practice have been far more intermingled than their conceptual separation suggests. The agrarian plantation complex built by European colonial capital in the New World is a good illustration not only of this mixed control (over production, over the trade in what was produced, and over investment) but also of new ways of organising labour and nature, with the slave plantation as the forerunner of the modern factory, with its controlled rhythms, supervised labour and emphasis on productivity. Those merchants embodied the practices we now call capitalist, which gradually spread not only to other regions of the planet but also into other spheres of economic and social life. As merchants linked up with one another through long-distance trade, archipelagos of capital took shape and their positions grew stronger. In a continuous process of unfolding and expansion, they colonised human life while provoking resistance among ordinary people and among traditional elites jealous of the merchants’ growing wealth. That resistance, and other obstacles, could be overcome by forging alliances with and within the state, which most of the time meant force and war. In Capitalism, indeed, the state is a central actor without which neither the origin nor the triumph of the logic of capital and its usual agents, such as private firms, can be understood.

Besides political resistance, Capitalism also features ecological limits that merchants seek to overcome. These arise from the relative scarcity of natural resources and account for what Beckert calls “commodity frontiers”: a way of naming the process whereby the exhaustion of a resource (a forest, a soil, a population to enslave) drives activity elsewhere, to a place where new resources can be exploited. The movement of capital is thus characterised by landing in a territory, commodifying the resources capital needs to reproduce itself, exploiting and depleting them and, once they are finally exhausted, moving on to another place to repeat the process. Capitalism is full of historical cases documenting this process of successive exploitation and plunder, which shows, following Jason Moore, that capital puts “cheap nature” to work for it in a seemingly endless unfolding. This logic reaches into the present: the competitive scramble for, and unbridled extraction of, critical minerals, for example, make up what Thea Riofrancos calls “the frontiers of green capitalism.” In this sense, frontiers are not national borders but the outermost layer of capital's logic. With these levers, merchants and commodity frontiers, Beckert’s capitalism unfolds across his stimulating pages.
A global analysis


One virtue of Capitalism is that it lets us grasp the logic of capital at its proper scale: global. Accustomed as we are to thinking in national terms, Beckert’s approach forces us to think globally. It is not simply a matter of adding other national or regional histories to the traditional Eurocentric narrative on which millions of people in the West (myself included) were raised. Rather, it is a matter of understanding that the logic of capital operates everywhere at once, so to understand capitalism we must analyse everything at the same time. For instance, some say capitalism is in terminal crisis because Western economies show clear signs of decline. But can we be sure that what is actually happening is not a redefinition of the international division of labour, with the economic centre shifting towards Asia? There is no doubt that the gloomy horizons tormenting the Western middle and working classes, who are watching the welfare states won through decades of struggle come under siege, are not shared by an emerging international working class that has recently escaped absolute poverty and is only now beginning to form the middle strata of its countries and regions. What is, for us, largely a step backwards (towards precarity, vulnerability, instability and fear) is, for them, also broadly speaking, a dream world that none of their previous generations could even have imagined.

This global approach, in which the world economy is the central unit, places Beckert in the tradition of Marx, Bukharin and Wallerstein. This is a sensitive matter among historians of capitalism. The historical tradition that has studied the capitalist economic system most thoroughly, the Marxist one, is deeply divided over its origin. Broadly speaking, one of the main fault lines in the debate has pitted those who believe capitalism originated globally in the sixteenth century, with the expansion of trade networks across the planet following the European conquest of the New World, against those who believe capitalism was born later, as a result of new property relations in the English countryside. The former are usually called Wallersteinians (after Immanuel Wallerstein) and the latter Brennerians (after Robert Brenner). While the former emphasise the world-economy, that is, capitalism as a logic that can only be understood at a world scale, the latter believe they have found a kind of patient zero in the transformations that took place in a single country, England. This theoretically unbridgeable divergence dates back to the postwar period and the work of Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy, grew fierce in the so-called Brenner debate of the 1970s, and resurfaces every so often in the same or similar terms. For me, the best recent review is Henry Heller’s The Birth of Capitalism (Pluto Press), though in Spanish there is also Ellen Meiksins Wood’s now-classic survey, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Siglo XXI).

It is impossible not to ask where Sven Beckert stands in this debate and, after months of reading him closely, I would say it is impossible to give a definitive answer. On the one hand, the global history of capitalism that Beckert tells, as commercial activity unfolding progressively and inexorably, clearly bears Wallerstein’s stamp. On the other hand, Beckert concedes almost everything to Brenner in the chapters reviewing transformations in the rural world. My somewhat trivial conclusion, then, is that Beckert has remained deliberately ambiguous on this point because his real aim is not to explain why capitalism emerged but how the processes we now call capitalist have spread historically and geographically. This is not a flaw but a virtue, because Capitalism provides indispensable raw material for any research programme. What matters is that the rest of us, readers and researchers, are the ones who must ask the questions.
The limits of capitalism


Both interpretations I have described above share a blind spot that is also present, though to a lesser degree, in Beckert’s book: the question of limits. When the 2025 Nobel Prize was awarded, I had the opportunity to discuss this in these pages, but it is worth insisting. If, for most Marxists, the origin of capitalism lies in the history of trade and/or in transformations of property relations, mainstream economists usually locate it in the emergence of institutions such as technological innovation, democracy, or the monetary system. But none of them tends to give sufficient weight to energy and the role of natural resources.

Today’s dominant common sense holds that capitalism faces no real limits but, at most, obstacles that human action can overcome. So we assume that economic growth could continue indefinitely if the right decisions are made; the usual debate is about what those decisions are (should we expand or shrink the space of the self-regulating market? reduce inequality of income and wealth? recover monetary sovereignty? invest much more in research and development?). Since the 1970s, however, what we now know as ecological economics has challenged that belief and raised the possibility that capitalism faces limits that are independent of human decisions: biophysical limits, that is, limits that can be acted upon but not repealed. Even so, most economists ignore these warnings, either downplaying the problem (even when one expression is climate change, which tends to be acknowledged) or trusting that human creativity will solve the problems with more technology.

The irony is that the classical economists, such as David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, and later William Stanley Jevons, considered infinite economic growth impossible. For them, limits linked to land and/or natural resources were obvious. Marx was reluctant to accept the idea of absolute limits valid for every economic system, although the matter is still debated; he accepted that capitalism had internal limits, but not that future socialism would face the same deficit. And although this path was closed off in the formation of most economists’ common sense, it remained a subject of research and theorising.

From this other research programme, inspired by the work of E. A. Wrigley, Kenneth Pomeranz, Georgescu-Roegen and Paolo Malanima, industrial capitalism was only possible because it drew on fossil fuels (first as a source of heat, which freed up land, and then as a source of mechanical energy, which raised productivity). This necessary but not sufficient condition allowed economies to break free of the limits that land had imposed on every society since the dawn of humanity, but at the cost of consuming a non-renewable stock that we are squandering like a reckless heir. The availability of an extraordinary source of fossilised energy allowed the societies that managed to harness it to make a giant leap in productive capacity and, when political struggle pushed for it, in the living conditions of the population as a whole. The consequences of this fact are not mere externalities, as climate change and other ecological impacts are usually presented, but are intrinsic to economic dynamics. This means that the future of capitalism is also necessarily bound up with the fate of fossil fuels and with humanity’s capacity to replace them with alternative energy sources that provide the same physical services (among them power, the key to the systematic rise in productivity over the last two hundred years).

Beckert touches on this point only superficially. On the one hand, he accepts that the growth of preindustrial societies was constrained by the fixed availability of land, but assumes that technological advances overcame these limitations and that, consequently, Malthusian fears were not borne out. This reading is too conventional, because the classical economists’ concern was not cancelled but suspended, insofar as the leap rested on drawing down a finite stock. What will remain when that stock runs out? On the other hand, in the epilogue Beckert also concedes that the creativity capitalism stimulates has managed to decouple economic growth from fossil fuel consumption. This concession is too hasty, because the observed decoupling is between economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions, and it holds only for the most developed economies; absolute levels of fossil fuel consumption, for example, reached a new all-time high in 2025. Moreover, we still depend on fossil fuels not only for transport but also for most of the goods and food we consume. In fact, immediately after making that concession, Beckert openly asks whether capitalism can coexist with a natural world that will always be finite. And the truth is that, so far, no combination of energy sources has managed both things that would be needed at once: to provide the world economy with the physical services that fossil fuels provide today, and to do so in time.
The world to come


While Capitalism says little about energy, it is generous on land: exhausted soils, felled forests, shifting frontiers. The same is true of the social conflicts capitalism generates. These are described in marvellous depth and, particularly for recent decades, organised by political regime. The sections on the taming of capitalism, that is, on what we have called the “golden age of capitalism” (for its high rates of economic growth, today a pipe dream in the West), are brilliant. They also allow an apt contrast with the features of social conflict under neoliberalism, yielding a picture of the profound structural weakness of workers’ organisations in their capacity to influence economic decisions.

According to a well-known anecdote, Margaret Thatcher once said that one of her greatest achievements was New Labour and its leader, Tony Blair. She was not wrong, because that Third Way was both a renunciation of reformism (which, for all its limits, still pursued a socialist society) and the expression of ideological defeat at the hands of those who promoted ideas such as “popular capitalism.” For decades, the Western political left has been so defensive that the new and modest proposals of authors such as Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, or, more recently, Daron Acemoglu seem revolutionary. Perhaps that is why neoliberalism’s self-inflicted defeat after the 2008 financial crisis did not give way to a progressive and socialist wave (which is what even someone like Nicolas Sarkozy expected when he rushed to call for a swift refounding of capitalism) but to a genuine and dangerous reactionary tsunami across the West. A new division of labour that downgrades the place of the economies that have formed the world’s centre since the sixteenth century, growing inequality produced by neoliberal inertia, and ecological and labour anxieties: together they make the perfect cocktail.

Indeed, Beckert reminds us that union density is in decline, and that this is not just a question of will but of structural problems. His argument raises a further question. When the logic of capital has advanced to the point of contaminating almost every aspect of our lives, turning human beings into isolated individuals stretched to the limit by market competition, cooperative behaviour becomes much harder to sustain. In a world economy in which billions of workers compete for the best-paid segments of the labour market, capital runs a race to the bottom on wages. And in that structural context, in which workers in Cambodia or Kenya occupy the bottom rung of the global ladder of exploitation, workers in Morocco or Thailand the next one up, and those in Spain or the United Kingdom the higher rungs, it is not hard to understand (though never to justify) why fear drives workers to turn against one another, demanding protectionist and/or anti-immigration policies to ease that anxiety.

This brings me to the last point I would like to raise in this review: geopolitical tensions. Although English liberalism, born of the Napoleonic Wars and especially after 1846, rested on direct and indirect imperialism over other regions of the world, it still proclaimed that capitalism was associated with peace and a better future. Even a considerable share of the left-wing thinkers of the time, many of them followers of Richard Cobden, accepted this thesis, which many still defend today when they equate trade with peace. Chapter 13 of Capitalism, however, takes us back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when competition between countries intensified and helped create the conditions that led to the two world wars. The central question is: why did this happen? Beckert suggests that the defensive reactions of countries such as France and Germany were driven by fear of a rising power, the United States.

It is worth remembering that both Germany and the United States were accelerating industrialisation through mercantilist policies of tariff protection and support for infant industries, and both knew they needed raw materials. Beckert cites, for example, Friedrich Naumann, a German liberal politician who argued for expanding the colonies in order to secure the supply of natural resources German industry required. This was a widespread view, and it had an immediate historical precedent: it was exactly what the United States had done in expanding westward, killing and isolating Native Americans (whom the dominant ideology considered inferior) and seizing their lands and resources. Late nineteenth-century colonialism also reflected a zero-sum conception of the world.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that today we are witnessing a return of the same mercantilist proposals in the West, justified largely by similar arguments. Western militarisation is advancing by leaps and bounds while industries retreat to their home territories, where the shelter of the state guarantees them solid defences against threats in the international market. The state is coming back, but not to broaden the rights of the working class; rather, to direct an industrial policy aimed at “securing” supply chains. Elsewhere, I have argued that a pendulum swings between free trade and protectionism, and between conceptions of wealth as a positive-sum or a zero-sum game. Today, in the midst of the eco-social crisis, and when not even billionaires trust in the future, eager as they are to leave for Mars or build underground bunkers, it seems more urgent than ever to reorganise resistance to capitalism. Because our lives depend on it.


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